By Rob Linn
Dennis Lee, the Retired CEO from Methodist Hospital of Southern California in Arcadia, California tells a story of his experience as an orderly early in his hospital management career:
My CEO was a nun and she said, “You will never be an effective hospital administrator unless you have some exposure to the clinical side – the bedside,” and I have never, ever forgotten that experience. It was more important to me than I think my master’s degree. Being able to work alongside nurses and doctors and see what happens at the bedside and see how hard it is to be a nurse, to be an orderly, to be a doctor. It gave me an appreciation for patient care and the difficulties of taking care of patients.
Patient care is very emotional. Certainly, it’s intellectually challenging, obviously, and it has gotten more intellectually challenging over the years because of just how sophisticated you have to be to be a nurse today. But, it is also very emotionally and psychologically draining on you because you can’t make a mistake.
As a result, I am convinced that a command-and-control style of leadership is not an effective way of leading in a hospital environment because you rely on other people to get all of these thousands of moving parts to work together in some fashion to get the service provided.
So you have to rely upon influence and inspiration and teamwork and communication. Those have to be the hallmarks of your style as opposed to making decisions and directing people to do things. I think as it relates to nurses and other caregivers, therapists, etcetera, they’re much more highly educated, much more sophisticated in terms of their knowledge, and they wouldn’t tolerate somebody who is a command-and-control type of person. Or at least they would not be able to work as effectively under that type of leadership.