Claudia S. P. Fernandez

Emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Adding emotional intelligence to your toolkit of success skills might be the most important thing you can do for your career. Emotional intelligence, or EQ, matters more than intellect alone, and it has practical value in the workplace. “Emotional intelligence is the skill of understanding and managing your emotions and also understanding the emotions of those around you,” says executive coach, consultant and speaker Irene Becker, who works with clients worldwide. “High emotional intelligence is reflected in self awareness, self management, motivation, empathy and social/communication skills.” In “Working with Emotional Intelligence,” author Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., CEO of Emotional Intelligence Services, calls EQ “a different way of being smart.”

Creating thought diversity: the antidote to group think.

The Management Moment is a regular column within the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. Edward L. Baker, MD, MPH, MSc, serves as the Management Moment Editor. Dr Baker is Director of the North Carolina Institute for Public Health, School of Public Health, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This column provides commentary and guidance on timely management issues commonly encountered in public health practice.

UNC certificate program in core public health concepts: lessons learned.

OBJECTIVES Public health workers need to be trained in the core public health sciences. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health created a Certificate in Core Public Health Concepts to meet the training needs of public health workers, primarily those working in state or local public health agencies. METHODS This article examines the demographic, educational, job classification, and workplace characteristics of certificate program applicants from the first 3 years of the program. In addition, this article assesses student performance and graduate satisfaction with the program. RESULTS Among the 273 applications reviewed, the majority were from females. They worked in a variety of job classifications: 19% were public health agency workers, 64% were public health system workers, and 17% worked in other occupations. Nearly all students received High Pass or Pass grades on courses. Initial data on graduate satisfaction with the program are positive. CONCLUSIONS Implications of the findings for training the public health workforce are discussed.

Developing Emotional Intelligence for Healthcare Leaders

Skills in emotional intelligence (EI) help healthcare leaders understand, engage and motivate their team. They are essential for dealing well with conflict and creating workable solutions to complex problems. EI skills are grounded in personal competence, upon which build the skills for social competence, including social awareness and relationship management. The leader’s EI skills strongly impact the culture of the organization. This article lists example strategies for building seventeen key emotional intelligence skills that are the foundations for personal and work success and provides examples of their appropriate use as well as their destructive under-use and over-use. Many examples are those incorporated into our healthcare-related leadership development institutes offered at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Managing the difficult conversation.

Managers are often faced with the dreaded “difficult conversation.” For some people, this event is so terrifying that they employ the ostrich strategy, avoiding the event altogether and living in denial of the serious problems their organizations face. Good managers practice the art of the difficult conversation. This requires patience, calmness, and objectivity—what author Ronald Heifetz might call “getting on the balcony.” But the artist of the difficult conversation understands that getting on the balcony is not enough—you need to get others there too. When people are caught in a contentious issue, they come to the table with their position staked out in the sand: “my team needs that office space!”, “our budget allocation must be. . . ,” “my line of authority includes. . . .” Whatever the issue: territory, power, symbols, money, resources, time—they come with a goal, and I want position. Lucky for managers, there are some simple tools to take the terror out of holding difficult conversations. The first tool is a classic: whole heart listening. You might have heard this described as active listening. This is when your total attention is devoted to hearing what the other person is saying, and not to enumerating the flaws in their argument or planning what you are going to say in response. Whole heart listening, without judgment, helps people feel heard. Another tool for facilitating difficult conversations is letting the person know what you heard them say. Rephrase their concerns using different words. Do not merely parrot the words they said: rephrasing helps you both gain clarity. Then, reflect the emotional content of what they are saying. Sometimes in order to feel heard, people need an acknowledgment of their frustration, anxiety, anger, or sense of injustice about the situation. So the kinds of statements you might

Reflections on the contributions of self-advocates to an interdisciplinary leadership development program for graduate students in health affairs

