I wonder when people in the health service started to speak as if they had swallowed some kind of management jargon dictionary and I also wonder how necessary it is for people to use those kinds of words? When I look at the current job adverts on the NHS jobs website or look at job descriptions for the positions there I am told that the person needed should be able to develop ‘matix working’ or have a ‘can do attitude’. I am meant to be able to promote partnership working, use joined up thinking and possibly walk on the moon for all I understand some of it. Nurses and other medical types of course have other types of words they can use to help create their semi secret world, and I have been privy to much of that for a long time. At least these are often proper medical or nursing terms, though in my opinion there is too  much use of abbreviations and acronyms. There is a time and a place to use these terms and there is a time to speak in plain English and that is where some of this manager speak seems just plain wrong.

I would hope that I have an attitude that says, I can do that, and whats more I am going to try to help you do it too. Surely that is what leadership and change management is about. But it is a behaviour, a way of doing things. Matrix working though is just a word someone seems to have thought up and chucked into a meeting one day to see who would ‘pick it up and run with it’! I think matrix and partnership working might be quite similar things, they might be about trying to work across organisational, professional and team boundaries to get to the same end result. But putting the terms in a job description makes them look like they are some kind of special skill that only a manager might understand. Having said that of course, I am going to have to keep brushing up on my vocabulary to that I have a chance of understanding what the  hell is going on around me!