Fort Worth Medical School Launches Servant Leadership Speaker Series

FORT WORTH – How can you make other people successful? It is a question that many businesses and organizations continuously work to find a solution for in the medical field and beyond.

It is also a question that the TCU School of Medicine plans to explore in depth in a new lecture and panel discussion series being led by Jacqueline Chadwick, M.D., Vice Dean for Educational Affairs at the TCU School of Medicine.

As the leader of any group, one way to help the members of your group find success is to embrace the role becoming a servant leader, according to Dr. Chadwick.

“When it (servant leader) was originally developed the primary idea was to be a servant first,” Dr. Chadwick said. “A lot of people put it the other way around that if you’re a leader you act like a servant but that was not how it was intended.”

The TCU School of Medicine held the inaugural Jacqueline Ann Chadwick, MD, Servant Leadership Keynote Lecture and Panel at the TCU in late March. The series is being funded by the Jacqueline Ann Chadwick, MD Servant Leadership endowment, which was created to provide faculty development in servant leadership.

“The way it was really intended was to identify people who have a servant’s heart and choose to lead,” Dr. Chadwick said. “The purpose is to lead another group of people to be successful. If they are all successful then you feel successful and the organization is definitely successful.”

Dr. Chadwick served as the first featured speaker in the series named after her.  Students, faculty and staff attended the lecture.

Dr. Chadwick opened with a talk about the meaning of servant leadership and how her family helped her acquire those skills long before she became a physician. She gave an analogy her mother told her as a child.

“It’s easier to catch flies with honey rather than vinegar,” Dr. Chadwick said. “Once I figured it out, I understood what she meant and it’s to be kind and nice to people. You win them over when you are kind to them. It’s been something that has been built into my character and nature since I was a child.”

Servant leadership is at the core of the School of Medicine’s mission to transform health care by inspiring Empathetic Scholars®. At the school’s inception, Dr. Chadwick joined TCU as a critical leader in the schools’ design, creating partnerships and leading the school to receive preliminary accreditation in 2018, among many other roles.

Prior to that, she was the dean of the University of Arizona’s branch clinical campus in Phoenix, then was the vice dean of education as that campus became a fully accredited separate four-year medical school.

At the launch of the speaker series, some of the TCU medical students had a chance to meet Dr. Chadwick for the first time.

“It’s neat to meet the mind behind the School of Medicine and her thought process behind it all,” said Kevin Chao, a first-year medical student at TCU School of Medicine. “These are the ideas that drew me in as prospective medical student.”

Following the lecture, Dr. Chadwick was joined by David Capper, M.D., Chair of Clinical Sciences at TCU School of Medicine, and Ric Bonnell, M.D., Director of Service Learning at the TCU School of Medicine, for a panel discussion about servant leadership in the medical community.

The panelists discussed the importance of leading a medical team, or organization, with care and compassion and how that type of care would filter down into the communities that are being served. That is a different approach to training future physicians and practicing medicine, according to Richard Neville, M.D., assistant professor at TCU School of Medicine, who attended the lecture.

“This was important for the medical students to hear because the way the school is set up they are teaching this to their students early,” Dr. Neville said. “This way they can go out and be leaders of this type of (way of practicing) medicine. It is a much different way of learning to practice medicine from the way I was taught where all we cared about was knowing what to do and how to do it.”

The message resonated with Nathalie Scherer, a third-year medical student at the School of Medicine. She is currently spending a lot of time working alongside Dr. Capper at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth.

Dr. Capper is Scherer’s mentor for her four-year Scholarly, Pursuit and Thesis project at the medical school. The way he leads his medical team as they treat patients is something she one day hopes to emulate as a future physician.

“It really takes a leader to act as a servant leader to get the team to follow them and be the best they can be,” Scherer said. “That is a fascinating take away that I’ve had.”

Fully grasping what servant leadership is and how that can lead to better outcomes in medicine and beyond is what Dr. Chadwick hopes students and leaders in Fort Worth will take away from the series.

“Then the next step is developing the skill of how you can incorporate that into your own style of leadership,” Dr. Chadwick said. “We’re all leaders in some fashion. We need to keep in mind that we need to treat others with dignity. Listen and communicate with them in an honest and transparent way and really hearing what makes them tick.”