Is there a direct connection between communication skills and the art of successful leadership? Most of us would agree that there is. But is there a direct connection between blogging and leadership? That may be more of a reach.

Can the process of writing a blog help to develop communication skills that will prove useful in leadership? In my opinion the answer is yes, but a qualified yes. Writing a blog won’t help anyone become a good writer who never learned to write competently in the first place. Perhaps even more important, writing a blog won’t help anyone become a thought leader who hasn’t developed any original thoughts.

Communicating a vision

To make a real mark in history, a leader has to communicate a vision that people understand. The vision must be powerful enough to motivate them to follow. In decades past, for instance, the men who became President of the United States typically were graduates of liberal arts education, trained in the arts of debate, oratory, and essay composition. They knew how to make their points.

No matter which end of the political spectrum you favor, most of us would agree that Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were gifted communicators. Though obviously they benefited from the help of speechwriters behind the scenes, both were skillful writers on their own, as proved by their private documents and letters.

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Nepal? I don’t know anyone in Nepal. Yet not long ago I received a courteous email from a physician there, asking my permission to translate an article of mine into Nepali. The topic: advice for older patients who need anesthesia. He wants to distribute it to patients and publish it in his local newspaper.

I asked how he came across the article. He was browsing online among anesthesia blogs, and found mine, “A Penned Point“. Now “blog” isn’t a word Jane Austen would have recognized. It is a lumpish merger of “web” and “log”, and is generally defined today as a website on which an individual records opinions. The proliferation of blogs–like Tribbles–may be seen as a pernicious trend, but it demonstrates the power and reach of the Internet. Business Insider estimates that 22% of the people in the world own smartphones, an increase of 1.3 billion smartphones since 2009. In social media, once you put content out, you have no idea how far it will travel.

Many physicians consider social media a frivolous waste of time. Certainly they can be horribly misused–think of the cyber-bullying that goes on among teenagers. But used wisely, social media can be valuable communication tools. Here follows a brief guide to social media for physicians, admittedly subjective, with caveats included.

The doctor with an opinion

We all have opinions. Occasionally, we want the world to know about them. If you want to publish an opinion column and don’t want to create your own blog, there are online sites where your submission may be welcome. Probably the best-known public site for medical topics is KevinMD, which is curated by Dr. Kevin Pho, a New Hampshire internist. He came early to the game, starting his blog in 2004, and now has over 1000 regular contributors, myself included. You can submit a 500-700 word piece on almost any topic within medicine, aimed at an audience of physicians or at the general public. There’s a good chance that if you can put together a coherent sentence, Kevin will find a place for it. Brace yourself for the comments: Kevin’s readers tend to hold opinions as strongly as the writers do.
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Really, sir.  What were you thinking?

I’m talking to you—the anesthesia provider (I hate to think that you might be an anesthesiologist) who allowed himself to be videotaped while a patient injected his own induction dose of propofol.  Most people know something about propofol even if they aren’t in the anesthesia business–that’s the medication that Dr. Conrad Murray gave Michael Jackson to everyone’s sorrow.

I would insert the link here, but the video has been removed from YouTube.

Apparently the patient, a young man in his late teens or early twenties, needed anesthesia and decided it would be great fun if he could give his own drugs and film the adventure.  “Jackass” comes to the operating room.

The video shows the young man lying on an operating table with an anesthesia machine and monitors in view.  A tall, middle-aged man in blue scrubs, with a mask dangling around his neck, puts a pulse oximeter on the patient’s finger and hands him a 20-cc syringe of what appears to be propofol.  The young man starts to inject it and pushes the first 10 cc into the IV tubing, then laughs and says he feels dizzy.  He’s told to finish the injection, which he does, barely.  Then his eyes roll back.

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