GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

We teach a lot to medical students and residents. One thing, however, we don’t teach is leadership and entrepreneurship. While some schools are trying to remedy that, there are still significant holes,particularly when you try to put both together and create leaderpreneurs.

Here are the top 10 mistakes we make when we try to create leaderpreneurs:

1. We try to manage innovation instead of leading innovators
2. We don’t select medical students based on their leadership and/or entrepreneurial mindset
3. We don’t train the trainers
4. We don’t reward leadership or entrepreneurship or create incentives to do it
5. We give a mixed message. One the one hand we want you to innovate and lead. On the other, we want you to conform and not be a disruptive (in the business sense) physician
6. We confuse management with leadership
7. We don’t give students leadership experiential learning and a place to fail
8. We don’t have enough physician leaderpreneur role models students can emulate
9. The followers don’t trust the leaderpreneurs because they don’t get sh$t done and they don’t do what they expect followers to do.
10. We don’t agree on the definition and intended outcomes of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Here’s why executive coaching doesn’t work.

Here’s why leadership development programs fail.

Creating leaderpreneurs in about changing mindsets. Most of that comes from experiential learning, not chalk talk. Until we provide that, what we are doing is simply leadership theater.

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