The Role of Staff Managers in Service Transformation

Abstract

Staff managers are often under-appreciated actors of radical service transformation in the NHS. The current debate is dominated by the role of clinical professionals, which are expected to treat the involvement of staff managers as an intrusion and a threat. Against such expectations, this chapter shows how staff managers can gain a key strategic role and establish collaborations with clinical groups. This chapter reviews four cases of large-scale integrated care programmes with three types of staff managers involved (operations managers, quality managers and innovation managers). These cases revealed that staff managers exploited three opportunities to support integrated care: they appropriate the scut work necessary for service improvements in order to simplify and ease the contribution required from clinicians; they share the specialist knowledge of their organizational profession (e.g. operations management or human resource management) to expand the expert framework used by clinicians when they make their decisions; they tactically use their peripheral and technical status in the organization to mediate micro-conflicts between clinical groups. Staff managers can position themselves as both organizational professionals who support clinicians’ decision-making, and diplomats who mediate cross-professional relationships.