Chapter 8. Skills of personal effectiveness
Chapter Contents
Management skills in health promotion107
Managing information108
Writing reports108
Using time effectively110
Managing project work111
Managing change114
Working for quality117
Summary
This chapter is about developing skills to effectively manage your health promotion work. A number of skills are covered including managing information; report writing; time management; project management; change management; and finally, working for quality. Case studies and practical exercises are included to illustrate and give the context in which health promotion skills are applied.
Working effectively in health promotion requires a clear view of your aims and plans and the necessary competencies to implement your goals.
Management Skills in Health Promotion
It is not easy to define what management is, but in general terms it is about adopting practices which ensure effectiveness and efficiency in your work. Effectiveness means producing effects and accomplishing your goals. Being efficient means producing results with little wasted effort. It’s the ability to carry out actions quickly. However, by being efficient you may not necessarily be achieving effectiveness, so it is important to establish the correct balance.
A comprehensive introduction to management is beyond the scope of this book, but for further details you may wish to consult Boddy (2005) for general management and Longest (2004) for health service management.
Some aspects of management have already been covered, such as setting priorities and planning. A number of other managerial skills you will need to be effective and efficient as a health promoter are outlined in this chapter. However, it is important to emphasise that possessing these skills will not automatically make you effective and efficient. Other factors also influence this, including:
• How well you integrate ethical principles into your basic everyday work; how you exercise your responsibility as a health promoter. ‘Response-ability’ is your ability to choose your response and is a product of your conscious choice, based on values, rather than a reaction to your circumstances.
For further reading on ethics and values in health promotion, see Chapter 3.
• The people you work with. Your effectiveness and efficiency are limited or enhanced by the competencies and motivation of those you work with, for example receptionists, secretaries, colleagues and others within and outside your organisation.
• Your organisation. Both the structure and culture of your organisation will influence what you are able to achieve.
• The wider world. The state of the economy, government legislation, the organisation of local government and the impact of social trends are just a few examples of factors in the world outside your organisation that influence how effective you can be.
This book is designed to increase your awareness of these wider influences on your work, as well as to develop your own competencies.
There are some key aspects of personal effectiveness which will help you to manage health promotion.
Managing Information
Whether you keep information on computer and/or a manual filing system it is easy to be swamped by documents and papers, so keep only what is essential and cannot be kept by someone else or in another existing system.
Think about who else collects information in your workplace and how they store it. Is there a central filing system? Does it work? Which information could and should you keep centrally? Undertake Exercise 8.1 to enable you to identify what information you need to store.
EXERCISE 8.1
What information do you need to store?
Make a list of all the types of information you collect at present and analyse it by asking yourself the following questions about each one.
1. Do I need to keep this information?
2. How easy is it for me to find the information when I need it?
3. Could someone else, or another information system, keep the information for me?
4. Who else might need access to this information? How easy would it be for them to find it?
5. How could this information best be stored?
Principles of Effective Information Systems
When reviewing or setting up your information system, it is useful to keep reminding yourself of three basic principles:
1. Keep it simple! Systems are only as effective as the people who put in and take out the information. The simpler the system the more likely it is that busy people will use it correctly.
2. Do not devise any more systems than are absolutely necessary.
3. Organise systems so that anyone who might want to use them can easily understand them.
Writing Reports
Important information is often conveyed through written reports. For example, you are likely to need to write a report on plans for health promotion, or an evaluation report on a specific project. You may need to write reports for your manager or formal reports for committees. Written reports are likely to be read when you are not there, so there is no immediate feedback about whether the key points have been understood. To reduce the danger of being misunderstood, good skills in preparing and writing reports are essential.
See Chapter 10, section on written communication skills.
Work through the following stages each time you prepare and write a report.
Stage 1:. Define the purpose
To help to clarify the purpose, complete the following sentence: ‘As a result of reading this report, the reader will …’ What?
The purpose could be to inform, to influence decision making, to initiate a course of action, or to persuade. Whatever it is, keep it clearly in mind throughout all the later stages.
Stage 2:. Define the readers
Identify the readers and consider them at all stages. Direct the report to the needs and interests of the readers. What do they already know about the subject? How much time do they have for reading? What kind of style is appropriate, for example, formal or informal?
Stage 3:. Prepare the structure
Decide on the structure of the report. A report normally contains the following sections:
• Title – this should accurately describe what the report is about.
• Origins – for example the author’s name, occupation, work base and date.
• Distribution list – it is a great help to readers if they know who else has seen the report. They may detect that someone vital has not received a copy.
• Contents list – a long report will need a contents list, showing the main sections of the report and the pages on which the reader can find them. This is not necessary for short reports.
• Summary – this is vital for all except the very shortest of reports (less than a page or two). It helps the reader if the summary is easy to find at the beginning of the report. Remember that busy people will often read only the summary (and perhaps the conclusions and recommendations), or at least read the summary first in order to decide whether it is worth spending time reading any more. So the summary needs to set out the essence of the report clearly and concisely. It is sometimes referred to as the executive summary.
• Introduction – this sets the context for the report, for example why the work was undertaken.
• The main body of the report – this will be the bulk of the report. You need to break up the content into sections and subsections, all with clear headings. Headings should be signposts to help the reader to see a route through the document and have an overview just by skimming through the headings. Sections need to be ordered in a way which will be logical for the reader. It may help to organise material into sections by writing all the possible headings and sub headings down, then move them around until you are satisfied that they are in the most logical order. You could use a numbering system for each section, heading and subheading, e.g. 1, 1.1, 1.1.1.
• Conclusions – summarises the conclusions which can be clearly drawn from the information in the report.
• Recommendations – these relate to the future, and summarise any changes needed.
• References – putting any references at the end makes the report easier to read.
