The health care professional as a manager: balancing two important roles.

The health care professional who assumes a management role must recognize that this transition involves adopting a second and concurrent career of equal importance to his/her primary occupation. Many such managers have considerable difficulty balancing the 2 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 combined role lead to discomfort in management matters. This discomfort subsequently causes some managers to seek refuge in the familiar by emphasizing the profession at the expense of attending to management duties. The most successful managers are invariably those who develop the ability to appropriately balance the sides of the dual role.