The state of the art in evaluating the performance of assistant and associate deans as seen by deans and assistant and associate deans

This study explores the little-understood process of evaluating the performance of assistant and associate deans at dental colleges in the United States and Canada. Specifically, this research aimed to identify the methods, processes, and outcomes related to the performance appraisals of assistant/associate deans. Both deans and assistant/associate deans were surveyed. Forty-four of sixty-six deans (66.7 percent) and 227 of 315 assistant/associate deans (72.1 percent) completed surveys with both close-ended and open-ended questions. In addition, ten individuals from each group were interviewed. Results indicate that 75-89 percent of assistant/associate deans are formally evaluated, although as many as 27 percent may lack formal job descriptions. Some recommended best practices for performance appraisal are being used in a majority of colleges. Examples of these best practices are having at least yearly appraisals, holding face-to-face meetings, and setting specific, personal performance objectives/benchmarks for assistant/associate deans. Still, there is much room to improve appraisals by incorporating other recommended practices. Relatively high levels of overall satisfaction were reported by both assistant/associate deans and deans for the process and outcomes of appraisals. Assistant/associate deans rated the value of appraisals to overall development lower than did deans. Qualitative data revealed definite opinions about what constitutes effective and ineffective appraisals, including the use of goal-setting, timeliness, and necessary commitment. Several critical issues related to the results are discussed: differences in perspectives on performance reviews, the importance of informal feedback and job descriptions, the influence of an assistant/associate deans' lack of tenure, and the length of service of deans. Lastly, recommendations for enhancing performance evaluations are offered.

The making of an expert

Popular lore tells us that genius is born, not made. Scientific research, on the other hand, reveals that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching. Ordinary practice is not enough: To reach elite levels of performance, you need to constantly push yourself beyond your abilities and comfort level. Such discipline is the key to becoming an expert in all domains, including management and leadership. Those are the conclusions reached by Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University; Prietula, a professor at the Goizueta Business School; and Cokely, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who together studied data on the behavior of experts, gathered by more than 100 scientists. What consistently distinguished elite surgeons, chess players, writers, athletes, pianists, and other experts was the habit of engaging in "deliberate" practice--a sustained focus on tasks that they couldn't do before. Experts continually analyzed what they did wrong, adjusted their techniques, and worked arduously to correct their errors. Even such traits as charisma can be developed using this technique. Working with a drama school, the authors created a set of acting exercises for managers that remarkably enhanced executives' powers of charm and persuasion. Through deliberate practice, leaders can improve their ability to win over their employees, their peers, or their board of directors. The journey to elite performance is not for the impatient or the faint of heart. It takes at least a decade and requires the guidance of an expert teacher to provide tough, often painful feedback. It also demands would-be experts to develop their "inner coach" and eventually drive their own progress.

Make your company a talent factory

Despite the great sums of money companies dedicate to talent management systems, many still struggle to fill key positions - limiting their potential for growth in the process. Virtually all the human resource executives in the authors' 2005 survey of 40 companies around the world said that their pipeline of high-potential employees was insufficient to fill strategic management roles. The survey revealed two primary reasons for this. First, the formal procedures for identifying and developing next-generation leaders have fallen out of sync with what companies need to grow or expand into new markets. To save money, for example, some firms have eliminated positions that would expose high-potential employees to a broad range of problems, thus sacrificing future development opportunities that would far outweigh any initial savings from the job cuts. Second, HR executives often have trouble keeping top leaders' attention on talent issues, despite those leaders' vigorous assertions that obtaining and keeping the best people is a major priority. If passion for that objective doesn't start at the top and infuse the culture, say the authors, talent management can easily deteriorate into the management of bureaucratic routines. Yet there are companies that can face the future with confidence. These firms don't just manage talent, they build talent factories. The authors describe the experiences of two such corporations - consumer products icon Procter & Gamble and financial services giant HSBC Group -that figured out how to develop and retain key employees and fill positions quickly to meet evolving business needs. Though each company approached talent management from a different direction, they both maintained a twin focus on functionality (rigorous talent processes that support strategic and cultural objectives) and vitality (management's emotional commitment, which is reflected in daily actions).

The new deal at the top

What makes a company strategically agile--able to alter its strategies and business models rapidly in response to major changes in its market space, and to do so repeatedly without major trauma? Three years of in-depth case research on a dozen large companies worldwide showed the authors that one key factor is a new leadership model at the top. Senior executives at agile companies assume collective rather than individual responsibility for results. They build interdependencies among units and divisions, motivating themselves to engage with one another, and carefully manage their dealings to promote collaboration that is frequent, intense, informal, open, and focused on shared issues and the long term. Challenges to conventional thinking are encouraged. This is the new deal, and it's not easy to strike, because it requires executives to act in ways that are far from comfortable. After all, the corporate ladder at most firms favors independent types with a deep need for power and autonomy. At executive meetings, disagreement is suppressed or expressed passive-aggressively, eroding any real sense of belonging to a team. Switching to the new deal almost always requires a huge shift in the company's culture, values, and norms of interaction. The authors describe three approaches to making the shift: Executives can be given formal responsibility not for a business unit but for different stages in the company's value chain. This worked well for SAP, which has a relatively focused business portfolio. When a company's portfolio is less uniform, like Nokia's, business and functional units can be organized to crisscross on a matrix. And when a company is widely diverse, like easyGroup, it can emphasize the learning opportunities that units with common business models may share.

