How to Climb Higher and Engage your Team
Unpacking the Visionary Leadership Ladder to Unlock your Success
As a healthcare leader, chances are your team is often less engaged than you’d like. No matter what new trend you try or system you implement, it still feels like people don’t take initiative or understand what you want from them. And likely, this is negatively affecting your performance as well, creating stress and overwhelm and culminating in a less-than-ideal work environment. This can lead to a sense of helplessness. This is common -- you are not alone. But the good news is that these problems are neither inevitable nor unsolvable.
As you likely remember from How You Got HERE Will Get You THERE (if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, get your FREE download here!), the healthcare leadership position you find yourself in now is merely a new challenge -- it is NOT impossible. You’ve overcome challenges like this and found success many times before in your life and you can do so again.
Luckily for you, I’ve created an excellent tool to help you assess where you are. Through years of success coaching and guiding leaders towards their full potential, I’ve developed a metric to track your progress and chart your future.
I call it: The Visionary Leadership Ladder
From Sooksan Kantabutra’s excellent essay in Leading Organizations, Perspectives for the New Era, 2010, we know unequivocally that organizations with visionary leaders perform better, have more engaged teams, execute strategies more effectively, and leverage their vision as a source of mission and purpose. This is both historically true AND translates effectively to modern businesses, including healthcare organizations.
But creating a vision that’s clear and complete - a multidimensional vision - is, well, difficult! It takes time and effort. And consciously building a multidimensional organizational vision is not necessarily intuitive; it’s a learned skill.
The visionary leadership ladder will assist you as you learn the essential skills to creating and cultivating a sure-fire vision to lead your healthcare team to success. It illustrates the journey from a leader with a tunnel vision (not effective in the long run) to a leader with a fully developed multi-dimensional vision (exactly what you need to create the ideal workplace environment).
Contrary to popular belief, the journey of becoming a successful leader is not that of mastering more technical skills, but mastering what are sometimes referred to as “soft skills”. What contributes MOST to a strong vision is “compelling image of an achievable future”, as described by Wharton School of Management Professor Stephen Friedman in Harvard Business Review, 2009.
As we unpack the ladder, note these important trends:
When a leader moves up the ladder, individual performance increases AS WELL AS team engagement. Plus, resources are fully developed and utilized.
When a leader moves down the ladder, team output decreases, burnout starts to rear its ugly head amongst the team or the leader themselves, and precious resources are wasted.
And like most ladders, we start at the bottom.
Tunnel Vision
This leader has been promoted due to their technical skills and is in danger of becoming a victim of the Peter Principle. Technical skills are extremely important to this leader, as it’s these skills have been crucial to their own success.
A tunnel vision leader, especially in the healthcare profession, gets stuck in the mire of technical skills, unable to see beyond the end of their own nose. It’s important to note that not every technical expert suffers from tunnel vision, but lack of awareness and learning keep this leader from being able to grow.
This style of leadership includes ordering the team around, leveraging technical expertise as weight against anyone else’s strengths or deriving power from a sense of seniority. This type of leader rarely trusts their team to do anything independently, constantly stuck in the mindset that, “If I want something done right I have to do it myself.” While this leader may have good intentions, often they don’t realize that a lot more than expertise goes into successfully leading a healthcare organization.
Finally, a failure of communication often accompanies a leader with tunnel vision. Because technical competency comes naturally for them, they have very little patience with others and think things should come as easily for the team as it has for them. They don’t realize that their team may benefit from coaching, training or individual guidance. They tend to approach communication on a “need to know” basis and aren’t open to different approaches for solving problems instead of having an open door policy. Because of this, team members aren’t comfortable coming to this leader with any issues and many workplace grievances fester and become worse instead of being solved quickly.
Borrowed Vision
On the next rung is the leader with a borrowed vision. This leader also has technical expertise when stepping into their new position, but is aware that this new role requires more of them than their previous positions in the healthcare profession. They embrace their new leadership role with enthusiasm, along with the title that accompanies it. In this, they begin to “borrow” power from their title, overusing and sometimes abusing it. They may also borrow the schedule of the person they replace, their systems or even their management style.
Very often, this type of leader was a protégé to the previous person in charge. They feel they must “live up to” their mentor by becoming a mini-them in their new position. Because the healthcare profession rarely provides leadership training for those taking on management positions, “tribal training” takes over in the absence of formal preparation or training for this leadership role.
