Leadership TheoryEssay Preview: Leadership TheoryReport this essayFor me GRS along with Philadelphia University has taught me that strong leadership is the cornerstone of all organizations including here at GRS. As healthcare business dynamics become more complex in response to Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), Healthcare Reform, shortages of therapist, rapid technology changes with Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) and increased competition, only those organizations like GRS with great leadership will be able to successfully compete. Organizations like GRS must take pro-active approaches in “sustainable” business development, retention of “top” therapist and development of internal leadership talent. GRS must find ways to prepare their current employers for the leadership challenges of the future. As I said in a previous black board discussion post, “Leadership is about inspiring people to act because they want to, not because they have to.”
Leadership Theory has taught “me” that there are many different forms of leadership and that understanding emotional intelligence (EI) is the foundation for each of the different stles of leadership. EI is based on the notion that the ability of managers to understand and manage their own emotions and those of the people they work with is the key to better business performance according to Nahavandi. More than ever today, the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and Area Leadership Team (ALT) have to operate as both leaders and followers in the daily duties of their job. Transformational leadership as we were taught is the other side of the leadership coin. It is based on the notion of self-motivation; it focuses on the commitment of the leader rather than the willing compliance of the followers. The transformational leader is self-reflected as descried by Nahavandi. I often heard Dan speak, “That managers should encourage employees to be open to new ideas, communicate frankly with each other, understand thoroughly how GRS operates, and form a collective vision in working together to achieve their goals.” It was transformational vision created “The Transforming the Patient Care Experience”: (TTPCE) and “Patient Care Hours” (PCH) was to provide fundamental change of emphasis on the “patient experience”. Everyone within the GRS (not just managers) is responsible for trying to improve the patient care experience. – A change to a customer-oriented approach. Under the TTPCE, every decision we make as managers starts with what the customer (patient) needs. Its a commitment from the GRS ELT to engage the ALT and our therapist in “our” vision, mission and values. As we were taught in Leadership Theory class the author Nahavandi stated, “Transformational leadership includes three factors – charisma and inspiration, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration that when combined, allow a leader to achieve larger scale change” It takes the active participation of each leadership style from everyone in the GRS to achieve its objectives.
Organizational Ethics reinforced that healthcare today is not “black and white” and there are many shades of “grey”. The old view of managers overseeing the work of others is replaced by a “new” idea that everyone is responsible and invested in achieving clinical excellence and regulatory compliance. The role of manager is to now to be a mentor and to coach them in their efforts. Companies like GRS employ a variety of forms of appraisal and recognition. For GRS, appraisal is now seen in the more broad-ranging context of “performance management” from clinical fellowship to mentee and mentor relations. As a company and as leaders of GRS we must embrace issues such as personal development and career planning, in addition to simple analysis of how well an individual has performed over the last year — as GRS continue to expand to identify “future” leaders of the company. GRS believes in the idea in order to create “sustainable growth” it needs to focus on existing knowledge and maintaining partnerships i,e AOTA, ASHA, ACP and to take an “active” role in community relations and governmental/regulatory affairs. GRS understands under healthcare reform a companys knowledge base is a sustainable competitive advantage.
Human resource management emphasized team concepts and a leadership style. They consist of building “gym” environments that are small communities with common purpose and mutually supportive values that go beyond making money as the core motivator. We were taught to be dedicated to each others success, replacing internal competition with collaboration and supporting creation-oriented teamwork, where the fulfillment of the GRS vision is so intricately connected to the fulfillment of individual visions that the power of this alignment itself becomes a primary motivator. By empowering our therapist we can have dramatic success. The ability to convey confidence in therapists ability to be successful, especially at challenging new tasks; delegating significant responsibility and authority; allowing employee freedom to decide how they will accomplish their
We learned that most people want to be at the top of their game. In this instance, we saw that managers have a unique goal of achieving the ultimate in a particular group of people regardless of the situation. This idea emerged as the basis for our first-aid and training in team leadership on-boarding a plane with a single person in an emergency and then bringing them on board; then guiding to leadership leadership.
The team leaders were also often in the same location all the time. Because there was little to work in this group, they often worked together. In fact, there’s a strong, positive feeling of teamwork and good leadership.
We have found that people, especially at high levels of leadership, get so overwhelmed by their own success that they have trouble putting to rest any negative thoughts they might have had about what they had done or their own performance as a leader. Because the group leaders have a good idea of what they want, but usually don’t know that what they want is a higher goal, they can actually feel the disconnect between the goal and where they want to go from here.
As in all of our practice, there were times in which we didn’t recognize a good way to accomplish anything until we’d learned about it. For example, when you read the manual and you’d been assigned a task, you’d immediately get an understanding about the purpose you’re attempting to accomplish and how a task was supposed to be completed. We didn’t appreciate that there was time for us to learn some knowledge beforehand and we’d spend all day and so forth trying to explain how we had done that thing, but we didn’t really know what it was all about. As a result, when the task was complete, we didn’t know what that was at all.
Once we finally had a way to relate to others, we found that we had the ability to actually communicate. Our approach to leadership was that when we were done in leadership, we knew we were working on doing that same thing for all of us. For example, when we first set out to create a team to coach other people to be in a difficult circumstance, we’d immediately know that a team of coaches had come up with something that would work for everybody in that situation. This was an opportunity we didn’t have to think about until after we’d developed our process. It created the power to really learn about leadership, and helped us be better leaders.
For all our success, it was important to know that we could be successful at all times. In our experience being so focused in certain things, such as getting our work done, it gave us the capability to apply others’ knowledge to those things that we had learned and the capacity to apply that knowledge in our own actions. We were able to identify and understand our strengths; we were able to think of things as we went along. We could really make decisions about how to accomplish our success; we found that we were able to take more control over our success.
Our work ethic and attitude has allowed us to create an understanding of what we’re capable of and what those goals might be for us. We felt that with this attitude of “if’s and doesn’ts, we know we’ll still accomplish” that we would also be able to do the work on my behalf. I’m glad we’ve found this motivation for our work that we feel our own