eSSee Consulting

It’s become vogue, particularly in the nonprofit field, to praise leaders and leadership as the needed remedy to challenges in the sector while vilifying bosses and management as outdated—or even backwards—modes of organizing. This follows a long trail of thought-leadership that began in 1977 when Abraham Zaleznik published his seminal article, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” In the article, Zaleznik criticized the primary focus on managerial control that pervaded business schools at the time, and argued for the need to develop leadership practices aligned with inspiration, vision and innovation.

Through countless books, articles, and speakers on the subject since (Collins, Pozner and Kouzes, Maxwell, et al), the dichotomy of leadership versus management has grown stronger and, somewhat ironically, an inherent (and sometimes explicit) hierarchy of practices has formed. Indeed, Collins, in Good to Great, identifies managers as “level 3 leaders,” whereas there are two higher levels yet for those who practice traits of vision, humility, improvement and willpower.

Nonprofits, who traditionally have experienced greater difficulty in the basics of management to begin with, have leaped on to the leadership bandwagon with gusto, happily discarding the messy unpleasantness of “management;” in so doing, they jeopardize not only their organizations’ margins, but their entire missions as well. Many leaders in nonprofit aging services—executive directors, administrators, CEOs– actively campaign against “authoritative management,” citing their different “style of leadership” or “personality type” as their reasoning for glossing over the traditional facets of management. Leadership Institutes are now commonplace in trade organizations and professional societies, usually with a singular focus on leadership traits like vision and innovation and without regard to the duties and skills of a manager. In so doing, they throw out wholesale the lessons of the past and create real gaps in organizations’ abilities to actually effect the change they set out to create.

In 1990, John Kotter published an article entitled, “What Leaders Really Do.” The article’s first paragraph sums his entire thesis: “Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think… Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action.” In Kotter’s estimation, US businesses at the time were over-managed and underled. Unfortunately, the reality of aging services is that most organizations are both under-managed and underled, creating a disastrous combination that threatens their ability to survive.

Leadership is crucial, and we must continue to educate and train leaders in the practices that work. There is indeed still much work to do. Management, too, is critical to survival, however, and we must also stop vilifying the control of processes, the organizing of people, and the solving of business problems at the same time. As Kotter noted more than two decades ago, our success requires both.

The February 2014 issue of The Gerontologist contains a special supplement, “Transforming Nursing Home Culture: Evidence for Practice and Policy.” This 102 page volume contains a number of excellent publications, including, “What Does the Evidence Really Say About Culture Change in Nursing Homes?,” “Culture Change and Nursing Home Quality of Care,” “Who Are the Innovators? Nursing Homes Implementing Culture Change,” and “Building a State Coalition for Nursing Home Excellence.”

Overall, this supplement addresses the often-overlooked problem with research on culture change: it’s not yet clear what works and what doesn’t. Providers deep on a journey of culture change may object to this statement, pointing to numerous cases of anecdotal evidence that supports change practices. And, indeed, there is some evidence tying practices to improved outcomes (and less evidence tying practices to worse outcomes). Still, true lasting change will only broadly occur when we develop solid understandings of what will work, and many of the articles highlight areas where future research should be directed.

Some key findings:

• Current evidence doesn’t give providers enough information to select interventions for specific outcomes.
• The usage of control groups must be increased to develop a stronger evidence base.
• Mouth Care Without a Battle offers specific guidance for improving the resident-centeredness of specific care tasks.
• Culture change coalitions with broad stakeholder involvement can be successful catalysts for change.

Looking forward, an article entitled “Implementing Culture Change in Nursing Homes: An Adaptive Leadership Framework” by Corrizzini and Colleagues at Duke will be published in The Gerontologist soon. (Advance copy currently available online.) This paper, based on a qualitative, observational study of culture change practices in 3 nursing homes, highlights some crucial lessons for providers:

• Administrators too often rely on technical management solutions that unknowingly promote a continuation of management-driven practices. Instead, administrators must learn to better develop an adaptive leadership framework to understand how relationship-driven processes can be supported.
• Providers and proponents of culture change rely on technical measures of culture change, such as staff scheduling and resident involvement in care planning, rather than adaptive measures of staff empowerment and problem-solving capacity.
• Culture change nursing homes continue to experience dramatic disconnects in understanding between various roles, and, significantly, between management and line staff. Further work is needed on developing tools to measure and reduce this gap.

Adaptive leadership practices, as noted in this study, are woefully underutilized in the LTPAC space, as there is a stong bias for leadership that manages the technical aspects of an organization, i.e. census and revenue-driven outcomes, staffing costs and labor usage, and proxy measures (turnover, satisfaction, compliance). Unfortunately, changing payment models will continue to support this bias.

Leadership practices aside, organizations can also look at adopting transparent mechanisms for communication, instilling a just culture, and using recognized focus group practices to gather quality data about challenges and develop a better framework for promoting culture change in their communities..