Hello and welcome to this webinar, an introduction to leadership for veterinary nurses. Thank you so much to many pets for sponsoring this session. My name is Helen Silver McMahon, and I'm a veterinary nurse and research and development director at VetTE.
I'm lucky enough to have absolutely loved every moment of my career for over 20 years in practise, and then I went on to study human factors in clinical patient safety at the University of Edinburgh as a master's. Now I thrive on applying this knowledge to develop and deliver professionally relevant training for all members of the veterinary team. In this session we're going to explore leadership and what it and consider what it means to lead.
We're going to understand the pitfalls and challenges of leadership. We're going to consider the attributes of effective leaders, and we're going to understand the crucial relationships between leadership and communication. We're also going to explore the practicalities of being an effective leader.
The first thing I wanted to start with is to ask you all a question. Are you a leader? In your role currently, do you consider yourself a leader?
I'd like you to just ponder this question for a moment and think about the times within your day that you might be a leader. It's often the case that we associate leadership with titles like manager, director, or coordinator. And these are the roles that we consider to be decision makers.
The people who influence may cast the longest shadows or cause the most ripples across the pond. It's really important to consider what leadership is and consider the difference between leadership and authority. Eisenhower defines leadership as the art of some getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
Which is nearly impossible to do if you only have authority and no leadership skills. Leadership is an acquired skill, something that's learned and practised. We have to consider that authority is something that's assigned.
It's a very different animal. So a leader is someone who whose ideas and actions influence the thoughts and behaviours of others. Through the use of example and persuasion and an understanding of the goals and desires of the group, the leader becomes a means of change and influence.
Leadership has also been described as a way of thinking, a way of acting, and most importantly, a way of communicating. And Brene Brown defines it a leader as anyone who takes the responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes and who has the courage to develop that potential. So we know that leadership is an acquired skill, something that has to be learned and practised.
And we've touched on the idea that leadership is a way of thinking, a way of acting, and most importantly, a way of communicating. Leadership is defined by Corey Brooker as no, not a position or a title. We lead through action and example.
And that's my favourite quote on leadership. We need to understand that whilst we may have been given a title or a position. It's really how we act and how we model behaviour that influences others and without That action an example, we are simply managing people.
We are not leading them. To be an effective leader, we need to understand what an effective leader looks like, and sometimes we can do this by considering how other people have led us. So I want you to just take another moment to reflect on your career to date and consider your favourite leader.
Who's been the best leader that you've worked with and what was it about them that made them particularly special to you? We know that Rhona Flynn, O'Connor and Creighton. Defined leadership as the personal qualities, behaviours, styles, and strategies adopted by the team leader and other team members and influences how and whether a team achieves their objectives.
Leadership is recognised as an important non-technical skill over many safety critical industries. And it can be broken down into 4 key skills elements using authority, maintaining standards, being able to plan and prioritise, and managing workload and resources. When we're using authority.
And assertiveness, it refers to the ability to create a challenge and response atmosphere by balancing assertiveness and team member participation and being prepared to take decisive action if required. The leader must know when to apply his or her authority to achieve safe task completion. When we talk about maintaining standards, this relates to compliance with essential standards such as SOPs, as well as supervision and intervention if any deviation occurs.
When we think about planning and prioritising, this includes coordinating and communicating plans and interventions. Therefore, it makes sense that good leaders also have to be good communicators. And we also know that it's important that leaders can manage workload and resources, both theirs and those of the team.
Flynn found this a study of instant commanders showed that effective leaders go into a situation and first of all diagnose it. And then they have a a range of skills available and match his or her style to that situation. And we're going to talk about that situational leadership as we go on.
Many companies have looked at what it means to be an effective leader and what effective leadership looks like, and companies that you would have heard of, such as NASA and Google have looked at things extensively in this area. So it's important that we learn from their learnings. When we look at NASA's research, they suggest that effective team leaders are appropriately assertive, that they communicate task responsibilities.
That they can balance responsibility with situational leadership. They can involve all the resources that they have at their disposal. They can communicate expected norms again, that important factor of communication being so tightly woven with effective leadership.
They can also establish authority. And they are able to model appropriate behaviour, and that's key in their success. We know that there's other key attributes that are required by leaders.
Having good situational awareness is imperative, being able to gather information within a situation. Interpret that information, then anticipate what might happen as a result. What the next instrument a surgeon needs or what the client needs next or any other opportunities you see for situational awareness and then through that anticipation, being able to consider how we might solve problems that might occur.
