Essay on Personal Leadership Model

Introduction

Organizational performance is achieved with the help of outstanding leadership qualities and performance. In order for an organization to grow and perform better, the kind of leadership they possess really matters. If the leadership is not according to industry standards they will not be as productive as the rest of the organizations in the industry. This will mean that they will lag behind in terms of organizational performance. In order to better utilize the leadership of the healthcare organization, the hospital should ensure that their leaders in management and other dockets have the best leadership skills and qualities. The leaders should also make sure they evaluate themselves and work on their leadership skills. A leader who is all rounded will ensure top notch performance. An all rounded leader has management skills, inter-personal skills as well as social skills such as emotional intelligence. Healthcare leaders are expected that when they entered the work place they can be in a position to easily identified errors and mistakes and follow up to ensure things are running as smoothly as they should. Assessing the work environment includes considering the morale and needs of individual team members, as well as the department or strategic organizational direction. A good leader uses their own skills and natural leadership qualities to enhance positive outcome through the personal interactions with employees as well as using their emotional intelligence.

Section One: Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

Emotional intelligence is described as the capacity to get, use, and deal with your own feelings in positive ways to mitigate stress, impart adequately, understand others, beat difficulties, and stop conflict. Emotional intelligence can also be described as is the ability to perceive emotions (both our own and the emotions of those around us) understand the causes and meanings of different emotions, and use this knowledge of emotions to guide how we think about and respond to people and situations (Salovey, Mayer, & Caruso, 2004). Emotional intelligence has five major components to it. These are self- awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. Emotional intelligence has four main sets of skills. These are the self-management, self-awareness, social awareness and relationship management.

Self-awareness is described as the core of emotional intelligence. This is because in order to understand other people’s emotions and feelings, one has to first understand their own. Self-awareness includes three skills; emotional self-awareness, where you can peruse and comprehend your feelings just as perceive their effect on work execution and connections; precise self-assessment, where you can give a practical assessment of your qualities and limits; and self-confidence, where you have a good and solid feeling of one’s self-worth.

Self-management is described as the capacity to deal with our practices, thoughts, and feelings in a cognizant and useful way. Self-management is consists of five competencies. these are Self-control, which is monitoring troublesome feelings and motivations; transparency, which is keeping up with norms of genuineness and uprightness, overseeing yourself and obligations; and versatility, which is the adaptability in adjusting to changing circumstances and beating deterrents; accomplishment direction, which is the directing drive to fulfill an inner guideline of greatness; and Initiative, which is the preparation to take advantage of lucky breaks and act.

Social awareness is our ability to accurately get on the feelings of others and get what is truly going on with them. Social awareness consists of three competencies which are empathy, which is getting others and taking a functioning interest in their interests; organizational awareness, which is the capacity to peruse the flows of hierarchical life, assemble choice organizations and explore legislative issues; and service orientation, which is perceiving and meeting clients’ needs.

The other skill in emotional intelligence is relationship management. A leader who has relationship management skills are able to use the understanding of their own feelings and those of others around them to make successful personal interactions. Relationship management includes seven competencies. These are visionary leadership, which is rousing and directing gatherings and people; developing others, which is the affinity to fortify and uphold the capacities of others through criticism and direction; influence, which is the capacity to practice a wide scope of powerful techniques with trustworthiness, and furthermore incorporates tuning in and sending clear, persuading and very much tuned messages; change catalyst, which is the capability in starting novel thoughts and driving individuals toward another path; conflict management, which is settling conflicts and cooperatively creating goals; building bonds, which is fabricating and keeping up with associations with others; and collaboration and teamwork, which is the advancement of participation and working of groups.

All these skills and competencies of emotional intelligence are important and necessary in leadership. They help a leader to make better and informed decisions based on the emotional evidence they have. Certain emotional intelligence concepts affect specific leadership competencies. Such concepts such as empathy are important in leadership skills especially in the healthcare industry. This is because the leaders can be able to actively listen and relate to the patient’s condition. This way, they will be in a better position to know how to handle the situation. This will improve their leadership skills and performance in general. Visionary leadership is another concept of emotional intelligence that affects the quality of leadership. A leader who is visionary will be in a better position to steer their organization to greater performance. In general, by building upon the four set of emotional intelligence skills, a leader will be in a better position to improve their leadership skills and hence increase performance. When a leader is able to understand their emotions, they will be in a better position to effectively control their emotions. When emotions are in check, a leader will be able to think and act rationally and will hence make a better and effective leader.

Section Two: Personal Leadership Assessment

Stress is described as the feeling of emotional or physical tension. Stress brings about various changes such as temper, irritability, frustration, anger and might even go to the extent of raising the blood pressure. If a leader or a healthcare organization is faced with stress, the quality of their work will deteriorate. This is because they will not be in a better position to handle their emotions and hence their work is affected.

There are various ways to cope and manage stress using emotional intelligence. The first is recognizing your emotions. When one knows their emotions, they will be in a better position to control them. This will mean that they will be more resilient and less likely to succumb to a burn out or depression in the case of severe stress. This means that despite there being feelings of anger and other stress related symptoms, the individual will not allow the anger to take control of their actions.

