Collaborative Management Development: Sharing a Wealth of Ideas and Experience

A collaborative approach to the development of lower‐level management skills was devised and put into practice at a teaching hospital. Beginning as an open forum in which attendees questioned an instructor, it progressively evolved into a controlled “free‐for‐all” in which each attendee with something to contribute was able to “teach” the others. Dealing with one real‐life problem at a time, the collaborative management development group entered into a process that eventually provided practical, usable advice for the participant who posed the problem, and tested solutions that all attendees could carry away on paper. A useful by‐product of this activity, when extended over months and years and involving hundreds of supervisors′ questions and problems, was a meaningful distribution of the sources or causes of supervisors′ problems (employees, peers, superiors, etc.). The collaborative management development approach has enabled a group of working health care supervisors to tap into the best that each of them can bring to bear on any given problem.