Buad 540-B - Leadership Good to Great

Leadership Good to Great

LeRoy Wombold

Southern Adventist University

BUAD 540-B

Introductions

 In today's fast-paced world leadership from good to great is rare.  Companies are searching for their next great leader.  Leadership is both an art and a learned trade.  Talented leaders learn early that talent alone will not keep them at the top, but continued learning and developing will strengthen their position.  Good to great, a catch phrased used by consultants, as one avenue for leaders to improve their skills.  Clinton Longenecker in his paper “The best practices of great leaders” identifies twelve areas that leaders should incorporate in becoming the next great leaders (Longenecker, 2014).  These twelve practices will be the basis for this paper, with an attempt to challenge healthcare to use some of these practices to improve their business model.  

        The obstacle that healthcare has been that the industry of healthcare would not survive as a corporate identity today from the indicators of quality, safety, reliability or cost.  Healthcare’s business is failing.  The inflation rate for healthcare is two times the rate as compared with any other economy and some studies show ten’s of thousand of patients die each years in part as a result of medical errors (Driver 2011).  Driver also found that hospitals at best-practiced evidence medicine approximately fifty percent of the time.  In an article by Dan Weberg, healthcare cost is not improving.  In 2005, American's spent $6000 for healthcare, which is twice the median cost as compared to 30 other industrialized countries.  This cost increased to $8000 in 2009 and America ranked 37th in world quality care  (Weberg 2012).  Our country needs empowered leadership and leaders that will take healthcare in America to its rightful place first.  

Mission

        Leadership is all about mission, vision and value (Longenecker 2014).  Joe Calloway in his book “Indispensable” describes five drivers for leading companies.  They are “create and sustain momentum, develop habitual dependability, continuous connection, big picture outcome, and engage, enchant and enthrall (Calloway 2005).  Of the five drivers create; a big picture is rank number one.  A leader without a mission or big picture will not have followers.  A clear purpose that is surrounded by the mission will accomplish great strides for companies.  Without a clear picture of the organization, the leader will be operating the business blindly.

        Blind leadership described by Nelson contains five basic faults.  These leaders will not see the moral complexities in some business process.  The leaders will not be able to fulfill their ethical responses.  The companies practice and culture will be out of line to the values.  Information that the company will act upon will incomplete or flawed, and the companies mental image will portray that of misconception or misperception.  The answer to blind leadership is to start with developing data for your company that is local.  Once the local data is mined, compare that information to similar companies.  Most important for the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is to get out of his office and meet both his employees and the competition (Nelson 2014).

 Medical leadership has failed on the mission.  This failing can be measured in quality, performance, and safety.   Birk states that if healthcare could get providers engaged these three indicators would improve.  Senior leadership, who can engage physicians, will see their hospitals outperform.  Birk further states that without this big picture the shift of volume to value will not happen.  The interesting piece is healthcare is seeing an increased engagement of providers with providers seeking broader leadership roles (Birk 2013).  Johnson could not of put it better mission; vision and values will drive to great hospitals (Johnson 2011).

        Quality in medicine according to Drive could be located in other industries.  The development of checklists, simulations, measures of performance all come from the airline industry (Driver 20110).  Today all procedures in surgery begin with a checklist before a surgery begins.

People Priority

 Leadership today more than ever requires people skill.  Leaders need to have high emotional intelligence, with great people skill.  Caring, compassionate and empathy cannot be over looked (Longenecker 2015).  Leaders go from good to great when they can balance company tasks with people.  Showing that empowered employees are just as valuable as the company strengthens moral and indicates to workers that the company will go the extra mile.  A company that emphases were learning and leadership will foster a culture of stability and longevity for its employees (Birk 2013).