"The Ronan Report" provides insight about the activities at the Western Maryland Health System in Cumberland, Maryland, and about the changes taking place in healthcare today from a CEO's perspective.

Friday, May 2, 2014

Emotional Competence

This morning, I was getting a briefing on the recent successes within our Leadership Institute at WMHS.  The focus was on how we are doing with training our evolving leaders.  The leadership group in training is nearing completion of a nine-month program; and, as a result, executive leadership has been introduced to some very talented people in our organization—our succession of leaders.  So, the program has proven to be a success and will be built upon going forward.  

As was discussed this morning, one of those areas to be built upon will be emotional competence.  It is no longer simply how smart you are or what you know; it's also about how you handle yourself and how you are viewed by others. We go to great lengths in selecting and on-boarding staff to ensure that they are the right fit for WMHS.  Through our more recently established processes, we do very well in choosing the right people.  Not only do they need to have the right training and education, but they need to be able to embrace our mission, our values and our service excellence standards.  It is one's ability to demonstrate these prime qualities that will keep someone employed at WMHS.  In simple terms, it is more than the hard skills, those few initials after your name i.e. RN, MD, RD, Pharm D, etc.  You have to possess the soft skills as well: the knowledge, the job skills and the experience.  These soft skills equate to that emotional competence on the part of the individual employee.  

The upcoming message to our evolving leaders through the Leadership Institute will be that possessing a strong emotional competence along with the necessary hard skills is the difference between an outstanding leader and a mediocre one.  Going forward embrace the importance of emotional competence.

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