Tackling the Tough Issues

As a leader, you have to address the tough issues. I used to tell my healthcare management students, that leadership is not lollipops, cotton candy, unicorns, and rainbows. Leadership is difficult work where you deal with difficult issues every single day. This is true of every business sector imaginable. There is no one place where everything is positive and happy all the time. That place does not exist. Unfortunately, what does exist is a thing called the real working world. In the real working world, work is messy. Everyone is not positive all day every day. No one tells you how great you are all the time and gives you inspiring and motivating messages around every corner. For some employees and leaders, their motivation is do what they are supposed to do or else lose their jobs. Everything at work is not fun and a good time, either. Everyone at work is not always happy. In fact, they bring with them to work all of their problems from home and the outside world finds its way into the workplace no matter how hard employees/employers may try to work in a vacuum.

The same is true across industries, and it is especially true in healthcare. Healthcare is not pretty with nice little bows tied on it. It is messy and dirty, and it gets down to the nitty gritty of what life is all about. Every single day healthcare workers, no matter their specialty, deal with some of life's most difficult and darkest issues. It is the responsibility of great leaders to provide those workers, no matter their specialty, with the tools they need to tackle those tough issues.

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The truth about healthcare is that it is a high stress, emotionally charged industry that literally deals with life and death every minute of every day. This is true of the hospital, the doctor's office, the insurance provider, the clinical research organization, the public health agency, the health information technology company. These organizations also have to address those serious health matters as they affect their employees, their clients, their patients, and their organizations. Some of those serious health matters do involve workplace bullying, domestic violence or violence in the workplace and community, suicide, gaslighting, addiction, death, disease, dismemberment. In fact, in some healthcare organizations, these very issues and many others may all arise in one day.

In order to keep moving forward, to have a positive attitude, to feel like the workers are making a difference, to give them hope and find purpose and meaning in their work, tough issues must be tackled. Health needs of the community, no matter what they are, must be addressed. As a result, healthcare leaders do at times have to be controversial, they need to have opinions, they need to talk about the tough issues. These issues are a part of their daily reality. These issues are not part of some lecture they had in high school or something they saw on a television show or in a movie. No amount of complaining, bullying or harassing is going to make the issues go away. Each time there is resistance to healthcare advancement, no matter the health issue, is given credence, treatment of a disease or illness and lives of people are put in the back seat.