Reading List: Steven Dinkin, 'The Exchange Strategy for Managing Conflict in Health Care'
In “The Exchange Strategy for Managing Conflict in Health Care: How to Defuse Emotions and Create Solutions When the Stakes Are High” ($22, McGraw-Hill), authors Steven Dinkin, Barbara Filner and Lisa Maxwell share how healthcare professionals can foster a healthy workplace. Dinkin talked to Healthcare Finance News about the book.
Q: Please give us a brief description of your book, and share with us what you think is its most important take away for readers.
[Also: Reading List: Stanley Chao, 'Selling to China']
A: This book is written for healthcare professionals of all levels who are concerned with the negative impact dysfunctional workplace relationships have on patient safety and satisfaction, operational quality and reimbursement. Research confirms that organizational excellence comes from a workplace environment that fosters quality personal relationships between employees. The Exchange Strategy for Managing Conflict in Healthcare discusses the sources and nature of workplace conflict, teaches specific interaction skills and a pragmatic four-stage process for using them, and uses relevant narrative to show how respectful and trustworthy exchanges of understanding between people reduce conflict, increase communication and lead to better collaboration and teamwork.
Most important take away: That the skills and process offered in this book have proven effectiveness; you can learn and use in your workplace pragmatic skills that will significantly improve your own workplace interactions and relationships, that can be used to resolve conflict between others, that will make you a role model for appropriate workplace behavior and that will have a rippling positive effect on the organization.
Q: How did The Exchange Strategy develop?
A: ... In formal settings conflict resolution and mediation can require many hours or even days, and the involvement of highly trained and experienced neutral third party facilitators. Consequently, in the past, workplaces have been reluctant to allocate the time and resources necessary to address anything but the most egregious complaints or grievances.
However, the growing body of research showing the negative impact on workplace and organizational performance caused by unaddressed or poorly addressed interpersonal issues, as well as the lower cost of addressing issues early, has created demand for conflict resolution strategies suitable for use by managers and supervisors in workplace settings. In response, the National Conflict Resolution Center created a streamlined version of its proven methodology, combining a small set of very specific interaction skills and an efficient step-by-step four-stage process, called "The Exchange." The Exchange skills and process are taught in an eight-hour course to people of all levels of experience, and can be applied in the workplace with as few as three, structured 15 to 20 minute meetings.
Q: What makes this process unique to the healthcare sector?
A: It is a pragmatic, carefully structured conversation between disputants that is also non-punitive and informal, facilitated by their manager or supervisor, that truly "exchanges" information, understanding, expectations, and ideas between the disputants, and which results in participant-created solutions based on shared interests.
Q: What are the results for an organization if conflict isn't dealt with effectively?
A: Overall, a decline in patient care and satisfaction, low operational quality, increased management activities in response to conflict (managers spend more than 25 percent of their time working on reducing conflict), poor decision making and mistakes due to poor communication, passive aggressive and other disruptive behaviors, less efficient workload (workload is restructured to accommodate employees in conflict). Absenteeism due to stress-related illness and the desire to avoid the conflict, employee replacement costs including termination costs, recruitment and effective on-boarding time (the national average of voluntary resignations due to unresolved conflict is 65 percent). Lower employee engagement and commitment to their job and reduced morale. Litigation, dealing with grievances and even violence.
