I have often heard of the terms \u201cservant leadership\u201d but had never before taken the opportunity to find material as detailed in scope as the reading for this post.\u00a0 I found the ideas and concepts from the Nordhouse text that details the Model of Servant Leadership (p. 232) thought provoking, encouraging, and challenging.\u00a0 For the purposes of this discussion I have chosen to select a principle from each of the three main components of the model, and for the purposes of my own development all three that I have selected will be, to varying degrees, difficult for me to realize in my practice.<\/p>\n
Context and culture is listed as one of the antecedent conditions that will impact servant leaders.\u00a0 Nordhouse makes the statement:\u00a0 \u201c\u2026 in health care\u2026 settings, the norm of caring is more prevalent\u2026\u201d\u00a0 (p. 231).\u00a0 I would agree that each and every person that enters a health care job or profession does so because they care about people.\u00a0 However, my experience in health care for the last 10 years is that it can difficult to be a servant leader in this setting, and one of the factors that contributes to the challenge is the unionized environment.\u00a0 Whether historical, or whether by design, or by intent I do not wish to debate here, but the context in health care in my province is that the relationship between out of scope managers\/leaders and unionized employees is supposed to be adversarial.\u00a0 It is difficult to be a servant leader in a culture where serving others is constantly viewed through a lens of mistrust.\u00a0 Having been in a manager\/director role now for over 10 years there is hope \u2013 I can see where consistent servant leader behaviours can break down these barriers.\u00a0 However, staff turnover in health care is also a constant issue so it is difficult for servant leaders to develop the long term relationships required to create trust and mutual purpose between employees and managers.<\/p>\n
Conceptualizing is listed at the top of the Servant Leader Behaviours and of the three principles that I discuss this is, and will continue to be, the most difficult for me in my chosen career.\u00a0 From a personal perspective I continue to wrestle with bringing the vision and strategic plans from the senior leaders at 30,000 feet down to the front line staff at ground level in a way that is understood.\u00a0 From a system level, it is difficult to conceptualize the overall goals of health care when they consistently change.\u00a0 Governments are voted in and voted out \u2013 the overall goals change.\u00a0 Governments change direction \u2013 the overall goals change.\u00a0 Public interest groups lobby government \u2013 specific goals change.\u00a0 Communication up and down the lines of authority can be like the game \u201ctelephone\u201d at times.\u00a0 Later on in the chapter Nordhouse discusses that one of the criticisms of the servant leader model is the inclusion of conceptualizing:\u00a0 \u201cBeing able to conceptualize is undoubtedly an important cognitive capacity in all kinds of leadership\u2026\u201d (p. 241). I am truly humbled by this statement and know that this needs to be an area of focus if I wish to improve as a leader.<\/p>\n
The third principle that I will find challenging to consistently realize in my practice is organizational performance under the Outcomes heading of the model.\u00a0 First, organizational performance in health care is a difficult metric to measure.\u00a0 Second, as stated earlier, the culture does not encourage, and in some instances, does not even permit followers to function in a capacity that goes beyond their basic job requirements.\u00a0 Third, my areas of responsibility are very small in the context of the full scope of my organization.\u00a0 However, I have experienced and been inspired by organizations where servant leadership has changed the behaviours of individual employees and how teams function, so I remain committed to the challenge of improving the organizational performance to the extent that I am able for the sake of my patients and their families.<\/p>\n
As I reach the end of my blog I realize that I inadvertently did not select any intrinsic challenges where I discuss how I need to incorporate or improve on my personal servant leader behaviours.\u00a0 Of course I know that this is far from the truth \u2013 there is much that I still need to work on in me.\u00a0 But change in me is a daily, sometimes moment by moment experience; influencing widespread change in a culture and change in others is not my daily experience.\u00a0 So I have preconditioned myself to believe that influencing individuals, groups and situations is more difficult, challenging, and, well… unlikely.\u00a0 So my closing question to invite further comment and discussion is this:\u00a0 are there others who have wrestled with this mindset?\u00a0 And does this mindset put limits on one’s ability to lead?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have often heard of the terms \u201cservant leadership\u201d but had never before taken the opportunity to find material as detailed in scope as the reading for this post.\u00a0 I found the ideas and concepts from the Nordhouse text that details the Model of Servant Leadership (p. 232) thought provoking, encouraging, and challenging.\u00a0 For the […]<\/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-63","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\/63","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=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/achsahs-springs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}