Leadership in Veterinary Medicine. Clive Elwood

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      3.3.6 Socialised Power Motivation

      The willingness to exercise power is essential for leadership and can feel uncomfortable, certainly when one first moves into leadership. Some professionals have a low ‘formal’ power motivation and do not want to bear the responsibility of leadership. This motivation can grow and may be specific to a given situational need. A socialised power motivation means you are willing to exercise power in the service of the greater good, not just for your own ends (a personalised power motivation). In the veterinary professions, which have a compassionate and broadly altruistic background, only a socialised power motivation is likely to be authentic and aligned with those around you.

      With an excess of power motivation might the risk of moving into areas of overcontrol and a damaging focus on ends as opposed to means. When power motivation is not social, but is personalised, ends are for personal gain and might well be at the expense of others.

      Without some drive to take on leadership, however, no one would step into leadership roles and we have seen the importance and benefit of leadership. Wanting to take on leadership is not something to be ashamed of, as long as the goals are benign.

      Bernie had drifted along for a while, initially enjoying the early years as a veterinary assistant but having no interest in moving up the leadership ladder. For a while, Bernie's drive and enjoyment in veterinary work waned and she very nearly gave up the profession. Then she realised that there was a need to provide in‐house end of life care services and an opportunity to develop a meaningful, values driven business. Gradually, as a small business grew into a much larger enterprise, Bernie found that supporting, developing, encouraging, and directing others when the end goal was something she really cared about, was enjoyable, fulfilling, and worthwhile.

       Admission of fallibility, of not knowing the way ahead, asking for help and time is not showing a lack of confidence. Quite the opposite. Admission of uncertainty in uncertain situations is honest and authentic. It offers others, who may have different and significant perspectives, the opportunity to contribute in a place of psychological safety. Do not be afraid to admit you do not know.

3.4 Intuition

      Using your intuition is about listening to, and cautiously trusting, your ‘sixth sense’ (Gooley and Gower 2018). We are bombarded with sensory data and we each make sense of that in our own way. As data scientists, veterinary professionals are suspicious of, and sometimes trained out of, trusting intuition. But clinicians can legitimately apply all their experience and unconsciously perceived information about the current situation to apply heuristics (mental short cuts) to create action; the same is true of leadership. The key is learning to sense‐check and avoid cognitive errors at the same time.

      3.4.1 Situational Awareness and Social Perceptiveness

      Can you walk into a room and it feels like you could cut the atmosphere with a knife? Do you know that things are tense and that saying the wrong thing at the wrong time might be met with cold stares, tears, or worse? Can you lighten that mood with your presence, body language, careful choice of words and, maybe, an interjection of humour? Do you know intuitively what needs to be done to make things happen and move people in the direction they need to move? That is social perceptiveness and situational awareness. It means you can read the body language and verbal tone and understand what might be going on. It represents empathy and emotional intelligence on a group scale and requires an understanding of the potential interpersonal dynamics that might be in play. For leadership, this ability to read a room, to understand the alliances, antagonisms, friendships and tensions, as they ebb and flow in an organisation (be it in a staff meeting, boardroom, over time during normal operations or even over a colt castrate in a field) is a valuable skill, which means you can head trouble off at the pass and capitalise on the energy and enthusiasm that is present.

      This does not mean you have to be the life and soul of the party to be an effective leader. Nor should you overanalyse, or fret over, all the social currents in a situation. They will be present and inevitable but should not override the need to ‘get the job done’. Excessive sociability and a desire to be liked are not beneficial leadership attributes.

      Not ‘getting it’ is also a problem. Leadership is a relational activity and a failure or inability to understand the social situation means you will be missing important information upon which sound judgements are made.

      3.4.2 Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

      Emotional intelligence has been a popular concept in recent years, and much of the popularity has been generated by Goleman (1998). He emphasises the importance of EQ, as opposed to other forms of intelligence in leadership and his broad definition of emotional competence includes factors such as empathy, self‐awareness, self‐regulation, and social skills (Goleman and Boyatzis 2017). A narrower and more psychologically based definition is as follows:

      Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and their relationships, and to reason and problem‐solve on the basis of them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion‐related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them. (Mayer et al. 2001)

      Whether you like a broader or more specific definition of EQ, without an ability to read and interpret emotions, which are themselves key to relationships with others, a leader lacks a valuable tool. Despite debate surrounding some of the less circumspect claims for the important of EQ, there is acceptance that EQ is an important contributor to leadership (Walter et al. 2011; Webb 2009).

      3.4.3 Empathy

      Empathy is ‘commonly defined as the ability to recognise the emotions of another person while maintaining one's own perspective’ (McMurray and Boysen 2017). Empathy is using one's emotional intelligence to step into someone else's shoes and see the world as they see it, without losing oneself in the process. It is a critical component of compassion. As a leadership function it assists in building a mental model of a situation and predicting responses to decisions, as well as being able to react in the moment to how someone else is feeling.

      Too much empathy, allied with compassion, can overwhelm us and lead to a failure to look after ourselves, putting others needs before our own and becoming self‐destructive.

      For some people, such as those with poor connection with their own emotional needs (e.g. narcissists), empathy can be a more difficult competency to achieve. Where this is the case, those in relationship may feel poorly understood, overlooked, or unimportant. Note that empathy and compassion are not the same thing; psychopaths can understand the feelings of others but do not truly care.

      3.4.4 Embodied Awareness

This the ability to notice your physical responses, e.g. tension in the shoulders, shivers down the spine, a sense of relaxation and ease. Our bodily sensations may be telling us something about the world around us and can be comfortable or uncomfortable. These responses, representing our autonomic nervous system, are aspects of the bidirectional connection between body and mind that represent unconscious responses to the myriad of information that is received from the environment and others around us (Van der Kolk 2015).

      We have varying levels of embodied awareness; some of us are more connected than СКАЧАТЬ