Engagement is over-used; we don’t need more of it. We need partnership, not engagement. Leaders want supportive followers, but do not want to give up command and control for partnership.
Engagement
Leaders talk about people being engaged, how to engage, lack of engagement, and otherwise use engagement to explain all kinds of operational failure and success.
Engagement, for leaders, means interested, positive followers. Interested, negative people are labeled irritants, not engaged. Leaders love engagement, but change requires more.
Partnership
Peter Block writes that partnership is
- Exchange of purpose
- Absolute honesty
- The right to say No
- Joint accountability
- No abdication of responsibility
Engagement means support for a pre-defined purpose. Partnership exchanges and builds purpose together.
Staff engage, but hold back criticism or gossip, whereas partnership demands absolute honesty.
Partnership gives others the right to say No. It requires vulnerability, humility, and willingness to give up command and control.
Followers enjoy complaining about leaders’ decisions no matter how much they engaged. True partnership eliminates complaint through joint accountability.
Engagement fizzles when parties walk away. Partnership means parties keep their commitments.
Medicare needs partnership
Government needs to embrace partnership, and providers must follow through in all it demands. True partnership would lessen the turmoil of election driven change, allow us to build on success, and create meaningful change for patients.
(photo credit: smallbusinessbc.ca)
Shawn….this is the only recipe that will work to create collaborative change. Impact full read. I hope you and your medical associates will tackle the very tough and key question of “how will all key stakeholders come together for the partnership talks”…. Not an easy roadmap but paramount to start process.
Doctors, those that are hands on, must be part of the partnership. The bureaucratic docs , appear to be too far removed and politically motivated to input to that partnership constructively. They haven’t so far…..they’ve rode that horse into the ground.
I hope more of your associates start commenting on your thoughts…..that would start a vocal collective that can have a meaningful voice.
Don
Good comments, Don!
I’ll challenge you a little on one point. It seems that some of the medical culture has rubbed off in you in this: docs love to accuse their colleagues who help in leadership of having ‘gone to the dark side’. Unfortunately, I almost never see the loudest critics stepping up to help lead their clinical groups, hospital programs, LHINs, or provincial associations. I can think of only a handful of MDs who work full-time as bureaucrats, most keep clinically active.
We need physicians who see the value in wrestling with the system. Most have resigned themselves to fatalism and do not have the time or energy to bother. I can’t blame them; days of work produce barely perceptible change.
Again, thanks so much for reading and commenting!!
Best
Shawn