Healthcare leadership goes beyond the traditional and transactional leadership styles, which mainly focus on employee supervision and team performance. The profession emphasizes the effective work attained when participants have a sense of mission. Thus, clinical leaders are required to communicate their vision in a meaningful and exciting manner, create a collective unity and purpose, committed and visioned management, and empowering motivation. An essential quality of healthcare leadership is the performance motivation and attitudes influence. Therefore, becoming a healthcare leader is among the most demanding activity among all other learning programs. Taking this leadership course has played a great role in changing how I view leadership in healthcare. Throughout the course, I have learned that leadership in healthcare involves much more than being a boss. Leaders in healthcare should be transparent, have a clear vision, treat others fairly, be humble, motivate others, and provide feedback to their subordinates. This paper is a provisional course reflection, which also provides the significance of this course to my future healthcare leadership roles.
The first most important thing I learned in this course is that leaders should be transparent and consistent. Transparency in leadership means that leaders can keep their subordinates in the loop by sharing important information. They should also be welcome to any feedback they receive from any member of their team. Transparency is especially very important in healthcare organizations where the successful provision of services to patients relies on how well the organization is run. For proper running of healthcare facilities, individuals must learn to work in teams, which are based on trust. Having a culture of transparency helps improve employees' performance and improve employee advocacy. Therefore, healthcare leaders must learn to involve all individuals working in the hospital in decision-making by providing them with the information they require to work efficiently.
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Another lesson is that healthcare leaders should be visionary. A visionary leader is an individual who passionately and clearly communicates his/her vision. In healthcare, having a direction is critical in ensuring that services provided to the patients are top-notch. Therefore, healthcare leaders should clearly communicate their vision with their colleagues and subordinates. Having a clear vision propels the hospital in the right direction, thereby improving the quality of services provided to patients. Additionally, having a leader with a clear vision motivates employees to work hard to accomplish the common goal of providing quality healthcare services to patients (Alghazo & Al-Anazi, 2016). Therefore, healthcare should have a clear vision as it would help hospital workers to work towards a common goal, resulting in the success of the organization and improvement of the quality of services provided to the patients.
Also, healthcare leaders should be humble and should treat everyone fairly. Being in a leadership position does not mean that the leader is always right. Sometimes, leaders make mistakes, and they should be willing to admit them. They should also share credit, learn from others, and treat everyone with respect. Humility in leaders promotes overall effectiveness. In the healthcare setting, leaders should acknowledge every member of the staff and their role in making the organization run effectively. In addition, humility in leadership increases employee engagement rates, job satisfaction and reduces the rate of employee turnover (Wang et al., 2015). Generally, humility promotes a good job environment based on mutual respect. Therefore, healthcare leaders should be humble and appreciate every worker in the hospital to increase the employees’ productivity, which results in the provision of high-quality services to patients.
The final lesson is that healthcare leaders should motivate health workers and provide them with feedback. The quality of services provided at healthcare facilities heavily depends on the motivation of health workers; often, health workers are termed as the gatekeepers of the healthcare system. Employees' motivation goes hand in hand with job satisfaction. Healthcare leaders should ensure that healthcare workers are always motivated. By keeping the workforce motivated, their level of productivity increases, which improves the services, they provide to the patients (Shoraj & Llaci, 2015). One way of motivating healthcare workers is providing them with feedback, providing competitive compensation, and appreciating their services. Therefore, healthcare leaders should develop a culture of motivating employees to increase their productivity and employee retention.
Based on the lessons that I have learned throughout the course, I feel that transparency is the most impactful. As stated in paragraph two, transparency means that healthcare leaders are able to keep their subordinates in the loop and welcome any feedback from members of the team. As a healthcare leader, being trusted by the health workers is very important as it improves motivation and trust, resulting in an improvement in performance. As a healthcare leader in the future, I would be very interested in creating unbreakable trust with my subordinates. Therefore, I would ensure that I am transparent by keeping all individuals in the healthcare organization in the loop. Additionally, I would welcome any positive and negative feedback provided by the employees. Welcoming employees' feedback would help me improve to become a better leader.
In conclusion, pursuing a course in leadership has helped me learn different things about healthcare leadership, which will be helpful in my future career. Throughout the course, I have developed a deeper understanding of leadership principles and how they affect organizational performance. Some of the lessons I have learned are that leaders should be visionary, humble, motivators, and transparent. Among these lessons, I believe that transparency is very important as it builds trust between leaders and health workers. In the future, I will apply this principle as it will help me build trust with my subordinates. Trust will be essential in improving their commitment and performance.
References
Shoraj, D., & Llaci, S. (2015). Motivation and its impact on organizational effectiveness in Albanian businesses. SAGE Open . https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015582229
Wang, J., Zhang, Z., & Jia, M. (2017). Understanding how leader humility enhances employee creativity: The roles of perspective taking and cognitive reappraisal. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science , 53 (1), 5-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886316678907
Alghazo, A. M. & Al-Anazi, M. (2016). The impact of leadership style on employee motivation. International Journal of Economics and Business Administration, 2 (5), 37-44.
