On Aug. 31, Jeff Marshall, MD, retired as chief of cardiology at Atlanta-based Northside Hospital Heart Institute.
Dr. Marshall, a nationally recognized interventional cardiologist, has spent decades building cardiovascular programs across Georgia. He has also served as governor of the Georgia Chapter of the American College of Cardiology, chairman of the Georgia Composite Medical Board, president of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions and was inducted as a Master of SCAI and received the organization’s Mason Sones Award.
Dr. Marshall shared some of his best leadership advice on Becker’s “Cardiology + Heart Surgery Podcast.”
1. Get involved with medicine outside of the care setting: “It’s a blessing or an opportunity to get to lead in several venues, and each opportunity is different,” he said. “Those things outside the hospital give you the proverbial 10,000 hours you need to know how to interact with people, how to motivate people, build a culture and get everybody on the same page. You meet people with different backgrounds and from different places, different geographies, even folks outside the country — and you actually probably learn more from those experiences and those people than you put in.”
2. For cardiologists, remember that being a physician is hard work: “The younger generations appropriately value the ability to work hard but also be a family person. That’s really important. But you can’t forget that being a physician is really hard work. We’re blessed with the opportunity to have that special relationship with patients inside the four walls of an exam room, where people will bare their problems and their souls to you, and that requires you to work hard to fulfill your side: taking care of them. So no matter what the regulatory pressures or volume pressures are, you have to remember you’re primarily there to take care of patients the best you can.”
3. For cardiology leaders, listen and watch: “Listen to what the physicians and the people on the front line tell you about the problems, and don’t sit in your fancy corner office and not come watch what people do. I’ve been blessed to work with administrators who would come to the cath lab or come to clinic and see what’s actually going on. The best CEOs in healthcare are the physicians or administrators who are walking around the hospital every day — they know the people working in HR by name, they know the people cleaning the beds by name. This is a people business. Our job is to care for folks and give them the highest quality care, and the only way to show that is to show people you care.”
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