BACKGROUND To advance equity and to enhance leadership skills, self-advocates with intellectual/developmental disabilities are now part of the cohort of trainees in the University of North Carolina LEND, which means that they fully participate in the Interdisciplinary Leadership Development Program, a collaboration among programs in public health, social work, and LEND, which meets monthly. OBJECTIVE Given this important new participation by self-advocates, this study analyzes the reflections of graduate students on the contributions of self-advocates to their leadership training. METHODS At the conclusion of the program each year, graduate students respond to a questionnaire about how self-advocates influenced the content and interactions/discussions of the monthly workshops and are asked to provide specific examples to explain their perceptions. The 12 MCH leadership competencies were used to guide the coding of the comments for this qualitative, directed content analysis. RESULTS Forty-six of 58 students (79.3%) from two consecutive cohorts responded for this cross-sectional study. Interactions with self-advocates prompted comments on 8 of the 12 leadership competencies, including interdisciplinary team building (29% of the comments); developing others through teaching and mentoring (22%); and self-reflection (18%). CONCLUSIONS The inclusion of self-advocates throughout an interdisciplinary leadership development program for graduate students in health affairs can strengthen MCH leadership competencies for all participants as they enter an increasingly interdisciplinary workforce.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Leadership Development for the MCH Workforce

As the Guest Editors of this Special Issue focusing on the theme of MCH Leadership Development, it has been a privilege to review the many submitted manuscripts and ideas, and to interact with authors and researchers from across the nation who share a passion for both developing the next generation of leaders and ensuring that our current MCH leaders have opportunities to refine, hone, and promote their leadership skills. One insight that was confirmed for us in selecting papers for this special edition was the diversity of voices and perspectives around what MCH leadership means to the variety of stakeholders. This diversity of voices is heard throughout the collection of research articles and commentaries. We were not surprised by this response, since MCH is a broad field where many different disciplines share a central concern for women, children, youth, and families. These stakeholders sometimes see leadership differently, depending upon whether they view leadership from a clinical lens, a training lens, a policy lens, or a practice lens. As a result, our MCH leadership teachers focus on a variety of ‘‘hard and soft’’ skills that they develop in their students and colleagues. Yet this seeming diversity of voices and perspectives come together in a most striking way through this collection of work. Although viewing the manuscripts based on these lenses is interesting, the articles, as a whole, tell an MCH leadership story of their own. Valuable lessons in history (and the kind of effort and partnership required to give rise to a new specialty in MCH) are addressed by Baer et al. in their examination of the birth of the field of nutrition services for children with special health care needs, by Kogan et al. in their review of the evolution of MCH epidemiologists, and by Reynolds et al. in their overview of the evolution of parent leadership in MCH settings. This rich experience is likely familiar to many senior leaders in the field, who followed a similar journey to help their own disciplines mature in leadership and MCH. Both history and the challenges facing present day leaders in MCH-dedicated academic institutions, state agencies, and the federal government are addressed by the contributions by Petersen, Streeter, and Kavanagh, respectively. Together, these commentaries lay the groundwork for understanding much of the complexity of our fragmented and yet still intertwined MCH systems as a whole—from those working on the ground, to those preparing the future workforce. The article from Kavanagh et al. illustrates the systems view of the Federal commitment to supporting the development of MCH leaders in many fields, and details the outcomes of that investment. A set of articles give a broad sampling of evidence of the outcomes from these many investments, ranging from activities to recruit and train MCH professionals, to develop clinical leaders, and to hone the skills of leaders at senior levels of government administration. To this end, Guerrero et al. enlighten how a Laura Kavanagh —The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily those of the HRSA or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Strengthening negotiation skills, part II: moving beyond sheer knowledge with 4 additional key strategies to create influence for public health leaders.

N egotiation skills represent a core competency for leaders in many fields. All too often experienced as an unpleasant, competitive, or combative process, negotiation is found by many to be difficult. Negotiating is particularly challenging when the parties start to negotiate on “the how” (coming to terms) before they have arrived at the commitment to reach an agreement (“the yes”). Prior to the actual negotiating phase comes a phase of influence, which has 5 major sources of power: knowledge, attitude, authority, objectivity, and skills. Knowledge, as a source of power, consists of 2 major categories: one’s technical fund of knowledge, and insight data (understanding of the other person and one’s own assumptions). The acquisition of knowledge through dialogue is greatly facilitated by the use of open-ended questions, such as “Tell me about . . . ,” “Explain to me . . . ,” and “Describe to me . . . ,” referred to as T.E.D. questions. While knowledge is powerful, it would be a mistake to overrely upon its importance. Part I of this article explored several facets of knowledge as sources of power in negotiation; however, 4 other variables also play a large role in creating power in negotiating situations: attitude, authority, objectivity, and skills.