Another way of managing stress is by not demanding for perfection from yourself and others. This means that you allow yourself to understand that sometimes mistakes can be made and that perfection is sometimes hard to achieve. With this in mind, one will not be under pressure to deliver perfection in impossible situations. As a result, they will not pressure themselves and will therefore reduce their emotional tension.

Another way of managing stress is by recognizing one’s mistakes and not dwelling on them. When a leader has a high emotional intelligence, they are able to recognize their mistakes but will not dwell on them. They will choose to learn from their mistakes and move on.

While working as a volunteer at our community hospital, I learnt the art of first aid and wound dressing for minor injuries. At one point, I dressed a wound to a minor cut of an elderly man. The man came in again after three days to get redressed for the wound. Upon inspection, I noticed that the wound was not getting better. I was perturbed by the fact that the wound was minor but was still not getting better or why it was not getting better. I therefore decided to change the dressing method as well as prescriptions. I then dressed the wound and gave the elderly man new dressing compliance instructions to follow regarding the wound. In future if faced with the same challenge, I will first consult the attending doctors and nurses for their opinions and inputs on the way forward regarding such cases. This is because they might have a better insight on the matter as compared to me. By asking for their opinions and insights, I will be in a better position to understand a different dynamic of the same subject. This will improve my qualities and experience from the insights of the more qualified staff and personnel.

Section Three: Personal Leadership Brand Statement

A personal leadership brand is how a leader interacts with other employees in order to achieve results. The personal leadership brand statement simply states the identity and the uniqueness of a leader. A strong personal leadership brand statement will explain to fellow workers the leadership qualities that the leader possesses. A leadership brand should be developed with several considerations such as the organization’s direction as well as its need. Depending on the kind of direction needed, the leadership brand can now be created. A good leadership model will define adequately the mission of the organization in a few words. A proposed example of such a leadership brand would be “warrior for a better life for all patients”. This is because the organization direction is to provide quality care to its patients by being accountable and equipped with information and knowledge. Based on the results of the competency analysis done to show strengths and weaknesses and the results of the emotional intelligence, a good leadership brand statement for me would be informative accountability so that I can effectively lead the hospital to financial success and accountability by being informed of all the sectors of care, the emerging trends, improvement to existing methods as well as adding more knowledge to effectively handle the patients.

Section Four: Personal Leadership Model

In order for a healthcare organization to achieve maximum organizational performance, the needs to be division of duties and delegation of roles. This will require that there be subdivisions of medical personnel to handle the division of duties. For those teams that are highly effective, there should be a method or way of keeping them effective rather than letting their enthusiasm die off. As a result there should be leadership strategies that have been set up in order to guide the highly effective teams. Such leadership qualities include setting up of a vision statement. This will ensure the highly effective teams are aware of their role in fulfilling of the hospital vision. Another strategy to set is to introduce recognition for the highly effective teams when they succeed on a task. This will help to motivate even the lower teams to work better in order to receive the commendation. When the highly effective teams get recognition, they will now strive to ensure that they are better than they were. As a result, there will be more work done meaning that the organization will achieve better performance. Another strategy is to commit to continued process of seeking more information and education. This means that the highly effective teams will have a wider knowledge base. This will mean that there will be more ways which are safer and less costly than the ones already setup. As a result, the organization will experience better performance.

Financial forecasting is said to be the process whereby an organization tries to predict the upcoming future events and prepares for them now. It is the prediction of possible future financial position of an organization. Financial forecasting is important because it gives a leader a picture of what their visions and goals look like financially. With the financial forecast in mind, a leader can now effectively plan and strategies on the best leadership style to use. There are various leadership styles that can be used effectively in line with the financial forecast in order to yield greater financial performance of the hospital. I the financial forecast of the organization predicts better financial position, a leader can use transactional leadership style to ensure an even better performance. Transactional leadership is where the leader offers incentives for those who perform better. This will ensure that all employees are motivated enough to continue working even more effectively. Another leadership style that is most effective in all situations is the charismatic leadership. Charismatic leaders have a vision of where they want to lead the organization as well as a personality trait that motivates others to follow their leadership and directions. With this leadership style, creativity is present and is often highly motivational. This will ensure that employees yield better results even when the forecast was negative.

There are various leadership styles as there are various definitions of leadership. Different leadership styles translate to different approaches of leadership. The leadership approach determines what an organization’s vision and mission will be. A leader who is directional and goal oriented will have a mission and vision that will help lead others to the goals of the organization. Vision and mission prescribe how employees should conduct themselves in the pursuit of performance. In charismatic leadership however, creativity is highly encouraged meaning that the vision and mission are followed but not as strictly as in autocratic leadership where what the leader states is followed.

Conclusion

In order to achieve better financial and general performance of a healthcare organization, a leader should exhibit high emotional intelligence. This will help the leader to easily connect with their employees and understand their strengths and weaknesses. This will mean that they will assign duties based on strengths and thus performance is guaranteed. Also, leaders should use financial forecasts in order to know their expected future position. This will help the leaders in effectively planning for the strategies to put in place to ensure future success.

References

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