Physicians must provide transformational leadership at many levels. This begins with a deep self-awareness and connection to one's values, purpose and mission. Transformational leadership is key to building highly effective teams, fostering interprofessional collaboration, providing exceptional patient care, and positively impacting complex systems.

Michigan has a long history of graduating leaders. Our innovative program embeds and integrates leadership training during the entire medical school experience with mission to enhance and develop leadership skills and the ability to positively influence health care.

As a medical student at Michigan, your leadership and management skills are cultivated through a variety of action-based learning experiences. The majority of leadership skill and knowledge development will come from students’ experiences as leaders, through working on teams, observing other leaders and reflecting on their own and others’ experiences. Leadership learning will also come from interactions with mentors and coaches.

Fundamental leadership skills and concepts will be taught in didactic and small group sessions as a supplement to experiential and mentoring leadership learning. Through mentored experiential learning and specific training, students will:

• Direct their own leadership journey based on their personal mission, vision and values
• Set and be accountable to specific goals
• Reflect on their own development to plan future professional and leadership engagement

Specific activities in the Leadership Development Program are designed to develop leadership skills, including:

• Leadership 360° evaluation:
  - Feedback solicited from multiple evaluators pertaining to students’ leadership in different realms including academic, extracurricular and interpersonal
• Opportunities for 1-on-1 reflection on personal leadership development with faculty
• Small group, interactive learning sessions where students are challenged to perform an informed self-assessment, then work with their peer groups to further develop and enrich their leadership skills
• A four-week Branches elective on strategic leadership and management, which focuses on introducing students to key managerial, organizational, leadership and business topics related to health systems and physicians. You’ll be prepared to address the complexities of the modern health care system and effect change that will improve the quality of care.
• Capstone projects