Leadership Philosophy

Personal Leadership Philosophy:

Inspire. Dream. Learn. Serve. Become More.

Leadership may come in many different forms, have multiple facets or perspectives, and can be defined in some different ways. Leadership is a function of our social system. The definition of strong leaders is not the results of their leadership but how others perceive the environment that their leaders create. Ultimately, leading becomes about allowing for spaces and climates that cultivate and care for people. Fostering environments is not only a vital part of leadership, but it is a massive responsibility that is centered on people first. Metanoia and self transformation are empowering and energizing forces in individual life, but another profound type of transformation exists in the occupation of the very different space of transformative organizational objectives.

Due to factors like globalization, technological innovation, and complex adaptive systems behaviors, we must begin to analyze what consistent adaptation means for the constantly evolving business world. In an era of engaged transformative behavior patterns, the presentation of an opportunity to change and adapt to new situations, variables or circumstances are constant—we owe it to ourselves to begin transforming how we think about metanoia in life and the approaches to which we initiate valuing people first. It is a given that ethics is about action; however, it is worth proposing a newer radical quality. We might think of ethics, justice, individual and social values, and transformational leadership as a concept of experiences—experiences of the people that believe in it or work to educate us about these conceptual understandings. It would then be possible to begin to envision the human experience our leadership efforts create.

This leading narrative is interesting because it confronts not the limits of our knowledge but the reality of our existence and what values means to other people. Humanity's valuations are definitive; they become more defined from a major engagement in our physical reality and the ideas of possibility. We, as leaders, should begin to conceive our transformative leadership efforts as organizational structures subject to change over time. The critical shift that this type of perspective would have on leaders would create a basic understanding that is leading within a structural thinking framework better applies to other systems. The implementation of core leadership values that are both functional and experiential, we can create structures or processes that enable the generation of relationships and narratives for ethical behavior models.

We must understand that our success in achieving the virtues of justice and fairness are foundational on our divisions and dysfunctional connectivity with others. The role of an individual is to provide for internal perspective focusing on short-term goals while defining personal imperatives consistent with rational moral behavior. Some expected personal objectives are a raise in personal ethical standards, increase in relationship-based sensitivity, innovate immediate development opportunities for sustained growth, and an individualized metanoia or transformational change. The role of an organization is to allow for external perspective concentrating on long-term goals while developing strategic imperatives to magnify transformative leadership and appropriate action. A fundamental truth for leaders is that there is a clear distinction between leadership and authority. Simon Sinek (2014), in a TED Talk, made an analogy of leadership and parenting:

If you think about what being a great parent is…[w]hat makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves (Sinek, 2014).

As children, we have opportunities to learn valuable lessons about leadership and the impacts of transformative efforts or behaviors. The conclusion provides a total of the requests and results that are effective. For Sinek (2014):

[There are leaders] and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead [also] inspire us. Whether they are individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead not for them but for ourselves (emphasis added). [Moreover, it] is those who start with "why" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them (Sinek, 2014).

One of the key aspects of understanding is that fundamentally leadership is not about deliverable objectives—from resources to opportunities or education to discipline—it is about delivering relationship-based experiences. Influence and choice, while variable elements of leadership and authority, are directly linked to oppression and dominance because they are all items are a part of human nature. When we reflect on our history and expertise, failures, and successes, we like to think that it is a unique tapestry of opportunities that have enriched our lives. I often remember an earlier time in my childhood, considering a course of pursuing medicine as a professional endeavor, when my father was in his residency at the University of Iowa. Imagining what residency was like from his perspective—it must have been a grueling experience, and with all the paperwork and pages of patient charts, lab results, consult orders and sleep deprivation, it is easy to comprehend that we can forget why what we do matters. Looking at my experiences, now, has allowed me to step back and think about leadership and transformation from the perspective that, as leaders, we gravitate to places, opportunities, and people because what we do everyday matters. It defines us.

