Discussion Question: Enhancing Talent Management in Public Health and HealthcareIn the dynamic and competitive fields of public health and healthcare, effective leadership and talent management are crucial for organizational success. The chapter provides a comprehensive guide on managing individual employees to achieve optimal results, emphasizing the importance of understanding both organizational and individual components of talent management. The GEM Model of Talent Management is highlighted as a versatile tool that can be tailored to fit organizational needs and personal leadership philosophies, focusing on three critical aspects: setting employee goals and expectations, enhancing engagement and execution, and managing and motivating employees effectively.Discussion Prompt:Reflect on the application of the GEM Model within a public health or healthcare organization. Write a minimum of 200 words discussing how a leader could implement the GEM Model to address the specific challenges and opportunities within these sectors. Consider the following in your analysis:Goals and Expectations: How can leaders in public health and healthcare set and communicate clear goals and expectations in a way that resonates with individual employees and aligns with the organization’s mission?Engagement and Execution: What strategies could be employed to enhance employee engagement and ensure the effective execution of these goals within the fast-paced and often high-pressure environment of public health and healthcare?Management and Motivation: Discuss the methods a leader might use to manage and motivate employees, considering the diverse and multidisciplinary nature of teams within these sectors.Provide research support for your arguments, citing at least one external source to enhance the depth of your analysis and engagement with the topic.
Leadership in Practice
Essentials for Public Health and Healthcare Leaders
Chapter 17: Creating Effective Public Health Messengers
Susan C. Helm-Murtagh, DrPH, MM
Paul C. Erwin, MD, DrPH
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Chapter 17 Objectives
• By the end of this chapter, the reader will be able to:
• Recognize the historical and political conditions that currently challenge public health’s ability to change law
and policy in order to meet urgent community needs
• Address ways in which public health and healthcare leaders can communicate more deeply and meaningfully
with communities of all backgrounds, given the politically polarized culture
• Apply practical communication strategies that public health can use internally to improve its political skill sets,
as well as externally to nurture the voices of other non-public health allies to support common efforts
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Factors Contributing to the Public Health Communications Gap
• Local and state public health leaders have scarce resources and insufficient clout
• Frequently must shape messages in a dynamic situation, without waiting for 100% data certainty
• Communication about issues that are evolving, complex, nuanced, and subject to unexpected change
• There has been a long decline in public health’s political skill sets
• Decreasing levels of civil discourse in the U.S. cultural and political environments undermine the ability
to form the coalitions critical to solving public health problems
• The good news is that public health, healthcare, and local elected leaders share a common goal: to take
care of their communities
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Inputs to Communication
• The sender
• Leaders should assess their own interpersonal and communication skills
• Influenced by sender’s personal and professional credibility, their power and authority, and their social capital
• The receiver
• Receptivity influenced by receiver’s values, knowledge, beliefs about message and perception of sender
• The message
• Effective framing is key
• The channel
• Delivery of method may involve traditional or social media, direct action advocacy, one-on-one, or other
methods
• The context
• Many issues compete for stakeholder attention
• Historical or cultural contexts, current political climate, other external factors may impact effectiveness
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Figure 17.3: McGuire’s Persuasion Matrix.
Source: Reproduced with permission from Martin BA. Improving Public Health Communication in a Politically Polarized
Environment: Exploring the Use of Moral Values in Message Framing. Dissertation. 2021. University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/dissertations/dj52wf88m
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Ways for Public Health and Healthcare to Communicate
Figure 17.4: Ways for Public Health and
Healthcare Leaders to Communicate.
Source: Reproduced with permission from
Martin BA. Improving Public Health
Communication in a
Politically Polarized Environment: Exploring the
Use of Moral Values in Message Framing
[dissertation]. 2021. University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/dissertations/dj5
2wf88m
© Springer Publishing Company, LLC.