As I've mentioned several times already, excellent communication skills are required by leaders. We know as part of these communication skills, we need to have empathy. We need to be able to step back.
Whilst remaining self-aware and achieve that understanding of other people, put our feet into their shoes just for a moment or two, leave the laces undone and walk around and try to understand why they might be behaving in the way that they are and listen to concerns that they have without judgement and just holding space with that person. We know that having kindness is incredibly important as a leader. And as I've already mentioned, a deep self-awareness is very important.
We know that because leadership is often associated with higher stress, it's important to have stress resilience and be able to remain calm. We talk a lot about resilience being the responsibility of an organisation, but it's also really important that individuals foster a sense of resilience and have wellbeing that means that they can remain calm and remain emotionally stable. It's important that good leaders remain humble and remain aware of the power of a team and understand as this quote by John Wooden says that the main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.
Frequently when we look at examples from high performance sports, we see what we perceive to be a leader. We perceive Steve Redgrave, who won his 5th Olympic gold medal in Sydney in 2000. As being an incredible athlete.
And the leader of the crew. However, arguably the main reason he was so consistently successful was his ability to get the most out of the people in the crew he rode with over his 16 year Olympic career. Similarly, when we look at the sky cycling team, they've endured enormous success over many years at the Tour de France, but they've always had a star rider.
At any one time, but we only produce this star through the acceptance that the rest of the team must be led in a way which means actions and decisions are made for the good of the team, not for that particular star. So humility in practise as a leader is essential. It's essential that we're situationally aware and we can apply situational humility just as we do with our leadership.
The importance of humility is often overlooked. Team humility is essential for the success of the team, and fostering humility within teams creates a very special energy which allows innovation and opportunities to occur. As Amy Edmondson says, it's very hard to learn when we already know.
When we are leaders, we need to model humility, and we can do this through demonstrating a willingness to learn as well as acknowledging the specialist knowledge that other people can bring to the table and share. We need to make sure that we maintain a proper placement of ourselves. We don't want to be come across as overly important or overly unimportant, not taking credit for what others have done is very important as a leader.
We need to show show care and concern for another group or organisation members through checking in at appropriate junctures and assessing what's needed for others to thrive. And we need to foster and develop an open and honest feedback circle, which allows for an understanding of what one does well and what we need to improve upon. So as leaders, when we demonstrate humility, we need to consider, as Stephen Kobe says, that we need to seek first to understand and then to be understood.
It's also important to understand that within the veterinary environment, we may not have the luxury of stable membership within a team. We may not work with the same people in the same shifts on the same days at the same time. And so we need to employ something called teaming.
We describe a team as a people, a group of people that are independent in achieving some shared outcome with a clearly delineated membership. However, teaming is collaboration coordination to get important things done without the luxury of stable membership, and this is how we work a lot of the time within veterinary hospital environments. So if we think of how this works, we like to use a football team to describe and my husband would be upset if I mention any other than Liverpool Football Club.
So these are a highly practised and skilled group of individuals, and they work together as a team 100% of the time. They train together and they understand how each other moves. However, if we were looking at teaming within a football context, it would be more like a group of lads in a park who have gathered together for a kick about.
They don't practise together the same group 100% of the time, but they still want to have that that end goal to enjoy themselves and to score goals. So this. The concept of teaming that we experience within veterinary practise, it means that we work with different people each day or different combinations of teams which vary day to day.
And indeed even the tasks or roles which people may undertake might be different within that team. One day we may be the anaesthesia nurse, one day we might be asked to be the circulating nurse, or one day we might be asked to be the consulting nurse and it bringing the patients in for their operations. But We know that teaming is a very good way of making sure that we can adapt and be dynamic in our environment, and it's also really relevant when we start to include students, locums, new team members, and rotating interns that might be joining us in our team for short periods of time.
So as leaders, it's important that we understand how to put teaming into practise. What can we do to make it easier to team more efficiently and effectively. So the first thing we need to do is let go of the need to have all of the answers.
We need to free ourselves from feeling that we should know everything, and this enables other people to pitch in to collectively problem solve, and this may help you feel more in control, in fact. The next thing we can do is make some time to connect. Even if it's only briefly, we need to get to know our new team, what they can bring, what they can contribute, and it might surprise us, especially if somebody is completely new, but sometimes it's important to reestablish those those team connections with people you haven't perhaps worked with very recently.
