Skills Management

6Hospitals: Facing New Shared Leadership Skills

As a place that is often a point of confluence for the various and contradictory expectations of our contemporary society, hospitals are undergoing profound structural changes that heavily influence the actual and expected skills of the professionals who work there. Because of our multicultural society, emerging multi-professionalism, and also professionals’ new attitudes towards their work and its place alongside their private life and personal and/or family plans, etc., the restructuring of hospitals occurs in an increasingly hybrid frame of regulation, wherein the needs of public service are sometimes at odds with the demands of economic performance. As they experience the evolution of regulations, situations and the content of their work, hospital human resources workers have various mindsets of management: a role-driven mindset, a skill-driven mindset, even a leadership-driven mindset for certain establishments.

As a space that is home to unsettling and pivotal moments in people’s lives, the hospital is called upon to meet these various expectations, to develop different cooperative configurations and to gather various’ parties interests and the means for dealing with these in certain given areas, whereas historically and culturally hospitals could be characterized instead as hospital-centric. More than a mere “vocation” to work in a hospital, hospital managers must now display their desire for shared leadership to support ...