Medical students will shape the future of the nation’s health care delivery, and while learning the clinical aspects of care is significant, leadership skills are also key to one’s development.
“For medical students, being great at your coursework and understanding the science and ‘technical’ aspects of health care delivery are the table stakes” said Ann Manikas, the AMA’s senior director of organizational development and learning. “The differentiator needed [to excel] is having great leadership skills.”
The AMA Medical Student Leadership Learning Series aims to develop tomorrow’s leaders in health care. Having worked in leadership development for more than two decades, Manikas helped write the content that populates the modules. For medical students looking to begin their development in leadership, she offers a few tips.
The series is part of an online learning platform called the AMA UME Curricular Enrichment Program, which features a robust library of engaging, interactive e-learning that showcases relevant scenarios and quality assessments. Nonsubscribing medical schools can find out how to give their students and faculty access to the AMA UME Curricular Enrichment Program.
Don’t count yourself out
Medical students may enter their training thinking they lack the skills to lead. Manikas says that is seldom the case.
“Leadership is not determined by a title,” she said. “It’s not a position. It can show up in informal ways early on. I always encourage people to think about a time they had to get others to a common goal where they had to help clarify what they were driving towards collectively. That’s a good example of leadership.”
Some examples of leadership that Manikas touts include volunteering in organizations, playing team sports, and helping to organize school projects.
Content to grow leadership
There are five modules in the series.
“Art of Collaboration”
- Medical students will learn strategies for optimizing team functionality, recognize techniques to improve collaboration through communication, and describe approaches for resolving conflict during collaboration.
“Conflict Resolution”
- This course will allow trainees to define conflict, identify its sources, describe different conflict management styles, and apply strategies to resolve conflict.
“Effective Communication”
- By taking this course, students will learn to recognize the importance of strong communication skills and identify key principles and styles of communication along with the components that make feedback effective.
“Managing Stress While Leveraging Your Unique Experiences”
- Students will gain the skills to recognize the signs of stress and burnout and identify steps, strategies, and one’s personal core values to reduce stress and burnout in their life.
“Present Like a Leader”
- Offering a road map to help students present with confidence and effectiveness, this course identifies the key elements that make an effective speaker, techniques for overcoming presentation anxiety, ways to successfully use your voice and body language and best practices for inviting and reacting to audience participation.
Understanding is an asset
Leaders need to understand where their colleagues and subordinates are coming from. That sense of empathy is important across the board, but with so many stakeholders, including sick patients, it takes on even more significance in health care.
“In all sectors, but particularly health care—leading with empathy is so important,” Manikas said. “Because of the burnout, the stress, the emotional stress, the strain, as leaders we need to focus on the work at hand but also realize we are working with human beings who have their own level of stress tolerance and resilience.
“You can still hold people accountable. But showing empathy is such a factor in whether people want to engage with you. If people are treated harshly, especially in a high-stress environment, if they don’t feel that you care, it makes it harder for people to want to be their best self and makes you less approachable.”
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Teamwork is increasingly important
Health care is becoming far more of a team sport than ever before. That means leaders need to be able to work with others effectively. Manikas says strong collaboration is rooted in relationship building within your own arena, with managers and across the health system.
“When you think about how health care is evolving, most practices now are more than just the lone expert physician model,” she said. “It’s really about working with other experts to deliver high quality care to the patient.
“In a collaborative environment, a leader can sit down and make sure everybody’s input and expertise are in the mix. They can define people’s roles clearly. Even if you’re not in a leadership role, you can figure out how to work across boundaries.”
For medical students looking to hone their leadership skills, the AMA offers the chance to distinguish yourself through more than 1,000 leadership opportunities and skill building through online training modules, project-based learning and more.
Leadership and the Match
Medical students’ leadership experiences can be a factor in how residency programs view them as applicants. Leadership work can be a centerpiece of an applicant’s personal statement and the experiences section of your residency application.
During an education session on preparing for the Match at the 2025 AMA Annual Meeting in Chicago, a panel of residency program directors said that leadership experiences listed on a residency application should be clearly explained and personally meaningful.
“Wherever you have the most meaningful experience that you want to talk about, I’d pick the ones you can elaborate on, you can describe, you can demonstrate ownership over. That's what people want to see,” said Sanjay Desai, MD, the AMA’s chief academic officer.
Dr. Desai added that one shouldn’t assume that a residency program director or faculty member is going to understand the scope and responsibilities of a leadership role. He said that applicants should explain “what were your responsibilities, what was the experience, what were the leadership skills you developed.”
