Community Health Centers: Leadership Integrity

Community Health Centers: Leadership Integrity

In this series, we continue to write about Community Health Centers and their central role in providing primary health care to the unemployed, underemployed, and part-time employed who are uninsured or underinsured.

Healthcare in America is not a looming crisis. It is not a pending catastrophe. American healthcare is in a state of crisis now. Healthcare for the uninsured and underinsured is a dark waltz with disaster:

From 13 consecutive months of job loss,

To 20,000,000 people unemployed, underemployed, or working part-time,

If these men, women, and children cannot afford adequate food, clothing, or shelter, then, they certainly cannot afford basic, primary healthcare for pre-natal, early childhood, and chronic diseases.

The way this can be dealt with immediately is through local Community Health Centers.

However, until Community Health Centers (CHCs) are well-led, well-managed, and well-financed, they will not be in a consistent position to serve the medically underserved.

This post will address:
Community Health Centers: Leadership Integrity

INTEGRITY (defined) – The ability to understand, and convert into action, as the leader’s first task and duty, the foremost need of the organization.

Do your leaders have the ability to see the world as it actually, not as they want it to be (which, of course, is vision, unfortunately, at this stage of development, vision may lead to illusion – a subject of future postings).

Leadership – Structure – Financial

Leadership Integrity, leads to - Structural Integrity - Selecting and adhering to the top four elements (Human Assets, Expertise, Parameters, Change) which leads to - Financial Integrity ( Selecting and adhering to effective predictive/leading financial indicators).

The Key Issue:
Do these elements have integrity?
1. Leadership,
2. Structure, and
3. Financial.

The Leadership Questions

What are the Board’s assumptions about their Executive Director and Senior Managers?

Are their assumptions premised upon:
The Lone Ranger theory of management?
That the supply of talented executives is strictly limited?

Do they understand, and convert into action self-executing mechanisms?

Do they have, and convert into action, their core competencies?

1. Are their core competencies relevant?
2. Are they effective, or merely efficient, or neither?
3. Are they muscle, fat, or cancer?
4. Do they staff from strengths or weaknesses?
5. Do they have, and convert into action, a one-line job description?
6. Do they not just playing well themselves, but help others play better?

Next post: The Integrity Structure of Leadership, Structure, and Finance – Introduction to Structure