Jeff Friedrich

Cohort 14, MCCN, Plastic and Hand Surgeon, Professor of Surgery, and Residency Director, UW Medicine Division of Plastic Surgery

What drew you to the MCCN degree track?

I had accepted a leadership position at my work in the Division of Plastic Surgery at UW and I quickly realized that my lack of formal leadership and communication training needed to be fixed. I looked at several types of executive graduate degree programs to get that leadership training, including Masters of Public Administration, MBA, and even a healthcare specific degree of Master’s of Health Professions Education. However, I came to the conclusion early in my leadership career that communication underpins 90% or more of all aspects of leadership. So the MCCN degree track at Comm Lead really appealed to me as it was really leadership training with a communication focus. And a bonus was having it located at the institution where I work.

The other part of the MCCN that was appealing to me was the opportunity to get into other aspects of communication that I had little experience with including things like social media, legal issues, and crisis communication. Once I started the program, I regularly told people that one of the reasons that I loved it was that I got to use a part of my brain I did not often get to use in the very scientific and very concrete world of surgery.

How does the focus and ethos of the MCCN intersect with your work today? 

My main take away from the MCCN degree was that it is designed to develop leaders who have an excellent grasp of the fundamentals of all types of communication across platforms and environments, and I really believe that that is what the program did for me. I was able to acquire a variety of tools, from interpersonal communication to digital and social media that I have continued to apply to my work in medicine. Interestingly, though surgery and communication may seem to be very disparate disciplines, at a fundamental level, they are quite similar: Neither of them has complex formulas or theorems to work out or solve, nor any great mysteries to be revealed, but they involve acquiring a set of skills, and then repeated application of those skills get good results. Skill acquisition is something that I love to do, and I keep trying to do that in communication and surgery.

If you could design a course for the MCCN degree track, what would it be?

Hopefully I am doing the Comm Lead program proud by curricular and course design in my local environment here at UW medicine. In our Division of Plastic Surgery, I have created an interpersonal communication curriculum on subjects such as working with diverse populations, critical conversations, and communication principles involved in the informed consent process. And at a larger scale, I have also worked with our Graduate Medical Education office (the entity that oversees all post-medical school training) to develop a leadership series. We teach communication principles to develop leadership capabilities in all aspects of medicine. I would love to complete the circle by designing a course at the MCCN program that incorporates bedrock medical principals such as beneficence and service centered work that can be applied to communication and leadership.

What is one of the best pieces of career advice you’ve ever gotten?

The best advice I got in surgery was that you should never miss a meal unless you have unstable patient, and I adhere to that rule every day 😊