Career Checkup

The Hospitalist. 2011 November;2011(11):

November 30, 2011 | The Hospitalist

SHM can be a resource for hospitalists to find ways and people to help them assess their careers, say Dr. Frederickson.

“The Society of Hospital Medicine and their annual meetings and chapter meetings are a great place to do networking and a good place to find out different ways and different people you can align yourself with to start looking at your career in an objective way and a critical way,” he says.

Career coaches can be a good option, particularly for hospitalists who are struggling with significant change. Coaches do more than assist with resumes and interview strategies, says Dr. Gaillour. They help people align their careers with their values, strengths, passions, and goals so that they reach their full potential as a professional and a person, she says.

Coaches also advise on how to strategically plan a career and help physicians build career resilience.

“By resilience, I mean that there is always going to be some relevance to what you’re doing and you’re going to be able to weather some of the [healthcare] changes,” Dr. Gaillour says. “With a lot of physician groups and hospitals coming together and the stress of new initiatives, mergers, integrations, electronic medical records, and accountable-care organizations, all of that has a direct impact on physicians.”

Career Coach Resources

Looking for a career coach? Try these resources:

Physician Coaching Institute (https://physiciancoachinginstitute.com): Features a directory of certified coaching professionals who have expertise in working with physicians and a library of articles that the coaches have published.
International Coach Federation’s Coach Referral Service (www.coachfeder ation.org/clients/crs): Features a searchable directory of coaches credentialed by the International Coach Federation and tips for hiring a coach. The International Coach Federation is a global organization for coaches, with more than 16,000 members in more than 100 countries and more than 7,300 credentialed coaches worldwide.

The Time Is Right

Recommendations vary on how often career assessments should be conducted. Flores suggests hospitalists conduct a career checkup every two to three years “to see if they’re still on track and if their interests and goals have changed.”

Two years ago, William Atchley Jr., MD, FACP, SFHM, assessed his career while chief of the division of hospital medicine for Sentara Healthcare, a nonprofit healthcare system based in Norfolk, Va. The assessment was illuminating, he says, because it helped him to crystallize his strengths and weaknesses and determine “what I wanted to be doing,” he says.

In July, Dr. Atchley joined Atlanta-based Eagle Hospital Physicians, a physician-led company that develops and manages hospitalist practices for client hospitals. He is now regional senior medical director and is overseeing clinical services and medical affairs in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

The more often physicians examine their career, the better they become at understanding themselves and using that understanding to their advantage, Dr. Gaillour says, who advocates annual assessments. Others suggest a daily dose of assessment.

“Daily, a physician can create a ritual to just check in with themselves, have a space where they can ask themselves questions of what went well today, what do I want more of, if there are complaints that are arising,” Dr. Allen says. “It’s an important way of preventing ourselves from getting in a place where we are really dissatisfied.”

Lisa Ryan is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.

What’s My Personality?

In the healthcare setting, the most commonly used personality assessment instruments are the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the DiSC tool, according to Flores. The MBTI takes psychiatrist C.G. Jung’s theory of psychological types and applies it to people’s lives, while he DiSC tool examines four behavioral aspects—dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance—and determines which aspects are stronger and weaker in a person.

Other assessment tools include Color Code and 16PF, Flores says.

“[MBTI] is a great self-awareness tool,” Flores says, “but one of the other really powerful things about it is if you know somebody else’s Myers Briggs type, it gives you a ton of information about how you can do a better job of interacting with them in a way that they will respond to the best.”

A 360-degree evaluation, which draws feedback from supervisors, colleagues and subordinates, can be very effective. It allows you to simultaneously gauge their skills and get appraisals from a wide variety of people at work, says Dr. Atchley, who used 360 evaluations when assessing his own career.

He’s taken the StrengthsFinder assessment, which is based on the philosophy that people should spend more time discovering and developing their strengths than fixing their shortcomings.

“It’s a small book, you read it, and you go online and do the assessment,” Dr. Atchley says. “It gives you a good understanding of where your strengths are.”