We ll discuss strategies for assessing management attitudes and culture. And we ll employ a tool for measuring current wellness leadership and its potential for growth in your organization. Finally, we ll explain strategies for changing the leadership culture so that it better supports health promotion objectives. Must Change Health promotion professionals don t need to be reminded how essential it is to have management support for their programs. After all, management controls the money, resources, employees time, access to space, promotional media, policies affecting health, and to a large degree the culture of the organization.
Managers can sabotage or save a program and hire or fire the wellness professional.
Perhaps it s the relative lack of corporate power that has caused some health promotion professionals to feel that they are beggars at the banquet. A 1993 study of Canadian health promotion professional and senior managers found that the health promotion professionals consistently overestimated the importance of economic factors in management choices about health promotion programs. Many of us assume that management is unsympathetic and skeptical of our goals, that all they care about is the bottom line, and that we have to constantly prove that health promotion is good for business. Of course there s often truth in that view. Some managers do lack enthusiasm for the full range of health promotion goals.