This week we return to the interview with Mary Ellen Doyle, Corporate VP of Nursing Operations at Scripps Health. In today’s featured video segments Doyle shares 2 important habits for leadership success, 2 questions she always asks potential new team members, and 6 additional pieces of advice for aspiring leaders.
When asked what habits she feels are most critical and beneficial for a leader to practice in order to achieve greater success, Doyle shared two:
- Communicate well at all levels of the organization
- Go and see the work being done
“Communication… is absolutely critical. And you can’t communicate well unless you understand the environment that you’re communicating in… for instance, as a senior nursing leader, I can’t really understand unless I go and see how the care is being delivered and I communicate directly with the staff.”
In the next segment Doyle talks about the process of interviewing job candidates and shares two things she always brings up in the interview, the first of which is “Tell me about your greatest failure.” Doyle explains, “The reason I ask the question… what I’m wanting to hear is, ‘What did you learn from that? Or what was important about that?’ It tells me a lot about a person, for them describing what was their greatest failure.”
In the last segment featured today Doyle shares and expounds on 6 simple but powerful pieces of advice for aspiring healthcare leaders:
- Be true to yourself
- Like what you do
- Do the best you can
- Never fear failure
- Be comfortable in the unknown
- Be comfortable working in teams
To watch one or more of these excellent segments from the interview, click above.