Questioning, understanding, co-operating

Work and co-operation in hospitals is organised in a highly complex manner. The high degree of individualisation of tasks and fast-changing conditions of work require organisational supervision and agile reactions. This renders necessary a more profound understanding  of the situation and wellbeing of  individual employees who have  management responsibility, and of their skills in flexible thought and action, extending across management interfaces.

We have developed our seminar  program “Management for Medicine” with this in mind, and have been  implementing it for a number of years,  with considerable success and excellent feedback -  for example in the UKM Münster [Munster University Hospital].

In our experience, there are two possible practical goals in the development of such management personnel:

On the one hand, these managers will receive a general indication that the hospital is interested in their further development, and is making them a corresponding offer.

On the other hand, emphasis may be placed on achieving a sustained improvement in the management performance of the persons addressed,  with respect to the topics outlined below.

If the second of the above possibilities is envisaged, it must be pointed out that the emphasis is on the combination of management principles, the fundamentals of communication and conversational exchanges, as well as on the issue of conflict management and handling one’s own conflict patterns, which are all  imparted in an effective and professional manner. This is based on our wide experience with university hospitals and with medium-sized industrial companies and large groups.

The whole field of conflict management occupies a central role – in the last analysis a major part of the professional activities of all managers consists of balancing divergent interests – but, in the first instance, this also requires that the participants are clear about the genesis and structure of their own personality with reference to their management responsibilities.

Our Seminar program consists of 4 sets of Seminars (Modules) of 2 days each:

Module I (Tools)

What is management?
  • Management as an art!
  • Basic rules for communication
Management role and role clarification
  • Dealing with nearness and distance
General principles of hierarchies
  • How to navigate skilfully through complex hierarchies
  • Communication within hierarchies
  • The modification of information within hierarchies
Collegial Coaching

Module II (One’s own personality as an important management tool)

Reflection on people’s own values and basic attitudes as managers
Dealing with different individuals and types of people
  • DISC Test
  • Successful Management of one’s own emotions
Work on actual management cases

Module III (Basic principles of conflict generation)

Management behaviour in hierarchies and teams
  • The laws of team dynamics
Management of emotions in management/conflict dialogues
  • Causes of conflict, conflict localisation
Principles of communication
  • Active listening
  • Types of conversation – differences
  • Confrontation without attack [JMS check] (Feedback)
Generation of conflicts and preconditions for conflicts (“Aporia”)
Analysing the  causes of conflict
Types of conflict – selection process

Module IV (Conflict and organisational/company culture)

Rules for conflict escalation
De-escalation strategies – basic principles of mediation
Cultural analysis of an organisation and its subunits
  • Standard, rules, rituals, taboos
Analysis of significant “Human Factors”
  • Measures for reducing operational risks and quality risks

All Seminars are designed with sufficient flexibility that they can always be adapted to suit the current contents and interests raised by the participants, without losing sight of any of the key topics.

Under the motto “Pleasure in Learning”, the structure and presentation of the individual activities are designed to be in close agreement with the individuals and their personalities, which limits the number of participants to a maximum of 15.

In Modules III and IV it should be noted that individuals should not take part if they consider themselves to be directly above or below one another in the hierarchy.

In these management seminars, we always work with two LP consultants for reasons of increased sensitivity to the participants and in order to ensure the quality of the consulting input.