“Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.” (Northouse, 2016, p. 6)<\/p>\n
As I reflect on all of the leadership roles that I have held, and all of the follower roles that I have held, the word that strikes me in this definition is “process”.\u00a0 When I think of the word “process”, I always assign “time” to this word.\u00a0 Every process takes time.\u00a0 Does true leadership take time?<\/p>\n
We have all experienced situations where an individual can lead or influence a group of people in a moment in time.\u00a0 Assigned leaders are expected to be able to make decisions, cast vision, develop and implement strategy from the moment that there position is announced, and successful leaders appear to accomplish all of these things.\u00a0 Emergent leaders can influence others and create a following from the time that they enter a room, and we have all seen this play out in positive and negative ways.<\/p>\n
The best way that I can pull together my thoughts and my learning from the reading is to apply it to examples from my healthcare world.\u00a0 I have two professional licenses:\u00a0 Physical Therapist and Emergency Medical Responder (EMR).\u00a0 Responding to an emergency scene requires an entirely different set of leadership skills than treating a rehabilitation patient.\u00a0 On an emergency scene the group context and goals are known, and power is absolutely necessary.\u00a0 The incident commander has legitimate power that is assigned to him\/her, as well as expert and informational power.\u00a0 There may be a relationship with the commander, in which case there may be referent power, but even in the absence of relationship everyone must follow that person’s lead.\u00a0 The influence on the team is through assigned power – the group context dictates this in order to attain the goal of saving lives.\u00a0 This is positive leadership that is established in seconds.<\/p>\n
In the physical therapy world, the process is quite different.\u00a0 The team is often two people:\u00a0 the physical therapist and the patient.\u00a0 The physical therapist does have informational and expert power, but wielding this without referent power is often disastrous.\u00a0 Coercing a patient in pain to do exercise is almost never successful.\u00a0 The group context, and the goal attainment requires the use of referent power and the development of a trusting therapeutic relationship so that the patient understands that our purpose is mutual.\u00a0 This is positive leadership that is established over days.<\/p>\n
Obviously both scenarios are different, and the different leadership styles are absolutely.\u00a0 Based on the reading, one could argue that the first leader is functioning more in a management role than in a leadership role.\u00a0 So I pose the question again (more to myself than to my fellow students):\u00a0 does true leadership take time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.” (Northouse, 2016, p. 6) As I reflect on all of the leadership roles that I have held, and all of the follower roles that I have held, the word that strikes me in this definition is “process”.\u00a0 When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,2,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ldrs500","category-emr-posts","category-ldrs500-unit-1","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}