Essential Skills for Managing in Healthcare

We live in an era in which it has become clearer and clearer what good leadership and managerial practice at work is. We know that if we are to attract and retain excellent staff and get them to ‘go the extra mile’ then we have to treat them with respect, empathy and skill, and that the quality of our relationships with them is a major key to success. Yet report after report, survey after survey, show that many staff feel undervalued by their leaders and managers, whom they typically describe as ‘arrogant’, ‘insensitive’ and ‘clumsy’. As one employee told me in a focus group looking at employee engagement, ‘ They regard us as human doings, not human beings!’
Clearly no one does this deliberately and many leaders and managers would be amazed and incredulous if they were able to hear what their staff really felt. Andrew Scowcroft and Andrew Price suggest that we should begin with an expectation that people will be led and managed well at work and that this should be the norm and
not a lucky bonus. As they point out, no one would expect such professionals as doctors and lawyers to learn on the job, but that this is usually the case with leaders and managers.
This book is dedicated to helping leaders and managers prepare forthose responsibilities by focusing on working with individuals, teams and change.It also addresses three areas that usually make leaders and managers uncomfortable– running meetings successfully, making presentations and writing reports. Getting all these aspects right will go a long way towards ensuring that instead of negative reports, we will begin to hear staff say that they are ‘pleasantly surprised’ and even‘delighted’ by the way that they are treated.
Making (and mending) working relationships is the means of building up the social capital that our organisations increasingly rely on to succeed in this interdependent world. This book gives accessible and practical examples of how this can be done and I have no hesitation in commending it to a…