Intercultural and Sustainable Leadership, Essay Example

The critical people to enlist in ensuring that an effective quality improvement team can be established include hospital managers and supervisors at a variety of levels. Ultimately, it is important to have a collaboration across several expertise and specialties to ensure that quality is understood and enforced similarly across the board. Furthermore, these individuals have an advanced understanding of how employees behave and act, which will help foster the development of best practices that will be reasonably implemented by the staff.

Supervisors and managers could be made interested in involvement by demonstrating the efficacy that such a mission would have on the hospital. Improving quality will improve the hospital’s image in addition to enhancing patient safety. Therefore, both administrators and health care professionals have a stake in such a plan. To do so, it is important to present a proposed plan in a manner that emphasizes the efficacy that a similar plan held in a different hospital in addition to incorporating patient and financial data in the presentation. If employees find that the quality improvement plan will support their personal work goals, they will be more likely to become involved.

As mentioned previously, when personal work goals are tied in closely to institutional goals, it is easier to get a greater variety of staff members involved. Therefore, it is essential to demonstrate what these shared interests are. Furthermore, once higher level managers and supervisors become involved, those who work under them will be more likely to commit as well.

Team members will remain invested in the quality improvement team if they are able to see the results of their work. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that the health care staff remain in constant contact with the patients in order to see the immediate and long-term impact. Furthermore, it will be necessary to conduct quantitative and qualitative studies to determine whether the changes that were made to practice benefitted the quality of care. Individuals involved with the initiative will therefore have the opportunity to have their work published in peer-reviewed journals in addition to having the ability to change practice within their own health care organization in addition to having the potential to change the practice of external institutions.

When developing my team, I will utilize my understanding of leadership and research theories to assist this process. Most importantly, it is essential for me to determine the skills that the individuals on my team should possess in order to ensure that the work is performed in an effective manner. To do so, surveys could be issued to individuals that are interested in becoming involved, and the team will be selected on the basis of valuable traits. Furthermore, these surveys can be utilized to determine, based on personality, whether the members of the team would thrive under my specific leadership style (Martindale, 2011). In this situation, it appears that the use of democratic leadership would be most beneficial, so it is important for all members of the team to be able to work together well in addition to bringing unique skills to contribute.

It is important for the team to meet at least once a week to review data and procedures. It is ideal for the team to meet face to face, as doing so may trigger many ideas that would not have arisen in a phone conversation. Furthermore, this style of meeting will facilitate comradery among the participants.

Before members are allowed to serve as a member of the team, ground rules will be established to ensure that all members will remain invested. As a consequence, members will be expected to dedicate between 10 and 20 hours each week to the shared mission and it is expected that all team members will attend the weekly review meeting. It is also necessary for all members to accept the general project outline that was provided and to take all actions that are voted for as a team in a timely manner. Establishing these rules ahead of time will ensure that there is maximal compliance and understanding (Schultz et al., 2010).

It is important to consider that one of the major potential barriers to team cohesiveness is the inability for team members to work together effectively due to personality conflicts (Reeves et al., 2010). To avoid this, it would be necessary to thoroughly interview potential members before they are accepted to ensure that this does not occur. An additional barrier to cohesiveness is a lack of knowledge that creates an imbalance among group members (Frawley, 2009). It is therefore important to select only team members that have a minimum level of knowledge and experience as it pertains to the health care setting. Lastly, it is necessary to ensure that the weekly meeting is set at a time in which all members are able to attend, because this is the most important event in ensuring that decisions are made as a group.

References

Frawley J. (2009). Intercultural and Sustainable Leadership. Journal of Leadership Studies, 3(1): 39-46.

Martindale, N (2011). Leadership Styles: How to handle the different personas. Strategic  Communication Management, 15 (8): 32–35.

Reeves S, MacMillian K, van Soeren M. (2010). Leadership of interprofessional health and social care teams: a socio-historical analysis. Journal of Nursing Management, 18: 258-264.

Schultz, Schultz D. (2010). Psychology and work today. New York: Prentice Hall.