The health care professional as a manager: finding the critical balance in a dual role.

The health care professional who assumes a management role must recognize that he or she is adopting a second and concurrent career of equal importance to his or her primary occupation. Many such managers have considerable difficulty balancing the two sides of the role because most are well trained in their specialties but enter management with little or no preparation for management. Lack of preparation and inadequate understanding of the requirements of the management side of the role lead to discomfort in management matters and in turn frequently cause a manager to seek refuge in being more of a specialist than manager. The most successful managers will be those who develop the ability to appropriately balance the sides of the dual role.