Leadership during times of change or transition is a common topic in leadership development circles and something that LTC is always facing!
In the United States, we are the most regulated industry and constantly facing regulatory changes. The ever-changing expectations of our customers and provider partners create additional challenges. As an Administrator, I was constantly working to set expectations and manage the expectations of healthcare providers up and down the continuum of care chain. All of this is in addition to leading of team of care givers and all the dynamics that come from being the Administrator or Director of Nursing.
The question is: How do you as a leader guide your team out of the chaos and into stability? Leaders amidst the chaos of change need a guiding concept or principle on which to base their actions, decisions, and reactions. There must be a strategy to avoid being in a constant cycle of reactionary leadership, emergent crisis management and ultimately, allowing CHAOS TO REIGN!
My guiding principle is simple: LEAD FROM A POSITION OF TRUTH… not power.
LEAD FROM A POSITION OF TRUTH… not power
From the beginning of time, literature and history are rich with example of leaders who have used TRUTH or HONESTY as their primary tool in leading their team.
Winston Churchill was brutally honesty with the British public regarding the difficulties facing them as they declared war on Germany. Because of his careful, integrous honesty and engagement with difficult facts, his words of encouragement had even greater impact. When he reminded the British Commonwealth that they had “…nothing to fear but fear itself”, it had greater impact and was not perceived as being trite or dismissive but an honest statement. It was his honesty regarding the difficult times ahead that allowed his words of hope and change validity.
Sybil Ludington is a revolutionary war hero. The daughter of a Colonel in the Colonial Militia, Ms. Ludington took a similar ride as Paul Revere to rally the militia forces in response to British military actions in Danbury, Connecticut. She was effective in sharing the details necessary to rally a response. She was not an officer in the military. She was not an imposing figure but a young teen girl tasked with sharing difficult/bad news and issuing a call to arms that needed to be effective.
TRUTH is the ONLY MEANS to guide and ensure impactful change. This kind of honesty is not reactionary or based in anger but requires you to be purposeful and careful in your word selection. This kind of honesty requires you to be self-aware and intentional. This kind of honesty calls out to employees, co-workers, and leaders. It offers people an opportunity to engage with truth and to choose to align with it and create the path forward. This engagement and interaction with truth in meaningful ways will result in decisive engagement and change individually and as a group. It follows the logic that if a leader is willing to be careful, purposeful, and brutally honest about the negative or hard truths, then he/she must be being honest about the positive statements of truth as well. Your words of hope, your belief that change can happen or is happening, your statements of encouragement are believable because of your complete honesty.
Regardless of your role, as an leader, it will not be a title or relationship with the owner/CEO that will get people to follow your leadership or my consulting guidelines. They do not remain in their leadership positions amid chaos because we are engaging or look like a “great leader”. People remain because they have observed careful, purposeful and complete honesty of the leader. It is not about power… it is about honesty. This undergirding reality has the power to create strength in both the leader as well as their teams, it enables cohesiveness as the teams gather around the facts and begin to envision a different path forward, and it gives people a sense of hope that in seeing their true location in a story that is happening in their lives that in the end, they will reach a new and better place both individually and together in their team/community.
Grace and Peace… Bryan