LEADERSHIP AND THE ARTS

For over fifty years, I have loved the arts. It was not until college that I discovered classical music. I have always loved popular music and broadway music. That is probably why I still retain my old 45′s, long play phonograph records, eight track tapes, tapes, CDs and many other musical forms. In college, I was a disk jockey and fell in love with all kinds of folk music. As I have grown older, it is country and western music. I love theater and my wife and I have attended plays and musicals for the past fifty years. My wife has been an actor in community theater. I have friends in theater. We have visited art museums all over the world. All of these cultural activities have enriched me and enriched my leadership work. In the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to blend my leadership and arts interests in briefly working with a Florida theater that is redefining itself for the 21st century.

My experience with this theater and my friendship for over 60 years with Carole Kleinberg of Sarasota, Florida who continues to work with theaters as an actor, director and administratively as an artistic director has led me to work with Carole on blending my interests in leadership with my interest in the Arts. Simply, our idea is to train leaders and Board members from any business and cultural sector on expanding leadership skills through the use of improvisation and theater games. In my toolkit, Tool 3-”To Get” and Tool 5–” The Public Health Machine” are two examples of theater games of relevance to leadership. I have tested these two tools with a number of groups who found them of use in understanding how participants can clarify how these practices enhance their understanding of their personal leadership practice. It does appear that leadership development using the other arts will also be possible.

Why leadership and the Arts?

1. Use of the tools of the Arts will strengthen the mental models under which leaders work.
2. Theater arts allow leaders the opportunity to test leadership principles and practices in life-like social situations.
3. Music provides the chance to see how leaders function with music in the background and how music affects leadership performance.
4. Communication strategies and techniques can be improved.
5. The Arts provide innovative approaches to conflict resolution strategies, problem-solving, decision-making, and team-building.
6. Theater games will be useful in emergency preparedness and response practices.
7. Coaching opportunities are possible in theater arts scenarios.

The Arts offer leaders innovative and creative ways to enhance their leadership skills.

A LEADER’S GIFT

A leader’s gift needs to be special because it is really not about monetary things. A leader shares his knowledge, his gifts of collaboration with everyone with whom he or she comes in contact, his or her creativity and ability to turn creativity into action, and an ability to see beyond the walls of his or her organization. In this holiday season, I want to share my gifts to you—my colleagues, my friends, and my readers. As I just watched a beautiful sunset on the patio of my Florida apartment this beautiful warm December day, I realized that my first gift is the ability to see all the beauty around us and appreciate all that this world has to offer us. The world offers us peace, respite, and ability to unwind each day as light slowly moves towards the calmness of the evening. I give you the ability to learn new things each day throughout your life and to know how to make those new ideas enhance and enrich your life. I give you the value and good feelings when you share yourself through mentoring and coaching. I give you access to the books of the world and their ability to make you more knowledgeable and increase the ways in which you will learn from the approaches taken by other leaders. I give you the gift of collaboration and the ability to develop new relationships and to learn the skills of working together and making our communities stronger. I give you the tools of creativity and the knowledge that each of us has areas of our lives where creativity thrives. I give you the gift of knowing how to make your creative acts enhance the lives of others.

This is a special time of year. It is clearly a time to count our blessings. It is a time to make our spirits soar as we get ready to make next year a special year for you and everyone with whom you share yourself and your leadership.

JOURNALING: A LEADERSHIP TOOL

About twenty years ago, I was at one of my first meetings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I noticed that almost every CDC public health professional was carrying a green book. Throughout the meeting, each CDC person opened their green book and took notes or wrote comments on the proceedings. These green books were journals. Since that time, I have observed many public health professionals carry these leadership journals. Today, many of these individuals carry a computer or tablet like the IPAD in which they now write their commentaries. I started carrying a journal a couple of decades back and I am entering the 21^st century by carrying my IPAD in which I continue to jot down my thoughts and ideas. In the public health leadership institute that I have been running for twenty years, we have started to give all participants journals. This one tool has become an essential for many managers and leaders.

