Healthcare is a business as well as an essential service industry. Hence, leaders in healthcare needs an expansive range of capabilities, including good business acumen and data management skills to ensure that patients receive compassionate care at their organizations. Healthcare systems comprises of multiple specialities and departments that may or may not interact. Regina Temple says that good healthcare leadership is vital to utilize available resources effectively, design management process, as well as set common goals for the organisation.
Regina Temple sheds light on how healthcare leadership has changed over time
A perfect healthcare leader can handle stressful situations, is achievement oriented and has personal integrity. Modern healthcare leaders must also have good conceptual skills, technical competency and interpersonal skills. They should not be overbearing or try to micromanage. Rather, they must try to set the stage for the development of collaborative relationships by creating effective support and task delegations.
Even though leadership theories were not traditionally developed for healthcare settings, they are quite relevant to this field. Prior to the 1940s, the concept of the “great man” theory of leadership was fairly popular. It assumed that certain individuals were simply born with charismatic qualities that made them superior leaders. Business leaders typically consider themselves naturally gifted with qualities like courage, resilience and many other virtues that put them ahead of their competitors as well as inspire their workers to achieve more. However, with time, organizational psychologists conceived of leadership as less of a reflection of intellectual or moral character, and more of a set of behaviours that could change the dynamics of an organization with time and effort. Prominent styles of leadership that come up with time included:
- Authoritarian
- Democratic
- Laissez-faire
As above mentioned styles have become quite common for categorizing leadership, and theorists gradually started to put more focus on the needs of workers. Transformational leadership in the field of healthcare involves a proper understanding of how the healthcare systems have changed and evolved. Back in the 19th and 20th centuries, healthcare leaders operated in information silos. For instance, a director of a health clinic in a small town may go through published articles on emerging healthcare technologies for special topics every couple of years. However, they mostly used to just see patients, crunch numbers, and balance their budgets independently, without any such outside influence. Moreover, in traditional healthcare leadership models, the people at the top of the hierarchy made decisions with little to no input from other healthcare staff. However, in the current age, transformational healthcare leaders recognize the value of bringing stakeholders from all areas of a healthcare organization into conversation.
As Regina Temple says, leaders in healthcare now have more to do than ever before. They need to manage more data, with an increasing number of patients and larger medical care teams to coordinate, as well as deal with more complicated hospital billing services. Healthcare leaders today also get less time to deliberate about large-reaching policy decisions that affect their organizations
The COVID-19 pandemic particularly forced healthcare organizations to do away with outdated styles of leadership. The fast paced and dynamic healthcare systems of today require a superior degree of coordination, along with accelerated decision cycles. They also require smooth and swift communication among healthcare team members and stakeholders.
