Mehmet ERDEM

WINDBER MEDICAL CENTER

Changes brought by Jacobs in the company and surrounding: He introduced the “preventive care” philosophy for the society and the hospital both. As he realized that keeping people in the community both physically and mentally healthy also meant financially heath of hospital. Windber established an affiliation with the Planetree treatment system under Jacobs’ leadership. It integrated meditation, music, and other holistic methods of health care. Windber introduced its wellness centre with facilities of fitness training, yoga, acupuncture and other treatments fetching huge returns. He promoted the situational requirement of keeping self fit and healthy rather than just taking medical aids. Structural renovation of the hospital was also done with more greener and fresh environment. Jacobs recruited former hotel manager to oversee food services and staff doubled to 450 employees and improved the pay. Windber also opened its own research institute and heart disease reversal programs treating around 250 patients.
The hospital is 101 years old, started especially as a hospital to take care of the coal miners for the 40+ coal mines of the Berwind-White Coal Company. The commitment was made by Jacobs that this hospital would be one of the most outstanding in the US. For the first 40 years, the starting physicians were innovators, to the point they held numerous patents and successes. When he came to that, the hospital had been given a death certificate by Ernst and Young. That gave him a chance to challenge board. He told them, "We can let it go, or we can try to go back to innovation and technical advancement and high-touch care."
The factor that Nicholas Jacobs and Windber Medical Center applied from the Situational Theory is that Jacobs considered his role as president at Windber Medical Center was the last hope in keeping the doors open. As the Situational Leadership Model suggests the leader must make decisions to use developmental intervention such as telling, selling, participating and delegating. A model of leadership theories demonstrates three interventional factors: Situation - Follower - Leader and the correlations between the factors. -Situation: is the case or context on which the leader applies his relationship behaviors. At Windber, the case when Jacobs took over the center is that the center was in trouble and toward the danger of being closed. The task set forth for Jacobs to accomplish then is to prevent the center from becoming the next sample in the series of small hospitals as victims of challenging economy. - Follower: in fact refers to the readiness of the staff. At Windber Medical Center, follower’s readiness was very low. In a degrading working environment with dropped revenue and staff’s income being lower than elsewhere, the key problem here is not follower’s capability but their lack of readiness and belief to get bonded to the hospital as well as the determination to recover the hospital. - Leadership: there are four leadership behaviors corresponding to the level of follower’s readiness. According to leadership theories, “leadership effectiveness is mainly determined by the right choice of leadership behavior and the changing of the situation to fit a particular person’s leadership style.” Telling, selling, participating and delegating are the most common leadership behaviors. However, none of them should be attributed to be the best or the worst option. Real situation needs to be taken into account in order to get the most suitable application. In Jacob’s