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Considerations for Effective Communication
• Channels
• Context
• Credibility
• Be aware of unintended effects
• Consider a public health champion—identify unexpected validators
• An unexpected stakeholder may make a bigger impact as the message sender
• Framing
• Diagnostic framing—focuses on what the problem is and how to define it
• Prognostic framing—focuses on how to solve the problem
• Motivational framing—offers the call to action
• Crafting
• Keep the intended audience in mind
• Create messages that combine facts and data with emotional appeals
• Messages should be culturally relevant, transparent, respectful, and flexible to change
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Considerations for Effective Communication (continued)
• Crafting (continued)
• Use concise and easy to remember headlines and subject lines
• Communicate in clear, simple language
• Utilize empathy and intuitive moral values to frame the message
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Using Empathy for Effective Messaging
• Beware of shaming and name calling
• Offer individuals a sense of control
• Enlist trusted partners who may be unexpected validators
• Emphasize benefits over threats
• Connect to what’s meaningful to the audience, not to you
• Remember that public health is a long game
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Centering Equity in Public Health Communication
• Know your audience
• Focus on systems, places, or conditions
• Use storytelling
• Be authentic
• Understand the opposition
• Always be aware of your own limitations
• Confirmation bias
• In-group favoritism
• Framing effect
• Authority bias
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Using Moral Foundations Theory to Inform Communication
Figure 17.6: Overview of Moral Foundations.
Source: Reproduced with permission from Martin BA.
Improving Public Health Communication in a Politically
Polarized Environment: Exploring the Use of Moral
Values in Message Framing. Dissertation. 2021.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/dissertations/dj52wf88m
© Springer Publishing Company, LLC.
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Becoming a Better Messenger
• Take the moral foundations assessment to learn which moral foundations you naturally resonate with
• Practice how to speak to the moral foundations that you don’t necessarily resonate with
• Consider the moral foundations of your audience
• Politically liberal—message on care and fairness
• Politically conservative—message on all six intuitive moral foundations
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Summary
• Recognize that stakeholders may view public health issues and solutions very differently
• Appreciate that communication has become more complex, due to political polarization and the
proliferation of news and other information from mainstream and social media
• Consider the major elements in communication
• Give careful attention to empathy and centering equity in public health messaging
• Tap into intuitive moral foundations in communicator and audience
• The bottom line is there is no alternative: Public health leaders must learn to message better
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Leadership in Practice
Essentials for Public Health and Healthcare Leaders
Chapter 16: Talent Management: A Leadership Imperative
Susan C. Helm-Murtagh, DrPH, MM
Paul C. Erwin, MD, DrPH
© Springer Publishing Company, LLC.
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Chapter 16 Objectives
• By the end of this chapter, the reader will be able to:
• Highlight the growing leadership imperative to effectively unleash the power of the workforce in an
increasingly competitive public health healthcare industry
• Provide a brief overview of the organizational components of human resource strategies/people
management and how they impact the leader’s approach to talent management
• Introduce a toolkit for enabling leaders to “unearth, polish, and deploy” their employees’ skills, talents, and
aspirations in a manner that creates value for the organization, the customer/patient, and the employee
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Talent Management in Public Health and Healthcare
• Increasing staffing challenges and competition trends will continue into the future
• Growth within healthcare industry at a pace that increases staffing challenges
• Insufficient talent pool
• Changing needs and expectations of public health and healthcare workers
• Hypercompetitive staffing landscape
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Organizational Talent Management: The HR Context
• Leader needs to understand explicit and implicit HR goals and strategies
• HR functions
• Necessary functions for basic operations
• Ensuring consistency
• Ensuring regulatory compliance and reporting
• HR and organizational leaders must engage in integrated planning for future needs
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Organizational Design
• Structure evolves over time and especially with growth
• Basic structure needs to be understood
• Who does the work?
• How does the work get done?
• How are resources allocated?
• Questions to assist assessment
• How does the organization determine its strategy and goals for the foreseeable future?
• How are the major work tasks and people organized to deliver the mission, vision, values, and goals?
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Job Design
• Addresses how work is structured into specific jobs and roles
• Defines individual scope of responsibility
• Scope and design of roles impacts meaning and growth opportunities
• Increasingly important to talent recruitment and retention
• Role design and description must be accurate and attractive
• Key considerations:
• What are the goals and objectives of the role?
