Leadership in Healthcare

"Hartley and Benington's Leadership for healthcare offers a fresh and compelling approach to understanding leadership as part of a wider frame of organisational issues. Their six-part leadership framework provides a useful means to draw down key lessons from the wider leadership literature into the healthcare setting."-John Storey, Professor of Management, The Open University Business School

"Never before has leadership been such an important lever for reform in health and healthcare. This important work provides a clear framework to understand healthcare leadership. It is also sensibly grounded in the complex adaptive system of delivering health and healthcare. This work is a refreshing departure from many other simplistic approaches which see leadership merely as a response to context rather than a complex dynamic process."-Dame Yve Buckland, Chair, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement.

Writing, advice and training on leadership is growing at a vigorous rate with various frameworks now competing for attention. Having a clear sense of which leadership ideas and practices are rooted in sound theory and convincing evidence, and which are more speculative, is vital for healthcare leaders.

This book provides a coherent set of six lenses through which to scrutinise the leadership literature relevant to healthcare - leadership concepts, characteristics, contexts, challenges, capabilities and consequences. It offers a view of leadership beyond the traditional focus on the individual, and argues instead that leadership has to be understood and developed as a complex set of practices by many people within specific organisational and inter-organisational contexts and cultures. This framework is particularly valuable in the highly dynamic and changing context of the public and voluntary sectors generally, and of the NHS and the field of healthcare specifically.

Leadership for healthcare will be useful not only to those who have a formal or informal leadership position in a healthcare organisation, but also to those in government, education, housing, leisure services, the police, fire services and the voluntary sector.

JEAN HARTLEY is Professor of Organisational Analysis at the Institute of Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business School, Warwich University. She undertakes research into public leadership and is also concerned with innovation and improvement in and between public service organisations.
JOHN BENINGTON is Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business School, Warwick University, where for over 20 years he has led Warwich Business School's research, development and teaching work in the fields of public policy and management.