One of the great paradoxes in healthcare is this: Women make up the majority of the workforce and drive most healthcare decisions in U.S. households, yet they remain persistently underrepresented in executive leadership roles.
This gap between presence and power is slowly narrowing — but not fast enough. In a recent conversation hosted by Becker’s Healthcare and Vituity, five healthcare leaders shared candid insights from their leadership journeys: what it takes to lead decisively without losing the room, to build cultures where safety is everyone’s job, to sustain energy over decades, and to sponsor the next wave of leaders.
Key takeaways from the conversation follow below.
1. Balance, not binaries Carla Braxton, MD, chief quality officer of Houston Methodist West and Continuing Care Hospitals explained the contrast between clinical decisiveness and administrative collaboration, urging physicians to adapt communication styles while maintaining authority. The panelists emphasized that effective leadership demands a balance of traits, particularly for women often caught in the “double bind,” seen as either too assertive or too soft.
“We don’t need everybody to aspire to be a CEO,” said Dr. Braxton. “We need you to be great at what you do and able to lead. You need to be an effective communicator, a team player and you need to be decisive because that’s a physician.”
Lily Henson, MD, CEO of Piedmont Augusta Hospital, underscored that decisiveness isn’t dismissiveness. Her default is to widen the aperture, especially to include quieter voices.
“99.99% of the time my team and my staff know that I count on all of the input and the brains and the talents of the people on the team to help come up with a decision that makes the most sense for the organization,” said Dr. Henson said.
2. Equity and safety are shared work. Health equity and psychological safety surfaced across the hour. Maureen Bell, MD, physician director of community impact at Vituity, was direct: don’t silo it.
“Equity is everyone’s job,” said Dr. Bell. “The goal is to create a health system where every provider, regardless of what you look like, what gender you are, where you come from, can deliver competent, compassionate and equitable care.”
Dr. Henson’s culture-of-safety example made the point: a nutrition aide stopped the chief of hospital medicine from entering an isolation room without PPE — and was thanked for it.
“It’s critical to create an environment for all of our staff to be able to speak up if you want to be able to provide excellent quality care to your patients,” Dr. Henson said.
3. Sustainability is a leadership skill. Sustained leadership requires boundaries, presence and honest support systems. Angela Ward, RN, vice president of quality, patient safety and performance improvement at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, named the tension many women carry — professional demands, caregiving, expectation-setting — and argued for mindfulness over rumination.
“There is a certain element of privilege to be able to do the work that we do,” said Ms. Ward. “We have to be mindful of that choice but we also have to create some sense of awareness and boundaries for how much of ourselves, our mind and our time we can give.”
4. Don’t just mentor — sponsor
Every leader on the panel pressed for concrete sponsorship, not just advice. Elissa Charbonneau, DO, chief medical officer at Encompass Health, wished she had mapped her goals earlier and urged rising leaders to ask for help—inside or outside their organization.
“Whether you’re on the early side of your career or more mature, I would take advantage of connecting with someone that you admire that has the leadership style that appeals to you,” said Dr. Charbonneau. “Go ahead and ask because If you don’t ask, then you’ll never know.”
You can watch the full panel discussion here.