• What level of education, training, and experience are required to perform that role (i.e., minimum
requirements)?
• How dependent or integrated is the role with other areas or other roles within the organization? How many
layers for decision-making? Who decides what (i.e., level of autonomy)?
• What is the target span of control (i.e., how many employees per leader)?
• What kind of flexibility does the role have in terms of when and how the role is accomplished?
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Recruiting and Attracting Talent
• Annual forecasts of recruiting and headcount needs
• Compensation levels of jobs/roles
• Corporate HR provides guidelines and parameters for roles
• “Market pricing” to set compensation ranges based on comparable roles in the industry
• Define other elements of the “total rewards” package
• Paid time off
• Health insurance and benefits
• Retirement programs and contributions
• Tuition reimbursement
• Relocation assistance
• Employee assistance programs
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Engaging and Supporting Talent
• Orientation to the organization
• Consistent onboarding
• Builds common culture and set of expectations
• Standard training and development programs
• Internal and external programs and events
• Ensure the requisite skill sets
• Rewards and recognition
• Linking performance management to the monetary and non-monetary outcomes
• Employee relations and support
• Ongoing mechanisms for employee feedback and issue escalation
• Supports a positive employer/employee relationship
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The GEM Model
• Toolkit to “unearth, polish, and deploy” employees’ skills, talents, and aspirations
• Three distinct aspects of talent management
• Goals and expectations—define how the employee is seen and valued
• Engagement and execution—showcase the employee through successful job performance
• Management and motivation—spur the employee to higher levels of achievement over time
Figure 16.1: The GEM Model of Talent Management.
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Goals and Expectations for the Employee (G)
• Set and communicate meaningful, measurable, and feasible set of expectations
• Job description should meet needs and objectives of organization and employee
• Do not assume the value or impact of the job is clear
• Role-specific goals—must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based
• Hiring requirements must be clear and include necessary qualifications
• Recruitment—build and cultivate a network of potential employees
• Interview process
• Consider who should be involved—diverse panel of interviewers
• Use a disciplined interviewing approach
• Collectively rate and rank candidate pool
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Engagement and Execution (E)—Onboarding
• Onboarding should have a set plan
• Schedule for proactive communications—written and verbal
• Established week 1 schedule
• Establish goals and expectations—consider four levels of authority model
• Level 1—act upon instruction
• Level 2—act upon approval
• Level 3—decide on action, inform, and act
• Level 4—decide and act
• Meaningful team integration—establish regular and meaningful dialogue
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Engagement and Execution (E)—Meetings
• Team and department meetings
• Distribute meeting agendas at least 24 hours in advance
• Encourage ongoing team reflection and feedback
• Action items and tracking create a “closed loop” on assignments
• Regularly scheduled 1:1 meetings to build foundation of trust
• Solicit and agree upon agenda topics in advance
• Create expectation of “upward management”
• Manage discussion for meaningful dialogue
• Beware of communication pitfalls
• Goal planning, refinement, and refresh—annual top-down/bottom-up approach
• Take advantage of coaching and development opportunities
• Identify needed skills and experiences and invest in training and development
• Hold work focused or problem-solving sessions
• Provide real-time feedback
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Motivation and Management for Success (M)
• Effective performance managements
• Performance assessment
• Balance the “how” and “what” of performance
• Manage the performance discussion effectively
• Tips for tough performance management discussions
• Clear written articulation of performance shortfalls and gaps
• Clarify potential consequences of not addressing shortfalls and the necessary timeframe
• Determine drivers of performance shortfall
• Allow time for silence and emotions
• Ask employee to take a few days to process and reflect and schedule a follow up discussion to plan for
moving forward
• Plan for rewards and recognition
• Use traditional reward levers wholistically
• Create employee-specific motivation plans
• Include non-monetary tools
• Career Planning
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Summary
• Effective leaders must understand both organizational and individual components of talent management
• Organizational context include HR policies, programs, parameters, and expectations
• GEM Model of talent management
• Employee goals and expectations (G)
• Employee engagement and execution (E)
• Employee management and motivation (M)
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