Creating the Management Academy for Public Health

Leadership Training and the Problems of Competency Development

CONTEXT

An important workforce development effort during the past 25 years has been developing competency sets. Several of the sets rely on the concepts of Senge's Learning Organization and Burns' Transformational Leadership. The authors' experiences and study in designing and implementing a curriculum for a public health leadership institute based on these concepts raised several important questions about competency development and application.

OBJECTIVES

To summarize the use of the Senge and Burns frameworks in several competency sets and the practice literature and to assess the status of competency development for those frameworks and for competency development generally.

DESIGN

The authors reviewed several commonly used competency sets and textbooks and searched 3 leading public health practice journals (Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, Public Health Reports, and American Journal of Public Health) for Senge and Burns framework terms. They also reviewed efforts to implement competency sets in public health education and practice.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

(1) The extent to which the articles and texts demonstrated understanding of the frameworks and reported their implementation and (2) whether competency statements and their uses in the literature contained precise definitions of competencies (knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes associated with them), the standards by which competence is to be measured, and the means for measuring their attainment.

RESULTS

"Learning Organization" and "Transformational Leadership" terms were used often and viewed favorably. However, the terms were rarely defined as Senge and Burns had, the uses generally did not indicate the complexity and difficulty of implementation, and there was only one report of even partial implementation. The review of competency development efforts found there is virtually no attention to the definitional and measurement issues in the literature.

CONCLUSION

Unless public health organizations recognize the need for a common understanding of competencies and how to measure their attainment and act on that understanding, it will be impossible to say with confidence that there is agreement on which individuals are competent, whether public health agencies have competent personnel, or that the public health workforce itself is competent.

The Management Academy for Public Health: program design and critical success factors

The Management Academy for Public Health is a team-based training program jointly offered by the School of Public Health and the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This 9-month program teaches public health managers how to better manage people, information, and finances. Participants learn how to work in teams with community partners, and how to think and behave as social entrepreneurs. To practice and blend their new skills, teams develop a business plan that addresses a local public health issue. This article describes the program and explains the findings of the process evaluation, which has examined how best to structure and deploy a team-based method to create more effective, more entrepreneurial public health managers. Findings indicate that recruitment and retention are strong, program elements are relevant to learners' needs, and learners are satisfied with and value the program. Several specific benefits of the program model are identified, as well as several elements that support business plan success and skills' application on the job. On the basis of these findings, four success factors critical for developing similar programs are identified.