Week 4: Solving Problems/Improving Leadership

As I conclude my fourth week as a participant in CVS Health|Aetna’s General Management Corporate Internship Program (GMCIP), I feel adequately prepared to parse my team’s leadership problems and potential solutions to improve the situation. While I have thoroughly enjoyed my time working with Aetna Better Health of Kentucky (ABHKY), I believe there are always ways leadership can and should be improved and want to use my Jepson academic background to delineate some examples. One place I have noticed a lack of congruence among my organization is within operational ineffectiveness with communication cross-divisions. The healthcare system in the United States is notoriously complex and the Medicaid system is no different. Working on the payer side of Medicaid (i.e. for Aetna, a managed care organization) requires collaboration among various departments in order to ensure high quality care is being provided to members. Because the work done in each department is quite specific and not generalized, it is important for departments to be constantly communicating with each other so as to inform one another of critical issues and updates. In ABHKY, one thing I was surprised about early on with my participation is the lack of communication across departments on a wide scale. While I have heard about the effectiveness of holding town hall meetings, where various groups on a team can come together to discuss updates, ABHKY does not currently have one that occurs regularly. ABHKY currently does an effective job at meeting on a smaller-scale and integrating various departments into certain projects; however, it lacks the large-scale integration. I believe having team members, from interns to executives, of the plan meet bi-weekly or even monthly would be incredibly beneficial to the organization’s effectiveness. As I have learned through my Jepson education, collaboration and communication is integral to a team’s success. 

One additional point I want to touch on in this blog post is how my position as a leadership studies major grants me perspective to identify issues and share strategies of leadership with my supervisor. An important aspect of leadership I believe my manager could better understand and utilize is the idea of social identity theory and how she and her team fall within it. The social identity theory of leadership is the idea that a group member relates to their group and their leader based on a shared social identity (may it be an identity that is physical, professional, emotional, mental, academic, etc). According to this theory, a good leader should take time to form a strong social identity and then foster connections with group members based on their shared relation to the identity. While I believe there exists a high level of respect within my team, I think my manager could improve her leadership skills by identifying this social identity and using it to motivate and encourage team members in a more effective way. I cannot readily recognize a social identity in my team and believe this is something that could be improved upon! One suggestion I have for choosing a social identity is investigating the reasons why all of the people on my team got involved in healthcare in the first place. I believe this is a strong place to start and would help my manager better understand and relate to her team.