Leadership in Healthcare Organizations

This course provides tools that can help you lead individuals and groups in health care organizations. In essence, the material serves as a practical guide to managing workplace behavior - your own and that of others. To explain key concepts, we draw on robust social science research that highlights several challenging aspects of leadership: making sound decisions, motivating employees, influencing others to support your ideas, and dealing with difficult personalities. We explore these challenges using readings, cases, lectures, experiential exercises, and discussion of examples from actual organizations. Given that the course is only one quarter long and the potential scope of concepts, theories, and applications is immense, we are forced to be highly selective. We will spend only a single session on topics that could easily take an entire quarter. The objective is to expose you to the most critical ideas and outline a framework to guide your future learning - not offering specific recipes for leading others, but enabling you to solve novel leadership challenges independently and with confidence.