As a medical administrator I am responsible for overseeing and administering a variety of medical and clinical services as well as consultation specialties. The role also requires me to supervise subordinate personnel in my team with specific responsibility for hiring, determining workload and delegating assignments, training, monitoring and evaluating performance, and initiating corrective or disciplinary actions. In my hiring process, I have to ensure that the right people are on the team.
It is my duty to define the goals of the team and establish in advance a working approach that clearly defines basic logistics like attendance, participation and patient confidentiality (Farkas, 2001). My team members have responsibility for patient check in, registration, prior authorizations and verifying insurance for patients. They also take care of patient scheduling, data entry and retrieval of demographic and insurance information. The goal for my team is to become a high performing, effective team.
To achieve this goal, we have been applying the principles of team management, project management and knowledge management. The guiding principles for these are discussed below with particular reference to their application in my organization. In her paper for the Harvard Business Review, Maria Farkas postulates that teams have become a necessity in today’s complex environment due to the fact that tasks have either become more complex, may require diverse skills or may require buy-in from the affected parties (Farkas, 2001).
However, team management is not without its inherent pitfalls. It has a tendency to fall prey to the problems with groups- inefficiency and infectiveness. It can also cause the team to lapse into groupthink or management by committee whereby creativity is stifled and individual accountability is lacking. But teams can be successful as long as the appropriate processes are available to enable the team meet the collective goal. Such processes involves the four aspects of an effective team that all team members can impact:
? Decision-making, ? Participation, ? Influence and ? Conflict. Team decision-making comes into play when there is need to solve problems or capitalize on opportunities. This process should encourage critical thinking and debate and finds its application in my job during hearings, meetings, teams, or work groups. By doing so, participation is encouraged and mutual trust, respect and cooperation are built among participants. Participation has to do with who participates, how often, when and to what effect.
It is my job to practice active listening and ensure that some form of intervention addresses large disparities in participation from team members. This enables all team members to be heard and encourages a culture of acceptance. Influence is usually governed by the individual’s status, competence, experience and even personal style. Influence in my team is monitored regularly to ensure that it lies with the person or group with the most expertise (and not with the highest ranking, loudest or most aggressive).
Conflict that results in productive teams must be encouraged. This is in the form of constructive conflict and creative abrasion. As medical administrator I have to provide expert advice or testimony and this will usually require my team to brainstorm in an atmosphere of constructive conflict so as to come up with superior contributions. The team will use logic to analyze and identify underlying principles and draw conclusions.