Rowitz On Leadership

Over the last two months, I have experienced the worst health problems of my life from unexpected back surgery, complications from the surgery, weeks of pain, and a further several day hospitalization. I have experienced some depression with the question of “Why me?” And yet, I have learned so much. I have spent the last several years exploring leadership, management, organizational development, and the oh so importance of connections and collaboration. I have needed to understand how I have put my faith in others from the exceedingly stable 50 years of love from my wife and family. Over the past two months, they have supported me, loved me, and helped me through my turmoil. I have learned to respect and trust all those around me who have kept our activities and relationships going and protect me on the days that I have not been able to protect myself. The skills and expertise of my fellow public health workers on the planet cannot be underestimated. My professional friends have kept me in their hearts and texted and called me on each day of my tortuous journey.

It is all about the relationships in our lives. It is about our trust and faith in each other and our willingness to make changes in order to improve the lives of our fellow citizens. The two most important words in our language is “Thank You.” The greatest lesson for me is to avoid complicating what we do. The basic human skills are the most important. Our leadership skills are about being good servants of the public’s trust, doing our jobs in the most effective manner, respecting our colleagues and resolving our conflicts in trusting ways. We can have diversity in our views but use our differences to build new levels of understanding in the ways that we can work together more effectively and efficiently. Our battles are not over. Fighting for the future of our Nation and the necessary priorities related to improved health and quality of life in a shrinking economic environment provides challengers but also innovative and creative solutions. Progress requires constant change, continuous quality improvement, testing new approaches, and working towards improved health outcomes through more effective performance of our programs and activities.

We will find new partnerships as well as new ways to connect and collaborate. We cannot lose our basic skills but must improve them and make them stronger. The secret is in our communities and our ability to make our ideas work on a foundation of trust and respect for others. It is true that it is important to stop and smell the roses and see all the wonderful connections that your life makes on each morning.

Those of us who work in government or in public universities believe strongly in our heart of hearts that service to the public, our communities and our countries is one of the best and most productive set of activities that guide our work life. We are often willing to work for lower salaries because service to our constituents brings us many personal non-monetary rewards. In our government work, we take ever-shrinking resources provided through taxpayer dollars and use them productively to improve the lives of all the residents in our communities, state, or Nation. We believe in social justice, health equity, high quality public education, public safety, and all other people-based services. We add value to our communities through our work on the public’s behalf. It is true that the taxpayer pays our salaries and requires accountability for the work that we do. We are willing to provide the information necessary to satisfy our accountability. We are seeing our work denigrated by many of our elected officials. We are being asked to take furlough days to balance the budget of our jurisdictions. We are seeing our salaries erode in value or attacked as being too large. Government is criticized as being too big and universities of limited value. We are seeing our health care plans contested as being too expensive. We are also seeing our retirees and present workforce pension plans attacked as being too generous or as being too expensive even though our local governments are spending our personally contributed pension dollars on governmental deficits. Our unions and our collective bargaining rights are being attacked or abolished. We are seeing an increasing number of people who want to shrink government , lower taxes, and cut public programs for the unserved or underserved members of our society. We are seeing our belief in civility as less important than divisive political agendas in government and public life. Money is the driving force in our society today with concern for our fellow man left in the dust.

In the 1970s, Robert Greenleaf conceptualized what servant leadership is. There are many people who see their role in life to serve others and to help others grow and be healthy. Servant leaders are servants first and then utilize their leadership skills to develop programs and service models that will benefit all those whom we serve. The ideas behind the approach to service to others help spread the Greenleaf model and expand on its conceptual approach. In 1998, his colleague Larry Spears defined the servant leader in terms of listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of others, and building community. Many leaders who work in government and in teaching others found a way to voice the reasons why and how they serve others. The model has grown and gained acceptance by many professionals in the helping professions, education, and governmental service. In the last few years, many politicians have criticized these professionals as making people dependent upon them. There have also been arguments that it is not the role of the public sector to do servant leadership work. In addition, the critics argue that people need to take responsibility for their own lives and not have the public sector rescue them from bad choices. Work in the service areas is now being seen in a negative light with the argument that taxpayers do not want to pay for these service activities any longer.

Public sector and educational leaders need to become more active in promoting the importance of our helping those that very often cannot help themselves. The destruction of the cultural infrastructure of our working and middle classes is happening. It is critical that leaders take up the challenge of protecting our partners on this planet. Our decisions need to be made on how we help others to live healthy and productive lives. Of course the economy is important, but it must be seen in the context of helping others. The approach must be “People First.”

