Leadership Challenges

4 Key excerpts on "Leadership Challenges"

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  Leadership for healthcare

  • Hartley, Jean, Benington, John(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  51 CHAPTER 5 The challenges of leadership In this chapter: We examine the challenges, or purposes, of leadership.What is it that leadership is trying to achieve? First, we examine the challenge of ‘sense-making’ – how do leaders make sense of the context and the purposes they are trying to achieve, and how do they communicate this to others to create a clear sense of common purpose? We examine ‘big picture sense-making’ and then turn to consider the different types of problems that leaders may face, and the degree of match between their leadership strategies and the problem, or challenge, to be addressed. How do leaders think about and orchestrate the work to be done? We distinguish between technical and adaptive challenges (sometimes called tame and wicked problems) and the leadership approaches that seem to be most effective in tackling each of these two types of problem. We then turn to examine five concrete Leadership Challenges for healthcare organisations. These are: the merger/acquisition challenge; leading partnerships and networks; leading organisational turnaround; leading organisational change, innovation and improvement; and nurturing future leaders in the organisation. This chapter focuses on the challenges and purposes of leadership (see Figure 5.1).What are the goals or outcomes that leadership is aiming to achieve? We have called these tasks ‘challenges’ in line with an emerging literature that frames leadership purposes in this way (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz and Laurie, 1997; Burgoyne et al, 2005; Morrell and Hartley, 2006). Most definitions of leadership focus on purpose in some way – for example, leadership as being influence towards a common goal, or mobilising others to tackle tough problems. The definitions of leadership from Stogdill (1974) or Smircich and Morgan (1982) are a reminder that the leader’s role may also be to find or frame the purpose not just to implement agreed goals, or communicate a vision to others.

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  Emotional Impact

  Passionate leaders and corporate transformation

  • P. Channer, T. Hope(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  These leaders do not have different expectations, hopes, fears or concerns from the rest of us. But they do have a different focus, particularly in the arena of change. They simply do not ‘see’ many of the barriers around change that others do. Rather it is their focus on the future that allows them to do extraordinary things, over- coming what to most others would be impossible barriers. 12 The Challenges Faced by Leaders are Changing The qualities of 21st-century leadership The 21st-century leader has to be able to meet a number of changing expectations from within and from outside the organisation. Even more than today, a leader will need to be capable of creating and communicating a vision, of providing a binding and compelling sense of purpose, of holding together loose and shifting networks and alliances, and of making change happen. Warren Bennis 1 talks of leaders having to ‘keep recomposing and reinventing their leadership’ which presupposes that they ‘have enough self- awareness and self-esteem to sense when a different repertoire of competen- cies will be needed, without being threatened by the need to change’. It goes without saying that leaders will have to be able to cope with the stresses of the role. In addition to loneliness, there are other pressures identified by Sadler: 2 such as status anxiety (wanting to be simultaneously respected and popular); the difficulty of maintaining a personal identity; and the problem of achieving a balance between work and home. Emotional competence will remain an important topic for businesses. For the leaders themselves, it will have a double importance. First, in terms of their personal well-being and capabilities, for it is unlikely that a leader will be effective at influencing the well-being of the whole organ- isation, in an emotional or in any other sense, unless they are capable of understanding and meeting their own needs first.

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  University Leadership

  Approaches, Formation and Challenges in Europe

  • M. O'Mullane(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  92 6 Challenges Facing University Leadership Introduction This chapter reports and discusses challenges facing university organisa- tional leadership and management in the immediate and longer-term future that were identified by interviewees in response to three sets of questions. Like the other interview questions, a number of character- istics of each interviewee were expected to influence their focus, and consequently, the breadth and detail of answers about challenges as both strategic and operational influences on leadership. The interviewees included experienced senior university leaders, public/civil servants from government agencies with responsibilities for university administration, professors without formal leadership or management positions, middle and junior university management and leadership holders, members of university boards, management consultants, and university administrative staff. This diversity of position and experience in the interview pool gave rise to responses that covered a wide range of challenges, both general to universities and peculiar to a single university and universities within one legislative jurisdiction. The findings are discussed using the broad head- ings in the core research questions. (3a) What are the main challenges for university management and leadership for the immediate future? A total of 678 challenges were described by the interviewees. These descriptors were sorted into groups of similar concerns through an ini- tial data reduction to 104 areas, which were further sorted into 10 Concept Challenges Facing University Leadership 93 Sets based on the broad similarity of focus. These Concept Sets and their numbers and percentages of the total are given in Table 6.1. There are two caveats in the interpretation of this information.

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  Educational Leadership

  Together Creating Ethical Learning Environments

  • Patrick Duignan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  58 Leadership Challenges as tensions Chapter 4 Chapter 4 Leadership Challenges as tensions 59 Many of the major challenges facing educational leaders involve situations where values and ethics are contested. Some of these challenges constitute what may be called ‘contestable values dualities’, or ‘ethical dilemmas’ (Dempster & Berry, 2003; Dempster, 2001; Wildy et al., 2001)). There seems to be agreement that ‘the whole field of ethics is a contested terrain’ (Cranston et al., 2006, p. 108) and for educational leaders it may often feel like they are ‘blindfolded in a minefield’ (Dempster & Berry, 2003, p. 457). Frequently, we tend to think of dilemmas as ‘ethical dilemmas’ because they identify difficult and challenging situations ‘in which a choice has to be made between two equally undesirable alternatives’ ( Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 2007, p. 294); hence the saying, ‘on the horns of a dilemma’. However, the majority of the challenges discussed in this chapter represent situations where there are more than two alternative possibilities; in fact most of the challenges are multidimensional in nature. In this book, the word ‘tension’ is preferred to ‘dilemma’ to describe these situations, because it denotes that relationships exist between a number of contestable values dualities (a dilemma with multiple horns) and that different possible solutions for each situation will reflect how these relationships are mediated. This perspective has profound implications for how educational leaders respond to difficult and challenging situations. The ‘real challenges’ of educational leadership – the ones that keep educational leaders awake at night, cause them to take stress leave or retire before their time – usually involve tensions between and among people based on differences in philosophies, values, interests and preferences.

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