The article cites data from job tracker Live Data Technologies, which monitors employment trends across industries such as professional services, technology, healthcare and finance. Its data shows that in 2023, middle managers accounted for 31.5% of all layoffs, with an average of 22% between 2018 and 2022.
While Mitul Modi, Korn Ferry senior client partner in the firm’s global healthcare services practice, said layoffs of managers have occurred at various health systems in 2024, he told Becker’s he is not seeing this occur with patient-facing roles. Instead, he has observed an increased emphasis on developing middle managers.
“When considering healthcare, healthcare innovation, digital health, healthcare transformation, and technological advancements — as roles are being eliminated, middle managers are instrumental to the success of these innovations,” Mr. Modi said.
“These technological advancements — they’re the link between strategy and execution a lot of the time. They’re the key drivers. They navigate the barriers to innovation, and that’s massively important when it comes to empowering staff and promoting organizational culture. You couple all of that with the scarcity of nurses and nurse leadership, and we’re seeing a lot of organizations talking to us about how to develop more of this middle management, not take it out.”
One example of this is San Francisco-based UCSF Health. Corey Jackson, senior vice president of human resources at UCSF Health and associate vice chancellor of human resources at UCSF, told Becker’s the health system views strong middle managers as vital to success.
“You have a lot of new people coming into healthcare, and you have to have strong managers and leaders. And a lot of the managers on the clinical side are also at the bedside,” Mr. Jackson said. “So that’s really important too, to have those people with that knowledge, that institutional knowledge, that clinical knowledge out there.”
UCSF Health’s efforts center around investing in a management core training program.
The health system, which is part of UCSF, includes roughly 1,500 people leaders — individuals with at least one direct report.
To support these leaders, Mr. Jackson said the program focuses on the fundamentals needed to successfully manage teams in a healthcare environment, preparing for what the health system calls “the leader of 2030.”
“It’s a combination of in-person, virtual and some self-applied courses as well,” Mr. Jackson said. “So people will go do some things on their own. We try to have a combination because we know we can’t take everyone out of the patient setting to come into a particular in-person class. We know that there are some people that are non-patient-facing, like in finance or IT or HR, that have access to the virtual tools that are out there too, in terms of Zoom and [other resources].”
Mr. Jackson said the program also incorporates interactions between leaders from different areas of the workforce. For example, nursing leadership is not always together, and finance leadership is not always together.
“Mixing people gets a bigger sharing of ideas, sharing of experiences, because people may not understand the pressures and situations that people are going through in other areas,” he said. “It’s about learning about the entire organization as well.”
Program participants initially receive an overview of UCSF as an organization and then go through training that focuses on equity, inclusion and belonging. Other topics include unconscious bias, restorative justice, psychological safety, emotional intelligence, constructive conversations, and giving and receiving feedback.
Additionally, Mr. Jackson said participants learn about navigating change management, coaching and developing conversations, navigating performance, performance management processes, supporting wellness and well-being, and “tools and how-tos in terms of our systems — how to navigate the various systems we have.”
The final piece of the program is called “developing performance,” covering topics such as budgeting, staffing, analytics and reporting.
“How to read their dashboards, what that means for you, and how to apply it in your particular setting. Even though it may not apply to you, understanding what this dashboard means,” Mr. Jackson said.
“Then the final area, too, around that is tools and frameworks for managing goals and projects. How do you drive performance? How do you make sure your teammates are being heard?”
He noted that other healthcare-related topics throughout the program are patient safety and quality metrics, patient experience, labor productivity and charge capture.
The program began in 2024, and UCSF Health aims for all 1,500 people leaders to go through the program by 2026; Mr. Jackson said he expects this investment in managers to improve patient experience as well.
To assess the impact of the program, “We want to say, ‘OK, here are the tools as you go through the program,'” Mr. Jackson said. “And we want to have the leaders within those areas say, ‘Are these people applying these things in the right way?’ Looking at the feedback, too, our engagement scores should go up from the investment in this as well.
“If we have people who are going through this program, they understand how the health system works and what we need to drive to, that we should see improvements in productivity across the organization.”
