4 types of leaders essential to hospital success

A long-term Gallup study reveals a roadmap that hospitals can use to select leaders, provide individual and team development and mange success throughout the organization, according to the Gallup Business Journal.

The Gallup study--which involved 40 years' worth of interviews with more than 50,000 leaders in different industries, including healthcare--revealed two key findings:

  • Leadership is a set of roles that differ in tasks and responsibilities in an organization.
  • The best performers in each of these roles have the necessary talent and experience to meet the needs of the role as a whole.

"Together, these two considerations not only define the leadership needs of an enterprise, but they also provide a road map for selecting leaders, providing individual and team development, and managing succession throughout the company," wrote Stosh Walsh and Paula Walker of Gallup in the Journal article.

The Gallup research revealed four distinct kinds of leaders run successful organizations:

  • Executive leaders outline an ideal future vision and collaborate with other leaders to bring that vision to fruition;
  • Senior leaders are responsible for profit and loss, and they work across functions to achieve business aims;
  • People performance leaders work through the managers they lead; and
  • Operational performance leaders grow the business by improving efficiencies, maintaining discipline in order to meet business goals, troubleshooting, innovating and monitoring key metrics.

Each role, they wrote, is crucial to the success of the organization. If hospitals don't fill one role, the other roles won't have the information, resources, response systems or directions they need to succeed.

"To give a business the best opportunity to win, leaders should be selected for a given role because they have the natural ability to thrive in that role," Walsh and Walker wrote, adding that organizations should give leaders opportunities to grow and develop in ways that will help them better meet the demands of their respective roles.

"This customized approach reduces the temptation to provide ineffective, 'one-size-fits-all' training and allows leaders to focus on the areas that will make them--and in turn, the enterprise--most successful," they said.

For more:
- read the Gallup Business Journal article