Aspiring to leadership
July brings us a further step forward in the delivery of Inspiring Leaders, the regional leadership plans.
The initiative itself recognises that sound leadership must be married with service improvement and good financial investment to improve care quality. Also, this month, strategic health authorities will present their talent and leadership plans to the Department of Health.
These plans appear to focus on those aspiring to executive leadership; it would be good to go further and enable all managers to reflect on their career and direct their personal development.
Taking a longer term look at your career means anticipating the future and planning at least two steps ahead. It means reflecting on your competencies and potential contribution. It’s also useful to reflect on your personal and career history to ensure you target the roles that suit you.
Pay heed as well to the working world in which you’re operating. Ever turbulent and difficult to predict, it will impact upon your profession, your sector and the general labour pool. It’s these challenges and opportunities that you’ll need to manoeuvre among to secure your career, home, social and economic needs.
A successful career plan will be based on the broadest outlook of your potential and your potential situation, and be adjusted as you develop, learn and anticipate new changes to your working world.
Path to leadership
A sound plan will reveal the range of pathways you might take to arrive at any given destination and find the role that fits best. It naturally delivers an inventory of your development needs – the new competencies and qualities you need to develop. It provides a new dimension to life-work balance and how to pace your career and development. It’s good for directing and motivating you to volunteer for new responsibilities at work, select development programmes and see how you might aspire to leadership.
For a few, that pathway to leadership is direct: progress to an executive role is rapid and linear. For others, the path to leadership may be less direct.
For some, a career plan and development may need to be “slow tracked”. They may be more suited to a ‘planned portfolio of roles’ to gather the competencies, build their confidence or even test their potential for – or even deal with their concerns about – leadership.
Others may need to pace their progression to fit in with the demands of personal or home life. Some may need to stall promotion to release time and energy to attain a key qualification. For them, executive and other leadership roles become feasible over a longer timeframe.
Not everyone seeks to be a leader or aspires to have a career. Some want only to contribute a specialist skill, realise “out of work” goals or offer parting gifts as they move towards retirement. Each one can lend expertise, skill and support to the organisation and its up and coming leaders.
Recognising a range of pathways to leadership will make us spoilt for choice by creating a still greater pool of leaders more reflective of our communities.
Originally published in the Health Service Journal on 2nd July 2009
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