HealthManagement, Volume 11 - Issue 1, 2011

The recently-held Management in Radiology (MIR) Winter Course, providing intensive coaching in the latest business, economic and strategic management trends, was held successfully from Thursday January 20, until Saturday January 22. An interactive and informative settings, the programme is designed to build a practical skill set over a three-day period, in order that each delegate will leave with new insights and practical solutions they can implement immediately.

Inspiring Change

Two trainers from "Inspire Change" explored the following three key areas:

  1. How to communicate successfully and win at negotiations;
  2. How to make meetings work for you, and 
  3. Innovating in practice


1. How to Communicate Successfully and Win at Negotiations

As part of this session, delegates learned how to:
  • Use practical techniques to ensure lasting, successful negotiations at work;
  • Build constructive relationships with people, through a variety of different approaches;
  • Create and develop your individual action plans for successful communication and negotiation;
  • Use a highly rated assertiveness tool to ask confidently for behaviour changes, and
  • Understand what you need to do as an individual in order to successfully communicate at all levels, even when the going gets tough.

2. How to Make Meetings Work for You

The theory behind this session was as follows: We spend a lot of our working lives at meetings. Often these meetings seem to be a waste of our valuable time. We often sit there wondering why we came. Do meetings have to be like this? Too often, meetings that we attend suffer from one or more of the following faults:
  • No published agenda sent in advance of the meeting or no agenda at all;
  • The meeting always starts late, as people drift in well after the advertised start time
  • The chair is a forceful, tough individual, who keeps going until the group is worn down;
  • Some people never speak up at all;
  • Decisions that could quite easily be made today are put off until the next meeting;
  • The advertised finished time drifts by and there is no sign of the end in sight;
  • People make promises they don’t keep, e.g. ‘leave that to me, I’ll do that’;
  • Someone comes in late and asks to have the main points of the meeting replayed;
  • More time is spent on trivial items, and less time on important ones;
  • The same people come to all the meetings, even if it is not quite clear why they (or their department) need to be represented;
  • Conversely, people who really should be there are never invited, and
  • Great swathes of business are brought up under ‘Any Other Business’.

Thus, participants learned practical skills to address these recurrent management challenges.

3. Innovating In Practice
Resistance to change is one of many reactions that are normal, but difficult to deal with effectively. The aim of the Innovating in Practice session was to help those present to learn some practical, easy to use and highly effective tools for asking for a behaviour change and how to successfully make planned changes. The acceleration in the speed and complexity of change brings a new set of problems for both team members and leaders alike. Ranking high amongst these challenges is the urgent need to change workplace culture so that continuous change can be both effective and accepted. This challenge is particularly apparent in today’s NHS and across other healthcare structures in Europe. Finally, participants stated that they took home some valuable, practical lessons from these small, intensive group sessions.

To get involved in the activities of Management in Radiology (MIR), please visit
www.mir-online.org. All groups of radiologists interested in learning about management and administrative techniques can benefit from their initiatives from junior radiologists who wish to augment their knowledge to advance in their career and take a place of leadership, to existing leaders such as Chairmen, business managers and administrative staff, who wish to refresh their knowledge. An Annual Scientific Meeting will take place later in 2011 and be announced in this journal.

www.mir-online.org

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