Rowitz On Leadership

When you think about these two plants, what comes into your mind. The dandelion is a weed and seems to turn up everywhere on our lawns and the lawns of our neighbors every Spring and Summer. Orchids are beautiful and yet seem fragile. They are hard to grow but when they bloom, we see such beauty. I recently read an article by David Dobbs in the Atlantic magazine in the issue dated December, 2009. The article entitled “Orchid Children” explored the important topic of behavioral genetics. Dodds explored numerous research studies of animals and humans in this important area of genetics. He first explored the studies of professors of family and child studies. The major findings of this research in which the genes that seem to give us trouble as a species and raise the question of why we find many people who are self-destructive and anti-social and yet seem to add to our adaptability as a biological species. There are children who seem to become anti-social, depressed , addicted to drugs ,and destructive when they have bad parenting or come from bad environments. When the environment is good and the parenting is possible, these children may turn out successful and happy people. These orchid children are clearly impacted by their early life. If orchids are nurtured, they thrive. With the bad environment, they don’t bloom. Yet, there are children who show great adaptability and flexibility and seem to thrive wherever you put them. These are the dandelion children. Primate research studies seem to support this research.

When I read this article, a light bulb went off. Dandelion will manage to survive and often thrive under any type of leader in any environment. They will find the silver lining in all situations. They look for the positive. They will often become leaders themselves. Thriving orchid people will do well if their upbringing was positive and nurturing. If their upbringing was negative, they will not do well. They will become quite depressed in controlling leadership situations. They lack the adaptability gene. Thus, the important question in understanding your reaction to your superiors is whether you are an orchid who thrives only if your background was positive and nurturing or a dandelion that seems to be able to adapt almost anywhere.

In the past few months, I have discussed two important personal leadership tools—journals and learning contracts. In this posting, I want to add a third important tool that leaders in business, politics, and health care have found extremely useful. It is the leader’s checklist. A checklist includes a set of steps in carrying out a defined task or activity. The checklist can be used for many activities from a family planning activity to prepare for a vacation in Europe, remodeling a kitchen, carrying out a case management strategy, responding to a crisis event, or the procedures to follow during brain surgery, I have selected two books so far for book selections that deal with checklists—Gawande and Useem.

In public health, the checklist can become an important tool for public health managers and leaders. It is specifically useful when multidisciplinary teams deal with a problem or activity. The checklist allows teams to outline the process of activities and programs with the roles of each professional on the team delineated. By putting the checklist items in order, an entire program or activity can be defined. This is important when activity one by a nurse has to come before an activity by another health professional. Gawande gave many checklist examples from what goes on in a surgical suite at a hospital to pilots preparing for a flight. Useem applied the checklist to a series of activities that leaders need to perform to be seen as effective leaders. For a leader to carry out activities in a learning contract, a checklist may help in that process. Checklists are not all the same. Different checklists will need to be developed for different programs or activities. A checklist will also save time in that, the leader will not move down the list until other list items are completed. One interesting exception was discussed by Useem(October 2012 Book Selection) in which leadership checklists may be more abstract and involve a number of leadership events that might occur simultaneously or in all events.

I strongly recommend the use of checklists. They do seem to make the work of public health move for effectively and efficiently.

I was recently at a meeting of a number of experts on public health preparedness and response. Part of the discussion related to the discussion of a new set of tools related to preparedness data collection. Another part of the discussion related to a number of tools that had been created to carry out a similar process of collecting information to guide preparedness activities. We have been telling leaders about the importance of building their leadership tool box so that they will be prepared for all types of events and audiences. We have spent much time on the creation of tools to guide our work and are always on the lookout for new tools that will be better than the ones we already have.

Let us go back to our childhoods and the glee we experienced on our birthdays and Christmas when we got all those shiny new toys and games. Each year, these special events were wonderful. The new toys and games came wrapped in colorful paper. We loved unwrapping the paper and hoping we got the latest and most popular of new toys. These shiny new toys took all of our holiday attention. Within a few days or weeks, the shine was off. We played less and less with these toys and games and tried to get our parents or other relatives to buy us something new. Over time, our mothers would say that we should give away these toys if we were not going to play with them anymore. There is an important lesson here for leaders.

I want to talk about what I will call the shiny toy syndrome. I have gone to many meetings which discuss the latest tools that we as leaders will find the most relevant and the more useful than anything that we have used before.. We will be able to get rid of those tools that have been useful and replace them with something better- a shiny new toy. It is important to build and use the best tools that we can and not necessarily the newest. We will need constant assurance that new is better. Shrinking funds may mean that we need to be careful of the new and expensive. It may be that the tools that we use can be tweaked or modified to become more reliable with the modification. Let us go for the best and not the shiniest.

