From Clinic to Boardroom: Learning to Lead on the job

After four years of undergraduate physiotherapy training, I was on a journey to help people live their best lives. What I didn’t realise was that journey would quickly shift gears to a leadership journey. My first deputy manager role came before I had any formal management training followed relatively swiftly by a manager role.   Managing rosters, setting budgets, conducting performance reviews, and tracking team engagement with the ultimate goal of delivering improved patient outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Like so many clinicians stepping into leadership, I understood patient care inside out but had no idea how to read a P&L, conduct a difficult conversation, or set meaningful targets. So, I got really curious and leant on the executive team, and particularly the CFO.  She was one of the busiest people in the organisation, yet when a manager showed genuine interest in the numbers she would stop and give me her time. She’d say, “These numbers tell a story, they’re the picture of what’s really happening.”

That phrase stuck with me. Because understanding the numbers wasn’t just about budgets or cost control, it was about learning to see the system. I was buzzing! Once I could read what the data was telling me, I could connect it to the people and processes behind it. The spreadsheets stopped feeling like something abstract and became a window into performance, patterns, and potential.

Learning the nuts and bolts of management, finance, productivity, workforce planning didn’t make me less of a clinician. It made me a better one. It helped me understand how to deliver care sustainably, how to translate quality into efficiency, and how to make decisions that balanced compassion with accountability.

But as tenure as a manager grew, I realised that the real challenge was learning to lead through others. That required something deeper than process knowledge. It meant learning to communicate across different groups, up, down and sideways, to motivate rather than instruct, to hold steady when the team around me was under pressure. It meant understanding that leadership wasn’t just about knowing what to do,  it was about helping others bring their best selves to the work every day.

Clinicians are often the best-placed people to lead in healthcare because we understand the system from the inside. We’ve felt the pressure at the patient interface - we know the cost of inefficiency, and we see the direct impact of leadership on patient outcomes. But to lead well, we need the same investment in training and development that we had as clinicians. Communication and building positive team culture, like clinical skill, takes time, practice, and feedback.

We need to keep learning about management but also about human behaviour and about ourselves. We need to read widely, seek out mentors, and stay curious about what drives people and performance. Leadership, Manager or CEO can be a title you’re given, however it’s the set of practices you build on the way that make a difference.

If you are in the same place that I was, starting out your journey or thinking about how to get there.

Here are five reads that might help shape your journey:

1. “Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek – on why trust and safety are the foundations of performance.

2. ‘The seven habits of highly effective leaders’ by Steven Covey - a set of guiding principles that drive habits

3. “Dare to Lead” by Brené Brown – a masterclass in courage, vulnerability, and authenticity at work.

4. “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr – for understanding how to align goals with impact.

5. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear – because leadership isn’t a single decision, it’s the accumulation of small daily behaviours.

The shift from clinic to boardroom isn’t about leaving care behind it’s about expanding it.  When we invest in learning the management essentials and combine them with the empathy and insight we’ve honed as clinicians, we become the kind of leaders healthcare desperately needs:  grounded, capable, and human.