Individual Traits in Leadership

Individual Traits for leadership:

Self awareness

• Have to understand yourself well enough to know strengths and weaknesses

• How do other people see you, what image do you project

• More here (Johari window and how to improve)

Respect

• Respects show value to all team members, fosters belonging

• Is more than just not being disrespectful, value peoples input

Compassion

• More than empathy and listening, also requires action on the things you are told

• Fosters trust, respect, collaboration and reduces turnover

Vision

• Means two things

- Shared visions allow for greater collaboration, does everyone know where we want to get to and has an idea of how to get there. In medicine we refer to this as a shared mental model, ie does everyone know that this patient has sepsis or has a traumatic brain injury?

-  Leadership needs a vision for where its wants to go. This is less about the immediate scenario and more about what we want things to look like and operate like in a month, a year, a decade.

• Purpose driven leaders share that vision (which forms the purpose)

Communication

• Its well-recognized that to be a good leader you need excellent communication skills.

• In a survey published in the BMA it was one of the key skills desired in leaders by junior doctors

There are a variety of ways to be an affective communicator and a good leader should be able to do them all. Below are some examples

-          Transmitting information

-          Storytelling

-          Solicitating Input

-          Active Listening

Learning Agility

• Adaptablilty would be another word here. How well and quickly can you respond to unknow

• Fundamentally this comes down to desire. Do you want to learn more? Do you want to be able to adapt? Do you want your experiences to provide opportunity to improve

• As medics, particularly in emergency medicine, we deal with a lot of unknown and uncertainty and so are often adaptable and we have strong reflective practices. This allow us to be more adaptable and responsive to known or challenging environments.

Tips for this:

- Seek out things that stretch you, the more challenges you face (in and out of work) the more flexible and adaptable you will be to new problems

- Curiosity allows for rapid information gathering and learning. Ask why or why not whenever possible, you never know when that new understanding will be helpful.

- Active listening will let other people give you answers without you even asking the question. One of the fundamentals of looking after undifferentiated patients is that the patient will have the answer, this is because in the absence of other information you need to go and listen to the patient and they will tell you want is wrong with them. This works in clinical practice but also in leadership roles when responding to new challenges.

- It also links into self awareness, when you are stress, tired, angry, hungry etc your ability to respond to new challenges is hampered but so is your ability to adapt and learn. Often allowing your self a minute to take a beat or have a wee is enough to reset and confront the challenge ahead.

Collaboration

• Every team has different skills and people with different backgrounds and experience. Using this to the advantage of the team can only be beneficial. A good leader is open to contributions from outside. In high acuity scenarios is often challenging to open up and recognize the expertise around you, however doing so can make your life much easier and can improve outcomes.

• In managing department and developing services collaboration is vital! If people aren’t engaged in what you are doing it is unlikely to succeed and the very nature of these things is that they cross MDTs and skill sets and there is no way an individual can produce good outcomes without outside input into such complex systems.

Influence

• Every leader needs to be able to direct, delegate and cajole sometimes. Manipulation lacks the transparency needed to be able to lead well and often has ulterior, negative incentives. There is a big difference between directing or delegating work to avoid it yourself and doing to improve functioning and productivity.

• When practicing medicine, we all operate as individuals in seeing, assessing and treating patients but we work within a community of practice. Often the standards are set at a national level and then by senior members of staff at a cultural level. A good leader will leverage the influence they create to drive and improve standards and culture.

• Ways of developing influence seem to match a lot of the things on this list, as you have may realized a lot of these attributes overlap. Simply integrity and credibility, dedication and diligence will develop into influence, that is know your craft and strive to be better.

Integrity

• Holding ourselves and those around us accountable to standards goes a long way. It links in with nearly all the other points on this list – Respect, vision, communication, learning agility, collaboration, influence, courage.

• It is also a fundamental part of being a clinician, its is spoken about in so many of our domains – candor, good medical practice etc

Courage

• It take courage to implement change, to speak out, to report a problem or concern and to give necessary feedback. These are all fundamental parts of leading.

Gratitude

• It seems obvious when you think about it, but how often to you here thank you or positive assertions at work?

• On an individual level people who express gratitude are happier, less anxious and sleep better. On a systems level people work harder for bosses that express gratitude however, there is evidence that up to 35% of bosses never express gratitude in a way that’s recognized by their employees

• Gratitude fosters a sense of belonging in a work place but it also improves the sense of worth of the receiving individuals. This feeling of being valued is important and is often something that is missed in a naturally hierarchical workplace like healthcare. People tend to see their own role as small and with shifts the sense of being replicable is only too apparent at handover times. Demonstrating gratitude can go a long way to remediating some of these negative emotions and preventing a negative cycle from recurring.

Resilience

• Whilst this has become a bit of a dirty word in world of increasing healthcare pressures and complexity whilst resources are being squeezed, it still holds importance for leadership. Maintaining a positive, but not blindly optimistic, outlook when confronted with challenges will allow others the emotional security and strength to commit to the shared vision.

• Both the leader and employees need to foster a culture of wellbeing to maintain standards and strive for good outcomes.