Over the last couple of years, I have discussed the meta-leadership conceptual framework developed by Leonard Marcus, Barry Dorn, Joe Henderson and Isaac Ashkenazi. The model was developed to account for the special skills needed by leaders in an emergency preparedness and response environment. In addition, there have been a number of state meta-leadership summits sponsored by the CDC Foundation to bring together leaders from business, government, and the not for profit sectors to explore ways for leaders from these sectors to work together on preparedness issues. During the NACCHO Preparedness Summit in Atlanta in February 2011, a panel discussion was presented to discuss the results of a number of these summits around the United States. I was one of the panel presenters. I will use this posting to review some of my views about the next generation of meta-leadership thought and practice.

In my blog posting, “Meta-Leadership 2.0”, I discussed the issue of connectivity and whether leadership activities across organizations is always effective or not. The issue of research to back up the model needs to be done. The evolving impact of social networks and how they affect relationships is also an important issue. Cross-cultural issues also need exploration. It is important to explore how the meta-leadership model dovetails other leadership models. Personal leadership development activities also impact effectiveness of the meta-leadership partnerships For example, emotional intelligence concerns need to be addressed. The April 2009 posting also raised the issue of how the meta-leadership model moves from a relationship-based model to one that addresses the importance of change and systems transformation. Working on the dance floor is sure different than working on the first or second balcony.

In “Silos and Paradigms(May 2009),” I raised the important issue of how our silos guide our actions. Each silo has a governing paradigm and value system to guide the meta-leadership activities of leading up and leading down. The important concern is whether the silos allow us or prevent us from working across the silos of our organization or across organizations. I coined the term synergistic leadership in the posting to define the meta-leaders who move beyond relationship building to systems change and transformation. In “Resilience(August 2009),” The point was made that leaders in emergency situations need to be resilient and able to adapt to change. This is especially true for meta-leaders in system transformation situations.

In “Meta-Leadership 2.1-The Synergistic Leader(December 2009)”, I pointed out that most meta-leadership activities address short term fixes rather that long-term systems change. Relationships change depending on the activities that the relationship is built upon. Leaders for transformational change may not be the same participants in a short-term emergency situation. In addition, the long term utility of the meta-leadership model is its adaptability to other than emergency situations. This posting also addressed the issue of the life-span of the connectivity situation and that it will vary depending on the reasons why the connections exist. Finally, it is synergism that leads to value-added results. Synergism is a requirement of systems and complexity transformation.

Collaboration must be real( See “Collaboration Is More Than Just A Word”-August 2010). It must be based on the realization that leaders do not leave their agendas behind when they collaborate and negotiate. We use each other’s agenda to come up with realistic solutions to problems and policies that reflect our agendas and values. Collaboration allows us to turn ideas into actions. My two February 2011 book selections add to the important dimensions of meta-leadership from a problem solving and policy development perspective First, Godin talked about the importance of leaders being linchpins within their organizations. Meta-leaders also need to be linchpins in that they need to move their partners to new levels and non-traditional approaches to the transformation of programs and policies.

Second and most important, meta-leaders need to become boundary-spanning leaders(Ernst and Chrobot-Mason). This conceptual model moves us beyond the meta-leader him/herself. It defines the six practices buffering, reflecting, connecting, mobilizing , weaving, and transforming within and between organizations. Leaders need to learn how to span boundaries vertically, horizontally, across stakeholder agendas, demographically, and geographically. Effective leaders need to cross boundaries while respecting the need for theses boundaries or silos to remain. In addition, horizontal collaboration is collaborations with fairly equal partners. Vertical collaboration occurs when partners are not so equal.

Thus meta-leadership defines an important model for viewing how leaders act and what are the factors that affect their ability to lead. However, the model is not complete. It needs to not only be about the building of relationships, it must also be about differentiation between short and long term problem-solving and decision-making. Meta-leaders must also develop boundary solving practices and learn how to use these skills to manage boundaries, find common ground, and discover new frontiers(nexus effect) and synergistic interpretations at the systems and complexity levels of transformation.

February is a month for reflection. It is the time of year when we begin to look forward to Spring. It is the month when we celebrate love at Valentine’s Day and joy through the Mardi Gras season. It can also be a time for us to celebrate our leadership and reflect upon what makes us whole. Leadership is not only about the work that we do. It is about the things that humanize and provide the framework for our lives. It is about the things and ideas that make us grow. This posting will explore some of the things that enrich our lives and make who we are as leaders more meaningful (Also see my June 2010 blog posting). In my book PUBLIC HEALTH LEADERSHIP:PUTTING PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE, I discussed the five levels of leadership—personal, team, agency, community, and professional. In this blog posting, I want to explore further the personal development level.

