As a health care manager, you will be involved in strategic management. Discuss the following in regard to this:
Does strategic management involve long-term or short-term activities?
Describe how strategic management helps your facility control the future.
How strategic management helps your facility control the future
Strategic management involves assessing relationships to ensure that each department`s objectives align to the company`s overall goals. Long-term plans focus on activities that start now and continue well into the future. Good strategic management is essential for long-term business success. It involves defining a business strategy with clear objectives, creating clear plans as to how these objectives will be achieved, aligning business activities to support the objectives, and allocating the resources needed to achieve the objectives. A strategic management process helps an organization and its leadership to think about and plan for its future existence, fulfilling a chief responsibility of a board of directors. Strategic management sets a direction for the organization and its employees.
eamwork Teamwork plays an essential role within both Fiedler’s Contingency Theory and Chelladurai’s Multi-dimensional model particularly regarding leader-member relations, if the group are familiar and trusting of the leader policy implementation becomes much simpler. Similarly to leadership, understanding and adapting to the situation is key to a leader being able to implement policies that ensure a group work as a team. Teamwork is a product of good leadership, and is again the responsibility of the leader to ensure the group are working successfully together. Highly functioning teams are essential within organisations to increase productivity and member satisfaction, by utilising the talents of all group members effectively within the constraints of the task, personal relationships and the group goals (Pettinger, 2007). Figure 2: Tuckman’s Model of Group Development (Agile Scrum Guide, 2019) Tuckman in his Model of Group Development provides easily identifiable stages that a groups performance can be measured against, making it useful for monitoring performance, Figure 2 shows Tuckman’s model. Ranking group performance against this scale can provide leaders with a clear understanding of how the group are functioning, allowing them to implement policies to change this if performance is unsatisfactory (Pettinger, 2007). Within organisations, the theory can be loosely applied to creating teams by grouping familiar individuals with the aim that they will reach the norming and performing stage of the model quicker. For short and simple tasks this is an extremely effective way of organising groups, due to the increased short term productivity. However there are significant issues with grouping individuals in this manner, particularly when tasks become more complex, and ultimately the model should mainly be used for monitoring the progress of groups (Pettinger, 2007). Figure 3: Belbin’s Team Roles (PrePearl Training Development, 2019) A more functional approach of grouping individuals is to utilise Belbin’s Team Theory (Belbin, 2017). Belbin identifies 9 key roles that must be fulfilled within a group to ensure success, the roles are summarised in Figure 3. The roles cover a wide spectrum of skills that need to be present within a group to ensure success, and becomes essential when tasks are lengthy and complex. Organisations can find the Belbin roles each individual fits through a questionnaire, and thus balanced groups can be formed covering all the roles. However, like with Fiedler’s contingency model, the theory when translated to practice can often become very impractical for organisations to implement regularly. This is largely because the organisation is constrained by the personalities of their employees, their may be an abundance of one personality type and an absence of another, the only solution is to hire externally to fill the missing roles within teams. This can result in an extensive payroll for an organisation and huge financial implications as they cannot legally dismiss employee’s if they have too many of one personality type. The importance of Belbin roles in a team became apparent for Group 1 o