Practical Tips for Developing Leadership Skills Early in a Career

Abstract

Leadership is often the furthest thing from one’s mind early in their surgical career. After finishing residency and finding your first position, your early priorities focus on learning the policies of the institution, navigating the electronic medical record, as well as your new role as an attending surgeon and resident/student educator. However, it is in this time period that your leadership skills are most critical as they will help you achieve your goals and ultimately help you accomplish something larger for yourself. Good leaders inspire others to want to help a program be successful. The people that you work with on a daily basis will go out of their way to help you reach your goals and see that the daily pressures of building a new practice are eased. The difficulty arises in recognizing the face of leadership at this point in your career. In this chapter, we elucidate the leadership skills it takes to be effective in these first few years and how attaining these skills early on will translate into a successful leadership style that will enable you to lead on a larger scale.