Part of Leadership Means Preparing for the Next Leader (Podcast)

Anyone who spends years moving among a variety of leadership roles will find that the skills they need to bring and the goals they need to focus on will change with the situation.

In a recent “Beyond Leadership” podcast with Brian Bolwell, MD, Tommaso Falcone, MD spoke of the importance of setting the table for the next generation of leaders to take over.

Dr. Falcone serves as Chief of Staff, Chief Academic Officer and Medical Director at Cleveland Clinic London. In 2001, he was appointed Chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and from 2008 to 2018, he served as Chair of Cleveland Clinic’s Ob/GYN & Women’s Health Institute. He also served on the health system’s board of governors and was a member of the executive team from 2007 to 2010.

At the Women’s Health Institute, he says, “my main role was to create opportunity for the next generation.”

It’s not enough simply to decide that your colleagues will figure things out after you’ve moved on, adds Dr. Falcone. He remembers having coffee with a former team member from the Women’s Health Institute a couple of years after he had left.

“They said, ‘I can’t believe you built this institute when there were 20 people, and there were 160 when you left. We thought for sure you had so much influence over so many years that when you left, things would become unstable, but they did not,’” Falcone recalls.

That was the best compliment he could have received, he says. The goal of any leaders should not be to become so indispensable that things crumble when they leave. He believed it was his responsibility to build an entire system that worked smoothly when it was time for a new leader to take up the reins.

Now, Falcone says, his responsibility in London is to build a group of doctors who will adopt the Cleveland Clinic culture of caregiving as the prevailing culture.

Podcast excerpt

Dr. Falcone on checking self-perceptions against the perceptions that others have of you:

For doctors, we all think that empathy is our main redeeming feature and that we are very sensitive to patients. Of course, patient-experience scores [are] a revelation to a lot of people, as are the 360 assessments of how we do as leaders. In fact, I told my successors in the Women’s Health Institute, “When you do these 360s, you have to take this seriously, but you may feel hurt. You need to be ready for this. You’ll see things that you cannot believe that people think of you. You spend a lot of time [thinking], “I don’t understand. I’m a really sensitive person. I listen to people.”

Then you read the survey and you’re “insensitive.” We really feel we went into medicine because we have a lot of empathy. We listen. And then it turns out that maybe we’re not that good at it.

Of course, as a lot of people do, I felt a little bit depressed afterwards. But then once we get over that part, we realize that, yeah, maybe there is truth to this and we can improve both with the patient experience as well as in leadership role with our group.