Supes missing?

by Jana Rimando

Have you ever noticed the department heads missing from their units two days at a time since June 2006? Well, fear not. They are not missing in action or taking vacation leaves or whatever it is that you may be thinking. Actually, they are working their butts off to improve themselves and ultimately, to improve CLDH. At least, that’s the objective. So, what have they been up to? Well, they have been undergoing the Leadership and Management Training Program or what is more commonly known as the LMTP.

The LMTP was initiated because the Quality Assurance – Improving Performance (QA-IP) subcommittee requested from our HR Training Officer, Ms. Aurora Felipe, a program of mentoring and coaching skills for the NSO. Ms. Felipe did a training needs analysis and her study showed that the employees were not yet ready for such an advanced program. Instead, they needed a basic skills and personal development program. And so, a program was designed and proposed to the QA Committee. The QA, together with top management and some department heads discussed the proposal and suggested that the program cover all middle managers of the hospital. And so, the LMTP came into existence.

It is a six-month program that started in June 2006 and ended in November 2006. The participants attended a two-day workshop per month. The first workshop, “The Person of the Manager,” dealt with developing self-awareness and overcoming personal barriers to leadership and management. The second workshop, “Managing with Confidence,” tackled management styles and assertion strategies. Workshop 3 enhanced communication skills in all aspects -- written and oral -- which caused panic attacks for some of the participants. The fourth workshop was on understanding and managing conflict. The fifth, facilitated by Ms. Leah Vidal who has a Ph.D. in Anthropology, helped the participants in identifying and understanding the culture of CLDH as an organization. And the last one brought closure to all the knowledge gained in the past five months with a personal assessment of what has been learned and gained.

Consequently, with the forthcoming developments of the CLDH, it is very apt to train its heads to become more assertive to be able to instill a professional following among the departments in preparation for this growth .

LMTP does not guarantee change; it introduces change. For as long as the knowledge and skills remain inside each individual participant, suppressed and unused, no change will take place. As unit heads, these individual participants have a responsibility to the company to change for the better . A better leader is followed by a better following. A better following is followed by a better foundation. A better foundation is followed by a better CLDH.

Quoting Carl Jung, “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”

Welcome!

Pintig is the Filipino word for heartbeat. It is also the official publication of the employees of CLDH. It has a print version as well as an online version: Pintig Online! That it appears on a blog site is something that I have to interpret yet. In the meantime...

The usual purpose for having a company publication is to spread information across all sectors and all levels in the organization. A noble undertaking, of course. But most employee publications die a natural death because they’re simply not fun to read. They’re boring and straitlaced. No such thing with Pintig.

The editorial staff has only one thing in mind in undertaking this project: fun. Our motto: Life’s too short; eat dessert first!

Pintig Online! is our version of dessert. The kind you get only at CLDH.

You can look at life in CLDH like it were some kind of buffet; you have appetizers, salads, soups, main courses. And dessert! I think you’ll agree with me when I say that there is just too little of dessert that comes our way in life -- anywhere. Which is a shame, really. Personally, I’d rather have an entire room filled with dessert! All kinds! Maybe with a little sprinkling of pizza on the side. And some sushi. But I digress.

The staff of Pintig envisions the stuff of Pintig to be a lot of fun while it informs. It aims to show the humorous along with the serious, even the humorous in the serious. It seeks to make meaning out of the commotion, confloption, distraction, and hodgepodge of information out there. Because you’d be surprised at the amount of information that surrounds you as a member of an organization, and CLDH is not a simple, nor is it a small, organization.

We at Pintig, online and offline, believe that information is key to a stronger workforce. We hope that with this publication, this workforce will not only grow in mutual respect and understanding but, as well, in learning how to laugh at the absurdities that life throws our way. In short, how to pick the sweet from the not-so-sweet.

The online version will have mostly the same articles that will appear in the print, with some web-exclusive items now and again. The cool thing with this version is that it allows comments. See those links down there at the bottom of the post (this article) that says, "Comments? " All you have to do is click on that and post your comments! Comments are, however, regulated. This means all comments pass through me first.

Can you contribute articles? Sure. All you have to do is email me. See the narrow column at the left hand side of this page? Just click on "Pester the Editor" to open your email client. (Scroll up if you can't see the link.) Or, to make things easier for the web-challenged, send your articles to elai.cruz at yahoo.com.ph.

Can you send other things to the editor aside from comments? Sure. It is, after all, a free country.

Enjoy!