There are at least eight learning strategies that will enhance your leadership development activities:

1. Lifelong Multidisciplinary Learning
2. Systems thinking and Complexity
3. Reading
4. Exploring the Arts
5. Creativity
6. Family-Work Balance
7. Retreats and Reflection
8. Experiential Learning

To be a successful lifelong learner, learning should not be limited only to leadership. Leaders need to be well-rounded. We need to go beyond the academic specialty in which we were originally trained. If you are a leader originally trained as a physician, now you need to learn about management and leadership, behavioral sciences such as economics and psychology and sociology, political science, biostatistics, epidemiology, community engagement and so on. It is the multidisciplinary perspective that broaadens our view of the contexts in which we work.

Most of our education involved the development of a linear thinking approach to problem solving. The real world of the leader requires more. We need to see the big picture with the role of our agency or organization within it. We need to develop tools that help us to organize our systems thinking perspective. In THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE, Senge gives us a number of systems tools called archetypes to help us in this endeavor. With mastery at this level, we are able to see the chaos that must be addressed in our community work. It becomes imperative that leaders develop a complexity perspective that helps us use tools to bring order out of the chaos that we see.

Leaders love to read and read widely. They read books in many fields and even learn to use fiction to help them understand the world better. I personally give you two books a month to add to your leadership learning in my blog book club as well as a basic leadership bookshelf(February 2010 blog posting). Just visit a local bookstore or explore new books and literature on online book sites. Many books have become available on e-book readers as well. Of course, there is also the excitement of visiting a good library. There are also many internet sites that give you many interesting articles to read.

Exploring the arts also enrich us at many levels. Everything from movies, concerts, museums, opera, symphonies, theater, art exhibits, travel and restaurants teach us much about what makes our culture and other cultures tick. Not only do these experiences give us much to talk about, they also help us view the world from many perspectives. Personally, I find that I begin to understand our country better after a trip to another country. Travel gives me the chance to see us from a number of different perspectives.

It is important for leaders to explore their creativity by doing different things as well as stepping back from a conflictual situation to explore innovative and non-traditional new approaches to addressing the challenges presented. Using new group process strategies like six thinking hats(Edward de Bono) open space technology(Harrison Owen) and world café(Juanita Brown) employ creative approaches to solving challenges of many kinds. Another interesting approach is to use theater games to explore creativity.

Leaders know that it is important to maintain a balance between their personal lives and their work lives. Leaders sometimes let their work overpower their personal lives. Because leaders are embedded in their communities, it is important that they work to strengthen their personal connections. Many of the above listed learning strategies will also support the life balance concerns raised here. It is also possible that the personal leadership tools that I discussed in my blog posting from June 2010 will help leaders better understand how they function in the work and in the family sectors.

In his book SELF-RENEWAL, the late John Gardner discussed the importance for leaders to set time apart for personal reflection. He and others have argued that leaders need to set time apart on a regular basis for self-renewal( For example, see my January 2010 blog posting). Others have pointed out that retreats at a remote site are another mechanism for leaders to collaborate with their work or external partners to review and evaluate their activities. Retreats can utilize creativity exercises and strategies to develop new programmatic directions or to explore and develop their personal leadership knowledge and skills.

Leaders often learn from their action-based activities. If a leader goes out into the community to be actively involved , they and their partners should learn from the activity. Experiential learning will also enhance leadership and give leaders the opportunity to apply leadership knowledge skills, and tools in real time.

Leaders become expert in applying all of these learning strategies synergistically. Personal leadership development is an important precursor to effectiveness at the other four levels of leadership.

The events of September 11, 2001 changed the landscape of leadership development. We began to make a distinction between more traditional approaches to leadership development and the important area of development of leaders who need to function in crisis situations from natural disasters to domestic terrorism situations. During the first decade of this new century, we saw the development of special leadership development programs on crisis leadership. Ian Mitroff wrote several books during this first decade to demonstrate not only that crisis needs to be looked at in detail but there is a need to understand the leadership skills needed to function in all sorts of crisis including business downturns, reputational crises, legal crises generated by changes in the law, and so on. He has also strongly argued about the complexity issues inherent in crises. Vincent Covello gave many workshops on risk and crisis communications. I wrote a whole book on leadership and crisis and how leaders can make their public health organizations more prepared. In addition, I have written a book on traditional public health leadership.

I developed an exercise that I have used in numerous groups to distinguish between the skills of public health leaders as they work in organizations that are not in a crisis situation in contrast to leadership skills which are utilized to ameliorate the impact of a public health emergency. In my early experience with this exercise, groups appeared to make clear distinctions between the skills needed by leaders in traditional or normal situations in contrast to the skills needed to function in an emergency preparedness and response situation. It also became apparent during this period that there was confusion over what was management and what was leadership. Preparedness situations and the general perspectives tied to incident command seemed to reflect more of a command and control management and linear perspective rather than a systems-based leadership perspective. I have covered some of these issues in a number of my blog articles. One of the interesting results of this exercise was an increasing awareness that all leaders need to know how to function in an organization on a daily basis, but not all leaders seem able to function during a crisis. In other words, crisis leaders need to function in both traditional and crisis focused organizations, but some leaders seem to function well only in non-crisis situations. In his book MANAGING AT THE SPEED OF CHANGE, Daryl Conner has addressed some of these issues by concentrating on the importance of leaders  being resilient.

