Content area
Full Text
Both train middle managers to be more effective leaders BY DAVID R. SELDEN, ACSW, LICSW
What do you think is more difficult to do: manage a coffee shop, oversee a burger joint, or supervise mental healthcare professionals? If your answer was based on the length of training programs each industry requires of its managers, coffee shop and hamburger chain managers would rank before supervisors of therapeutic services.
Starbucks requires its store managers to complete nine months of on-the-job training, an apprenticeship, and classroom instruction plus be personally examined by senior staff. McDonald's requires a similar experience over eight months. Yet the typical behavioral healthcare manager is lucky if she has any opportunity to develop managerial knowledge and skills prior to taking on more complicated responsibilities.
Even after many years in a behavioral healthcare management position, stalwarts commonly have received nothing more than informal on-the-job training. If they are lucky, they may receive supervision and guidance from an experienced manager, but more often they are supervised by someone with similarly inadequate experience.
We can no longer accept this.
In Behavioral Healthcare's October 2006 issue, articles pointed out the inadequacies of management training in our field and the impending crisis that faces us if we do not aggressively address the problem. In one article, winners of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 note that many of our accomplished and experienced leaders are nearing retirement.1 They also note a decrease in the number of talented people of diverse backgrounds moving into behavioral healthcare management.
In the same issue, David J. Powell describes the addiction treatment field's perception of the leadership crisis.2 He cites a University of Georgia longitudinal study that found that 30% of addiction treatment program directors/CEOs were age 50 or older in 1995-1996, which increased to 54.8% by 2003-2004. This portends a frightening leadership gap. Powell notes that "we are at least ten years late in leadership program development."
One Agency's Response
The North SufFolkMental Health Association has decided to not sit still. In the spring of 2007, we implemented an in-house training program for middlelevel managers. North Suffolk is a mid-size community mental...