Healthcare Leadership Trends for 2025
The numbers showed some interesting year over year movement. Expanding recruiting scope, which has historically involved casting a wider geographic net, entertaining candidates with non-traditional healthcare backgrounds and other tactics, saw a nine point decline. Potential explanations include budget constraints and the desire to restrain fill times. Financial limitations are also a likely contributor to decreases in the response rate for HR staff additions, process enhancements, and use of technology. In some cases, departments other than HR are taking the lead on executive recruiting, while technology use may have reached a steady state after notable expansion in recent years. Investment will no doubt increase as AI sees growing use in talent acquisition. Reliance on external search assistance jumped six points from last year. Organizations need maximum leverage in a talent market that remains tight. They seek help gaining access to a broad pool, including passive candidates who are not actively job-seeking. 6. Leadership Development to Prioritize Strategic Attributes and Clinical and Technology Roles Leadership roles and requirements must evolve in tandem with healthcare’s changing directions. Two baseline aspects of this evolution are today’s preferred traits and competencies and the roles that are growing in importance.
Leadership attributes This year’s top four required leadership qualities were:
23%
12%
28%
13%
COMMUNICATIONS
INTEGRITY AND TRUST BUILDING
VISION / STRATEGY
ABILITY TO BUILD POSITIVE CULTURES
This lineup mirrors 2023 findings. Vision/Strategy has been a perennial leader, and its ongoing prominence shows how critical it is for organizations to chart the right course amidst great change, uncertainty, and, for some, existential financial threats. Trust building and integrity rose from 19% last year to place firmly in second place. Trust is essential to change management and to establishing credibility with all stakeholders. An extensive independent healthcare survey underscored the workforce implications with the finding that “employee perceptions of organizational support and whether they had trust and confidence in senior leadership were among the top three contributors” to turnover intention and satisfaction scores. 1
1 K. Meese, L. Boitet, K. Sweeney, et. al., “Don’t Go: Examining the Relationships Between Meaning, Work Environment and Turnover Intention Across the Entire Healthcare Team,” Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare, January 23, 2024.
© B.E. Smith 2025
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