The role of the clinical director: self described strategies for success and satisfaction.

Clinical leaders and other practicing psychiatrists face a great deal of pressure and frustration in their professional lives. Organizational, supervisory, practice and interpersonal challenges are great. The potential for burnout is high, perhaps higher than for those in other medical disciplines. With these concerns in mind, a facilitated meeting of a large group of clinical directors working in New York State's Office of Mental Health was focused on a discussion of the role of the clinical director. The meeting employed an approach that can be termed "mindfulness". Clinical directors described their current roles, what they would like their roles to be, impediments to achieving the roles they wished to have and approaches that could be taken (mainly by themselves) to enhance their role success and satisfaction. The paper describes this process and its outcome.