Our lives are so busy. Ideas seem to come at breakneck speed. As leaders, we need to keep our eyes and ears focused on many things and issues in the course of a working day. Our journals prevent us from losing many of these high speed ideas from getting lost. I would like to use this posting to briefly discuss some of the uses of our journals. First, you would go back at the end of each week and make a new entry that prioritizes the ideas of the previous week. Then, give a score from 1-3 with one being an idea to really continue to develop and three being an idea that is interesting but not of high priority at the present time. Write a few lines on the issues ranked one and what are the next steps in developing these ideas. Each month, it is necessary to look back at the high scoring ideas and determine your progress in addressing them. Should some be dropped because a dead end has been reached?

A leadership journal needs to be a living document. Share your ideas with other leaders and have then share their ideas with you. Then, idea-sharing becomes a collaborative activity. It will be in the process of working with others that some of your ideas and the ideas of others will lead to new programs and policies. Don’t lose your ideas. Make your ideas live through making them come to life.

LEADERSHIP:THE ESSENTIALS

Over the last twenty years, I have probably read over a thousand books on leadership and management. A large number of these books present theories about what leadership is and how it works. Many leaders have embraced one theory, combination of theories, or their own theory about leadership and how they practice it . As these theories are examined (see a sample of well-known books that present differing approaches in my February 2010 posting entitled A LEADERSHIP BOOKSHELF), it becomes useful to try to determine the essential skill of successful leaders. To complicate this task, let’s limit the essentials to the five most important skills:

(1)Knowledge with the intelligence to use it- leaders are bombarded with new information on a daily basis from new health data statistics, new public health technical reports, new funding opportunities, and new demands for service based on emerging threats or program emphases. All this new information has to be translated into the context of public health and the governing paradigms that drive public health action.

(2)Empathy and motivation of others- Leaders have learned that the technological expertise that brought them into public health careers has become secondary to their relationships with colleagues and external partners. Leaders struggle to develop the social skills necessary to be an effective leader who is able to collaborate with others with ease. This set of basic skills has come to be called emotional intelligence in recent years.

(3)Risk-taking with action and follow through-leaders need to not only be visionary and creative, they need to be able to take risks and to get their ideas translated into action with well-defined projected outcomes. Every new vision or creative idea has a potential risk associated with it. Many people including colleagues are fearful of change. Risk-taking is the attempt to change the status quo and move in new directions.

(4)Ability to communicate at many different levels- Leaders have to learn to communicate both verbally and in writing. They need to listen to others carefully. They may also have to communicate cross-culturally or to others who do not speak their native language. They need to be able to communicate through the Internet. Social networks can become critical to their work. Most leaders are excellent at using real life events to show how their theories work. They can also be excellent storytellers.

(5)Systems thinkers with an understanding of how complexity impacts their work- leaders understand that they need to concentrate on the big picture. They look at their agency as a whole organization with interacting parts. They see their agency in the context of a whole community. They understand that most of their work is about upsetting the status quo in order to change things for the better. Public health leaders think about the population and how to improve the health of everyone in their geographic jurisdiction. They also understand that the best plans may still lead to unanticipated consequences.

All the other leadership skills that are described by the many leadership writers and by leaders themselves grow out of these five basic leadership skills.

