HLTH 4000 Week 2 Manager Workday Role Analysis Example

Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling Between 7:15 and 5:45: The Four Classical Functions Measured Against One Tuesday as a Patient Access Supervisor

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 4000: Introduction to Healthcare Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling Between 7:15 and 5:45: The Four Classical Functions Measured Against One Tuesday as a Patient Access Supervisor

Purpose and Method

Our management text, like most, sorts a manager's work into four classic jobs, which it calls planning, organizing, leading and controlling (Buchbinder et al., 2021). The list is useful, but it can suggest that a manager spends a morning planning and an afternoon controlling. This paper tests that picture against one ordinary working day in my job as supervisor of a nine-person patient access team at a multispecialty clinic. I kept a log of every activity on a Tuesday, from 7:15 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., noting the time each started and ended, then assigned each activity to the function it mainly served. Activities that served none of the four, or more than one, were noted as such. The day was ordinary: no staff member called out, no system failed for long and the clinic was busy but not overwhelmed.

The Day in Numbers

I logged 64 separate activities in 10.5 hours. The longest lasted 35 minutes, a meeting with the practice manager about next month's schedule. The median activity lasted about four minutes. Thirty-one activities began because someone interrupted me, in person, by phone or by message; 21 were things I chose to start; and 12 were scheduled. Table 1 shows how the time divided among the four functions and the activities that fit none of them.

Table 1

Time Spent by Function on One Working Day

Note. Minutes are rounded. Activities were assigned to the function they mainly served.

What Matched the Textbook

All four functions appeared, and each did real work. Planning shaped next month's schedule and prepared for a staff member's upcoming leave. Organizing moved people and equipment so the morning rush could be handled. Leading took the largest share of management time, mostly in short coaching moments and one difficult conversation. Those coaching moments mattered because they gave staff immediate feedback on their work, which job design research treats as one of the core conditions for effective performance (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). Controlling, which means comparing performance with expectations and acting on the gap, happened through reports and spot checks several times a day. In that sense, the textbook list describes what I do.

What Did Not Match

Three features of the day do not appear in the four-function picture.

Fragmentation. No function received a block of time. Planning happened in six pieces scattered across the day, the longest 35 minutes. This matches what Mintzberg (1973) found when he observed executives directly: managerial work was brief, varied and fragmented, with most activities lasting minutes and many started by others. A front-line health care supervisor's day is, if anything, more fragmented, because the clinic's work does not stop for management.

Functions blended in single moments. When I noticed during a spot check that a new hire had registered a patient with the wrong insurance plan, I was controlling, but the next two minutes, showing her how to verify coverage, were leading, and moving her to a desk next to an experienced colleague for the afternoon was organizing. One four-minute episode served three functions.

Doing the work. A quarter of my day was front-line work: covering phones at lunch and checking in patients during a rush. The four functions leave no room for this, yet in a small team it is unavoidable. When I cover the phones, I am not managing; I am filling a gap that a better schedule might close.

The fragmentation also has a cost I had not noticed before keeping the log. Each interruption pulled me out of whatever I was doing, and several tasks I started in the morning, such as reviewing a staff member's request for a schedule change, were not finished until after 5:00. Nobody was harmed by the delay, but the staff member waited a full day for an answer that took four minutes to give once I sat down to it.

What the Gap Suggests for My Job

The log suggests two changes. First, planning needs protected time. Six short planning episodes produced a schedule draft with three errors I caught the next morning. A single 45-minute block, scheduled when the phones are quietest, might produce a better plan in less total time. Second, the front-line work I do should be examined rather than accepted. Covering lunch for the phones every day is a sign that the staffing plan does not account for breaks. If the schedule covered lunches, I would gain more than an hour a day for leading and controlling.

The log also suggests something about the four functions themselves. They describe the purposes of management well, but not its rhythm. A manager who expects to plan, organize, lead and control in tidy blocks will feel constantly behind. A manager who understands that the functions arrive in fragments, often all at once, can design the day around protecting the few moments that need focus.

Limits of One Day

One day cannot represent a job. A day with a staff absence or a system outage would shift much more time to organizing and front-line work, and a day at the end of the month would include more planning for the next schedule. The classification of activities is also my own judgment; another observer might count the coaching episode as controlling rather than leading. I intend to repeat the log on two more days, one busy and one quiet, before drawing firm conclusions. Even so, the pattern of fragmentation was strong enough that I doubt more days will change it.

References

Buchbinder, S. B., Shanks, N. H., & Kite, B. J. (Eds.). (2021). Introduction to health care management (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250-279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7

Mintzberg, H. (1973). The nature of managerial work. Harper & Row.