Committees in healthcare organizations discussion guide

The first instruction is administrative and the easiest mark on the page: indicate within your post which option you chose. Write Option A or Option B as the first words of the post. Beyond that, the two options are not two versions of the same question, and choosing well is worth a few minutes. Option A is diagnostic — what goes wrong when a manager sets up a committee, and what you would do about it. Option B is a design brief — you are building one and must decide how much power it has and how you will lead it. Option A rewards people who have watched committees fail; Option B rewards people who can reason about authority. Do not answer both, because 250 to 300 words is barely four short paragraphs, and splitting that across two options leaves nothing developed enough to mark.

If you take Option A, the trap is naming challenges that are really complaints about other people rather than problems a manager can act on. Top three challenges from a managerial perspective means structural problems you own: unclear charter and scope so the committee debates whatever is loudest, membership chosen by availability rather than by the decision rights and expertise required, no authority to act so recommendations die, meeting time that competes with clinical work, and no measure of whether the committee achieved anything. The advantages question is the counterweight and needs real answers too — distributed expertise, buy-in from the people who will implement, a defensible record of how a decision was reached, and shared accountability. The conflict question should distinguish task conflict, which is productive and should be surfaced in the room, from relationship conflict, which is not and should be handled privately and quickly before it recruits other members.

If you take Option B, the influence question is the substance. A committee can be advisory, consultative, decision-making within a defined scope, or fully delegated, and saying which you would grant and why is the whole answer. Advisory is safe and breeds cynicism the first time advice is ignored without explanation; delegated is motivating and dangerous without a clearly written boundary around what the committee may decide alone. Then the authority question is really about leadership style: you hold authority by owning the decisions that are genuinely yours, by being explicit about which decisions are the committee's, by setting agendas and deadlines rather than outcomes, and by explaining decisions you overrule. That is the distinction between authority and autocracy, and naming a leadership style — servant, transformational, democratic — with evidence is what turns the answer into an argument rather than a preference, and it is what the rubric means by applying course resources.