Developing a Personal Communication Plan
In the February 2026 blog, I discussed the importance of leadership communications. I feel that communicating is the most essential function of my job and probably the same for every leader and physician. In this blog, I want to share my thoughts on developing a personal communication plan. Each year, I craft my own communication plan with great intentionality and thoughtful planning and I carry out that plan each year. I present the considerations below so that the reader can work on developing or refining their own communication plan in order to be more effective and intentional with their own lives and careers.
Newsletters
Each month, I send out a newsletter to each team member and another one for each student that includes communications from my office as well as from each leader of the medical school. It typically contains what each department is doing, what their needs are, or successes that they want to celebrate. The majority of employees and medical students read these. They are not intended to be for the general public so we can focus on matters relevant to each of those audiences. We use Google Slides with beautiful templates that our Director of Communications created and we send out to the leaders at the beginning of each month (with weekly automated reminders) to give folks plenty of time to do their sections. My section only takes about 10 minutes or so to complete. This pays dividends in terms of getting folks on the same page. It also prevents comments like “no one ever told me” that is frequently heard in other organizations - getting corrected by your peers about something going on within the organization works as a powerful reminder for folks to read the newsletter and stay engaged. We also send a separate newsletter to our approximately 1,500 clinical faculty that is focused on informing them about what is going on within the organization and keeping them engaged.
Blog
This blog series that you are reading now is part of my communications plan and is a monthly series that I can focus on topics that are a combination of things that I think may be helpful to the OCOM community as well as areas that I have a keen interest in. I never use AI to write them and they are an authentic way that I can express my creative writing while hopefully improving the lives of others. While readership isn’t huge, it also acts as an archive of my thoughts on certain topics that I can send out when asked for specific advice about one of the topics.
Podcast
Podcasts have taken off over the past 20 years and it seems like everyone has a favorite podcast that they watch or listen to. I created the OCOM Podcast Modern Medical Education to lead the way when our podcast studio was created to show folks what we can do with the technology. It is also a very helpful tool to connect with members of the community, both internally and externally, about topics related to the future of medicine or medical education that may have an impact on the future of OCOM. Team members enjoy being on the show and I get requests all of the time for folks to be on it. It also has created a significant amount of content for various areas of OCOM (e.g., admissions, OMM, AI in Medical Education, etc.).
Social Media
Whether you like or dislike social media, it has turned out to be an incredibly powerful tool to get messaging out to the community, to stay relevant in your network, and to grow your network. As an organization, it has helped us grow our community and opportunities for our medical students significantly over the past few years. While we are a medical school that is just beginning our third year of instruction, in many ways, we are functioning like a school that has been around for over 50 years (and just as busy). My Director of Communications, Rachel Freeman does a fantastic job with our social media and it takes about an hour of work from her each day to keep up with it. It also takes a significant amount of my time to create and share content with her as well as to routinely post and manage my personal social media pages.
Birthdays and Holidays
Birthdays and holidays represent an important opportunity to communicate with various communities. We send emails out to every one of our approximate 1,500 faculty members (including preceptors). We do the same with holiday cards. We also send out personal gifts to our hospital and university partners (this year it was popcorn) as well as a handwritten note from me. These small gestures have created trust, good will, and helped lead to a number of opportunities for our medical school and have helped grow our all important relationships.
Handwritten Note Cards
One of the most important communications that I do is to personally hand write note cards to employees for a number of key events: first day of their employment at OCOM welcoming them, a holiday note, thank you for their hard work at the end of the academic year, and notes about milestones (e.g., birth of a baby, success on a big project, etc.). I am always amazed with the number of folks who save those cards. Often, they are on display in their offices or stored somewhere that they keep mementos. While this takes some time, the novelty and personalization of a hand written note card is an important tool and gesture and I think the world would be a better place if we would all do so more often.
Email Etiquette
The communication tool that I use the most at work is email. I send and receive hundreds of emails every day. My goal with all of my emails is to be timely (usually the same day responses to emails that I receive), thoughtful, and intentional. I estimate that I spend an average of at least an hour each day reading and responding to emails (some days more). I have found that AI has improved the quality of my email (e.g., adding more empathetic tones) and sped up the authoring process (e.g., AI can synthesize complicated thoughts into elaborate emails in just a few seconds). I have also found that I write better emails as a result of seeing emails created by AI, especially using certain empathetic phrases. It is also important to know when not to send emails, such as when I have an emotional response or when a conversation needs to take place in person rather than by email.
Meetings
Face-to-face meetings are an important part of my professional life and I couldn’t run a medical school without them. The primary function of most of the meetings that I am in is for communication. We do weekly Dean’s Council meetings that act as a communications meeting within my team as well as a decision-making forum. We have quarterly State of OCOM meetings that communicate important items and also allows sharing of best practices from various departments (e.g., variety show style). One-to-one meetings between supervisors and direct reports have been shown to improve outcomes and enhance engagement and we have hardwired weekly 30-minute one-to-one meetings throughout the organization for most departments. For my 13 direct reports, I purposely don’t have an agenda going into each meeting and I spend the time listening, taking notes, and offering support. Topics of importance always have a tendency to surface and everything that I want to discuss seems to come out organically at each of these meetings. I believe that they play a major role in developing and maintaining our very positive culture.
Random Walkabouts
Randomly walking through the building provides unstructured opportunities for folks to talk with me, for me to talk with them, and to enjoy the positive culture of our organization firsthand. OCOM was designed for “collision encounters” that intentionally spurs creative conversations and brings people together that sometimes may have not interacted much. You also learn so much about your co-workers during these meetings and for someone who is an “E” on the Myers Briggs, it is incredibly stimulating.
Bringing People Together Quickly
One major part of my job that I deal with each day is conflict resolution. Walt Disney believed that nearly all workplace conflict could be resolved through communication and I resolutely believe that he was correct. I hear conflict every single day. My initial approach to nearly every potential conflict is to bring people together. Nearly everyone that has worked with me has experienced me calling someone else during a meeting (not always in a conflict situation). My initial statement to the person on the other side of the call is “don’t say anything bad about XXXX (the person that I am with)”. This starts the conversation off in a lighthearted tone and oftentimes gets the person to say something nice about the person that I am with, paving the way for a collaborative discussion. I resolve a lot of tension and conflict on these calls and I am convinced that it has helped improve our culture. When two people have major conflict, I get the two of them in the room with me and I am always amazed (oftentimes without any mediation) how people come together and solve whatever conflict that they had.
I hope that sharing my personal communication plan helps inspire you to create or further develop one for yourself. The one thing that I think every medical school dean (and probably most human beings) needs is to have excellent communications. It is one of the things that has the power to improve your personal life and the world around you.
