Skills Required to Head Physician for the Management of Staff. Emotions in the Organizational Context

Corresponding Author: Lucio Mango, Director "Health management" University Master, University of International Studies (UNINT) – Rome, Italy, Chief Nuclear Medicine Unit, “S. Camillo-Forlanini” General Hospital – Rome, Italy, Email: lucio.mango@unint.eu


Introduction
This short paper aims to identify the key skills required for personnel management that makes possible a peaceful business climate and a level of excellence in rendered services. All issues related to the personnel management of the type "hard skills" have been deliberately omitted, i.e. of all the technical and management skills, which a head physician should have done his own in a profound way [1][2]. So we can focus on the "soft skills", i.e. on all those relational and communicative behavioral skills that are the true "toolbox" of excellent personnel management. For management excellence we mean all those operational and managerial "systems" pursuing a double goal: total quality and continuous improvement. Given that complexity, personnel management become, if not the main strategic element, an important strategic element to achieve excellence.
The main problem to be faced, for a head physician, is how to coordinate highly skilled personnel, with a common decision-making power.

Emotionality
For long time emotionality was considered a "phenomenon" to be countered, especially in an organizational/business environment. Rationality was thought of as the main and noblest faculty of the human being, while emotionality was linked to ancient and primitive biological heritage.
Subsequently, this "radical" position was abandoned, up to the concept of emotional intelligence [3]  Connection.
The psychological presence involves the connection to work and to people, to aspects of their situation, the execution process of the task and feel the experience of "flow", in which people do not experience themselves as separate from their activity, but they live a mutuality of connections and the sense of giving and receiving in relating to other people Integration.
That is, keeping the physical, intellectual and emotional sphere together in an integrated and balanced Perfectionism This is an exaggerated attention to detail until you lose sight of the problem. Perfectionism develops an anxiety that is: the obsessive need for domination and control that produces high levels of concern, especially in the presence of instability and organizational changes. [is] a new type program in a new field of medicine, behavioral medicine…[that] discusses the effect that psychological and emotional factors, the ways in which we think and behave, have on our health and on our ability to recover from trauma and disease… The course for stress reduction is essentially an intensive self-training to the art of living consciously…a systematic training in the practice of awareness… awareness is cultivated by learning to pay attention deliberately gentle, non-judgmental about things that normally ignore or decide not to know. It is a systematic approach to the cultivation of a new wisdom and mastery of our lives, based on our inherent ability to relax and internal observation" [13].
Currently there are several "Mindfulness strands" the best known of which is what led to the development of the MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression) protocol, which is a scientifically highly accredited method to prevent the relapses of major depression [14].
One of the benefits of Mindfulness is the ability to experience negative emotions without being "overwhelmed". Practicing Mindfulness makes possible the distinction between the experience of the present and the sense of the narrative self. This allows the person to focus on the experience that lives at the time, rather than on negative thoughts related to past experiences or worries about the future [15].
The Mindfulness practitioner is more disposed to have a stable emotionality, which tends more easily to positivity, regardless of the external situation, without entering the spiral made by: negative emotion, enhanced and negative perception of the real situation, stronger negative emotion and new perception of the even more negative reality, and so on. Even more important is the fact that the described changes are also related to a more efficient immune function [16].
Mindfulness allows experiencing negative events with less reactivity. A 1976 study by Goleman and Schwarz [17] hypothesized that meditators exhibit less physiological responsiveness to unpleasant stimuli than a control group.
In conclusion, the addressed issue is a "set of skills" that a head physician must possess, but which are usually not considered in manuals. Those deal with personnel management in the health field. With these themes a reformulation of the concept of institutional leader is obtained, which is extremely dynamic and takes on an extremely less central role, at least in the context of personnel management. The head physician has become a sort of "manager" of a widespread leadership that transfers to the various organizational actors on the basis of "operational contingencies". In fact, in a context of a "health market" technologically in constant evolution and with extremely problematic management profiles due to the greater "demand of health " of users (population aging, increase in information, its diffusion and the average culture,…) with stagnant or even decreasing financial resources, a rigid and static leadership is likely to be the problem, than the solution to the problems caused by the social and political dynamics in place.