Why It’s So Important to Train Your Leaders—Starting Now
Immense Changes Come from Giving Managers the Tools for Success
While it’s certainly true of other industries, it’s particularly true in health care: there aren’t enough formal training programs for leaders. “We’re always trying to do more with less, and leadership training can feel like too big of an investment,” explains Louise Keogh Weed, program director of the Health Care Leadership Intensive for Managers program, instructor in the Department of Health Management at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, and affiliate faculty at Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care.
But it’s also one of the biggest reasons why attrition and job dissatisfaction can be so high in the industry. “Not only are individual leaders floundering for months, years, decades at a time, we are actually doing a disservice to our organization—to our potential for success, to our patients, to our communities. Ultimately, these are very small investments that have huge returns,” says Keogh Weed.
Helping an organization’s managers—both veterans and novices—learn core tenets of leadership can be transformative. Here’s where to start.
The Need for Better Leadership Training in Health Care
Health care can be a particularly challenging work environment for managers. One major obstacle is the frequency of policy reform, which can in turn lead to new standards and processes. Another challenge is the hierarchical nature of clinical practice, wherein a clinician may be acting as the de facto leader because of their technical knowledge. We’re now starting to see leadership training programs in medical school and residency, but it’s still not standard. And the programs for non-clinicians are even fewer.
“Doing training piecemeal isn’t really working,” Keogh Weed explains. She notes that, in addition to lower morale and productivity, ineffective leadership can lead to workers leaving and thus can trigger a time-consuming, expensive process to hire new people. “You can create all the systems you want to try and be effective in your work, but without the leaders, you’re not going to get there.”
“My argument is that training and developing high quality leadership and management is how you maximize your mission,” she adds. “It’s how you’re able to make your organization and the work you do bigger than the sum of its parts.”
A lack of trust in one’s manager (and thus the organization) can happen fast—workers can lose psychological safety within three months of starting a new job. And it’s much easier to build trust for the first time than it is to rebuild trust that has been broken. Better leadership in an existing organization is often both reparative and preventative.
“We’re improving current dysfunction and training the future to prevent the dysfunction. No more gatekeeping leadership,” explains Keogh Weed.
The Benefits of a Health Care Leadership Program
The process begins with a shift from reactivity to proactivity, ideally across the organization. Cohesive training will result in top leadership setting up the right conditions for short- and long-term success, in part because leaders will now speak a common language.
Keogh Weed adds, “Train everyone now, but also stop training people too late. Send your next generation now and get ahead of it, because then you’re going to have a deeper bench of talent. You’re going to be able to shift your culture, and when those folks get promoted, they’re ready to start on day one—not scramble for three years.”
Within the Health Care Leadership Intensive for Managers program, Keogh Weed implements some of these practices in an academic setting. By forming a cohort of participants that can share individual challenges, the instructors give insight but also promote a sense of community so that leaders feel understood and appreciated for the work they’re doing. “The amount of relief that people feel, because we can demonstrate that we understand, brings a level of safety from feeling seen and heard and understood for the first time,” says Keogh Weed.
When she’s working with participants, she helps them understand what they can and cannot do in their position. “We have to start with what’s in your locus of control. What are the tiny things you can shift that will have a big impact? If you’re not the CEO, you’re not trying to reform your whole organization. But shifting behaviors, like the words that you use and the way you approach people about a concern, can be extremely impactful,” she notes.
If anyone’s ever in doubt about the efficacy of this work, she uses the following analogy: when trained and given the right tools for success, an effective leader is like a drop of water that has a deep ripple effect in the rest of the organization. With enough ripples throughout the organization, real change can begin.
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health offers Health Care Leadership Intensive for Managers, an on-site program designed to develop skills in conflict resolution, operational analysis, employee management, and quality management to achieve individual and organizational goals.
