Becker's Hospital Review

Leader Development Is Often Underfunded. Your Organization Is Paying for It Anyway. M ost healthcare leaders genuinely want to invest in their people. ey say they value leader development, and they mean it. We all know what happens next: Budgets tighten, priorities shi, and development is the first line item to get cut. It gets pushed to "next year," when we think there will be more breathing room. (I don't have to tell you that the breathing room rarely arrives!) e point is that leader development feels like a safe place to pull back because the cost of skipping it doesn't show up right away. e trouble is that skipping it doesn't really save money. It just moves the cost somewhere else. And when the bill comes due, it's high. Here are some of the ways organizations pay when leader development is underfunded: Your best people leave first. High performers have options, and they use them. Research consistently shows that career development oen outranks salary as a retention driver. Many employees say they'd choose growth opportunities over a raise or even a promotion. Promotion without preparation sets people up to fail. e best clinician becomes the manager with little to no training in how to actually lead people. It's unfair to the individual and damaging to the team they're now responsible for. Bad leadership clones itself. Without training, leaders manage the way they were managed; good habits and bad ones are passed down across generations of staff. Patient safety suffers… Untrained leaders erode psychological safety. When that happens, staff stop speaking up about errors, unsafe conditions, and near misses. Communication breaks down between departments, shis, and disciplines. Conflict gets avoided until it's no longer small. …And so does patient experience. Engagement and patient satisfaction are tightly linked, and engagement is driven less by perks or policy than by the immediate leader. In the absence of development, leaders produce inconsistent cultures (warm and organized one shi, chaotic the next), and patients feel that difference. Burnout accelerates, oen invisibly. Leaders don't recognize it, don't know how to address it, and sometimes cause it without realizing it, in their teams and in themselves. Middle management buckles. ese leaders absorb pressure from every direction with none of the tools to manage it. And when one of them exits, you're le promoting someone unprepared or hiring an outsider who doesn't know your culture. Change initiatives stall. Every new system, process, or strategy depends on leaders who can bring people through uncertainty. Untrained leaders generate resistance instead of buy-in. e bottom line? Organizations that don't prioritize leader training are setting themselves up for a wealth of expensive problems down the road. And the other point I'd emphasize is this: How leaders are trained really matters. In the past, training has oen been generic, event-based, and disconnected from real work. e problem is that a single workshop doesn't change behavior. A one-size-fits- all curriculum doesn't account for the fact that a new manager fresh off the floor and a ten-year department head have completely different gaps to close. Today, healthcare is finally borrowing a page from precision medicine and treating leadership development the way we now treat patient care: individualized, not generic. At Healthcare Plus Solutions Group®, we call it Precision Leader Development™ (PLD). An organization that embraces a precision approach starts with data, not assumptions. A gap analysis comparing a leader's self- assessment to their direct supervisor's assessment shows exactly where that leader needs to grow. From there, it's tailored to the person, their skills, role demands, schedule, and learning style, so they're trained in what they actually need for the job they have right now. Development is continuous rather than a single event, with built-in coaching and follow-up that keep learning alive long aer the workshop ends. (Repetition and application over time are what make it stick.) And critically, development is owned by the direct supervisor. When a leader's growth is driven by their immediate manager, it signals investment and strengthens the relationship that research shows matters most to whether someone stays or goes. In short, it's time we viewed leadership training as important as clinical training and applied the same rigor. Clinical training saves individual patients. Leadership development saves entire teams, cultures, and organizations, which affects thousands of patients over time. e high cost of skipping development and the low return on generic training share the same root problem: treating leadership growth as an aerthought instead of a discipline. Precision development changes that. You were always going to pay for leadership, one way or another. e only choice is whether you pay for it up front, in development that works…or later, in everything it costs you not to. n Dan Collard is the cofounder (with Quint Studer) of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group® (HPSG). He recently coauthored with Dr. Katherine A. Meese the book Genfluence: How to Lead a Multigenerational Workforce (ACHE Learn). He is also the coauthor (with Quint Studer) of Rewiring Excellence: Hardwired to Rewired and Rewiring Leadership in Post-Acute Healthcare: Equipping Leaders to Succeed. For more information, please visit HealthcarePlusSG.com. Dan Collard Co-Founder, Healthcare Plus Solutions Group® (HPSG)

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