Becoming an Effective Health Care Manager The Essential Skills of Leadership By Len Sperry, M.D., Ph.D.

Excerpted from the Preface of Becoming an Effective Health Care Manager: The Essential Skills of Leadership, by Len Sperry, M.D., Ph.D.

Copyright © 2003 by Health Professions Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Preface

"If there is one thing that keeps this place from being a first-class health care system, it’s a lack of really effective managers."

I’ve heard countless hospital administrators and consultants make this and similar remarks. No doubt it is the reason why highly effective health care managers are in such high demand today. Such managers play an indispensable role in boosting productivity, quality of care, and cost savings as well as patient and employee satisfaction. Other business sectors are experiencing a similar shortage of highly effective managers but not as severely as in health care. Studies across all business sectors find that skilled leadership is more predictive of the financial viability of an organization than any combination of the other key indicators of financial viability, such as market share, reputation, and overall assets. Research also suggests that health care organization systems that actively focus on skill building in leadership development programs can dramatically increase productivity and employee commitment.

What skills are essential in increasing productivity and commitment? Technical skills? Analytic skills? Operational skills? Relational skills? It is assumed that managers would not be hired if they did not possess at least adequate levels of technical and job-related skills. Research studies and surveys, however, consistently reveal that relational, operational, and analytic skills are the most important and essential for increasing productivity and commitment.

Accordingly, this text can help to increase and enhance the leadership skills of managers in three key functional skill set areas:

1. Operational (team performance, commitment and motivation, delegation, and time and stress management)

2. Relational (communications, negotiation and conflict management, coaching, and counseling and interviewing)

3. Analytic (budgeting, managing financial and human resources, strategic thinking and decision making, and evaluating organizational and personal resources)

This book focuses on several skills within 12 core skill sets. A skill set, as the term implies, is a set or cluster of related skills. For example, communication is a skill set consisting of several specific skills such as listening, engagement, empathic responding, nonverbal communication, verbal presentations, and written communication.

This book focuses on the 12 skill sets that are essential to becoming an effective health care manager. These skills are described and illustrated in this learner-friendly approach to leadership development. Unlike other leadership and management books that simply describe the skills that effective managers and supervisors need, Becoming an Effective Health Care Manager: The Essential Skills of Leadership is designed to promote the learning and mastery of these skills. The discussion of each skill includes five learning sections:

1. A concise description of the skill

2. Skill-focused exercises for learning each skill

3. One or more case examples illustrating the successful use of the skill in a realistic, daily health care management situation

4. A set of review questions and related individual and group activities to assess learning outcomes for that skill

5. A self-assessment for identifying the learner’s current skill level

The book is based on solid research findings and on the author’s consultation, courses, and seminars in which managers have been taught these skills with this effective  learning approach. It is a high-interest, high-impact, hands-on approach to learning. It includes self-assessment devices to evaluate current skill levels in each of the 12 skill sets, as well as a pre- and posttest assessment of the reader/learner’s overall leadership skill competency. Finally, realistic individual and small-group learning exercises promote skill development.

Becoming an Effective Health Care Manager: The Essential Skills of Leadership will be useful in leadership and management courses and continuing education workshops and seminars for health care managers, as well as in undergraduate and graduate courses in health administration programs. It should also appeal to individual managers interested in developing these skills to increase their own effectiveness.

The structure of the book is straightforward and direct, and consists of three steps. Step I is preparatory. This section introduces the idea of skill building in leadership development and contains the Self-Assessment of Essential Leadership Skills: Pretest, which provides the learner with an assessment of his or her overall leadership skills competence level. In Step II, the learner explores the principles and practices of the 12 skill sets. Each chapter in this section focuses on one skill set and contains case examples, skill development exercises and activities, and a detailed self-assessment of that skill set. The goal of these chapters is to assist the learner in becoming a more effective manager. Finally, Step III progresses to an action plan for continuing the journey of becoming an effective manager and making the transition to being an effective manager, that is, achieving and maintaining mastery of the skills of effective leadership. Step III concludes with the Self-Assessment of Essential Leadership Skills: Post-test.