Rowitz On Leadership

In my book,PUBLIC HEALTH LEADERSHIP: PUTTING PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE, I argued that leadership is complex and occurs at multiple levels. In this blog, I want to explore the five levels again and discuss change at the various levels. The first level involves the development of leadership skills at the personal level. The leader needs to develop himself or herself at the personal level and incorporate all types of leadership tools to guide the personal growth process. There is also a need for the leader to incorporate a leadership mindset or mental model that incorporates leadership and lifelong learning into what it means to be a leader. Since leadership is interactive and also change-making, the personal skills of relationship-building and change management becomes an important set of tools for the leader to master at the personal level.

The second level involves learning the tools related to building teams, coalitions, alliances, and partnerships. These collaborative come together to interact and address a common need. Their goal is to address a challenge, solve it and make a decision that benefits not only the team but also the organization or community that they represent. As soon as a decision is made a series of changes will be initiated. These changes may or not make positive things happen. There may be resistance on the part of some of the team, coalition, alliance or partnership members. These groupings need leaders for change to happen. Leaders must utilize tools from the traditional or new change management toolkits.

The third level involves agency-based leadership. Agencies are constantly in flux. Everything from new rules and regulations to new program or product development changes agency priorities. In our modern organizations, change is a constant. There cannot be a sustained status quo. The structure of the organization may help or hinder change and change opportunities. Leadership is critical in an environment in which conflict may run rampant. The leader must function as an organization arbiter at the same time in which external demands often predominate. The leader needs change tools as well as tools of strategic planning, conflict resolution, visioning, and action generating tools and strategies.

The fourth level involves the leader in community, politics, community transformation, collaboration, transactional and transformation leadership and many other activities. The tools are many, the applications often difficult, the successes sometimes rare, the finances often declining, and so on. The process of building social capacity and eventually community capacity takes time and effort. Community work requires collaboration not only at the community level, but also at the vertical level with government at the state and federal levels. Leaders will spend much of their time advocating for such things as improving access to health care. Change is not only constant, it seems to operate at multiple levels.

The fifth level is the professional level in which leaders share their stories, challenges, opportunities, experiences, and advocacy with other leaders in their field. Paradigms will change as a result of change. New programmatic models will be shared and tried in different contexts. Information-sharing and knowledge management is critical at this fifth level of leadership. It has been my purpose in this posting to begin to look at change in the context of how leaders work and carry out their day to day activities. Change and leadership also are critical in crisis situations. These issues will be explored in other postings.