Health
June 02, 2026
How to lead multidisciplinary teams in complex healthcare projects
The sector’s biggest challenge is the difficulty of transforming individual excellence into collective results
Strategic projects in healthcare rarely fail due to a lack of technical knowledge. In general, what happens is that organizations bring together excellent professionals who cannot act as a system when faced with conflicting priorities, permanent care pressures, and historically fragmented structures.
This contradiction has become even more evident in recent years. Digital transformation, population aging, increasing litigation, scarcity of specialized talent, and the accelerated advance of artificial intelligence have changed the nature of leadership in the sector. Leading is no longer just about deciding. It has become about integrating distinct competencies in highly complex environments.
Today, implementing an electronic health record, seeking hospital accreditation, redesigning care pathways, expanding telemedicine, or incorporating analytics requires coordination among physicians, nursing, pharmacy, information technology, legal, procurement, finance, compliance, human resources, and senior leadership. The challenge is to make them converge. In theory, everyone advocates for collaboration. In practice, each area responds to its own incentives.
The clinical staff protects decision-making autonomy and care safety. Nursing observes a real impact on workflows and operational load. Technology prioritizes integration, interoperability, and cybersecurity. Finance seeks sustainability. Legal anticipates regulatory and reputational risks. Procurement measures contracts and costs. HR monitors engagement and installed capacity. None of these rationalities are wrong. The problem arises when they coexist without coordination. At that moment, the project loses coherence even before it loses its deadline.
The myth of automatic promotion
Many organizations still make a recurring mistake: they assume that technical excellence naturally produces leadership. The best surgeon will not always be the ideal manager to lead a digital transformation. The most experienced financial executive may not mobilize clinical teams. The longest-serving professional may carry historical legitimacy, but not necessarily the repertoire to negotiate complex changes.
Similarly, younger professionals often bring speed, technological mastery, and new perspectives, although they are still consolidating relational experience and resilience for high-pressure environments.
For years, the Project Management Institute has been demonstrating that interpersonal skills, influence, communication, and stakeholder management are decisive in complex projects. In healthcare, this is even more true because knowledge is distributed. No one alone masters all critical variables.
Contemporary projects require less vertical command and more relational leadership. Less symbolic hierarchy. More alignment capacity.
When good professionals fail together
Recent organizational change literature shows that collective performance does not arise from the simple sum of individual talents, but from the ability to transform distinct competencies into coordinated action (WHO, 2021; Edmondson, A., 2018). In healthcare, three factors appear recurrently.
- Structural fragmentation
Many organizations function as administrative archipelagos. The surgical center seeks efficiency and room turnover. The pharmacy prioritizes drug control and safety. Billing pursues compliance and revenue. The outpatient clinic maximizes scheduling. Each logic makes sense in isolation. The problem is that the patient travels through the entire value chain. And it is at the interfaces that disorganization exacts its price.
- Ambiguous governance
Many participate. Few decide. Meetings multiply, consensuses are postponed, and responsibilities are diluted. In some institutions, the decision-making process has become so sophisticated that it has become incapable of deciding.
- Operational overload
Professionals accumulate an intense care routine and parallel strategic projects, without protected time for qualified execution. The result is predictable: full agendas, scarce energy, and relevant initiatives conducted in the leftovers of their workday.
When technology merely digitizes
Few topics expose these fragilities as much as digital projects. Hospitals across the country have invested significant amounts in robust systems, automation, analytics, and information security. Nevertheless, part of these investments delivered less value than promised. The script is familiar: doctors complain about wasted time, nursing points to an increase in clicks, IT attributes problems to user resistance, and management demands adherence to the schedule. The problem is rarely just in the software. It lies in the leadership model.
Institutions such as the Albert Einstein Israeli Hospital and the Sírio-Libanês Hospital have become benchmarks not only for embedded technology but for their ability to combine protocols, management, continuous training, and collaborative culture. Technology without governance can hardly sustain a competitive advantage.
In the supplementary sector, large operators face a similar challenge: integrating assistance, accredited network, regulation, customer experience, and economic-financial sustainability. They do not just manage health plans. They manage complex ecosystems.
In the public sector, successful experiences from the Unified Health System show the same logic. Municipal networks that advanced in electronic health records, telemedicine, and digital regulation normally combined technology with agreements between primary care, specialties, and central management. The World Health Organization has been reinforcing this principle: sustainable digital transformation depends less on equipment and more on people, processes, and governance.
The new profile of the multidisciplinary leader
The contemporary leader does not need to be the brightest in the room. They need to make the room work. Five competencies have become central.
- Translate technical languages – Convert specialized jargon into shared objectives. Turn “FHIR interoperability” into less rework and better continuity of care;
- Managing productive conflicts – Conflicts between cost, deadline, quality, and safety can elevate the quality of decisions. The risk begins when technical divergence turns into territorial dispute;
- Thinking systemically – Every local change produces chain effects. Changing the medical schedule impacts reception, exams, billing, call center and patient experience;
- Create psychological safety – Amy Edmondson’s (2018) research shows that teams perform better when they can question, admit mistakes, and suggest improvements without fear of retaliation;
- Execute with discipline – Empathy without delivery turns meetings into corporate therapy. Leadership requires clear responsibilities, indicators, cadence, and follow-up.
The end of the solo leader
Models based on excessive centralization are losing relevance. Complex projects require distributed leadership: variable authority according to the nature of the problem. In the clinical front, care protagonism. In systemic integration, technical leadership. In the regulatory agenda, legal and compliance. In financial sustainability, executive management. The main leader acts as a conductor, not as a soloist.
AI adds a new layer of complexity. It can support demand forecasting, scales, productivity, triage, auditing, and healthcare risks. But it can also amplify biases, decision opacity, and reputational exposure. Algorithms do not eliminate organizational conflicts. Often, they just accelerate them. Serious AI projects require integration between clinicians, data scientists, technology, legal, ethics, governance, and operations. The mature debate is no longer about “does it work or not”. The right questions are now different:
- Who does it work for?
- With what risk?
- With what clinical impact?
- With what transparency?
- Under which rules?
Many organizations still believe that their competitive advantage lies in brand, capital, buildings, or equipment. These assets matter. But they can be bought, copied, or financed. Rarer, and more valuable, is building environments in which different professions work together with intelligence, speed, and value focus.
Leading multidisciplinary teams does not mean eliminating disagreements. It means transforming technical differences into collective execution capability. In 21st-century healthcare, the competitive advantage will not be within professions. It will be between them.
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Who wrote this column
Beatriz Cristina de Freitas
