Manage Your Risk

Managing your risks is often said to be a leader's most important job. The notion behind it is quite simple: you can't be a good manager if you don't know where the risks lie. As the leader, you need to determine how big of risks you are willing to take on for your organization.

Be sure to establish a clear strategy for managing risks by assessing the problem, learning what's been done to prevent it, evaluating your internal competencies to identify your biggest risks, setting some goals for mitigating risks and then overseeing your management of them.

Let me spell out how this applies to health care specifically:

Identify and understand the potential risks you may be facing and establish a strategy for managing those risks. For example, in the United States, healthcare accounts for about 30 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. You know that you have a lot of work to do to manage the risks and that if you aren't managing them, then the financial health of the organization is at risk. Start by setting some goals and determine where you can go for improvement. Remember: managing risks is an important job for leaders. If you don't know where you stand and what risks you are facing, then you can't manage them.

Also, establish some goals for managing your risks. Some might be related to quality, others might be related to avoiding adverse financial results.

Manage the risk in your organization

While managing your risks may be a major part of your management strategy, you are not going to be able to prevent all risks from occurring. The simple truth is that you will manage the risks in your organization, and if you don't manage your risks then there is risk management failure and you will need to go back to managing risks from the beginning.

Regardless of your management strategy, you should consider what you will do to mitigate risks in your organization. If you are managing a lot of risk, you need to be very careful to set limits on what risk you can take and what the financial consequences of that risk will be.

There may be times when management of risk is challenging, because managing risks and managing risks of the same issue are different. You should learn how to manage risk and manage the risks in your organization, but you should never get so tied to managing a risk that you ignore the risk of managing the other. If you are managing risk but you neglect managing the risk of managing it too, you are setting yourself up for failure, then that is a clear indication that you need to reassess what you are doing.

You need to have a way to manage your risks. If your risks are adequately managed, then there will be financial stability in your organization. Without it, there is an important risk management failure in your organization.

How does risk management work?

If you want to take on the challenge of managing risks in your organization, I would recommend taking a course in risk management to educate yourself about the different issues surrounding risk management. Taking some time to learn about risk management is not going to be as daunting as you think. After all, risk management is a management job, and there are management courses available all over the United States. The key is to learn about risk, take the course, practice, and then apply what you have learned to your organization. The process will be more productive, and it will be easier to evaluate your management and to manage your risks effectively.

Conclusion

There is more to leadership than managing assets. I hope the above gave you a clearer perspective of what leadership really entails and provided you with more insights to manage your own risk and ensure your organization's long-term success.

Growing organizations and managing risk are closely related in many ways, but in the end, all leaders want their organizations to be successful. By understanding the risks and managing them, leaders can help grow their organizations and secure a stronger and brighter future for all stakeholders.