Health institutions all have the primary mission of providing quality care to a population. Leadership in medicine is usually always consistent with this mission.
A positive leader in medicine is, in my opinion, someone who brings together and motivates individuals and systems to evolve, to become better caregivers.
The leader is like a therapist of resistance to change: he manages to secure, to rally, to accompany, to lead by example… so that individuals and systems are less afraid to dare to change.
I think so. On the other hand, I do not believe that feminine values have managed to take their rightful place in decision-making processes in health management and the practice of medicine. In my opinion, the question of female leadership goes deeper than that of gender parity.
The promotion and application of the values associated in our society with women, such as welcoming others, the attention paid to people’s emotional well-being, the importance given to life skills rather than TO DO.
Inside medical institutions, we see that most of the time it is masculine values that dominate: the overvaluation of performance, composure, rationality, etc.
Because of the domination of these values, we sometimes find ourselves faced with their extremes and their dark sides. I am thinking of the blood-chilling coldness of certain individuals or of certain institutional rules, of the vision of individuals as interchangeable numbers, with disregard for the relational, emotional and environmental needs of employees.
All these abuses that dehumanize work environments feed an industrial vision of health care and betray the lack of presence of feminine values in our system.
It is the imbalance between these two visions that leads to deviations. The objective is to achieve a complementarity where feminine and masculine enrich each other.
I initially had a very masculine vision of professionalism and competence. A competent and professional doctor, in my opinion, had to be rational at all times, to maintain an emotional distance with his patients, his colleagues and his students! So I left my sensitivity and my spontaneity at home. Of course, it didn’t quite work out: hard for me to hold back a laugh or an exclamation… Gradually, aided by the experience of motherhood and other significant personal events, including my child’s serious illness , I tried to let myself be a full-fledged woman at work.
For me, the question of female leadership first evokes the search for an inner balance between masculine and feminine principles.
I observe that most doctors have internalized some form of misogyny, such as a disregard or fear of feelings… of their own feelings! Achieving a feminine-masculine balance in our systems (including in medicine) I believe begins with achieving a feminine-masculine balance within each of us.
It is important to distinguish pathological narcissism from healthy narcissism. Most people in managerial positions or leadership roles need a good dose of healthy narcissism to get there: self-confidence, competitiveness, a desire to excel, a pursuit of excellence and success.
What distinguishes pathological narcissism is mainly the inability to tolerate states of vulnerability (failure, humiliation, disappointments) due to a significant fragility of self-esteem. The person who suffers from it only recognizes a value through his accomplishments. In this sense, success becomes necessary, as a matter of psychological survival.