Leadership Institute

Health Care Leadership Skills

Recommended Solution for: Health Care Leadership Skills

Health care organizations need a leadership development strategy to gain a competitive advantage in a challenging industry. In fact, a recent study found that ensuring the right people are in place and well-equipped for promotion to top leadership roles appears essential to the quality of hospital performance at Best of Breed hospitals.(1) The quality of a health care organization’s leadership directly affects clinical and operational outcomes, including quality of care, patient safety, patient satisfaction, productivity and profitability, as well as employee retention and engagement. Whether the goal is to achieve Magnet status, earn the Baldrige Award, or become the regional provider and employer of choice, health care organizations must adopt a strategic approach to developing their leaders and provide them with essential skills. In particular, health care leaders must be able to:

  • Foster an environment that inspires individuals and teams to perform at their best.
  • Provide the coaching and support that are critical to successfully manage a diverse workforce.
  • Create and drive culture change in a way that minimizes conflict and resistance and maximizes commitment.
  • Help others align individual performance goals with the facility’s strategic goals.
  • Retain valuable staff members who are critical to achieving higher patient satisfaction and loyalty.
  • Build partnerships across functional units.

Course Recommendations

These courses build the skills that leaders need to move the organization to a team-based, high-performance structure.

* Essentials of Leadership -- This prerequisite course for most leadership courses teaches leaders how to get results through people.  Option: Essential Skills for Health Care Managers**

  • Coaching For Success -- Teaches proactive coaching skills that leaders need to help people take on new tasks or solve problems. Option: Coaching Staff**
  • Coaching For Improvement -- Builds the skills leaders need to help people with performance or work habit problems. Option:  Improving Staff Performance Parts 1 and 2**
  • Leading Change -- Explores how change affects individuals and teams and shows leaders what they can do to help others adapt. Option:  Leading Staff through Change** 
  • Resolving Conflict -- Enables leaders to recognize signs of conflict, assess the conflict, and serve as catalysts to achieve resolution.Option: Conflict Resolution**
  • Developing Others -- Helps leaders understand the critical role they play in developing organizational talent, and provides a process for them to follow in doing so. (No prerequisite course required)
  • Retaining Talent -- Helps leaders understand their critical role in retaining organizational talent, and creating an environment in which people feel valued and satisfied in their jobs.

Supplemental Courses and Development Tools

  • Influential Leadership  (No prerequisite course required)
  • Motivating Others
  • Setting Performance Expectations
  • Reviewing Performance Progress
  • Setting Performance Expectations
  • Getting Started as a New Leader (For first-time health care leaders) (No prerequisite course required)

Rationale

Today’s health care leaders -- at all levels -- face immense challenges. Imagine a nurse who becomes a first-time leader. Overnight, their universe expands from a limited number of patients to responsibility for care delivered by dozens of direct reports across a unit. Their daily reality checks for the first time include resolving conflict and coaching staff, in addition to making rounds and working collaboratively with physicians, patients, and family members. And when front line leaders are promoted into operational roles, again, their world turns upside down as they become management representatives and change agents expected to articulate and implement policy and assume responsibility for those policy implementations. These leaders must be provided with the skills they need to excel in a challenging environment -- if a health care organization is to reach its important goals related to clinical and operational excellence.

(1) Hospital CEO Leadership Study, Cejka Search and Solucient, LLC @2005

**Courses available through 2007, however, DDI recommends the courses in bold, many contain health care video and exercises.
Options require a supplemental health care video.