Collaborative Skills Essential to Leadership

First, we would like to acknowledge Dr Mainous for his thoughtful editorial on our validation study of the Foundational Healthcare Leadership Self-assessment (FHLS) published recently in Family Medicine.1,2 We appreciate that he considers this an important topic worthy of attention. His reflection about our conceptual view of leadership education is accurate: that leadership skills include essential teamwork and collaboration, and that in this era of interprofessional practice “the success of the team is what is of paramount importance.” He summarized a key concept well: collaborative skills are essential leadership skills that all of our graduates should demonstrate.

We wholeheartedly agree with Dr Mainous’ point that the demonstration of content validity is essential to the validation process. We did include the requested information in the original article, including using eigenvalues >1.0 and factor loadings of 0.3 or greater to reduce items and develop domains.

We appreciate Dr Mainous’ editorial reflections on how to measure validity of an assessment, the importance of this work, and the value of collaborative skills for all family medicine residents.