Shared Leadership and the Patient Experience

Shared leadership promotes robust management structures by providing broader competence, continuous learning, and joint responsibility for clinical services. Co-leaders create synergistic work environments that foster trust and interprofessional collaboration with the mutual understanding of when to lead and when to step back and allow peer-leaders to step in. Shared leadership also enables the promotion of women to senior executive positions, accelerates gender parity at the top, and improves the leadership development pipeline and retention of talent. As described in this chapter, shared leadership leverages the combined strengths of the coequal leaders for better outcomes. When clinical and nonclinical staff collaborate effectively, healthcare teams can improve patient outcomes, prevent medical errors, improve efficiency, and increase patient satisfaction over prolonged periods.