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By David S. Partridge, CRA, FAHRA
In 15 years of management I have learned that the best way to make your work life easier is to have a great team working with you. Whether you are lucky enough to follow an amazing leader that took a promotion and left you in a great position, or if you walk into a challenging situation with a lot of opportunities, building a strong team is always worth the effort. After you clean up any issues and gain your early successes it is very important to maintain and grow your successful team.
One of the best ways I have found to keep a great team together is by having a high associate engagement level. Some ideas that have helped me most often are involving staff in decisions that affect their work lives, communicating successfully and consistently, managing assets effectively, ensuring quality and policy compliance, and of course hiring/growing great people (coincidentally these things all fall in the key domains that comprise the CRA examination.)
I believe these are all important, but the single biggest key to associate engagement is one thing: trust. Trust in your team, trust in your peers, and trust in your boss. One great way to help build trust from your team is to become a CRA. It exemplifies your mastery of all of these topics and shows your dedication. Many of us expect our staff to be/become registered in their modality of expertise; we should have the same expectations of ourselves and our leadership teams. Did you know that 70% of the US News and World Reports top 20 hospitals in the United States have a CRA on their leadership team?
This year we are very excited to celebrate 15 years of the CRA credential. We have a great promotion for the November examination coming out soon to help everyone join the current 1,128 leaders with this prestigious credential.
You can learn from sessions on all of these ways to build associate engagement and many more great topics from your peers at the upcoming AHRA Annual Meeting in Anaheim in July. Please visit me and the other RACC commissioners in the CRA booth for information about the credential, testing, and the promotions for our 15th anniversary celebration. If you’re a CRA or CRA-Retired, we look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our reception Monday July 10th.
David S. Partridge, CRA, FAHRA is the director of imaging at OhioHealth Neighborhood Care in Columbus, OH. He can be reached at d.partridge@yahoo.com.
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Great article, Dave! If I hear someone say they’re not a CRA, I ask them, “what are you waiting on?” Being a CRA myself, I have learned that this credential carries a great deal of weight from a credibility standpoint.