• Appendices – a misused feature of some reports, to be avoided unless really necessary. Ask yourself ‘What information will most of my readers need the first time they read this report?’ If they need this information straight away, put it in the main body of the report.
Stage 4:. Write the report
Tackle the various sections in the order that makes it easiest. For example, it may be easiest to write the detailed body of the report first, then summarise the information, then discuss the information, then draw your conclusions, then set out your recommendations, then write the summary of the report and lastly finish it off with the title, contents list, origin, distribution list and other essential details.
Stage 5:. Review and revision
After the draft report has been produced, review it and revise as necessary. Make sure pages are numbered and check that sections and subsections are correctly numbered. It is a good idea to get a colleague to proofread the report, someone with good report writing skills who will give constructive comments.
Stage 6:. Final check
Always do a final check for writing and typing errors, spelling and other mistakes. It can be helpful to ask someone who has not seen the report before to check it for typing and layout errors. For further information on how to write a report consult the online How To website (http://www.howtobooks.co.uk).
Using Time Effectively
How well organised and effective are you at your work? The following paragraphs should give you some ideas about how to improve your effectiveness by looking at how you use your time. Time is an expensive resource, and the one that some may find the hardest to manage. First of all, you need to know where your time goes. Exercise 8.2 and the next section are about analysing and improving the use of your time and scheduling your work appropriately.
EXERCISE 8.2
Analysing and improving your use of time
1. Devise a recording format that suits you, based on the example below
Then photocopy or print out a supply of the sheets. Use as many sheets as necessary each day. Remember to include any work you do away from your organisation, for example at home.
If you discover that a particular activity, for example telephone interruptions, is causing you a problem, then make a detailed log of what happens each time. Do this immediately – do not leave it till the end of the day. Keep the diary for at least a week. If none of your weeks are typical you will need to keep the log for several weeks.
Using codes will save you time. For example, you could use M for meetings, I for interruptions, P for phone calls, IP for phone interruptions.
| Time diary | ||
| Day _________ | Date _________ | Page no._________ |
| Activity | Time spent | Comments |
| _____________ | _____________ | ________________ |
| _____________ | _____________ | ________________ |
| _____________ | _____________ | ________________ |
2. Now analyse how you used your time
Each week, analyse your use of time by answering the following questions:
▪ How did you actually use your time compared with how you planned to use it?
▪ How much of your time do you spend on different activities? Does this reflect the importance of the different activities? Important activities are those that help you to achieve your objectives.
▪ Which jobs did not get done? Does it matter? Did you finish all the important and urgent jobs?
▪ How much time do you lose through interruptions? What sort of interruptions?
▪ How much of your time is spent on other people’s work?
▪ Do you do the right job at the right time? Most people have a time of day when they work best. Do you use this time for your most important work?
3. Now plan how to improve your time management
Some of the changes you could make will be obvious. For example:
▪ You discover that jobs started early in the morning tend to get completed quickly. So you decide in future to do your most important work at this time.
▪ You discover that you spend about 8 hours each week handling interruptions. You decide to experiment with techniques to cut down this time.
▪ You discover that urgent jobs are generally done but important long-term projects tend to be neglected. You decide to make realistic plans to ensure that these jobs will be done.
▪ What else can you do?
Time Logs and Time Diaries
A time log involves keeping a record of how you spend your time at regular intervals, which may be as often as every 5 or 10 minutes. It is useful if you wish to know exactly how you are using your time on an activity that seems to be taking longer than you think it should, and can help you to pinpoint the source of the problem. But keeping a log is time-consuming itself, so is really worthwhile only if a particular activity is causing you problems.
If you want to know more about how you generally use your time you can keep a time diary. This records how you have spent your time day by day and should take only a few minutes to fill it in at the end of each day. If you have a short memory you might find it better to fill in your diary more frequently, say at the end of the morning and at the end of the afternoon, or at any other convenient break between blocks of work.
Scheduling Your Work
See Chapter 6, section on setting health promotion priorities.
Health promoters can find that they have to do far more than their time permits, and that they are faced daily with too many requests and demands. This means that, first and foremost, they must be very clear about their priorities. Second, they must be assertive about saying ‘no’ to requests to take on nonpriority tasks. Third, they need to develop skills of organising time and scheduling work to ensure that work which should get done actually does get done.
Scheduling work into the time available involves three steps:
1. Identify how long you need to spend on a job. This depends on:
– The nature of the activity; for example, whether it is possible to reduce the time allowance without endangering people or the outcomes.
– How important the job is. If it is unimportant it does not merit a large investment of your time. Ask yourself ‘What am I employed for? Will doing this job contribute to my main aims and objectives?’ If not, it is unimportant. If the job is important it merits a large investment.
2. Identify how soon you need to have the job completed. This depends on how urgent it is. Urgent jobs are ones that have imminent deadlines. If an urgent job can be completed quickly, deal with it right away. That means it will not interfere with you getting on with the most important jobs.
3. Plan when the work will be done. This involves the following steps:
– Break the job down into manageable parts. If the job is big or difficult, or parts of it are boring, try setting aside regular, small amounts of time to complete specific bits. Dividing it into manageable segments will help you to see that you are progressing.
– Estimate how long each part will take to complete. It can be difficult to estimate how long it will take you to complete a particular task, but an informed guess will at least help you to be more realistic in future. Here are some suggestions that may help:
• use your experience from similar jobs
• consult colleagues who have experience in doing the job
• build in some contingency time
• keep a note of how long the task actually takes, so that you can make a better estimate next time.
– Schedule in your diary or organiser when the work will be done. You may find that you need to reschedule daily, to take account of changing priorities. The important thing is to ensure that the key tasks you need to undertake are scheduled to allow enough time for their completion. For more tools and tips on effective time management see Evans (2008).
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