Sustainable rangeland management using a multi-fuzzy model: how to deal with heterogeneous experts' knowledge

While fuzzy specialists commonly use homogeneous experts' knowledge to construct fuzzy models, it is much more difficult to deal with knowledge elicited from a heterogeneous group of experts. This issue is exemplified in the area of sustainable rangeland management (SRM). One way to deal with the diversity of opinions is to develop a fuzzy system for all experts and to combine all these, the so-called primary systems, into one multi-fuzzy model. To derive each of the primary fuzzy systems, several semi-structured interviews were held in three different areas of the Fars province in Southwest Iran using the knowledge of a group of administrative experts. To obtain the final output of the multi-fuzzy model, we applied different 'voting' methods. The first method simply uses the arithmetic average of the primary outputs as the final output of the multi-fuzzy model. This final output represents an estimation of the right rate of stocking (RRS). We also propose other (un)supervised voting methods. Most importantly, by harmonising the primary outputs such that outliers get less emphasis, we introduce an unsupervised voting method for calculating a weighted estimate of the RRS. This harmonising method is expected to provide a new useful tool for policymakers dealing with heterogenity in experts' opinions: it is especially useful where limited field data are available and one is forced to rely on experts' knowledge only. By constructing the three fuzzy models based on the elicitation of heterogeneous experts' knowledge, our study shows the multidimensional vaguenesses that exist in SRM. Finally, by comparing the final RRS with its common values, this study strongly points to the existence of overgrazing in pastures in the three regions of the Fars province in Southwest Iran.

Divergent effects of transformational and passive leadership on employee safety

The authors concurrently examined the impact of safety-specific transformational leadership and safety-specific passive leadership on safety outcomes. First, the authors demonstrated via confirmatory factor analysis that safety-specific transformational leadership and safety-specific passive leadership are empirically distinct constructs. Second, using hierarchical regression, the authors illustrated, contrary to a stated corollary of transformational leadership theory (B. M. Bass, 1997), that passive leadership contributes incrementally to the prediction of organizationally relevant outcomes, in this case safety-related variables, beyond transformational leadership alone. Third, further analyses via structural equation modeling showed that both transformational and passive leadership have opposite effects on safety climate and safety consciousness, and these variables, in turn, predict safety events and injuries. Implications for research and application are discussed.

Skills. Move with the times

Future NHS leaders will need a wide variety of emerging skills in strategic leadership, HR, market management, clinical engagement and partnership. Work being carried out by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement aims to embed these principles through action learning sets and leadership programmes. Fitness for purpose reviews, such as those recently carried out for PCT chief executives, are designed to assess whether leaders have the skills they need.

Which competences and what managerial training for the health professions

The process of passage to be e-profit and loss organization following the reform of the Italian health system, especially in a context of fiscal federalism and administered competition among the public and private producers, causes implications on the competences of whom develops his/her own professional activity. The aim of the paper is to give some inputs for discussion about the training of manager: starting from the meaning of the word 'management' and using the model elaborated by Mintzberg and Simon with the purpose to identify who is involved in such training, trying to make explicit that the analysis of the organizational positions and the profile of the resource that will go to occupy it is a forced passage for building the training package and to make clear characteristics and contents of the training offer.

Are leaders portable?

Does management talent transfer from one company to another? The market certainly seems to think so. Stock prices spike when companies announce new CEOs from a talent generator like General Electric. But how do these executives perform over the long term? The authors studied the careers of 20 former GE executives who went on to lead other major organizations, with strikingly uneven results. Even the best management talent, the authors found, is transferable only if it maps to the challenges of the new environment. More specifically, the authors identified five types of skills that may or may not transfer to a new job: general management human capital, or the skills to gather, cultivate, and deploy financial, technical, and human resources; strategic human capital, or individuals' expertise in cost cutting, growth, or cyclical markets; industry human capital, meaning the technical and regulatory knowledge unique to an industry; relationship human capital, or the extent to which a manager's effectiveness can be attributed to his or her experience working with colleagues or as part of a team; and company-specific human capital, or the knowledge about routines and procedures, corporate culture and informal structures, and systems and processes that are unique to a company. The GE executives' performance as CEOs depended on whether their new organizations were able to leverage each type of skill. The authors'findings challenge the conventional wisdom on human capital, which holds that there are two types of skill: general management, which is readily transferable, and company specific, which is not. In fact, they argue, other types of management capabilities can make a significant contribution to performance, and company-specific skills can be an asset in a new job.

Defining the PACS profession: an initial survey of skills, training, and capabilities for PACS administrators

The need for specialized individuals to manage picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) has been recognized with the creation of a new professional title: PACS administrator. This position requires skill sets that bridge the current domains of radiology technologists (RTs), information systems analysts, and radiology administrators. Health care organizations, however, have reported difficulty in defining the functions that a PACS administrator should perform-a challenge compounded when the tries to combine this complex set of capabilities into one individual. As part of a larger effort to define the PACS professional, we developed an extensive but not exclusive consensus list of business, technical, and behavioral competencies desirable in the dedicated PACS professional. Through an on-line survey, radiologists, RTs, information technology specialists, corporate information officers, and radiology administrators rated the importance of these competencies. The results of this survey are presented, and the implications for implementation in training and certification efforts are discussed.

Delegating Decision Making in Health Care Organizations

This article explores the realm of delegation from the behavioral standpoint. Delegation is defined as well as reasons why it fails. The limitations of decision making as related to delegation are covered. Ways in which health care organizations can improve managerial decision making to make a positive impact on delegation are explored. Finally, considerations for managers to engage in effective delegation are delineated.