Market Data 
In a field as complex and fast-changing as medicine, it’s crucial to understand that nobody, including yourself, has all the answers. Nor are we expected to. As physician leaders, it helps to break ourselves of any sense of needing to be the smartest person in the room. Humility and openness are essential aspects of good leadership.
Let’s be honest: As doctors, we can justifiably think of ourselves as intelligent people. We were at or near the top of our class in high school. Then we got accepted to a great college, a competitive medical school, and a good residency program. The whole physician-training process is designed to select for folks who have high intellectual capability, much like the world of professional sports selects for the athletically gifted. So, it’s statistics, not hubris, to acknowledge that physicians are accustomed to being seen as smart.
Once within the healthcare space, we typically have the last say on decision-making. Although we may receive input from others, we ultimately make the call. At the end of the discussion, everyone looks at the attending and says, “Okay, doc, what do we do?” And we need to have the answer. We can’t be paralyzed with indecision in the OR, the ER, or the clinic. The physician must come up with a diagnosis and a plan, and then get people to implement that plan.
Despite all this, it is essential to avoid “Smartest Person in the Room Syndrome.” A physician who wants to make the best decisions possible must recognize that other people have valuable lenses through which they view the situation. And many of those people are, in fact, the smartest people in the room when it comes to their areas of expertise.
This becomes abundantly clear as you become a more senior executive leader in healthcare. You won’t get very far in your career unless you can humbly learn from seasoned pros in areas like finance, HR, logistics, marketing, and strategy. In those domains, you are not the smartest person in the room by a long shot. And even if you become the ultimate decision maker—say you make it to CEO—you still must have the humility to listen carefully to your senior team, all of whom have vast realms of knowledge you don’t possess.
But you don’t need to wait until you’re a senior executive to learn how to do this. Wouldn’t this be a great habit to adopt early on, in the patient care arena? Yes, you’re the doctor. Yes, you make the diagnoses and write the orders. And yes, maybe sometimes you do need to be the smartest person in the room, but let’s redefine smart. Smart doesn’t necessarily mean pulling every answer from that big, expensively educated brain of yours (insert laugh track here!). Smart also means recognizing the limits of your knowledge, expertise, and experience. It means maximizing the knowledge and experience of your team by listening to everyone and then making truly informed decisions. Remember that many of those team members have decades of experience and really “know the terrain,” if I’m allowed to pull an Infantry metaphor.
Let’s say you’ve been practicing medicine for three years. Well, maybe that OR nurse you’re working with has been in her job for 26 years. Who is smarter than whom on how to run the OR? Learn from that nurse; don’t try to upstage her with your smarts and authority. And don’t assume that because you were a 4.0 student throughout your life, you’re going to be smarter than everybody in the room. There are many forms of intelligence—interpersonal, physical, organizational, spiritual, creative, etc.—and, odds are, most people you work with are smarter than you in one or more of these dimensions.
Humility in leadership means putting the ego in the backseat and letting the best ideas drive the decision-making, no matter who comes up with those ideas.
