HR Pulse - Winter 2007 - (Page 34) Identifying the Next Generation of Frontline Managers Succession Planning Isn’t Just for Executives Anymore By Chris Miller and Wesley Hoke So, how does the typical hospital determine who will fill these vital roles? Most people are promoted to frontline managers because of their clinical skills and hard work, with little consideration given to whether their strengths as a clinician are the same strengths they will need as a leader. And usually they are given little, if any, training as they transition into a manager role. Once a promotion is made, dealing with any subsequent failure of the new leader is significantly more painful and difficult to remedy than keeping unqualified people out of manager roles in the first place. These revelations are relatively new to healthcare, but they have been well-recognized in other industries for some time. Building Bench Strength At Carolinas Medical Center-Union (CMC-Union), we realized several years ago that we needed a deeper “bench” in terms of our frontline leadership. According to a 2004 survey conducted by the American College of Healthcare Executives, only 8.3 percent of hospitals had a systematic approach for developing high-potential leaders. Since the practice is not very mature within the healthcare industry, we decided to look at the best practices in other industries. The Leading Edge Consortium, sponsored by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) in 2006, presented a great opportunity for us at CMC-Union to see the talent management practices of Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, Pepsi and Johnson & Johnson. Using those benchmarks, we created a program for high-potential employees called “Foundations” that we can now use to fill our leadership pipeline well into the future. For the program to be successful, we determined it would need to: • Assess the potential leadership abilities of participants and give them basic leadership training • Create masters-of-change management • Demonstrate a return on investment to the hospital. Once all of these elements were in place, we would have created leaders with the proper foundation to serve as frontline managers. HR Pulse Winter 2007 ©Grafikeray/Dreamstime.com 34 S uccession planning is a process that has been around for quite a while to help ensure organizations do not suffer from a leadership vacuum at the executive levels. Poor leadership at the frontline manager level, however, can be just as devastating or more so—particularly in the healthcare arena—yet very few organizations have a systematic way of filling those critical positions. In his article, “Survey Your Way to Better Performance,” which appeared in the summer issue of this publication, Tom Olivo stated it quite eloquently when he wrote: “Of all the factors that matter to employees, the quality of frontline management is the most important driver of performance improvement. When a hospital has talented and capable professionals in frontline management positions, employee satisfaction increases, employees do their jobs better, and patient satisfaction levels rise.”
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