Leaders must be leaders regardless of the realities that they face each day. Leaders develop not only their personal leadership skills, they develop skill for their work on teams and other collaborative relationships, skills at the organizational level, skills at the community or systems level, and also skills involved in promoting knowledge and leadership at the professional level. Leaders need to learn when to manage and when to lead. They must work on trying to develop their personal as well as their organization’s resilience. They must learn that leadership is about normal times and not so normal times stimulated by a crisis. If resilience is low, an administrator needs to be able to draw on the skills of others who can lead in crisis. What this discussion means is that the parallel development of traditional and crisis leadership now needs to be merged. Leadership is about leadership under changing circumstances and contexts. It is time to view leadership as a lifelong learning process in which leaders explore and develop new skills and tools as they need them to address all these changing situations. I have used the concept of synergistic leadership in these postings to define leaders as individuals who draw from many sources and resources to address all possible situations. When the traditional leader cannot deal with crisis, they need to recruit others who can deal with these potential crises. However, traditional and crisis skills build upon each other to form a more comprehensive approach to leadership development. For me, this means that I have to combine my two leadership books into an integrated whole to reflect the complexities of leadership as well as the overall needs of effective leadership in a constantly changing social environment. As I pointed out in my last posting, we now need to consider the impact of health reform and an expanding definition of public health and how our leaders will be affected by these new changes.

When you attend a workshop, it is often beneficial to change your seat after each break. Changing your seat tends to energize you and to give you a fresh perspective on the content being presented. In my October 2010 posting entitled A Thinking Continuum, I began a discussion of the fact that leadership decisions are made from different thinking perspectives. I also discussed the thinking model presented by Heifetz and Linsky in their book LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE about moving from the dance floor to the balcony. This posting will explore and extend the discussion of the dance floor and the balcony. I think there may be a second balcony on which complexity issues are addressed. Synergistic leaders must view things and situations from multiple perspectives and synthesize the information gotten from these different perspectives into a comprehensive view of their leadership world.

In my October article, I equated dance floor thinking to a linear thinking perspective. When you are operating from the dance floor, you are concerned with detail. You are also concerned with keeping situations in balance and as organized as possible. You are a participant in the activities of the dance floor. You concentrate on getting certain results. You have key roles to play. A hierarchical organization feels comfortable. Working in a programmatic silo feels safe. You know the rules and generally what is expected of you. If you are promoted to a supervisory position, your perspective begins to change. You seem to be leaving the dance floor by going up one or two steps to the balcony. You are still a key player but your job responsibilities undergo a key shift in perspective. Being a manager is different. Another promotion and you seem to be moving more away from the dance floor and up a couple of more steps to the first balcony.

Eventually, it becomes your task to observe the functioning and activities of several of the programs in your organization. You are on the first balcony and trying to understand how your organization works systematically. Systems thinking and the big picture now becomes your modus operandi. A move from a more traditional management orientation to a leadership orientation becomes a requirement of systems thinking and working from the first balcony. You notice the structure of things and how the various parts interact. You can look at the dance floor and see how tasks are performed and how potential problems disrupt the activities of the dance floor. You begin to use the tools of systems thinkers to analyze events. The system archetypes guide your action activities. You begin to observe things and events off the dance floor in the hallway and outside the building. You begin partnering activities with external collaborators.

There is a second set of steps up to another balcony. Events and activities appear less structured as you move up the second set of steps. Your synergistic leadership approach allows you to see the mess beyond the structure. You need to expand your leadership beyond your organization and cultivate new relationships as your activities become more complex and less predictable. Structures become less permanent and seem to grow out of the new cultivated relationships. Social networks expand and contract due to increasing social network relationships. You notice more chaotic situations that demand creative interventions to resolve. In one of my workshops “The Paradox of Inside/Outside,” I suggest that many organizations are view mechanistically. This is the dance floor view. As we move from the first balcony to the second balcony, we see as Margaret Wheatley has pointed out that human beings seek organization in their lives and it takes messes to get us to organization. Organization is clearly about developing new relationships and new structures that are co-evolving. It is change that is the organizing force. Order is about our ability to influence our organization and communities to organize, reorganize, and continue to grow more complex. The second balcony can clearly be an exciting place that increases our understanding of the activities on the dance floor and the first balcony.