EMS Leadership Academy Teaches Management Skills
How do you enhance business management skills in an EMS agency? Many EMS field management staff are “homegrown,” having come up through the ranks first as paramedics, then as supervisors and lastly into management roles. Because of this, there may be different leadership skills between administrative and operational staff at the same agency.
The Richmond Ambulance Authority (RAA) has developed a leadership academy to help supervisory and management staff learn about their agency, the community they serve and their own leadership styles. This helps bring managers from all areas of the agency together and develop their leadership and management skills.
The RAA leadership academy is a yearlong program consisting of two-hour monthly sessions, with outside projects assigned during the year and ending in a graduation ceremony. The monthly sessions include presentations by each department chief: CEO Expectations; Operations 101; Overview of Finance and Reimbursement; Managing Staff by Human Resources; and Clinical Overview by the Medical Director. Participants are supervisors and management-level personnel in all departments of the agency.
Other academy sessions take place off-site, such as Myers-Briggs self-assessments to determine the personality types of these emerging leaders and their coworkers. In other sessions, the group takes a guided tour of the city and volunteers at a local food bank to learn about the community they serve.
A favorite session of the academy is “Breakfast with the Chairman.” The group meets at a restaurant for breakfast with the board chair to learn about the chair’s leadership philosophy. This is often the first time participants have had a chance to get to know a member of the board face-to-face. It has the added benefit of allowing the board chair to get to know the management staff.
Throughout the year, academy participants are given resources and assignments to develop their own leadership styles. At the first session, the group is divided into teams, with each team assigned a specific leadership book to read. The teams work together to write a book review to be submitted for publishing in EMS trade journals. In addition, participants are required to update their resumes and write short biographies. These are kept on a shared drive and can be a resource for succession planning for the agency.
The academy year ends with participants initiating, researching and presenting ideas on improving one thing about the agency. They present projects at the final session, followed by a graduation ceremony. Many of these projects have ended up providing valuable insights and ideas, such as wellness initiatives, flowcharting the patient care reporting process and computing costs of long-distance transports.
The Richmond Ambulance Authority’s first leadership academy was in 2009. With management turnover and new hires, RAA repeated the academy in 2015 and again in 2017, with the addition of a mentor program where members from the previous classes serve as mentors to members of the next class. Mentors are matched with mentees from different departments to give a different perspective from the employee’s chain of command. At the beginning of the RAA leadership academy, the mentor/mentee team is given “lunch money” to go offsite and share a meal to get to know each other. Mentors offer support and are a resource for project assignments through the year. They attend the project presentations, graduation and, hopefully, continue the relationship past the leadership academy year.
After graduation, all leadership academy classes continue to meet quarterly to discuss agency issues, participate in trainings or work on projects.
Using simple ice-breaking and team-building techniques to start off every monthly session, mixing up teams for the projects and tablemates at monthly meetings, sharing meals and holding some of the sessions off-site—all of these result in natural interactions and conversations among field and office staff who may not interact on a daily basis.
The premise of the academy was to teach management-level skills to enhance and develop professional leaders; however, RAA found that the unexpected benefit obtained from the leadership academy classes is the interaction and better understanding between the field and administrative employees.
Lee Ann Pond is the chief administrative officer of the Richmond Ambulance Authority and responsible for the Authority’s finance, reimbursement and human resources. She has a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s in business administration, both from the University of Toledo. Lee Ann has experience in finance and administration in both private and public organizations, with her last position as the chief financial officer and director of administration for an Ohio social service agency.
