Physicians’ presence in leadership roles within hospitals, health systems and private practice has declined in recent years, as increased administrative burdens, burnout and other job pressures make it more difficult for physicians to expand beyond purely clinical responsibilities.
But physician leadership remains critical, Leo Specter, MD, CEO of Charlotte, N.C.-based OrthoCarolina told Becker’s.
“I think more physicians need to be involved in physician leadership, whether it’s running their own practice or even if they’re in an employed model,” he said. “I think we should see more physicians that are involved with hospital administration or healthcare insurance companies, because at the end of the day, we’re the ones caring for the patients. We need to have a strong voice in leadership.”
Dr. Spector originally joined OrthoCarolina to complete a fellowship in spine surgery and got involved in leadership early in his career.
He eventually earned his MBA, serving in multiple clinical and administrative leadership roles at OrthoCarolina before becoming CEO in 2024. As CEO, Dr. Spector still sees patients, performs surgeries and takes calls, along with his other physician partners.
While getting an MBA proved fruitful for Dr. Spector, not all physicians interested in leadership need to follow the same path.
“Leadership and business are a little bit different, right? I think they are two different skill sets,” he said. “I don’t think everybody needs to go out and get an MBA, although I would encourage anybody that has any desire to get it.”
He said that earning his MBA taught him about negotiation processes, marketing and finance, better equipping him to collaborate with nonphysician executives.
The type of leadership that physicians are accustomed to in clinical settings is also very different from that of most other work settings, which requires a mindset shift for physicians interested in administration and leadership.
“We as physicians are highly trained to be physicians, and that is not business and it’s not the leadership that we really need in companies and healthcare systems today,” he said. “The leadership that we’re taught as physicians is still very much hierarchical. It’s very much command and control.”
This is for a good reason, he said. Physicians, surgeons and other clinical practitioners perform procedures with exacting precision and planning, which requires a certain level of centralized control and delegation.
“The kind of leadership you need to lead an organization or any kind of business is different, and we are not trained as physicians for that,” Dr. Spector said. “What I struggled with the most, and probably a lot of [other physicians] do, is No. 1, we’re always thought of as the expert. We’re the doctor. We know everything, but you walk into an administrative room and all the administrators know more.”
Many physicians retreat in these scenarios, Dr. Spector added, an instinct that physicians must push past to become effective nonclinical leaders.
“We’re almost too embarrassed to ask the questions. And so you have to start getting comfortable knowing what you don’t know, and asking good questions,” he said. “Doctors are taught to be the experts, to know everything. We’re not taught to show that vulnerability, to ask those good questions.”
When it comes to business affairs specifically, he encourages physicians to ease away from the “type-A” tendencies that are common among physicians, focusing more on building up the knowledge that is necessary to ask the right questions in areas they are less familiar with, such as finance.
Dr. Spector recounted one conversation he had with the dean of his MBA program that helped him adapt his physician perfectionism to his business education.
“The dean actually had to come in and say, ‘None of you are here to be the CFO of a company. None of you are here to do the financial accounting of a company. The reason you’re here is so you can have a basic understanding, and you can have a conversation with your CFO,'” he said. “You don’t need to go get an MBA. But if you’re going to be on the business side, you’ve got to get some education, so that you can have the conversation.”