Over the past couple of decades, I have probably seen the musical FIDDLER ON THE ROOF about a dozen times. Each time, I see the musical, I see it from a different perspective. A couple of years ago, my wife played Yenta the Matchmaker in a community college production of the play. Of course, I watched the play from the perspective of Yenta. Yenta is a very interesting character. She is extremely knowledgeable about her community. She understands all the traditions that guide community activities. She takes the time to learn all the strengths and weaknesses of the residents. It is her job to match the young women of the community with husbands who will most benefit the young women and their families. She knows when to participate as an active member of the community and when to stay in the background. She is resilient in that she recognizes she may not always be right and is flexible enough to modify her stance.

Leaders need to have many of Yenta’s abilities. Leaders need to understand their organizations and the communities that surround their organization. They need to understand the people with whom they interact and become experts in building and sustaining relationships. Leaders need to be able to match people with each other to best carry out the activities of the organization. They are experts in collaboration. They know when it is important to be an active player in activities and when to stand back and let others take the lead. Leaders need to be resilient and need to work with their organizations to become more resilient as change occurs. Finally, leaders need to know when to leave. The Yenta Factor clearly helps leaders to become more effective.

I confess. I like but not quite love yet to send tweets. It is so easy to let my emotions run away with me and express my dismay at how our elected officials are running our country. They do not act like leaders although they seem to think they are leaders just because they were elected. I am also dismayed that the electorate do not think through what their votes mean and that their votes count. We vote emotionally and vote over and over again for the same party regardless of what they do. Thank God for the Independents who have the right idea but tend to vote with their pocketbook. Here is a sample of some of ProfLou’s tweets over the last couple of years:

1. Why don’t our elected officials practice what they preach?
2. What makes Republicans think that everyone agrees with them on health reform?
3. Maybe our elected officials need civility training.
4. Public service may go the way of the dinosaurs.
5. Transparency is in the mind of the viewer.
6. Great political leaders are community-centered and not self-centered.
7. To lead is to set a high standard.
8. It’s time for us to stand up to the extremism of the Tea Party
9. Republicans since Reagan don’t believe in a safety net….
10. How often do we vote for the lesser of two evils? Where are the good candidates?
11. Republicans think only about organizations and the rich. Democrats think about people.
12. Is not it interesting that politicians justify their stance by lying about what the public thinks?
13. It seems like the GOP is still fighting the Civil War. Hmmm-Limited government or a stronger federal government.
14. Cost cutting does not improve health outcomes.
15. I wish that I could believe in the wisdom of the electorate.

All of the social media allow us to express ourselves in different ways. This blog allows me to look at leadership in an objective matter. My books allow me to integrate my ideas with the ideas of many leaders and writes on leadership. Facebook allows me to touch base with many friends and leaders in many different venues. Linked in allows me to see how my professionals colleagues to use their leadership to change the world. And finally, Twitter allows me to express not only my discontent but also my expressions of joy when positive events occur. It has been great to see all these outlets become available for communication in my lifetime. Who knows what new opportunities for self expression will occur in the next several decades.

If it is true that building relationships is the most important activity of leaders, then it is important to determine what skills are the most critical for building these relationships. We must build these solid relationships both inside and outside the organizations that employ us to use our leadership skills to make our organizations effective in the marketplace if we are businesses or in the community if we are service agencies. Many leadership books talk about the impact of new technology on our work, the processes that drive organizational action, the use of our partners in business or community collaboration, and the measurement and determination of successful and unsuccessful outcomes. Yet, many writers and leaders today talk about the critical nature of emotional intelligence skills in today’s world if our partnerships and our leadership approaches are to be successful.

Although emotional intelligence is not really a new orientation, it has come to the forefront due to the influence of Daniel Goleman and his five-part model for better understanding the importance of emotional intelligence in our leadership work. The five part model includes:

1. Self-awareness or our ability to understand how our emotions affect our decision-making
2. Self regulation or our ability to control our actions as circumstances and the context of our work changes
3. Social skill is our ability to manage our relationships and use our skills to better impact the direction in which our partnerships move
4. Empathy or better understanding others’ feelings
5. Motivation or as Goleman argues being able to achieve our goals

What is unique about our emotional intelligence is that we can learn to control and adapt our emotions over time. IQ does not appear to be able to change in the way that we can change or control our emotions and have a direct impact on the emotions of others. Although we can creatively move our technology forward and change the process by which we do things, it becomes clear that EI helps us in these activities in a ongoing way. Without emotional intelligence skills, we would not be able to accomplish what we do in an efficient and effective manner. Change would not be permanent without these EI skills in play. EI is not only our secret ingredient for the successes we attain as leaders, it is the ingredient that most often makes our success possible.