Build Trust, Boost Leadership

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Family physician Amir Atabeygi discusses his article “Building trust in dyad leadership partnerships.” Amir explains why trust is the foundation of successful dyads, highlighting how implicit follow-through and consistent communication turn a partnership into a cohesive leadership unit. He shares practical strategies for over-communicating, maintaining situational awareness, and ensuring that each partner can speak for the dyad with authority and confidence. Amir illustrates how intentional relationship-building transforms dyads into seamless, high-functioning teams that enhance both organizational outcomes and professional satisfaction. Listeners will take away actionable lessons on cultivating trust, setting expectations early, and treating dyad relationships as central to leadership success.

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Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Amir Atabeygi. He is a family physician, and we are going to talk about the KevinMD article that he co-wrote, “Building trust in dyad leadership partnerships.” Amir, welcome to the show.

Amir Atabeygi: Good morning. Thanks for having me on.

Kevin Pho: All right, let us start by briefly sharing your story and jump right into the article that you co-wrote.

Amir Atabeygi: Oh, sure. I work at a critical access hospital in Elma, Washington, and I am the medical director of two of our outpatient clinics with my partner Christina Mitchell, who could not join us. And she and I wrote this article about dyad relationships. I think mostly it was my idea and she jumped in with me because we have a great working relationship, but I have also seen what the other side looks like when you are under the leadership of dyads that are not so high functioning.

And I think there is no training for this. When you take on these leadership roles, you just get thrown in and you have to figure it out. So it is nice to have a little bit of a framework to go by.

Kevin Pho: All right, so for those who are not familiar with clinician administrative partnerships, I know dyads is one version of that. Let us bring everyone to the same page and explain what a dyad partnership is.

Amir Atabeygi: Sure. So generally a dyad would be a partnership between a clinician and an administrator, and you co-lead a clinic or a service line. And so I am the clinician in our partnership and Christina is more administrative, operational. And I think the point of a dyad is that you each bring unique skills to the job and sort of co-lead together and highlight your strengths and fill in each other’s weaknesses. That is what the model is supposed to be anyways.

Kevin Pho: All right. So tell us how those responsibilities are shared between you two.

Amir Atabeygi: Well, we originally started off as dyad partners for one clinic and then took over another clinic as so happens in rural health care. You just do a lot of things at the same time. But very early on I think we delineated our roles in that anything that was clinical related I would take care of, and anything that was more admin related she would take care of. And there are always things where it involves both aspects. And we started just having a great relationship in that we would communicate those things and make shared decisions together.

And part of that was we trusted each other in our competence and information sharing. And that made it real easy because we never had to think what the other one was doing. We always knew what we were doing.

Kevin Pho: So it sounds like of course, communication between you two is critical to a successful relationship. So can you share an example or a story where that dyad framework, that successful dyad framework in your case, overcame a problem or obstacle just so we can see what it looks like in practice?