ABSTRACT
Myths impede the effective management of health care, for example that the system is failing (indeed, that is a system), and can be fixed by detached social engineering and heroic leadership, or treating it more like a business. This field needs to reframe its management, as distributed beyond the "top"; its strategy as venturing, not planning; its organizing as collaboration beyond control, and especially itself, as a system beyond its parts.
Subject(s)
Delivery of Health Care/organization & administration , Efficiency, Organizational , Health Facility Administrators , Metaphor , Mythology , Organizational InnovationABSTRACT
Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change, perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. When the authors, respectively the director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter in the U.K. and the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, set out to develop a masters program for practicing managers, they saw that they could not rely on the usual MBA educational structure, which divides the management world into discrete business functions such as marketing and accounting. They needed an educational structure that would encourage synthesis rather than separation. Managing, they determined, involves five tasks, each with its own mind-set: managing the self (the reflective mind-set); managing organizations (the analytic mind-set); managing context (the worldly mind-set); managing relationships (the collaborative mind-set); and managing change (the action mind-set). The program is built on the exploration and integration of those five aspects of the managerial mind. The authors say it has proved powerful in the classroom and insightful in practice. Imagine the mind-sets as threads and the manager as weaver. Effective performance means weaving each mind-set over and under the others to create a fine, sturdy cloth.
Subject(s)
Administrative Personnel/psychology , Leadership , Models, Educational , Organizational Innovation , Administrative Personnel/education , Commerce/organization & administration , Cooperative Behavior , Economic Competition , Humans , Internationality , Interprofessional Relations , Organizational Culture , Personnel ManagementABSTRACT
Managing may be managing, but it is practiced in a wide range of ways in the so-called 'healthcare' system. All or in some cases part of a day in the life of seven managers is described and then analysed, separately and then together. This presents a consistent picture of the varieties as well as the discontinuities in managing this hopefully integrated system.