Don't assume that you have sufficient familiarity. Not to have to do this. It's important to take time to consciously and intentionally open that channel of communication so that everybody feels psychologically safe, so they know that they can speak up, they can speak to you, whether you are the leader or not in that situation.
We want everybody to be able to feel this way, and we do that by modelling this behaviour. So it's also important to be curious and welcome curiosity, make it easier for people to share their ideas and their concerns, and be less worried about hierarchy or what people think of each other. We all know that horrible feeling of being a work experience student standing in the corner of the room, not daring to speak up and feeling that we're wearing a cloak of invisibility.
By bringing each and every person into the conversation. When they notice something that might not be going well, they feel safe to speak up and let us know, and that can really impact on the safety of our patients and on the safety of each other. Amy Edmondson, who first considered the concept of a teeming culture in 2013, says that there's three pillars to this teeming culture.
The first is curiosity. We know that we already mentioned that, and it drives people to find out what others know and what they can bring to the table and what they can add. Passion fuels enthusiasm and effort.
It makes people care enough to stretch and go all out, and empathy is the ability to see another person's perspective, which is absolutely critical to effective collaboration under pressure. And we know that the leader's task is to model these behaviours when leaders ask genuine questions and listen intently to the responses, displaying a deep enthusiasm for achieving the team goals, and they show that they are attuned to everyone's diverse perspectives, no matter their position in the hierarchy. Curiosity, passion, and empathy start to take root in culture.
As leaders, we're not all going to be exactly the same. And it's important right at the start of your leadership journey to consider what kind of leader you want to be. What are your strengths?
What are your challenges? And how can you develop your identity and your personal core values? So we are just going to look at a self-awareness exercise next.
So I thought that I would include an exercise in today's webinar to look at our strengths and the areas that we might feel more challenged and to really ponder what kind of leader we would want to be. So let's have a look. I wonder if you would like to jot it down on a paper perhaps as we're going and have a real good think about what what areas for you would be important.
So please feel free to pause the webinar at this point and just work through this exercise in your own time. So, first of all, we're going to look at real life strengths, and these are the things that we really enjoy doing. We feel good about doing them, and it really shows.
We get good feedback and we're aware that we do deliver precision and quality in these areas, and we often find a state of flow. Something perhaps we do quite frequently, and something that when we think about what we've achieved when we do had a good day, and perhaps at work and play, what what we were doing and what brought us that joy. So We need to think about the tasks, the the the situations and sometimes the people we're with, what contribute to that those strengths.
So have a think about what fits this description for you and perhaps just jot it down on a piece of paper or come back to it at another time. The next section we look at are unrealized strengths. These are things that we enjoy and are good at, but we don't do them as frequently.
Perhaps these are things that you feel that you want to learn to do better, and you feel energised by them, but you might also feel that you're quite rusty at doing them, and perhaps you are good at doing them, but maybe you don't do them very frequently, so you don't feel as confident. So they still give you more than they take from you. You want to do them.
So have a moment to think about what these might be for you, what are your unrealized strengths. So the next. Core we look at is our learned behaviours.
These are things we do on auto pathlet we can do because we've learned to do them more competent at them, but this doesn't mean that we enjoy doing them. Other people might come to us and ask us to do them because they recognise we're really good at them. But they might not bring us joy.
In fact, these could be things that de-energize us because we have to concentrate more on them, and they might be things that we wouldn't usually leap to do or volunteer for. They might be things that we've had to do to get us where we are now. So have a think, what are your learned behaviours and.
What, what would you put in this area? And then we look at the areas we would consider challenges, the areas which we might consider where we at. We often procrastinate with these tasks, and we wouldn't devote lots of voluntary time to these tasks because we feel them very draining.
In fact, we might suggest that they suck the life out of us. So again, I just want to have a moment with you to recognise. Those things that DNRR is you.
What are those things that you would consider a challenge or even a weakness? I then want you to ponder all of these things together in how this aligns with what you're doing at the moment and how knowing what our strengths and perhaps the areas we find more challenging can help us realise when perhaps we need to delegate to others. You may find if you did this exercise with your team that your realised strengths are not the same as everybody else's in the team, and those things that de-energize you might energise other people.
So it's worth doing this exercise with those members of your team that. You you work with regularly and who perhaps support you as a leader because you might find that you pick out areas that where delegation would be really very mutually beneficial and helpful to all of you. When we consider our strengths and the areas we might find more challenging, we could also do a core values exercise, and I'll let you have a look on the internet for one of those.
