Principles of Healthcare Leadership Paper

Principles of Healthcare Leadership Paper
Background Information/Introduction
A leader needs to understand the difference between leadership and management. In addition, leaders must recognize and maintain various skills to lead an organization. Whereas different skills are required for different types of organizations, there are some fundamental skills that every leader should have. In this vein, a great deal of recent research has been inclined to establish the differences between leaders and managers and the value of training managers in leadership principles. Leaders should inspire and motivate their followers to complete their assigned tasks more effectively and on time. As the current paradigm shift in the healthcare sector, providers are increasingly encountering disruptive changes, prompting them to look for strategic leaders to help them handle the uncertain landscape they face. This report evaluates the difference between leadership and management, identifies and explains different leadership skills in detail, makes sense of the need for a healthcare leader to have the identified skills, recognizes the value of cultural diversity in leadership, and ways to promote diversity in the workplace.
The Difference Between Leadership and Management
People in leadership positions are typically described as managers, suggesting that management and leaders are interchangeable, which according to extant research, is entirely misguided (Sjöström & Olsson, 2021). More explicitly, leadership is centered on movement, while management anchors on ensuring stability. Management is tailored to bring consistency and order to critical organizational dimensions, including profitability and quality and key managerial activities include staffing, coordinating, planning, and controlling outcomes. For example, a healthcare facility manager oversees the organization’s routine operations to ensure it runs appropriately. On the other hand, leadership is designed in an increasingly positive light. It is typically associated with developing futuristic visions and training followers toward surviving changes in the future by influencing understandings, ideas, and meaning (Sjöström & Olsson, 2021). For example, a leader in healthcare settings advises their staff, provides support, connects them with resources, and assists them in defining their professional goals.
Leadership Skills Explained in Detail
According to Healy (2017), health care leaders’ primary necessary leadership skills include empowerment, communication, innovativeness, and people development. Although these skills apply to any organization, they are highly recommended for leaders directing service delivery organizations, including healthcare. The ability to communicate effectively is a crucial skill for healthcare leaders. Good communication skills are associated with higher employee satisfaction and better patient care outcomes (West et al., 2015). For example, some hospital leaders’ written and oral communication skills include using precise, grammatically correct terminologies that the intended audience will understand. Empowerment is a critical leadership skill in healthcare that entails granting decision autonomy to workers, thereby enhancing their intrinsic motivation, for example, leading by example, informing, showing concern, and encouraging participative decision-making (Tripathi & Bharadwaja, 2020). Innovation skills enable health care leaders to develop and adapt themselves and their organizations to enhance effectiveness in the changing contexts or environments (physical, social, psychological) (West et al., 2015; Healy, 2018). Lastly, healthcare leaders foster continuous development of staff skills, abilities, and knowledge to promote patient treatment, compassion, safety outcomes, and the overall patient experience with the healthcare system (West et al., 2015). For example, leaders motivate, encourage, recognize innovation as well as initiate novel and better models of working.
Importance of a Health Care Leader Possessing each of these Skills
Healthcare leaders should possess communication skills to be viewed as authentic by their staff in hospital settings. Effective communication allows the manager to let their team know that they care. In addition, effective communication skills enable the leader to encourage candid and open interactions in the healthcare organization, thus fostering trust (Evans, 2018). In this vein, trust between the physician and patient supports the delivery of more patient-centered care, thus improving care quality and related outcomes. A health care leader should have empowerment skills to offer empathic, respectful, available, supportive, and compassionate leadership. In this way, they pro...