My four siblings and I grew up in a small town in the State of Washington, where our parents are both healthcare professionals. My mother was a nurse in the emergency department while my father is a doctor with a dual specialty in Internal Medicine and Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology. He has been honing his professionalism for more than twenty-five years, and his office is cluttered with the evidence of it: an overflowing office of patient files and gifts from patients. One of the most memorable items that hung in his office, but now, hangs in mine, is a painting of Norman Rockwell’s (where a little girl is holding her “injured” baby doll while the doctor is listening with his stethoscope). I had always loved this painting, especially when I was young even though I did not know why. Now, I understand that the value of the portrait is because when considering how transformative behaviors and interdependent relationships with others interact depicts perfectly the compassion and skill involved in the divine calling of caring for and serving others.

Occasionally, I ponder the impact and implications my parent’s success. I used to think of medicine, science, health care, business, and even social relationships—as fixed areas of knowledge and skill acquired in learning and training—and then perfected in practice and the application of ideas. Reality turns out to be very different. Instead, reality becomes an entanglement of all of them. “You do get good at certain things,” my father tells me, “but even once you do, you find that what we know is obsolete or replaced with better ideas, technology, or people (speaking specifically about healthcare leadership becoming more lead by nonphysicians).” The reality, as we know it, leads to beginning the learning curve all over again. “Most of what I do daily, I never learned in medical school, residency, internship, or fellowship,” he says, “we were there to learn about science and medicine, not a business, leadership, behavioral relationships, or interdependent and networked connectivity.” It is because of my passion for systems thinking and globalization that he believes I will be more successful than he is, even though at times I am not as sure.

The vital concern is that, shortly, we will have a critical shortage in many of our specialties, disciplines, studies, and areas of life experience—but equally concerning is that we live in a time and environment where leadership is also depreciative and will result in a future supply and quality crisis. Some people harbor feelings of disenchantment or disenfranchisement in various industries from health care to technology or business to service-based professions, but a far many more others are bright, intuitive, optimistic, and hardworking. They example the lifetime commitment to the care of others. These individuals are often successful in their practices, lives, and communities. They participate in a variety of responsibilities, by choice or dictated-circumstance, and some are quite comfortable with the concept of leadership and management within their scopes of practice.

It is understandable that we can feel that their accomplishments get misconstrued as a success of managing (or leading) a larger organization. However, this is a misunderstanding of the results of that causality. Increasing engagement and enabling individuals and groups to adapt and overcome various challenges or elements to create a system of sustainable delivery is crucial to successful transformational leadership. As with many endeavors, growing and sustaining team or other functional groups tasked with achieving success, these efforts take time, require planning and effort, and have fluctuating levels of flexibility or adjustments as the processes progress. The concepts of leadership and management, like the practice of medicine, requires talent, dedication, study, and experience of the practitioners. For the success of any organization or industry, specifically in health care, a transformation must begin with the mentality of an individual to a mindset of leadership, learning, systems thinking, relationship-based design, and examples modeling for the future’s leaders.

There is a continuing chasm between our knowledge of the world and the ambitions of our pursuits. This gap complicates the complexity and uncertainty of life. We are always facing risks and the necessity to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Often, information is limited or inadequate; science or knowledge is ambiguous or unknown, and our abilities or actions are never perfect. However, progress is many times haltingly or humiliatingly slow, but the purpose of our human experience is to learn. This acceptance is a curious adherence to the egalitarian belief that practice can outweigh deterministic ends and means.

To Kouzes and Posner (2010), “leadership is about relationships” (p. 329). Margaret Wheatley (2006) ingeniously connects how leadership to the physics principle of the quantum mechanics that governs our physical and temporal universe from time to the interactions of atoms, quarks, and energy to the movement of planets. She states, “[in our clockwork universe], we grew assured of the role of determinism and prediction. We absorbed expectations of regularity into our very beings. And we organized work and knowledge based on our beliefs about the predictable universe. It is interesting to note just how Newtonian most organizations are” (p. 28). Organizations, companies, and groups of people demonstrate the same complexity in interactions and relationships as quantum physics. Warren Weaver (1948) succinctly stated that:

Science has led to a multitude of results that affect men’s lives. Some of these results are embodied in mere conveniences of a relatively trivial sort. Many of them, based on science and developed through technology, are essential to the machinery of modern life. Many other results, especially those associated with the biological and medical sciences, are of unquestioned benefit and comfort. Certain aspects of science have profoundly influenced men’s ideas and even their ideals. Still, other aspects of science are thoroughly awesome (p. 1).