They are a list of core values, and you basically spend some time looking at each of the core values and thinking about what they mean to you and what things you prioritise as a leader and as a person. But when we know what our core leaders, our core values are, we can begin to consider our leadership style, and knowing our leadership style can put you on the path to being a more effective leader. So we know that there's 8 primary leadership skills, and I'm sure you're already familiar with many of them or can match them to people who've encountered you've encountered previously.
So the first is democratic leadership. It sounds exactly like what it is, and the leader makes decisions based on the input of each team. Although he or she makes the final call, each employee has the equal say on the project's direction.
Then We know that democratic leadership is one of the most effective leadership styles because it allows lower level employees to feel that they can exercise authority and feel safe to speak up. And They use this exercising authority wisely in the future positions that they might hold. Autocratic leadership is the inverse of democratic leadership.
It's a leadership style where the leader makes decisions without taking input from anyone who reports to them. Employees are neither considered nor consulted prior to a change in direction and are expected to adhere to the decision at a time and pace stipulated by the leader, and we know that autocratic leadership is rarely effective. The French term laissez-faire literally translates them to let them do, and leaders who embrace this type of leadership afford nearly all the authority to their employees, and it's sometimes effective.
Strategic leadership is commonly effective and is is a desirable leadership style in many companies, because strategic leadership thinks and supports multiple types of employees at once. Transformational leadership is perhaps the, you know, the gold standard, the thing that we would all wish to reach for and this is always transforming and improving upon the company's conventions. Employees might have a basic set of tasks and goals that they complete every week or month, but the leader is constantly pushing them outside of their comfort zone.
Sometimes. Sometimes Sometimes it is effective in transformational leadership, when you have a truly great transformational leader who encourages people to stretch and grow, what you find is these are the type of leaders who actually develop followerships. And transactional leadership is also fairly common today and that's where managers reward their employees for precisely the work they do, and it's sometimes effective.
We also know that coach style leadership is commonly effective and is similar to a sports team coach. The leader focuses on identifying nurturing the individual strengths of each member on their team and helping them realise those strengths. Bureaucratic leadership, very similar to autocratic and similarly rarely effective.
This type of leadership might listen and consider the employees, unlike autocratic leadership, but the leader tends to reject any employee input as it conflicts with the company policy or past practises. So I hope that gives you a little bit of an overview of the eight primary leadership styles. There's also various theories of leadership, and I promise that this is the last piece of heavy lifting in this session.
The 33 theories of leadership we can have trait theories, style theories or contingency or situational theories, and Contingency or situational theory emerged in the 1970s and poses that there's no single leadership style that's effective in all situations and that the style needs to match the situation. And the optimal spe, depending on the size of the team, environment, technology, and strategies can only be decided in that moment. So when we're considering the best way to lead in in the veterinary setting.
We need to first consider that setting. What Does it look like and what's special or challenging about it? Is it fast or slow paced?
Is it dynamic and changeable, or is it steady and unchangeable? What does your practise in the area you might lead in look like? And when we look at veterinary practises, we often conclude is that actually none of the typical approaches to safety really fit for us.
We know that all of these areas are required in the world that we work. So when we look at the three contrasting approaches to safety, I think this will explain it a little bit better for you. And this was created by Charles Vinson and Rene Amalberti.
When they were looking at real world and medical scenarios. So, What we have is 3 different types of safety. We've got ultra adaptive, where we have to embrace risk.
We've got high reliability, where we manage risk and ultra safe where we avoid risk. So within the ultra safe environment we prioritise the prevention of any risk being taken, and we have to maintain an ultra safe environment. Within the high reliability sector we prioritise procedures and adaption strategies to manage the risk that we know is inherent within that environment.
And during the ultra adaptive area we prioritise adaption and recovery strategies, so we Understand that within this environment we have risk. We have to move quickly. We have to be dynamic.
We have to understand that we have to change. And so what we need to do is be able to adapt and also recover when risk is inherent in what we're doing. So if we consider what we would consider to be ultra adaptive environments within the wider world, we consider trauma centres, mountaineering, armed forces, or wartime and professional fishing, and for us in our veterinary stings, this is likely to be the emergency clinic, the ICU.
We know that we've got patients coming in who are sick, who require our immediate attention, and there may be risks involved in their care that we have to almost. Overlook to some degree to understand that we have to adapt to accept some of the risk, so that we can treat the patient. In other areas of our clinics, we know that we have scheduled surgery, for instance.
