Rowitz On Leadership

Leaders tend to look for ways to develop and expand their leadership skills throughout their work lives. My last posting also stated that leaders tend to continue their leadership activities into their retirement years. Earlier, I also discussed the importance of journaling for leaders. The leader’s journal becomes an important tool for the leader in keeping up on personal reactions to events and readings that help guide the leader in future interactions with others. In this posting, we will explore another tool for leadership learning.

The individual leadership learning contract is a tool that many leaders use. The contract has the leader prepare a yearly learning plan to guide him/her each year. As these plans are developed, the leader may need to decide if an executive or life coach is needed to help the individual in the preparation of the plan and evaluation of progress in meeting the goals of the plan. Another consideration here is that the leadership learning plan needs to be seen as a contract in which the leader sees the plan as a set of obligations that guide the leader to become more effective.

Some of the questions that the plan needs to address are:

1. What are my key learning objectives for the next year?
2. What is my reading agenda and conference agenda for the next year?
3. What are my objectives for my agency over the next year?
4. Are there new collaborations that I want to initiate over the next year?
5. Pick 2-3 employees to mentor for the next year?

Now comes the important part. It is the actual writing part and the tendency to lose the plan in a file or some place on our desk. What I suggest is the beginning of a merger between our leadership plan and our leadership journal. The good place to record your personal leadership learning plan is in your journal. Your plan updates and plan progress can also be put in your journal. Thus your own leadership journey becomes a well documented series of events.

For leaders, retirement is not an end but rather a new set of opportunities for new experiences and continued growth and learning. At the end of this month, I will retire from an academic position that I have had for over 40 years. In my first posting “Giving Back” in November, 2008, I provided a list of ten ways that a leader can give back to his colleagues, community partners, and the community. Retirement allows giving back often without conflicting demands on the leader’s time. To review the giving back list, the ten giving back mechanisms included:

1. Sharing Knowledge through mentoring and coaching
2. Commitment to use our leadership for doing things differently as old ways become obsolete
3. Give opportunities for growth to others
4. Provide training opportunities to the staff of our agencies
5. Start a leadership book club
6. Teach others to become systems thinkers
7. Help others to become systems thinkers
8. Teach others to learn and to utilize leadership tools
9. Tell leadership stories
10. Continue your own personal growth

Retirement increases our opportunities to make our leadership continue to grow. Here are ten more ways to give back and grow in retirement:

1. Write about leadership and how to become a leader
2. Apply your leadership wisdom to new venues
3. Help the arts expand by volunteering to help the arts grow
4. Run for political office
5. Use your age and a quality of life plan to show that retirement can be a growth thing
6. Continue to read and attend professional meetings to keep up with your profession
7. Give workshops on leadership topics. You might even get paid for these.
8. Offer your services to Executive Service Corps where retired leaders help local businesses and organizations succeed
9. Continue to travel and grow with your spouse
10. Give your time and knowledge to young people like your grandchildren.

I am excited about what retirement can mean for me. I am not ready for the rocking chair yet. Retirement is just a change of venue.

As I wrote my last blog posting, I became aware that performance measurement issues are also affected by the five levels of leadership. At the personal leadership level, annual performance reviews are all about how well we function as professionals. These performance reviews concern our work performance for the past year and recommendations about how to improve our performance in the future. The Gallup organization argues that these reviews should be based on our talents and how to make our talents work in a positive way for us. At the team level, performance relates to how teams reach their objectives and the whole issue of high performance. High performing teams are built on trust, mastering conflict, achieving commitment, embracing accountability, and focusing on results(Lencioni).

At the organization level in public health, performance is measuring by the adherence to the core functions and essential services of public health and how agencies measure this. At the organization level, performance is tied to results. Performance is also tied to continuous quality improvement. Some writers view performance from the perspective of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, market share, level of productivity, service performance, and growth. At the level of community, it is important to view the impact of collaboration and improvement of the status of the health of the population. For public health, the attainment and improvement in addressing the actions tied to carrying out the core functions and essential public health services also comes into play.

The final level relates to the activities of the profession. Performance is measured more at the qualitative level here. Delivery of papers, poster sessions, serving on regional, state, or national committees are all important measures of performance.

It has been my purpose in this posting to point out that we need to avoid simple explanations of what performance measurement is . It occurs at multiple levels and needs to be seen from a systems perspective.

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.

For over fifty years, I have loved the arts. It was not until college that I discovered classical music. I have always loved popular music and broadway music. That is probably why I still retain my old 45’s, long play phonograph records, eight track tapes, tapes, CDs and many other musical forms. In college, I was a disk jockey and fell in love with all kinds of folk music. As I have grown older, it is country and western music. I love theater and my wife and I have attended plays and musicals for the past fifty years. My wife has been an actor in community theater. I have friends in theater. We have visited art museums all over the world. All of these cultural activities have enriched me and enriched my leadership work. In the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to blend my leadership and arts interests in briefly working with a Florida theater that is redefining itself for the 21st century.

My experience with this theater and my friendship for over 60 years with Carole Kleinberg of Sarasota, Florida who continues to work with theaters as an actor, director and administratively as an artistic director has led me to work with Carole on blending my interests in leadership with my interest in the Arts. Simply, our idea is to train leaders and Board members from any business and cultural sector on expanding leadership skills through the use of improvisation and theater games. In my toolkit, Tool 3-“To Get” and Tool 5–” The Public Health Machine” are two examples of theater games of relevance to leadership. I have tested these two tools with a number of groups who found them of use in understanding how participants can clarify how these practices enhance their understanding of their personal leadership practice. It does appear that leadership development using the other arts will also be possible.

Why leadership and the Arts?

1. Use of the tools of the Arts will strengthen the mental models under which leaders work.
2. Theater arts allow leaders the opportunity to test leadership principles and practices in life-like social situations.
3. Music provides the chance to see how leaders function with music in the background and how music affects leadership performance.
4. Communication strategies and techniques can be improved.
5. The Arts provide innovative approaches to conflict resolution strategies, problem-solving, decision-making, and team-building.
6. Theater games will be useful in emergency preparedness and response practices.
7. Coaching opportunities are possible in theater arts scenarios.

The Arts offer leaders innovative and creative ways to enhance their leadership skills.

A leader’s gift needs to be special because it is really not about monetary things. A leader shares his knowledge, his gifts of collaboration with everyone with whom he or she comes in contact, his or her creativity and ability to turn creativity into action, and an ability to see beyond the walls of his or her organization. In this holiday season, I want to share my gifts to you—my colleagues, my friends, and my readers. As I just watched a beautiful sunset on the patio of my Florida apartment this beautiful warm December day, I realized that my first gift is the ability to see all the beauty around us and appreciate all that this world has to offer us. The world offers us peace, respite, and ability to unwind each day as light slowly moves towards the calmness of the evening. I give you the ability to learn new things each day throughout your life and to know how to make those new ideas enhance and enrich your life. I give you the value and good feelings when you share yourself through mentoring and coaching. I give you access to the books of the world and their ability to make you more knowledgeable and increase the ways in which you will learn from the approaches taken by other leaders. I give you the gift of collaboration and the ability to develop new relationships and to learn the skills of working together and making our communities stronger. I give you the tools of creativity and the knowledge that each of us has areas of our lives where creativity thrives. I give you the gift of knowing how to make your creative acts enhance the lives of others.

This is a special time of year. It is clearly a time to count our blessings. It is a time to make our spirits soar as we get ready to make next year a special year for you and everyone with whom you share yourself and your leadership.