Topics: Leadership Culture, Skill Development, Workforce, High-Potential Employee Development, Leadership, Mentoring and Coaching
Frontline managers and directors play a critical role in translating organizational strategy into operational changes. Amid unprecedented market transformation, hospital and health system leaders recognize the need to upskill current managers, but the prevailing one-size-fits-all approach to leader development is unsustainable and ineffective for two reasons.
- Intense margin pressure is constraining organizations’ ability to provide all managers with the same training and development opportunities.
- Success in the new health care marketplace will depend disproportionately on a subset of manager types whose work is fundamentally changing due to new market imperatives.
To optimize investment of limited resources, hospital and health system leaders should prioritize development of those managers most critical to advancing organizational strategy. Focused development of these managers will ensure they are equipped to execute on critical new market imperatives.
Group exercise to prioritize manager development opportunities
To assist members in allocating manager training and development resources, the HR Investment Center offers the Leader Development Prioritization Guide, a framework for accurately identifying the five to 10 manager types most impacted by new market imperatives at your organization—and therefore most in need of targeted development.
Executing the framework consists of three key steps:
1. Consider the workflow implications of new market imperatives: Many new market imperatives—coordinating care across the continuum, managing risk-based contracts, and implementing system-wide electronic medical records—give some managers not only more work, but fundamentally different work stemming from new management objectives. Managers required to execute on substantially different goals—such as a nurse manager now responsible for keeping patients out of the hospital—should be prioritized for development investment.
2. Apply strategic selection criteria to narrow the list of managers: All managers impacted by new market imperatives must be equipped to deliver on new management objectives. However, some managers warrant greater training and development investment due to additional strategic factors, including their responsibility for key outcomes tied to reimbursement, impact on physician relationships, and larger spans of control.
3. Isolate leadership competencies most in need of improvement: After using the two filters above to identify the organization’s most critical manager types, leaders may further target development efforts by pinpointing the leadership competencies on which the identified managers most need to improve. To isolate competencies most in need of development, leaders should consider both manager performance on each competency and each competency’s strategic importance to the organization. Competencies with low manager performance and high strategic importance should be the top priorities for development.
Access the tool
HR Investment Center members can access the Leader Development Prioritization Guide for step-by-step instructions for using this framework to identify your organization’s most critical managers and to learn more about key market imperatives, strategic criteria for selecting managers to prioritize for development, and essential leadership competencies to consider for investment.
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