RWL Newsletter #41
Greetings from the gloomy and rainy University of New Hampshire! While it's a cold and yucky day outside today, we had plenty of good things happening this week. The Student Organization for Health Leadership (SOHL) sponsored a speaker panel with the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) this past Wednesday. We were very lucky to be joined by (from right to left) Peter Wright, President and CEO of Valley Regional Healthcare, Allyson Hicks, AVP of Finance for Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, Travis Boucher (HMP '08), Director of Financial Policy and Reimbursement for the New Hampshire Hospital Association, and Kristina Griffin (HMP '08), Director of LTSS Contracting & Provider Engagement for BMC HealthNet Plan / Well Sense Health Plan. I had the opportunity to moderate the discussion, which was fun because the panel was diverse. The advice all of them agreed on: to be successful, you need both technical competence and the ability to build relationships.
So here's this week's leadership links:
Read
What: from the WSJ, W.L. Gore: Lessons from a Management Revolutionary
https://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/03/18/wl-gore-lessons-from-a-management-revolutionary/
Why: Erin and Jason gave a talk about Holacracy this week in our Organizational Behavior course. We're now into the organizational level part of the course, and they found this idea of self-managing teams interesting. I've always found the idea of self-managing teams fascinating, ever since I read about W.L. Gore during my MBA way back in the dark ages. Every organization has some degree of self-management, I tried to explain in class. Academia has more of it than most of the other environments I have worked in, but we also have a lot more independence by the nature of our work. I would like to believe I would thrive in an environment like Gore's, but it's hard to know. I did well in the highly structured environment of the military. Structure provides a degree of comfort, how ever much we complain about it.
Watch
What: from TEDxGrandRapids, Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management, Brian Robertson
https://youtu.be/tJxfJGo-vkI
Why: This is the video Erin and Jason shared during their presentation. It seems like a cool system. I haven't read the book yet, but I'm interested based on the video and the students' presentation. I explored the web site and it seems like Robertson and his team have refined the nomenclature and processes in such a way that it is internally consistent. Robertson taps into "emergent order" which is at the heart of the libertarian economics that I studied, but he doesn't really address in the talk the challenges of oganizing within the firm ala Coase.
Listen
What: Health Leader Forge interview with Susan DeMarco, Director of Organizational Development for Exeter Hospital.
http://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2017/04/susan-demarco-director-organizational.html
Why: If success is all about relationships, Sue is the person you want to listen to. Sue is a certified coach (among a whole bunch of other things) and works with teams and individuals to improve their performance in those relationships. This is the second student-led interview I've done, and Jess and Carly did a great job!
That's it for this week!
If you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line by e-mail, or you can tweet to me at @bonicatalent .
Thanks for reading and see you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
Twitter: @bonicatalent
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau