Course Preview | Strategic Healthcare Leadership Program from Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Executive Education
5:15 min
36
Welcome to the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. I'm Professor Chris Myers, the Faculty Director for this program. On behalf of all of the faculty and the whole team working to deliver this program, we're glad to have you as part of this cohort and look forward to working with you in the weeks ahead. As the health industry grows, evolves, and becomes ever more complex, the need for effective leadership has become increasingly important. The number of individuals working in and certainly affected by the health industry is growing and reflects an increasing diversity of jobs, employment settings, work arrangements, training, and personal expectations. The scope of change and transformation cannot be underestimated in this environment.
Yet individuals and health organizations are often, though of course not always, selected for leadership and management roles based primarily on their technical, clinical or research competencies. The hope is that these attributes will translate into effective managerial capabilities, but this often creates a challenge. Emerging health leaders are offered only sporadic haphazard training and leadership in management or worse or simply left on their own to learn effective leadership through gut intuition, popular management fads, or costly trial and error. In my own research, my colleagues and I have written about this tendency as what we call a double loss. In an academic Medical Center, for instance, we might say, ""Who's our best cardiologist? Great. You're now the chair of cardiology."" And unfortunately, this often leads to two losses. The first is that we took the person we identified as our best cardiologist and put them in meetings all day instead of giving patient care. And second, we're hoping that all the skills that make them good cardiologists will immediately translate into making them good department heads or good leaders.
Yet oftentimes, it's a very different skill set that can help us be successful in these leadership positions. And so, we need to spend some time building and developing those skills to succeed. Indeed, research has established the important impact that high quality leadership and management have on clinical and organizational outcomes in health care. We also know that when we look at the roots of error in medical organizations, we see some elements that can be addressed clinically, but many elements that need to be addressed organizationally if we want to be effective. When an error occurs because of a bad handoff or two departments not coordinating effectively, these are organizational issues, not clinical ones, and they require correspondingly organizational solutions. Likewise, no amount of technical or clinical knowledge can save an organization from a bad supply chain situation or a policy challenge. These issues require a different skill set from leaders to help guide health organizations of all types, whether health care providers, payers, pharmaceuticals, device manufacturers or policy makers.
The goal of this program is to arm health leaders such as yourself with an evidence-based understanding of effective leadership and management strategies taught by our expert faculty to help enable you to develop a more nuanced understanding of your organizational context and the ways in which you can most effectively act as a leader. What you'll see in working with the world renowned business faculty in this program is that they bring a wealth of insight from their research into issues of action, what individuals do, interaction, how small groups of people coordinate and collaborate, process, the policies and decisions that we enact to achieve outcomes, and structure, how we build organizations to make them more effective.
The faculty that you'll be working with across the program, all have a wide range of expertise in different industry settings, but a depth of expertise in the health care setting in particular. The research driven program content, reflective leadership exercises, and feedback provide a combination of new ideas, skills, and actionable strategies for changing your daily leadership practice. As America's first research university, we focus on evidence-based insights here at Johns Hopkins. Indeed, thousands of business and leadership books are published every single year and all this material is rarely integrated or woven into a coherent whole. Plus, much of it clashes, so good advice is very hard to distinguish from bad.
That's why we really believe that we have a competitive advantage here in our research focus because in this program we draw directly from established research in management, organizational behavior, economics, operations management, and other academic disciplines to help you understand the mechanisms through which things work. Ultimately, leading successful health care organizations will require both your clinical and technical expertise and management and leadership expertise, and our goal is to help you build that latter set. We're glad that you've chosen to continue your professional education and leadership development by participating in this program, and we're pleased to welcome you to the executive education experience at Johns Hopkins.
Yet individuals and health organizations are often, though of course not always, selected for leadership and management roles based primarily on their technical, clinical or research competencies. The hope is that these attributes will translate into effective managerial capabilities, but this often creates a challenge. Emerging health leaders are offered only sporadic haphazard training and leadership in management or worse or simply left on their own to learn effective leadership through gut intuition, popular management fads, or costly trial and error. In my own research, my colleagues and I have written about this tendency as what we call a double loss. In an academic Medical Center, for instance, we might say, ""Who's our best cardiologist? Great. You're now the chair of cardiology."" And unfortunately, this often leads to two losses. The first is that we took the person we identified as our best cardiologist and put them in meetings all day instead of giving patient care. And second, we're hoping that all the skills that make them good cardiologists will immediately translate into making them good department heads or good leaders.
Yet oftentimes, it's a very different skill set that can help us be successful in these leadership positions. And so, we need to spend some time building and developing those skills to succeed. Indeed, research has established the important impact that high quality leadership and management have on clinical and organizational outcomes in health care. We also know that when we look at the roots of error in medical organizations, we see some elements that can be addressed clinically, but many elements that need to be addressed organizationally if we want to be effective. When an error occurs because of a bad handoff or two departments not coordinating effectively, these are organizational issues, not clinical ones, and they require correspondingly organizational solutions. Likewise, no amount of technical or clinical knowledge can save an organization from a bad supply chain situation or a policy challenge. These issues require a different skill set from leaders to help guide health organizations of all types, whether health care providers, payers, pharmaceuticals, device manufacturers or policy makers.
The goal of this program is to arm health leaders such as yourself with an evidence-based understanding of effective leadership and management strategies taught by our expert faculty to help enable you to develop a more nuanced understanding of your organizational context and the ways in which you can most effectively act as a leader. What you'll see in working with the world renowned business faculty in this program is that they bring a wealth of insight from their research into issues of action, what individuals do, interaction, how small groups of people coordinate and collaborate, process, the policies and decisions that we enact to achieve outcomes, and structure, how we build organizations to make them more effective.
The faculty that you'll be working with across the program, all have a wide range of expertise in different industry settings, but a depth of expertise in the health care setting in particular. The research driven program content, reflective leadership exercises, and feedback provide a combination of new ideas, skills, and actionable strategies for changing your daily leadership practice. As America's first research university, we focus on evidence-based insights here at Johns Hopkins. Indeed, thousands of business and leadership books are published every single year and all this material is rarely integrated or woven into a coherent whole. Plus, much of it clashes, so good advice is very hard to distinguish from bad.
That's why we really believe that we have a competitive advantage here in our research focus because in this program we draw directly from established research in management, organizational behavior, economics, operations management, and other academic disciplines to help you understand the mechanisms through which things work. Ultimately, leading successful health care organizations will require both your clinical and technical expertise and management and leadership expertise, and our goal is to help you build that latter set. We're glad that you've chosen to continue your professional education and leadership development by participating in this program, and we're pleased to welcome you to the executive education experience at Johns Hopkins.
