The Foundations of Leadership by David S. Hefner and Katharine R. Becker
Excerpted pp 219-231, Section 2 Managerial Leadership from Clinical Laboratory Management, 2nd Edition Edited by L. S. Garcia ©2013 ASM Press, Washington, DC
OBJECTIVES To help the reader understand the difference between the realms of management and leadership To develop an understanding of the importance of integrity and its relationship with performance To clarify the misconceptions about operating with integrity by honoring your word, and why people may disregard it, thereby diminishing their power as a leader To help aspiring leaders appreciate the inward journey of leadership and discover for themselves what it means to be authentic To provide clarity about the relationship between being committed to something bigger than oneself and becoming a leader To offer resources for the reader’s continued education
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has great genius, power and magic in it!
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Being a leader has everything to do with Goethe’s quote. Every leader has faced the challenge to “just begin it!” This chapter offers access to actionable pathways for developing the foundational elements that are keys to leadership and exercising leadership effectively. You do not need to master the elements first, but they will be important for ensuring effectiveness in your leadership journey. Being a leader is a lifetime endeavor; once you step out, everything is different and there is no turning back. Healthcare today needs leaders at every level and in each discipline to succeed in solving complex problems with transdisciplinary solutions that can deliver cost-effective, high-quality care that ensures the health of all.
Distinguishing Management from Leadership
What Is “Leadership” and How Do You Become a Leader?
A 2012 Google search for leadership returned more than 113 million entries, but that is not really helpful, as you may only want the best 10 or 20. If you seek guidance from experts for a useful definition as a starting point, you will discover that faculty who teach leadership courses know there are as many definitions of leadership as books written about it. When checked in 2012, Amazon listed 96,883 book entries. Add to this the overwhelming amount of potentially contradictory information that conventional wisdom offers, such as that a really good manager will be a great leader, or that leadership is the same as good management, or that leadership is only available to those with a position near the top, or that people must be born with the inherent ability to lead.
The critical first step for answering the question posed
above is to understand what management is and how it differs from leadership. Management and leadership operate in different realms (Table 8.1). Managers are accountable for a known scope and use a set of well-developed skills to manage in their area. Conversely, leaders are responsible for and function in an unknown scope, using quite different skills to exercise leadership effectively.
Management
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term manager as deriving from an Italian verb, maneggiare, which means “to handle, train, be in charge of, control horses.” Today, managers are assigned accountability to oversee the processes dealing with or controlling things or people. Therefore, it should not be surprising that managers’ roles and responsibilities include coordination and interaction with employees; handling, sharing, and analyzing information; problem-solving and decision making; producing the best results possible; operating within a budget; and accounting for the status of everyone and everything within their scope of accountability. Larger organizations often have up to three levels of manager phenotype—top, middle, and supervisory—and at each level the scope of accountability
varies, and in some cases overlaps.
High-performing staff members are often promoted to become managers. Some succeed and others learn that being a manager is not to their liking. The shift to a manager’s role challenges strong performers to delegate and to develop others. The role requires a shift from self-concern to one of mobilizing employees to tackle tough problems, as a manager’s success is frequently measured by the results of those they manage. Managers need to be taught skills to succeed in their new role, which cover a range
from delegating, to building credible and reliable budgets, to delivering performance evaluations, to building a diverse, team-based workforce. Their roles cover a large span of activities and meetings, from providing incentives and recognition for work well done to implementing layoffs when the circumstances require it. Managers’ authority is limited and tends to remain within their assigned area or scope, and their actions must align with senior management and the organization’s articulated strategies. Tasks are frequently identified and assigned by middle- or top-level managers who have the authority to make such delegations. After 30 years of teaching and working with managers, the authors have found that managers are often interested in being taught how to “manage up,” or to get their manager(s) to do what they think should be done. However, we find that after being given the tools, rarely do these same managers succeed or even try. If the concept of managing up is of interest, one needs to understand that it has more to do with being a leader than managing.
Leadership
In contrast with the work of managing a known scope, a leader’s work is to make something happen in the future that was otherwise not (predictably) going to happen. Leaders have the courage to take on being responsible for what is unknown, the sense-making ability to navigate in uncertainty and ambiguity, the comfort to experiment using trial-and-error methods to discover their way, and the enthusiasm to inspire the engagement of others to garner progress when the pathways are uncertain or current knowledge argues that the vision being articulated cannot or will not happen (1).
How does one become a leader? As your parents probably said, anyone (you) can be a leader in any arena of concern or from any position in an organization. However, to succeed in being a leader and to exercise leadership effectively requires the development of a foundation upon which your confidence to lead grows and is recognized by others.
Can leadership be taught? Does understanding what other leaders have done or knowing the styles they used help someone to lead? The editors of a recent book, The Handbook for Teaching Leadership, reported an interesting conclusion after interacting with 30 authors during the publication of this book about their varied teaching methods (18). In more than 25 years of using many methods of teaching about leadership and leadership styles and
studying cases to learn what leaders do, the authors found “scant empirical evidence that any of these approaches work” (17). In addition, there is insufficient research and an inconsistent body of knowledge to validate whether the methods being used succeed in developing the kind of leaders needed for the uncertain future (17). While teaching skills and imparting knowledge are what educators best know how to do, “the current state of leadership education lacks the intellectual rigor and institutional structure to advance beyond its present (and precariously) nascent stage” (12). In fact, only one of the 30 different teaching methods in The Handbook for Teaching Leadership has the objective of leaving students actually being leaders and exercising leadership effectively (7, 9). Many of the perspectives in this book chapter are derived from, or are a synopsis of, the ground-breaking material developed to support the precept of actually being an effective
leader (5–8, 14).
