Better relationships among healthcare professionals, staff and management are the crucial missing ingredient for better patient outcomes.

So say Drs. Anthony L. Suchman, David J. Sluyter and Penelope R. Williamson in their new book  “Leading Change in Healthcare: Transforming Organizations Using Complexity, Positive Psychology and Relationship-Centered Care.”  They offer practical, innovative, evidence-based approaches for fostering a culture of good relationships, illustrated case studies from more than a 20 writers and researchers.

The book is a key resource for all practitioners, students and teachers of healthcare management, medical educators and leaders of all areas providing patient care.

“Understanding culture change has become a core leadership competency,” the authors argue, but they observe that “much current practice is based on antiquated and psychologically unsophisticated theories and it just doesn’t work. It only breeds frustration and cynicism.”

“Leading Change in Healthcare” offers a new and better approach, “relationship-centered administration.” It integrates fresh insights and methods from complexity science, positive psychology and relationship-centered care to create a more spontaneous and reflective approach to change management. “Changing big patterns of organizational behavior must begin with new patterns of communicating and relating at a personal level in each moment.

“If we want patients to be respected and engaged as partners, the staff have to be treated the same way. We can’t get to the new culture of relationship using methods from the old culture of command and control,” says Suchman.

Drawing on case studies from primary care, hospitals, long-term care, professional education, international NGOs, and other settings, the authors show how the principles of relationship-centered administration at work. They demonstrate that courage and authenticity are essential ingredients for leading change, that control is impossible and “not-knowing” is often a virtue.

“Leadership is more about taking the risk of acting in a new way,” the authors say, “than it is about having the right answers.”

They also teach about the many paradoxes of organizational change—exerting influence without having control, changing what’s wrong by focusing on what’s right, and changing organization-wide patterns of interaction by attending to patterns at a very local level.

“Leading Change in Healthcare” is available from Radcliff Publishing for $59.95. The book is available at Amazon.com.