Keys to Finance-Clinician Communication
HFMA research has found that a key leadership skill for financial executives is communication, especially with clinicians. How can healthcare financial executives develop this skill in themselves and in the next generation of healthcare leaders?
Here’s some advice from Leonard L. Berry, PhD, distinguished professor of marketing at Texas A&M University and coauthor of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World’s Most Admired Service Organizations.
“Most importantly, financial leaders should make sure they’re spending sufficient time with clinicians, both physicians and nurses. To develop leadership skills and communication skills, especially with the physicians, I would start by spending time with physicians, talking to them, listening to them, watching them work, exchanging ideas.
I have some specific suggestions for improving communications with clinicians.
One idea is for hospitals to start a book-reading club with carefully selected books that would be of interest to a diverse audience of both managers and clinicians. The club might meet every two months. You read a new book, and then you get together to discuss it. Ideally, the group would be a mix of clinical and nonclinical people. Getting people with different backgrounds in the same room, conversing about a book, and getting access to the other parties’ ideas and views of the same material could lead to healthy discussion and increased credibility on the part of all the participants.
Another idea is to create management clinical grand rounds where both managerial leaders and clinical leaders are in the same room. Clinical and nonclinical leaders could alternate in leading these sessions, perhaps one session per month. It’s another way of getting people communicating with each other, learning each other’s language, developing a level of trust.
A third idea is to offer a formal communications curriculum for everyone in the organization. Short courses, ranging from a few hours to a full day, could be offered on topics such as persuasive communications, media training, or public speaking.”
This article is excerpted from “The Mayo Culture of Leadership,” which appeared in hfm magazine. Read the entire article. (HFMA membership required).