Surgeons as Educators A Guide for Academic Development and Teaching Excellence

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In summary, the work of leadership requires both a relentless diagnosis of the
current (or evolving) situation and an ability to adapt style to situation [ 17 , 20 ,
29 , 30 , 31 ]. To do this, leaders must focus their attention so they can understand
the situation as a set of important and dominant variables, and then detect the
relationships among these variables and the likelihood of their effect on the
future. Leadership styles are alternative ways of behaving that can facilitate the
results leaders want to achieve [ 30 , 31 , 39 , 41 , 42 , 46 , 47 , 54 , 57 ].

Useful Theories That Underlie Models of Effective Leadership
Practices

There are four theories that underlie effective leadership practices and that are par-
ticularly relevant to surgical leadership: (1) situational diagnosis, (2) collective
intelligence, (3) fair process, and (4) goal theory.^24
Mary Parker Follett has said of situational diagnosis, that leaders must under-
stand the whole situation in order to effectively diagnose and determine the next
steps. In particular, analyzing the situation requires a deep understanding of the
interrelations among the environment, people, technology, structures, the work to be
done and how all of it is changing [ 23 ].
Collective intelligence, the second theory, is the ability of a group to perform a
wide variety of tasks. It begins with the following proposition—people are the
source of novel ideas and strategic innovations; however, no individual is smart
enough to evaluate his or her own ideas. Only through a collaborative process where

(^24) There are four underlying theories that help us to explain this—situational diagnosis, collective
intelligence, fair process, and goal theory. I do not have time to go into these theories, but I will
refer you to the following topics and authors:

1. Diagnosing Situations and the Discipline of Strategic Thinking—[ 13 ]


2. Collective Intelligence—[ 62 ]


3. Goal Theory—see [ 40 ]


4. Fair Process—Kim and Mauborgne 2007 [ 58 ] and [ 13 ]
   3. Share ideas,
   coach and
   facilitate
   making
   decisions
   2. Explain your
   decisions and
   provide
   opportunity for
   clarification

4. Turn over

responsibility for

decisions &

implementation

LL

M M

MM

MM

M

M

M M

M

M M

L

M

M M

M

L

M

MMM

M 1. Providing specific

instructions and

closely supervise

Fig. 20.4 Visualizing the
Attention Structure of the
Four Leadership Styles

20 Teaching Surgeons How to Lead