by Jordan Chapman
Catholic Health Services of Long Island employees participate in Adelphi’s High-Performance Leadership program.
Adelphi University’s newly launched intensive High-Performance Leadership (HPL) program, aimed to benefit middle- and senior-level managers throughout the entire system of Catholic Health Services of Long Island (CHS), certified 300 CHS leaders on December 10, 2014.
The course maintains and offers new techniques to sustain and enhance employee engagement and high-quality patient satisfaction and to devise solutions for myriad challenges facing the healthcare industry to positively impact business outcomes.
“One of the big issues in healthcare right now is patient satisfaction—that it’s no longer just enough to cure them,” said David Prottas, Ph.D., associate professor in the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business Department of Management, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) vice president for grievance and one of four Adelphi faculty members leading the HPL program.
“You get satisfied customers if your employees are fully engaged in their jobs,” Prottas said. The HPL program was brought in to sustain effective leadership in a health system of some 70,000 employees.
He explained that an employee’s engagement with his or her work comes down from their direct managers and leaders. When 25 percent of the healthcare leaders taking the course have 50 more people reporting directly to them, the impact is big.
“Most people are promoted to management because they’re really good at what they do,” Prottas said. “But very often they’re not given any training on how to be a manager.”
Course work didn’t involve lectures. Prottas described a setting consisting entirely of role-play and exercises, leadership assessments and feedback on management style. “It’s not telling them what to do, but helping them practice how to do it,” he said.
Instructors of the High-Performance Leadership program include (from left): David Prottas, Ph.D, Carol Ann Cacciopoli, Mary Nummelin and Neil Halloran
“It was enlightening, and I think it was self-fulfilling in that you get some time to reflect on things you’ve done for many years,” said Kathleen Engber, director for nursing education and clinical informatics at St. Francis Hospital. “It’s keeping them motivated and keeping the staff [motivated] so the patients get the best possible care. It’s all about the patients,” she said.
“We’ve been wanting to do management training for a while now,” said Tony Pellicano, senior vice president of human resources and chief HR officer for CHS. “We’ve had a very good experience with [Adelphi]. We thought it a good opportunity to take the relationship to the next level,” he continued, noting the special M.B.A. physician cohorts Adelphi currently offers to CHS doctors and managers.
“We know we can’t just do this once. We need to have an ongoing presence. We want to have follow-up educational sessions and see if we can grow this into something larger,” he said, noting aspirations to have the program merged into the special physician cohort M.B.A. program. “[That way] employees can go for an M.B.A. and, at the same time, get a leadership certificate from Catholic Health Services. …This is the first stage to getting that off the ground.”
The financial relationship and impact on providing better and more affordable care to patients is poised to change as Adelphi University continues to build its partnerships with hospitals to develop leaders and strengthen healthcare delivery overall. The HPL program is an extension of Adelphi’s growing commitment to improving the healthcare industry.