So, you may rightly ask, can this chapter possibly be different? While we cannot reach through these pages and shape you into a leader, the material in this chapter offers access to foundational elements that provide potency and bring power to leading. While they can also improve your management, mastering them is critical for anyone desiring to be a leader and to exercise leadership effectively. The rest will be up to you.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.
Robert F. Kennedy
The Foundational Factors for Being a Leader: The First Foundational Factor Is Integrity
The softest pillow is a clear conscience.
Narayana Murthy, founder and former CEO, Infosys
When you ask people what integrity is, their answers are often expressed as values and norms. For instance, someone with integrity does not lie or steal. While there are moral, legal, and ethical underpinnings in every situation, organization, or professional group, integrity (as described here as a foundation for leadership) is not a normative or relative phenomenon. Integrity is independent and yet it underlies everything, and without it nothing works. Without being a person of integrity, you can set aside the notion of ever being a leader, and to be a person of integrity is a never-ending undertaking.
The Definition of Integrity
To understand this area, we start with the Merriam- Webster
Dictionary definition of “integrity”:
- firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values: incorruptibility
- an unimpaired condition: soundness
- the quality or state of being complete or undivided: completeness
Rarely do people notice the second and third components of the definition, though they are critical to having an actionable access to operating with integrity. If you focus on the second and third definitions, the notion that integrity establishes the underpinning for workability and performance becomes clear. We ask you to consider the following heuristic: as integrity (unimpaired, complete) increases, the conditions that allow for maximum performance also increase; therefore integrity is a critical condition of performance.
But what does it mean for a person or a leader to be unimpaired and complete? What it means for a person to operate with integrity is to honor one’s word. To clarify what that means, we will examine what honoring your word is, and more specifically, what is meant in detail by your word.
Honoring Your Word
Honoring your word means doing what you said you would do, or if you cannot or will not be doing what you said, letting others know as soon as you know that you will not be doing what you said, and dealing with the resultant consequences. Though this concept sounds relatively simple, many people do not understand (or they disregard) how important and fundamental it is to optimal performance. We are sure you can think of instances in which people say they will do something, do not do it, and never talk about it again. Common misconceptions become pitfalls that often prevent people from honoring their word.
The Pitfalls in Honoring Your Word
Many people fail to let others know what they did or did not do, sometimes even after the fact. Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night in a panic about a passed deadline, because you didn’t know if your team member(s) delivered or not?
The first pitfall in the arena of honoring your word occurs when people think that integrity is only a virtue. If integrity is understood to be a virtue, rather than a necessity, it conceals the fact that honoring your word is a necessary condition for performance. As a virtue, integrity can become more easily sacrificed, especially when it appears to a person that he or she must do so to succeed, or that it really does not matter. For instance, reporting only the good news, or the news you think others want to hear, can seem to be acceptable or smart behavior, as can saying you finished something that you in fact did not, simply because it sounds better and you know you can complete it after the fact, on an evening or weekend. What is unseen or not easily recognized in these situations is the resulting damage to the individual and/or the organizational performance. When integrity is understood as honoring your word, then saying both what is and is not happening— the good, the bad, and the ugly—becomes dependable behavior. In environments where reliable information is readily available, managers can make more appropriate decisions about what is (or is not) getting done. For instance, if a manager knows what was not done, and the stakeholders who are expecting the deliverable have been advised of the potential delay, they can decide together if the deliverable can be delayed until a later date or if it must be completed immediately. As more people learn to speak openly about what is and is not done, individual and organizational confidence grows and overall performance increases. Honoring your word helps to establish workable relationships that enable others to develop a sufficient sense of security so that they can provide complete information.
A second pitfall occurs when managers are unaware that they have not honored their word or have missed a deadline. For years, we authors have discussed with people the importance of honoring their word. Many have admitted that they take better care of their automobiles than they do their word, because they can “see” their car but they cannot “see” their word. Managers have much to do; it seems almost impossible to know what outstanding commitments are yet to be completed (especially when many commitments are delegated via e-mail, often without discussion). Even when managers do know what has not been done, their energy may be focused on explaining why they did not complete the commitment (and constructing a report justifying their nondelivery) rather than communicating what was not done and focusing instead on the impact and possible solutions. When managers and staff operate without full awareness of their commitments, they frequently are unaware of the increased potential for a decline in performance in their area of accountability, their organizations, and/or themselves. It does not take staff long to determine if deadlines are reliable or not, or if their managers know the outcomes they are working on (or not), and reliable performance declines in such settings. If you see performance decreasing and it seems like everyone is honoring their word, you should ask, “When was performance last progressing at necessary or acceptable levels and/or when did it go off track, and at that point, what happened, what commitments were not being honored?”
The third pitfall that managers confront with honoring their word occurs when people think integrity means keeping your word or that you must always do what you said. Keeping one’s word and honoring one’s word are not synonymous as presented in this chapter. However, most people think the two are one and the same.
What happens when it is not possible (or when it is inappropriate, perhaps due to legal reasons, strategic reasons, force majeure, etc.) to fulfill what was previously committed? Working to keep your word, when it might be more appropriate to honor your word by letting others know what you will not or did not do, enhances performance. When transparency is not embraced, it often leads to counterproductive behaviors, like not responding to e‐mail in a timely manner (or ever) or avoiding people or meetings, and therefore impairs the overall coordination of performance. When a manager cannot keep his or her word and opts for the apparent short‐term gain of concealing it rather than courageously acknowledging it, he or she may forfeit the power and respect that will accrue from honoring one’s word. And without the respect of others, you can forget about being a leader.
Once you are aware of what it means to honor your word and how to honor your word, it becomes important to understand what constitutes your word.