What is the goal of a hospital? All too often, different members of an organization have different goals, to the detriment of patient care and healthcare systems as a whole.

It’s all too easy to blame physicians for everything that is wrong with healthcare today. We are the most visible, the top of the medical food chain, it would appear. Except, we aren’t.

When you spend most of your time with children- as I’ve inexplicably chosen both personally and professionally to do- you begin to notice that ninety percent of their waking hours are spent asking questions.

Mindset is an essential quality in a physician. The practice of medicine requires constantly stretching oneself and thus requires doctors to actively embrace challenge.

When I had my son, the gaps between the worlds of pediatrics and parenting became painfully evident. Suddenly, so much of the advice I had been trained to give felt lacking the essential component of HOW?

Reset buttons are ubiquitous. They allow us to restore a system to its original state of functioning when it has developed programming errors, become overheated, or flat out short circuited. Being the complex operating systems we are, there are times when we, too, need a reset.

It’s been said that ancient cartographers used to write HIC SVNT LEONES (Here are lions) to indicate unknown territories on their maps. I sympathize. Being in the dark about where we are headed stirs all kinds of deep-rooted fears about what may lie in wait in the uncharted places beyond.

Fixing work design requires we give up the myth that hospitals must inevitably operate this way and begin to question why approaches that are readily available in other industries remain out of reach for the hospital world.

Last week, I wrote about the ways in which toxic leadership behaviors generate toxic work cultures. This week, I wanted to tackle the subtle ways in which toxic social norms may show up in our work environments.

Toxic leadership sets in motion a cycle that is amplified the more people it reaches and thus becomes very hard to break downstream, which makes it a particularly powerful driver of toxic work cultures.