I am grateful to my family, friends, and many colleagues for your enthusiastic support, encouragement, and helpful suggestions along the way.
I appreciate your patience and understanding as I dedicated my time and attention to writing this book.
I am grateful to the editors of this Health Care series, David Dilts and Larry Fredendall, for approaching me with the idea of developing this book to fill a need you noticed in your work with health care organizations. Many thanks to you and publisher Scott Isenberg at Business Expert Press for your guidance, encouragement, feedback, and great suggestions that strengthened the usefulness of this book to the clinicians and managers we intend to reach. Thank you to Charlene Kronstedt for guidance on technical publication requirements.
I appreciate many helpful conversations with Ginny Trierweiler, PhD, a licensed psychologist and professional coach who has helped many organizations and leaders to build their managerial effectiveness. In helping me conceptualize important areas to address in this book, she pointed out how power differences between managers and those they supervise can affect the transition for clinicians who are promoted to manage teams they worked in with former peers. I appreciate her wisdom about the clarity needed to transition from the role of individual clinician to manager and her suggestions for doing that successfully.5
Special thanks to Curtis V. Smith for volunteering to proofread and offering helpful writing suggestions.
Thank you to the many professionals and organizations who generously shared their experiences with me in interviews and other conversations that helped to develop this book. They are all people whom I noticed and admire, or were referred by trusted colleagues, for their approaches, skills, experience, and contributions to the arena of health care management. Their insights and comments are included throughout the book. Everyone is listed in Appendix A of Volume I, along with selected highlights of interviews and conversations.