Doctors are typically lousy bosses, but they have lots of potential. So says Joseph D'Cruz, a professor of healthcare management at the University of Toronto who spends his time thinking about such things.

"There is very little in the training of physicians which would help them become good bosses," he says. "Things like teamwork and empathy are not part of the natural toolkit of the physician, particularly empathy towards co-workers. We call this emotional intelligence."

Mr D'Cruz says doctors score "quite low" in this area. "But the good news is that emotional intelligence is something that can be learned."

Doctors have immense potential as managers, he adds. "To be a good manager you need good native intelligence, and doctors have that in spades. They have the intellectual capability to be good managers — but they lack the emotional."

The first step, as with most things, is to acknowledge you have a problem. But doctors are often reluctant to admit it. "They think if they're smart as physicians, they must be smart as managers. That is a myth." says Mr D'Cruz. "Sometimes it's quite an epiphany when they're confronted with their ineptitude."

BAD BOSSES
In his line of work, Mr D'Cruz has heard some memorable stories of terrible physician bosses. One of his favourites involves a surgeon who's handed the wrong instrument and promptly sends it flying it across the OR.

Bad boss horror stories abound. Toronto's CityNews last year held a contest to identify the worst boss around. (You can breathe a sigh of relief. The winner — or loser — was a dentist who docked all his employees $100 when all his patients cancelled their appointments on September 11, 2001.) One entry was submitted by a former employee of a Toronto doctor who expected her to walk the six hours from her home in Scarborough to his office in Parkdale during the August 2003 blackout when public transit was out of service.

But Mr D'Cruz also knows a few doctors who've had very successful careers in management, including Dr Bob Bell, an orthopedic surgeon who runs the University Health Network UHN in Toronto, and Dr Alan Hudson, a neurosurgeon who's now the Ontario government's wait times guru. Their successes were hard-earned, he says. "They turned out very good, but both had to go to Harvard Business School to learn management."

MEA CULPA
The average doctor has had zero training in how to recruit, train or deal with staff problems. Perhaps in an ideal world doctors shouldn't be required to deal with managing their practices - family practices managed by nurses tend to be better run, says Mr D'Cruz - but in reality, it's part of the job.

So, given that you likely have to do some management tasks whether you like it or not, how can you identify if you're a bad boss? Mr D'Cruz says, "If you're experiencing a lot of absenteeism and turnover, that's a good hint you're not doing a good job."

Marilyn Haight, the Arizona-based author of Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Boss?, adds this can have a serious knock-on effect: if your staffers are unhappy, chances are they'll take it out on your patients — and you'll pay for it in the end.

Not sure if you're more like Larry Page, the Google co-founder who established the company as an employee-friendly workplace with free food and transportation, or David Brent, the fictional antihero of BBC's The Office who routinely harangues, embarrasses and patronizes his staff? Take NRM's quiz to find out whether you're a good boss or not.