Читать книгу Leadership in Veterinary Medicine - Clive Elwood - Страница 15

This book is grounded in practical experience and the ‘real world’ of leadership in veterinary medicine and outlines thoughts and ideas extrapolated to that context from writing and thought leadership from outside the veterinary professions. Given the rate of change of thinking around leadership/followership and the relative scarcity of active research in the veterinary context, it is inevitable that a textbook of veterinary leadership will not be able to rely on a strong specific evidence base. It is, therefore, based on my own opinion, perspective, and practise, supported where possible with reference to background reading and with specific reference to published works as required. I am writing as practitioner, translator and interpreter. It will, I hope, create differences of opinion, and the ideas I put forward will be open to challenge. Given the breadth and depth of the literature on leadership and influences upon it, there will be areas that I overlook, deliberately or otherwise, which others may feel deserve inclusion and emphasis. That is well and good; if it stimulates debate and discussion and further reading that will be pleasing and, if there is any stimulation of further research on leadership in veterinary medicine, so much the better.

There is a separate argument that making a study of leadership entirely based around published numerical data (‘evidence‐based’) fails to emphasise that it is a socially constructed individualistic phenomenon, the richness and variety of which is lost if it is broken into numbers and data points. We must be prepared to use and draw from other approaches, such as the use of personal narrative, as required to help us construct a rich understanding of what leadership means for veterinary medicine. With this in mind, I have tried to take a balanced approach as I write, emphasising what is known/understood (cognition), behavioural approaches to leadership, and also considering the unconscious; what might be out of day‐to‐day awareness. Throughout the book I have placed vignettes to illustrate particular points and these are deliberately designed to emphasise emotional responses to the subject matter, and to illustrate the importance of ‘leadership’ as an individual experience, co‐created with others.