The vision of leaders is often touted as their greatest value to organizations, and perhaps that is true. The ability to imagine a better future, to articulate it clearly, and then to bring others forward in building and attaining that vision is certainly an essential quality of effective leaders. Leaders with extraordinary vision are thus creative, well spoken, and influential, and generate a sense of co-hesiveness among individuals who, together, exert purposeful effort toward a foreseen objective. In academic psychiatry, leaders are people who can help our field generally, and departments of psychiatry specifically, to fulfill their commitments in multiple mission areas. Most traditional academic organizations define three core missions, but I believe we actually assume responsibility for five overlapping areas. The first two areas encompass education, preparing the next generation of physicians-in-training and developing innovative specialty and subspecialty initiatives, as well as research and scholarship, the generation, translation, and application of new knowledge for the benefit of society. A third mission area is clinical advancement and practice, which involves creating new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches and providing state-of-the-art clinical care for patients from all backgrounds and walks of life. We are also responsible for community engagement-working to partner with, serve, and improve the health of our communities, locally and globally.
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