Reflections on leadership

This course has been unexpectedly timely. Our cohort has looked at our own experiences with leadership, learned about leadership styles and theories while watching local and world leaders navigate health care and associated crises brought on by the COVID-19 virus.

I’m looking through new lenses, thinking about leadership from new angles with a better understanding of the attributes of effective leaders. While I still have deep appreciation for Reflective leadership (Castelli, 2016) with its grounding in values and flexibility in looking to the future, I’m gaining a better working understanding of distributed leadership (Julien, Wright, and Zinni 2010) as the institution where I work (like many) is thrust into an online-only course delivery model.

Within the distributed model, leadership is thought to lie within every member of the community, and that when it is their time and space to emerge as leader, they do. When their time is over, someone else emerges as leader. This most closely resembles the relay-like passing of the baton that is happening within my work spaces currently. Instructors are consulting with instructors from different schools in silo-breaking collaboration. Groups of faculty are working with traditional, hierarchical leadership to brainstorm and build new initiatives that will enable our students to complete the programs they are currently in. Everyone is bringing their own strengths to bear in problem-solving, and willingly sharing their resources. The multiplicity of change that we’re navigating together is benefiting greatly from a better understanding of the complexity of our organizational systems (Weiner 2009), and how one change within the system has cascade effects to other parts of the system.

Within my work spaces the traditional leadership has been clear and communicative of the day-to-day things we have needed to know to navigate the rapid changes over the past few weeks. It is interesting to note that Sheninger’s (2019) first pillar, Communication, is central to effective leadership at this time. Communication is being done through a variety of digital media simultaneously in an effort to reach as many people as possible with good, reliable information. We’re watching digital communication methods for work proliferate daily as all people, not just leaders, explore the flexibility and efficacy of digital communication.

While the timing couldn’t be better for our cohort to participate in and observe leadership through these new lenses, it’s been a difficult time to implement planning and project management as many changes are being rolled out without planning, but out of necessity. There simply hasn’t been time to create the scale of change that we’ve undertaken with any forethought. It’s times like these where the strength of our leadership is what makes and breaks the changes. We have to have trust in our leaders as they ask us to implement change. We have to trust in our own ability to be leaders when it is our turn.

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