Description
A woman gives a keynote-style talk introducing Professor Gwen Sees, an esteemed orthopedic oncologic surgeon, researcher, and cancer center coordinator at Ghent University Hospital. Gwen Sees then speaks about leadership in orthopedics, sharing her personal journey as an introverted clinician who learned leadership through courses and reflection. She emphasizes that leadership is a choice rather than a title, and focuses on the trust-and-inspire style: modeling who you are, inspiring people, and trusting others. She describes experimenting with trust in her residents, clarifying expectations, and learning that effective leadership is about understanding others rather than boosting ego.
Throughout the talk, she references books and concepts that shaped her thinking, including avoiding annoying habits like over-correcting others, recognizing fixed versus growth mindsets, measuring progress against where people started, and always asking questions instead of assuming negative intent. She also discusses cultural differences in communication, especially nonverbal communication, and the importance of navigating defensiveness through curiosity. In the second half, she turns to team leadership, defining a team as mutually dependent people pursuing a common goal. She cites Simon Sinek’s ideas about the difference between what and why, and contrasts finite and infinite games to argue that medicine should focus on a shared purpose: improving patient outcomes.
She concludes that trust in teams depends on authenticity, care, and competence, and warns against keeping high-performing but low-trust 'brilliant jerks' because they damage the team atmosphere. Her closing message is a call for the medical community to collaborate across boundaries, trust one another, and work together for better patient care, ending with the idea that hard work for something you do not believe in is stress, while hard work for something you love is passion.