Leadership
Introduction
This report details how my experience during my evidence based initiative (EBI) has changed my thinking about leadership.
I work as a Principal Support and Business Analyst for the NHS Wales Informatics Service, where I am responsible for leading and supporting a small team of four business analysts and the Welsh radiology information system (WRIS). The change that I have been leading, is the implementation and continual operation of a support webpage that will improve and streamline communication between the WRIS support team and its users.
My leadership experience
Prior to starting my EBI, I had always considered leadership to mean the same as management. It is only since reading academic literature during …show more content…
The resources within this context theme were very relevant to my EBI, as the NHS are both the stakeholders in my EBI, as well as my employers. Within this context I came across the NHS Leadership Qualities Framework, which is made up of nine leadership dimensions. Each dimension has a brief description, explaining why it is important and what it is not (UK Government NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, 2006). This framework helped me to visualise my development path and understand where my leadership skills stand at present. I have identified that I need to work on my confidence and assertiveness, and develop my ability to communicate when I have too much on by learning to say “No”. I am hoping to work on this throughout the rest of my EBI; delegating tasks and setting deadlines should help me develop my confidence in practice. I am also planning to read more of Ravens (2008) bases of power, and power and interaction model to help me find ways of developing these …show more content…
I am beginning to learn there are key differences between the two, but also recognise that leadership and management, qualities and behaviours often overlap. Grint (2005) suggests that leadership cannot be defined and that it is ‘an essentially contested concept’; an opinion shared by many researchers. While, Kotter (2009) suggests that leadership is about coping with change, whereas management is about coping with complexity, and suggests several competencies that align with each