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Mission-Based Management
What is Mission-Based Management?
Mission-based management is a process for organizational decision-making
that is mission-driven, ensures internal accountability, distributes
resources in alignment with organization-wide goals, and is based
on timely, open, and accurate information. It recognizes the need
for medical schools, in this era of constrained resources, to improve
their management processes and ensure the quality of the education,
research, and clinical care they provide.
The essential elements of MBM include measuring and reporting systems
for each mission of the academic medical enterprise. However, MBM
should not be equated to these new accounting and measuring systems.
Fundamentally, MBM is a management approach based on a philosophy
of "open books" and peer accountability. It enhances the ability
of school leaders to reward mission-critical contributors and fund
strategic priorities.
Six features are core to MBM design and its successful implementation
in medical schools:
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Integrating school financial statements.
Understanding the various costs and revenues associated with each
mission helps schools make strategic decisions and allocate resources
effectively.
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Measuring faculty and departmental activities and contributions
to mission.
Compiling and tracking information about faculty and departmental
activities and contributions clarifies school standards for accountability
and expectations on overall performance.
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Building organizational support for reporting tools and
metrics.
Using institutional design teams as the vehicle, faculty and school
leadership must build a consensus on the specific metrics that
will be used to measure faculty and departmental contributions
within each mission.
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Guiding the dynamics of leadership.
Supported by dependable data, school leaders are encouraged
to engage in communication and honest and open dialogue with their
faculty colleagues. This dialogue is particularly critical for
the inevitably sensitive discussions about faculty productivity
and its relationship to the financial health of and scope of opportunities
open to the school.
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Holding faculty and department and institutional leaders
accountable.
Schools need an effective procedure for establishing their priorities
and for holding faculty and department chairs accountable for
meeting or exceeding expectations. The specifics as to how decisions
are made, and accountability ensured, can take many forms, consistent
with the leadership style and philosophy of the dean.
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Building trust and institutional perspective.
Mission-based management affords the opportunity to share data
and other information across departments and with faculty members.
Open exploration of the facts establishes trust and encourages
a broader vision of the enterprise as a whole. It also furnishes
the school's leaders with a rational, informed basis for aligning
resources quickly and more accurately-in response to the actual
results produced by faculty efforts.
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