Healthcare Leadership and Management in Healthcare Effective

Healthcare Leadership

Leadership and Management in Healthcare

Effective Leadership and Management

Leadership is much like communications in regards to the complexity inherent in these concepts. There are many different perspectives that are used to examine these issues and researchers study leadership and management from such disciplines includes Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Social Psychology, Business, and Sociology. There have been somewhere in the neighborhood of six to eight major approaches, depending on the vantage point, to leadership theory produced in the scientific literature over the last sixty years and even more have emerged from outside academia (Kilburg & Donohue, 2011). Competing theories include such perspectives as trait theory, situational theory, behavioral theory, competencies theory, network theory of leadership and many more.

Much of the work that a nurse-leader engages in on a daily basis rests in their ability to communicate with others; including clients, colleagues, superiors, and subordinates. Therefore, since this position is heavily group oriented, interpersonal communication may one of the most salient leadership skills that a nurse-leader can possess (Marquis & Huston, 2011). Furthermore, the nurse-leader is expected to develop a cohesive team to meet organizational goals and therefore developing communication skills can be critical to communicating in an effective and efficient manner with all team members as well as the group as a whole to make sure that priorities and expectation are clear.

In today's workplace there are an unprecedented number of ways for team members to communicate and a nurse-leader must be competent in all of them. These options can range from face-to-face meetings, to email, to video chat, to instant messaging, text, and the list goes on and on. One of the most effective ways to communicate with a group is through a team meeting. A best practice in this type of setting is having a formal agenda and meeting process. If the agenda is prepared and distributed before the meeting, then this gives group members an opportunity to think about what is to be discussed well before hand. Leaders who understand how to conduct an effective meeting can enhance both communication and motivation.

Leadership, Management, and Quality

An effective leader or manager must understand how to effectively delegate various tasks in order to meet organizational goals. Delegation can be defined simply as getting work done through others or as directing the performance of one or more people to accomplish organizational goals or it can also be defined as the delegation as giving someone else the authority to complete a task or action on your behalf (Marquis & Huston, 2011). When a nurse leader can effectively delegate different tasks to competent subordinates, then this can ensure quality. However, if the nurse-leader is ineffective in delegating then there can be a variety of quality issues that can prevent the team from maintain high quality standards. Delegating as a nurse-leader is a must because there is more work to be done than a single person can handle.

Nurses that can delegate as well as monitoring the progress of subordinates to ensure they have successfully completed their tasks can be vital to organizational success. As a result there have been many organizations that have attempted to standardize the process. Organizations such as The Joint Commission, the American Nurses Association, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) have been a vital component in establishing standards of practice and clinical practice guidelines for health care organizations and health care professionals. However, these two organizations use different definitions for delegation though they both have produced a joint statement on delegation.

Experts also agree that delegation is an essential element of the directing phase of the management process because much of the work accomplished by managers (first-, middle-, and top-level managers) occurs not only through their own efforts but also through those of their subordinates (Marquis & Huston, 2011). One way for a leader to accomplish this is to lead by example. Though this concept might represent a cliche, it has stood the test of time for a reason. If leaders don't lead by example, then the employees might perceive something of a double standard which can led to a situation in which then they will undoubtedly foster resentment from the team. A good manager should hold themselves to as high, or even better higher, standards than those they are responsible for.

The transformational leadership model has been identified to be potentially the best model for leadership; especially in regards to organizational change. The definition of transformational leadership was described as a type of leader could relate to the moral values of their followers. Such a connection can act to transform their personal goals into organizational goals; employees would then devote their energy and resources into transforming the organization (Judge & Bono, 2000). Such a leadership style is heavily dependent on effective communication. To become a transformational leader, five suggestions that aim to help managers foster their own transformative style has been identified (Straker, 2011):

1. Developing the vision

2. Selling the vision

3. Finding the way forwards

4. Leading the change

Core Performance Measures and Critical Pathways

The facility in which I work does track Core Measures for community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), congestive heart failure (CHF), or myocardial infarction (MI) however the metrics from this tracking doesn't seem to be a priority unless something goes wrong. I do not believe that the organization tracks critical pathways for analysis however. First developed in the 1980s as a tool to reduce length of stay, critical pathways also provide a useful tool for monitoring quality of care. Once the cost of a pathway is known, analyzing the cost-effectiveness of the pathway as well as the associated cost variances is possible (Marquis & Huston, 2011). By using clinical and cost variance data, decisions on changing the pathway can be made with both clinical and financial outcome projections. The advantage of critical pathways is that allow for some measure of standardizing processes so that the health care delivery can be more streamlined.