The Leadership Gap
“Healthcare is the most difficult, chaotic and complex industry to manage” – Peter Drucker
What is the Leadership Gap?
Health care organizations are unique environments comprised of complex systems. This dynamic requires strong, reliable, and collaborative leadership. However, instead of placing leadership that best fits the difficult nature of the role, oftentimes leaders are pulled from the ranks because they have the necessary technical skills required of a healthcare provider or have fulfilled an arbitrary time requirement. As a result, the Center for Creative Leadership has noted that nearly 40% of senior leaders fail within 18 months. In addition, as current executives retire, their replacements are not being identified and nurtured so an ever-widening leadership gap continues on. The gap as we will define it becomes the growing need for talented healthcare leadership and the lack of trained and skilled leaders available to fill the need.
Bridging the Gap
The solution to the leadership gap may not be to hire new leaders, instead, the answer may lie with expanding the leadership search and development across the entire employee population in a given organization. The catch lies in the fact that in many cases the best and brightest young people enter these fields with exceptional academic credentials and receive the finest technical training available, but their training often focuses exclusively on clinical and professional skills, not leadership development. Additionally, potential leaders are often struck by the obstacles their own behavior creates, not just the missing skills they need. Oftentimes, without them even realizing it. A little training in many cases could go a long way in producing top leadership.
Developing the top 10 - 15% of your talent pool that shows an inclination toward leadership eliminates the need to attract, hire and onboard new talent making this the most efficient route to finding your leadership pool. Therefore the first step in your leadership program should be to identify current leadership potential in the talent you already have. Using tools like a 360 survey can help identify potential leadership as can broadening leadership projects where emerging leaders rise to meet the tasks at hand.
In order to find your top emerging leaders, your company must first define the behaviors they see as critical to your organization’s success over the next three to five years. They must keep a close eye on the trends that face their niche and then align potential employees with those skills and behaviors needed to bring the company forward through those trends. With the talent identified, companies can match potential leadership with existing leaders who can act as mentors and directors of that talent. Work efficiently to move these individuals forward in the company so they do not get frustrated and look to move on to other firms, as turnover from your leadership pool will be your company’s worst enemy.
Finally, make your leadership program available to a broad group of employees. Not all great leaders are identified through the 360 surveys or manager insights. Sometimes natural talent leads potential leaders to seek out learning opportunities and emerging leaders step forward of their own volition. Making opportunities available to all employees improves the chances of identifying your emerging leaders.
The Leadership Program Skeleton
In addition to having natural leadership instincts, some core leadership competencies must be formally taught or refined in every leader during their training period. While training and refining leadership skills, traditional healthcare departmental intelligence is also key for healthcare leaders who will someday need to understand the domain they are leading, like clinical practice, research, and nursing. These programs must be readily available across the entire employee base during all phases of the employee experience. Therefore a leadership program should be skill-specific, flexible and include mentoring opportunities.
Leadership styles can be generally categorized as: transactional, those who work within the boundaries set forth and maintain the current standards of an organization; transformational, those who motivate and encourage their teams to work smarter and re-shape the future of their departments and company; and the servant leader, who serves others first and keeps their team on track through relational connections. Healthcare needs more servant and transformational leaders in order to move through new healthcare trends that threaten to disrupt and sweep the industry. Transactional leaders may rise to the HRO bar, but they tend to do so at the expense of the status quo. With this in mind, leadership programs should work to:
Inform potential leaders of the current healthcare trends and direction of the company
Hone relational skills like listening, empathy, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, commitment, integrity, altruism, authenticity, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community.
Build on current technical and comprehensive healthcare knowledge, specific to their area of leadership.
According to Roberta Sonnino, “More training programs are needed to make comprehensive leadership development widely accessible to a greater number of potential health care leaders.” Access to leadership training across a broad group of people can be done through web-based programming, self-paced on-the-job learning, flex-schedule learning programs, and experiential leadership opportunities, like collaborative projects.
Arguably, mentoring and coaching are tantamount to every leadership program through which emerging leaders can be molded to build a replacement team for the current leadership. In addition, mentoring and team leadership projects can identify emerging leaders’ natural qualities at which point they can be enhanced or refined before the weight of the leadership role wears the engagement and energy level of the leader thin, potentially saving the organization from repeatedly needing to replace leaders.
While the leadership gap widens, attracting, discovering and retaining current talent to fill your organization’s future leadership needs, is not an impossible task. Work to define what you need in your leadership in order to take it to the next level. Begin to identify and train your emerging leadership as well as your current leadership. And maintain a working replacement leadership team through mentoring programs and coaching. Doing so will keep a highly talented leadership team in front of your organization at all times.