Читать книгу Leadership in Veterinary Medicine - Clive Elwood - Страница 37

How do we know leadership makes a performance difference? Intuitively, of course, we know there is a difference between good leadership and bad, and that leadership matters (Hogan et al. 1994). Assessment of whether or not leadership is effective will depend on criteria you are assessing; excellent financial performance might be seen but at the expense, for example, of a significant negative impact elsewhere (Hiller et al. 2011).

The importance of leadership in the medical professions, from which we can extrapolate, is summed up as follows:

Leadership is the most influential factor in shaping organisational culture, so ensuring the necessary leadership behaviours, strategies, and qualities are developed is fundamental. There is clear evidence of the link between leadership and a range of important outcomes within health services, including patient satisfaction, patient mortality, organisational financial performance, staff well‐being, engagement, turnover and absenteeism, and overall quality of care (West et al. 2015).

When defining and defending the significance of ‘good enough’ leadership I find it helpful to turn the question around and look at the impact of bad leadership. The lessons of patient safety failings in human medicine, e.g. the Mid‐Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandal in the UK, where horrifying failings of patient care have been documented, e.g. in obstetric services, and the contributions of bad leadership to real human suffering, should be more than sufficient evidence that leadership matters (Francis 2013). Even on a much smaller scale, in veterinary medicine, the significance of poor teamwork, and by implication leadership, on clinical error has been shown (Kinnison et al. 2015).

Veterinary professionals are often employed for their skills, as well as their professional status. With the associated responsibility comes authority which, allied with ‘good enough’ leadership, can be used for good. There are a number of areas relevant to veterinary medicine where leadership, as a function, has been shown to be important. These include:

 Well‐being measures, where leadership can have positive and negative effects (Arnold et al. 2007; Perrewe et al. 2016)

 Animal welfare (Higgins and Nicholas 2008; Sfantou et al. 2017; Sinclair and Phillips 2018)

 Public and society (Wagner and Brown 2002)

 Animal health and disease control (Broekema et al. 2017)

 Profitability (albeit a limited, single dimension measurement) (Waldman et al. 2001)

 Research capital (McCormack et al. 2014)

 Higher education (Bryman 2007)

 Conservation (Englefield et al. 2019)

 Business (Bloom et al. 2012)