Question
How does effective leadership affect quality in healthcare?
Answer
Leadership is linked to quality. Leadership affects the quality of patient care and that includes safety. The personality and behavior of leaders may contribute towards quality through the effects they have on the culture of the department.
How does a leader's personality affect safety in high stress environments? Some of this research comes from the airline industry. Research with airline crews found error levels were lowest where the leaders were considered to be warm and friendly and self-confident. There are other studies that have shown that teams produce less errors if they consider their leaders to be intelligent, self-confident, determined, honest, and social.
We have some studies in health service leadership where staff and leaders were asked what makes a good leader. The responses included:
- More "servant leadership"
- Less "promotional leadership"
- Fostering teamwork and creativity
Some people responded that "more servant leadership" was the quality of a good leader. Servant leadership comes out of the Christian faith model that we exist to serve our followers. Servant leadership is not limited to the Christian faith, and this leadership model is used in healthcare and other industries. It's fairly similar to transformational leadership. Others indicated "less promotional leadership". Promotional leadership means we promote someone into a "leader position" not because they have exhibited great leadership skills, but because they've been with the organization for a certain amount of time and then they are automatically promoted to the next level. Promotional leadership doesn't work very well and employees know that. Lastly, fostering teamwork and creativity is something that makes people think you're a good leader. Fostering teamwork and creativity are examples of actions we can take as leaders to reduce stress, enhance satisfaction, and improve quality, within our organizations.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Leadership in Healthcare, presented by Claire Aloan, MS, RRT-NPS, FAARC.
