Effective Leadership Through Turbulent Times

There are many leadership styles: democratic, autocratic, laissez-faire, strategic, transformational, transactional, bureaucratic, coach-like, and more. It can be tough to understand which style best defines the relationship between you and the members of your team.

Much work has gone into helping managers identify team members who possess skills that align with the needs of their organization through these different leadership paths. It seems to me, though, that imprudent application of such leadership dogma can be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Given the challenges of the past year, it’s vitally important that organizations be able to nurture and maintain core values that help inspire individual performance during difficult times. Leading our team members so that they persist and thrive through adversity is hard work. It requires vigilance and dedication to your vision and to your team’s aspirations.

Some folks have a unique capacity to persist through turbulent times and to show others around them a positive way forward. That ability to adjust the sails in the middle of the storm is, I believe, especially dependent on three core leadership competencies:

1. An understanding of yourself as a leader;

2. A global awareness of your environment; and

3. Dedication to your team.

UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF

Before we can begin to see ourselves in a position to lead others, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what is most important to us. I often joke that, when I’m in clinic, I enjoy being in a position of authority—but as soon as I enter my home with my little girls, I’m reminded that I’m definitely not always in charge.

I mention this because it’s important to know on a very personal level what your motivation is to enter a position of leadership. If your burning need to be a leader is so that you can add a title to your name, you’d better take an honest look at that motivation and realign it with the needs of the people around you.

Effective leaders must have the humility to understand that the people around them are likely to see things from angles that are not available to them. Are you open to the idea that one of your team members might on any given day have a solution that is more elegant than the one you worked so diligently to imagine? Perhaps you should be.

Another part of careful introspection on your way to becoming an effective leader: Your inner ideals and thoughts must align with your actions. Honest leadership is an absolute must, especially during times of uncertainty. The best leaders never blur the line between being strategic and pragmatic on the one hand and being honest on the other.

AWARENESS OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT

The global pandemic has reshaped our environment in dramatic ways, likely for years to come. In fact, the novel coronavirus and its variants are likely to become endemic. We, like other physicians, have instituted new protocols that help keep our patients, our team members, and ourselves safe. We’ve learned many lessons over the past year, especially regarding how best to deliver care.

The first test we quickly needed to work out in the early days of the pandemic was how to make our teams as efficient as they needed to be. This is where that honest leadership comes into play. In difficult, unanticipated situations like this, our team members depend on us to be their advocates and to be honest with them.

Deliberating over and making tough decisions are important parts of the leadership role. It is crucial for an effective leader to take the time to look at trends, threats, and opportunities, and to try to anticipate major changes. Perhaps no one could have foreseen the ferocity of the current pandemic, but we must be vigilant for such threats in order to see our teams and our practices survive them.

Successful leadership is more visible during times of stress than in times of stability. In our daily clinical operations, we’ve by now all instituted some form of virtual care, and this is likely to continue going forward. We’ve all become hypervigilant about sanitizing our waiting rooms and exam rooms before and after seeing each patient. We grasped the importance of distancing and give our patients the option of waiting in the car until we call them into a large waiting room. We’ve added shields to our slit lamps and front desks, and we all properly wear our masks throughout the clinic. From a purely medical view, the data are clear that these protocols save lives. In these daily operations, it’s critical that we lead by example.

Clinical practices that were well positioned to come together in the face of hardship look like they didn’t miss a beat in the current environment. Our teams want to come to work and continue to improve people’s lives through excellent eye care. They are more likely to overcome challenges if they are confident that their leadership is looking out for their health and supporting them should they need to be out of clinic.

DEDICATION TO YOUR TEAM

The most effective leaders, in my experience, are those who have a natural ability to inspire the people around them to reach their full potential. On the face of it, inspiring someone might seem pretty easy—just motivate everyone around you and they’ll achieve, right? It’s not that simple.

The challenge is in unlocking each person’s highest potential through his or her own motivations, aspirations, and needs, while understanding that you are the ultimate guardian of an innovative, nimble clinical practice.

This balance is realized through a deliberate effort to understand each team member and how his or her goals align with your vision. In doing this, you move away from a stagnant relationship in which a single source of satisfaction drives the interaction: that is, a task is completed because following the order leads to a paycheck.

This mechanical type of relationship is a red flag, and it leads to a culture that is highly vulnerable during times of stress. Instead, we must promote a culture in which each team member fully understands his or her contribution relative to the larger project and wants to carry it out at the highest level.

A bold clinic leadership style that marries the complexity of human nature with imagination is essential for long-term success in turbulent times.