Empowering leaders, empowering teams: fostering wellness through leadership

Pediatric radiology is deeply meaningful work, yet increasing workplace stress and burnout threaten workforce engagement, retention, and the delivery of high-quality patient care. Historically, many wellness initiatives have focused on individual-level interventions, such as resilience training and mindfulness, while inadequately addressing the organizational and operational factors that contribute to employee distress. Growing evidence suggests that burnout is driven less by deficiencies in individual resilience than by chronic workplace stressors, including excessive workload, inefficient workflows, staffing shortages, communication challenges, and organizational culture. As a result, leadership has emerged as a critical determinant of workforce well-being. In this commentary, a framework is proposed for wellness-centered leadership in pediatric radiology that reframes leadership itself as a primary wellness intervention. The framework is built upon three foundational pillars: caring about people by fostering psychological safety and trust; cultivating relationships through inclusive leadership, meaningful work, and community; and inspiring change by addressing operational barriers that create unnecessary workplace distress. Employee experience should be measured—including professional fulfillment, psychological safety, workplace inclusion, and retention risk—with the same rigor applied to traditional departmental metrics such as quality, access, productivity, and patient experience. Improving workforce well-being requires moving beyond performative wellness initiatives toward leadership strategies that intentionally shape organizational culture and the daily work environment. By creating psychologically safe, collaborative, and operationally effective workplaces, pediatric radiology leaders can promote professional fulfillment, strengthen workforce sustainability, and ultimately improve the care delivered to children and families.