COMPLEXITY AND BEYOND

In recent years, there has been much discussion about looking at systems from a complexity perspective. In the past, local health departments were very much oriented to the organization and its effectiveness in engaging in public health concerns for its jurisdiction with the public health professionals being seen as experts who would provide their knowledge to improve the health of the public. This period was also linear in that the major effectiveness and efficiency concerns for the agency was viewed primarily as a series of issues related to management. Over the last twenty years, there has been a gradual shift in public health agency work to a community or systems view of public health guided by the paradigm of the essential services of public health. As stated in the 1988 Institute of Medicine report on the future of public health and the public health reports to follow, leadership is needed if the public’s health is to improve. Leadership is need if public health infrastructure is to grow and capacity is also to increase. Public health leaders needed to collaborate with other health partners in the service jurisdiction to work together to improve the health of the public by making sure that the essential public health services were being addressed. This more comprehensive view shifted public health from an organization-centric management approach to a community-wide systems approach. An emerging trend was that the systemic approach was not as easy as professionals though. Relationship-building was not always easy. There was competition and hidden agendas within the service area. First, all the collaboration activities began to get complicated. Then the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the picture again with law enforcement, fire departments, the FBI and others becoming involved with public health in the protection of the public. Complexity issues began to predominate the service picture.

Complexity is about building relationships, redefining structure, and unanticipated consequences. We live in a period of constant change. As Ian Mitroff has argued in a number of writings, there has been an increasing number of natural and man-made crises since the 1980s. The resolution of these crises has become more and more complex because of the factors associated with the occurrence of the crisis, the effect of the crisis on the infrastructure of our communities, the response to the crisis by different groups in the community, all the unanticipated results of the crisis, and the difficulties associated with the crisis recovery activities. Leadership is needed to help navigate each of these events. Dealing with an individual organization is less complex than dealing with an entire community. Now another concern has been raised. Solutions at a community level are multi-level with concern not only at the grassroots level but also at the level of infrastructure, county level, state level, and sometimes at the national level. Now leaders must expand their levels of activity to the issues associated with MULTIPLEXITY. This new level of activity involves the integration of a complexity concerns at the horizontal level with our community partners and vertical collaboration and work with partners at higher jurisdictional levels. Putting all the pieces together is a multiplexity set of concerns.

ACADEMIC AND PRACTICE PARTNERSHIPS

In 1937, Everett Stonequist wrote a book which presented the marginal man concept. Marginal men are individuals who have one foot in one culture and the other foot in another culture. These individuals have a history related to these two cultures. If you picture a vend diagram with two circles with each circle representing a culture, the overlap creates a partial synthesis between these two cultures. I spent the first part of my career working in a practice setting in a state department of mental health and developmental disabilities. For the past forty years, I have worked as a professor in a school of public health. My personal experiences make a strong pitch for academics and practitioners working together. Having worked in both environments, I believe that academics and practitioners can work together in many ways of benefit to both cultures. When the two cultures come together leadership becomes important in making the partnership work.

Public health practice is about collaboration with people about important and relevant health concerns in real time and space. Space is about where we live, our neighborhoods, our communities, and our culture. When academics come out of their classrooms, they do so in order to better understand the health concerns and practices of the public. They gain this understanding through research. Faculty give back to the community through training and service. Practitioners want to serve through evidence-based practices and interventions which the academics help them to implement. In many instances, collaboration between educators and public health practitioners has led to advances in improvements in the health of the service populations. Examples include smoking cessation initiatives and improvements in the problems associated with HIV/AIDS. On the negative side, such events as academics leaving a community after a study is done has left bad feelings among practitioners. Academics have sometimes been disturbed by all the limits the community and its workers put on a research project carried out by the academic researchers. On the whole, these academic and practice partnerships have been more beneficial than harmful.

Over the last twenty years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) has funded a number of these academic and practice partnerships through the Prevention Centers, Preparedness research and training initiatives, the national and regional leadership development programs, the environmental educational training programs, and many others. These programs have had many successes. Over the past twenty years, these initiatives have helped build trust between many academic public health programs and the practice community. Many of these CDC programs are now in danger of being abolished due to cutbacks in federal funding Because of major deficits at the national and we could add deficits at the state level. This is a major mistake that may obliterate many of the public health successes of the past twenty years. Without continuation of these programs, collaboration will be difficult to maintain and all Americans will lose as a result. It is important for our academic leaders and our practice leaders to fight to maintain and expand these academic and practice partnerships.