Interpersonal skills refer to those important skills engaged in relating to and dealing with other individuals, mostly on one-on –one basis. Interpersonal skills are turning to be more necessary and important in the medical profession. Other than just medical facts and skills, healthcare professionals are also required to have people skills to enhance effective medical practice, According to Barakat (2007) Healthcare workers are required to develop interpersonal skills in teaching, communication, management, time management and leadership. This paper focuses on analyzing the required interpersonal skills and their importance in healthcare leadership and measures that healthcare leaders can employ to enhance their interpersonal skills.
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Why is it important for health care leaders to have and exhibit good interpersonal or people and communication skills?
Healthcare operations involve a lot of human operation at working level among different healthcare specialists and at public level between healthcare professional and workers. Healthcare leaders are thus required to have strong interpersonal skills to maintain good operational standards. Good interpersonal skills enhance the relation between healthcare leaders and healthcare workers which create a good environment to discuss problems facing the organization and what should be done to enhance proper care (Barakat, 2007).
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Effective interpersonal skills enhance open communication which creates friendly environment for staff and patients. This also helps in reducing litigation between leaders and workers and between patients and the organization. Good people skills also increases staff productivity, enhance effective management of time, patient care improvement, high trainees and employees training quality and development of good hospital or institution reputation (Barakat, 2007). Thus, healthcare leaders need to develop these skills to enjoy the above stated benefits.
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3 Interpersonal or People Skills that are Required of Health Care Leaders
One of the most important kind of skills required in leadership include emotional, affective, international skills which permit working with other individual. Interpersonal skill is comprised of three groups of skills which include delegating and helping, relationship skills and leadership skills. Leadership skills refer to the aptitude to motivate and inspire others to promote joint project, to negotiate and to sell them ideas (Slipicevic & Masic, 2012). Relationship skills refer to aptitude to be self-conscious, to do accurate self-assessment, understand others, enhance collaboration, facilitate communication, and working with teams. Delegating and helping on the other hand refers to aptitude to promote and establish relations, and assisting others to get chances to grow. This also involved the ability to teach others and to lead groups (Slipicevic & Masic, 2012).
How can leaders improve their interpersonal skills?
There are various ways that leaders can employ to enhance the development of interpersonal skills. One of these measures includes developing emotional intelligence which involves developing ability to use and recognize emotions to communicate better with others. This can be done by improving self-awareness, practicing self-regulation and refining individual social skills and empathy. This will help an individual to discover their emotional ability and hence to develop mechanism to control their emotions while dealing with other people, especially their followers (Eunson, 2015).
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A leader can also enhance individual people skills by working on his or her interpersonal communication which enhances human interaction and experience. One also needs to develop assertiveness a skill that assists an individual to achieve personal goals and assist in developing personal power. One also needs to develop self-talk ability which involves self-criticism, social assessment, self-reinforcement, and self-management. Leaders also need to consider reading more books reading more books on how to develop interpersonal skills and try applying the gathered knowledge in their daily operations (Eunson, 2015).
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