In almost every engagement, there is a need for board and management and leadership development. Scott Goodspeed, my colleague, talked in his blog about the support we offer for hospital board development. So I want to talk about the services we provide for management and leadership development. Before coming to Stroudwater, I was on the faculty at University of North Carolina and led a team that developed customized leadership development programs for clients all across the country. Traditionally, hospitals have sent their leadership to external conferences to develop contemporary knowledge and skills. But now, more hospitals and systems realize the benefit of internal leadership development for its cost-effectiveness and team building. And more hospitals are realizing that building leadership skills in the medical staff is essential to successful strategy execution. We recently worked with a client that had traditionally invested in leadership development but it was all focused on middle managers with little provided for senior leadership of medical staff. We worked with them to co-design and co-deliver a program focused on developing competencies in managing finances, managing people and leading change. These three core competencies were identified as their major deficits.
Our approach focuses on understanding what outcome the hospital wants. What evidence do they want that the investment in leadership development has been worthwhile? What behavior or performance indicators are expected to change? We develop a logic model that is focused on the core competencies, the learning methods, and the assessment processes that will drive the results they want. We focus on the bosses of the participants in the leadership program as they are key in terms of endorsing participation and strengthening their own coaching skills. And we know that our approach works because we evaluate, evaluate, evaluate whether they have achieved the intended results. Oh¦and we have fun in the process.
Janet Porter, PhD, is a Director at Stroudwater.