Communities are important, complex, excellent, and they provide a vital role in the structure of our society. They are critical in determining the cultures we develop. The strength of cohesion between elements and people in an organization correlates directly to the quality of our organizational and group cultures. The power of a leader’s effectiveness is a measure of their ability to empower those around them. For Kouzes and Posner, “Leadership is about relationships, about credibility, and about what you do” (p. 329). Credibility is a feeling gained through a process of constant cultivation, by earning trust and loyalty from those around us, much like a gardener tends to their garden. Relationships are deep human connections built on the emotions of confidence and commitment. Great leaders must develop quality relationships with others. They exercise extreme ownership and discipline. They have the perceptual acuity to act in uncertain and complex environments. Leaders utilize the strengths of others and themselves to help build organizations and companies.

My leadership plan is primarily focused on adaptive learning, building, and applying skill sets, and developing healthy relationships that are resilient. Relationships with resiliency enable leaders to navigate uncertainty and create better organizations, stronger teams, and a better society. Any leadership experience hinges on the simultaneously relentless pursuit of education and accepting nothing less than the long-time motto held by Mercedes-Benz “the best or nothing.” Education is an intangible product often gained in many ways both in traditional academic and non-traditional methods and forms. The desire to learn among leaders is ubiquitous. Leadership is about maintaining a delicate balance comprised of many active parts. Leadership has traits, skills, processes, structures, systems, teams, and characteristics that resonate on multiple levels of psychology. It is consistently changing and requires that those who lead have perceptual acuity, strategy, and firm commitments to resolve and courage in venturing into the unknown.

We know that education and leadership are not about teaching rote fact and figures, but instead teaching others how to research and find solutions on their own and then empower them to take action on those solutions. Teaching others how to learn. Unfortunately, our education system is not current with our existential reality. We are mired with centuries old methodologies, where schools and teachers serve as gateways to and gatekeepers of knowledge. Understanding that time results in change, we need to rid our systems of passive learning education models. We need to begin to have people work in groups and practice problem-solving. Leadership is about guiding others as they are learning on their own. Flexibility remains the vital element to building and designing systems that are robust, resilient, adaptable and anti-fragile. Learning how to learn captures well the challenges and difficulties that we now face. Our collective future depends on how well we can use our skills of learning to discover better solutions.

One of our life's harshest realities is that complex problems rarely have simple solutions, and it is where Occam's Razor fails. Simplest answers are not always best, and it is more probable that they do not even exist. Transformational leadership is never about finding clarity in the short-term. It is about discovering the small steps forward to progress through the uncertainty into the unknown and unknowable and develop marginal gains with ever increasing frequency until solutions arise. Hackers and other would-be charismatic leaders are not super-villains. They only appear as much and have levels of invulnerability because we collectively accept disparity and learned helplessness as a state of normal condition. It seems that there is no better time that the present for leaders to change that. Due to factors like globalization, technological innovation, and complex adaptive systems behaviors, we must begin to analyze what consistent adaptation means for the constantly evolving business world. In an era of engaged transformative behavior patterns, the presentation of an opportunity to change and adapt to new situations, variables or circumstances are constant—we owe it to ourselves to begin transforming how we think about metanoia and leadership in life and the approaches to which we initiate valuing people first.

References

Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Open Road Integrated Media/Harper Collins Publishers. (Amazon Kindle Edition).

Kouzes, J. and Posner, B. (2010). The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: The Leadership Challenge/Wiley.

Sinek, S. (Speaker). (2014, March). Why good leaders make you feel safe (TED2014). Retrieved March 20, 2016, from https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe

Weaver, W. (1948). Science and Complexity. In American Scientist. Retrieved May 1, 2017, from http://203.129.207.247/document_library/Science%20and%20Complexity3a7e.pdf

Wheatley, Margaret J. (2006). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.