Soon, however, a leader with borrowed vision becomes aware of the mismatch between what their style is and what they are actually doing. They may notice the limitations this blind imitation puts on them. But they feel lost. They try to be available for their team but struggle to adjust their schedule from their predecessor. They struggle to maintain the status quo instead of pausing to envision a different and stronger future for the healthcare organization.
This leads to reactive conversations when problems arise, putting out fires instead of planning ahead. Under pressure to perform, this leader relies too much on formal authority and can alienate their team in the process. They come across as arrogant or as a micromanager who doesn’t trust their own team.
The important difference between a leader with tunnel vision and that with borrowed vision is that often the leader with borrowed vision realizes that there is room for improvement.
In this realization, they have a choice:
They can acknowledge this awareness and look for a better way.
OR
They can ignore this realization, dig their heels in and insist that “this is the way things are done”.
And in this decision is a tipping point. This leader has an important choice.
Uni-dimensional Vision
When a healthcare leader with borrowed vision acknowledges their shortcomings and begins to search for a better way to lead their team, often before fully realizing success they tip into what we’ll call Uni-dimensional Vision. This leader begins to expand their leadership capabilities by creating their own vision for their healthcare organization, they start to bring themselves to their leadership. They want to use their own style and find their own voice.
Uni-dimensional vision is a useful first step, and can bring early success. This leader begins to be proactive, conversations with team members start to have longer lasting impact, and influence starts to grow.
But in stress, this leader is likely to return to old habits and ways of doing things. Communication may regress, becoming unplanned and unclear or incomplete. Their leadership style is not consistent and, while rapport may improve, their team does not completely trust this leader yet. The inverse is also true -- the leader may not yet trust their team fully either.
Climbing the visionary leadership ladder is a process that cannot be rushed or completed overnight. If a healthcare leader is serious about creating successful change in their organization, they must relentlessly pursue this path. They must create a multi-dimensional vision for their healthcare organization that stems from their own core beliefs -- their values, mission and purpose in life. Once these are explored and communicated clearly, only then can full leadership potential be reached.
Multi-Dimensional Vision
Finally we arrive at the healthcare leader with a multi-dimensional vision. This leader does not arrive overnight, but has made a conscious and concerted effort to grow far beyond their technical skills.
They have created and implemented a clear vision that engages their core values, as well as their team’s expertise and talent. They use this vision to create roles and responsibilities for both themselves and their team members to succeed. This leader clearly communicates their vision and leverages their influence to lead the team. They understand the value of true power and influence and exercise it without effort.
John Soski and Sandi Dinger’s study in The Leadership Quarterly in 2007 corroborates this claim, stating that the “empirical evidence from the past 20 years has shown that such leaders, through their understanding of the people and events around them, construct and deliver compelling statements that inspire followers to accept their vision of the future and behave accordingly. Because visions are a means for such leaders to attract followers and promote change, effective envisioning processes require leaders to integrate aspects of their self-concept and personality into the vision.”
This is vital so I’ll reiterate: a successful leader in the healthcare profession MUST bring themselves fully to their role. No one else can do it for them. They cannot survive with tunnel vision, borrow a vision from someone else, or merely focus on one aspect of successful leadership.
The leader with multi-dimensional vision makes the team their priority. They communicate purposefully and clearly, engaging their teammates in productive conversations that lead to change. But most importantly, this healthcare leader has a clear vision that helps the whole team stay energized, focused and efficient. The team feels a sense of belonging when they feel that the leader is invested in them. And this sense of belonging leads every team member to be more proactive and engaged, allowing the leader’s healthcare organization to accomplish more and the leader themselves to feel less stressed, overwhelmed and burnt out.
Which rung do you stand on?
Now that we’ve unpacked the Visionary Leadership Ladder, where do you honestly see yourself? Stuck at the bottom and struggling to the next rung? Working hard to implement a multi-dimensional vision while having limited success?
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
-- Jack Welch
Former chairman and CEO of GE
Hopefully, this ladder shifts your perspective so you can begin to focus on growing others, instead of just your own career. Visionary leadership in the healthcare profession requires discipline and focus to reach success. While it doesn’t happen overnight, with concerted effort, significant change can be made in 30 days or less. Contact us to learn more about our life-changing coaching program: 30 Days to Visionary Leadership.
Thousands have changed their lives and organizations by reaching out for help. Success comes to those willing to work for it, willing to seek and implement expert advice.
Are you ready for the next rung?
HAVE YOU JOINED HARJOT’S MAILING LIST YET?
Stay in the know! Sign up for Harjot's newsletter to receive updates.