So in the wider world, high reliable environments would be areas where we have surgical scheduled surgery, we have firefighting or the drilling industry. So in these areas we use strategies and procedures and protocols to manage the risk that's inherent. So this is where we have scheduled surgeries.
We know that we use checklists, we use specific handover tools to make sure that we're managing that risk and making sure that we can adapt as we need to to mitigate that risk. But there are some environments where we need to be ultra safe. We need to avoid risk at all costs and follow strict prevention strategies and We know that radiotherapy or chemotherapy within the veterinary profession would be areas that this would certainly be demonstrated in, where we know that we need to have policies and procedures in place to make sure that chemotherapy is not extra raised and that people are not exposed to radiotherapy.
So Within all of these areas as a leader you can see that the leadership might be very, very different, so we need to consider how we can be ultra adaptive in one area and ultra safe in another, and that those leadership styles might be might be quite different or require different things. And with that in mind, I really wanted to reassure you that. With our situation, our veterinary profession, our daily work, it's not a one box at a time approach.
It's a messy reality, a bowl of spaghetti all jumbled up that we have to react and respond to these different areas, to these different challenges and different risks at different times. So with that in mind, I wanted to focus on three of the important elements of leadership that I feel are really important for veterinary practise. And the first that I wanted to mention is situational leadership.
I've, I've already mentioned that it was emerged in the 1970s and proposed that no single leadership style. Was effective in all situations, and that's extremely true of our ultra adaptive and ultra safe environments that have to come together as I've already said, when we look to match our style to the situation, our style will be very different in those situations. So the optimum style depends on the team, the task, and the individual, and it's that coming together that makes it a really special leadership style.
So it's also known as functional leadership, and we know that the leader has to be the person who's making the adjustments to the particular situation or the task. And the style of leadership is not dependent on the skills of a leader. It's based on the leader's ability to adjust to the requirements of a team or an organisation in order to be a better and more effective leader.
So in this moment, we know that the leader needs to be effective in being situationally aware, being aware of what's going on with them, being able to pick up on subtle clues or not so subtle clues, and respond and react in real time to those things. We also know that they have to be very good at communicating. So I'm going to give you a couple of examples of situational leadership, so.
I want you to imagine that an emergency A&E has just received a large influx of patients that have been critically injured in a bus crash. With a large amount of patients in the emergency room, the emergency room supervisor must implement a telling style of leadership to direct the emergency room workers in an effective manner. So this requires the emergency room supervisor to provide constant supervision.
And regular direction to all of the emergency room staff to ensure that all of the patients are taken care of in a timely manner. Another example of situational leadership might be a manager who's overseeing the completion of a project within his team. The manager's team has ample experience completing similar projects, and they're confident and able to take responsibility for their work.
Knowing this, the manager can use a delegating style of leadership throughout the duration of the project and delegates tasks to each team member with minimal supervision. And we know that there's lots of advantages of situational leadership for both the leader and for the team involved. We know that leaders are able to use whichever leadership style they believe is best for the given situation, and it can be more comfortable for good leaders who know how to use it.
It's fairly simple. All we need is the ability to assess the situation. And then adjust to it and it can create a more comfortable work environment for employees as the leadership style implemented will typically match their their needs.
And we know that this type of leadership accounts for the various levels of development in employees and helps to address each employee's skills and levels and needs individually. We do know that there's some disadvantages of situational leadership. It can be really confusing when a leader constantly changes their approach, and it might be that this is not understood by the rest of the team.
It's also appreciated that if we're focusing on changing. To the, the situation, we're only focusing on the short term goals and long term goals might be overlooked, so it's important to consider how we meet those long term goals. And it often doesn't work when repetitive tasks that needed to be completed, as many of those types of task driven environments are not a flexible type of work.
We also know that it depends on the leader's ability to judge the employees maturity level. Some leaders are unable to do this and therefore it can be really difficult in these situations. But The main thing is that we keep an appreciation of the fact that our world as veterinary professionals is very dynamic.
It's very changeable. It can be ultra safe at one moment, it can be ultra adaptive at another, and what we need to do is balance these needs of all of the different areas of the individuals of the team and the tasks that they are undertaking to make sure our leadership is appropriate at all times. The second type of leadership that I think is very, very, applicable to the vet profession is shared leadership.
And it's already been embraced within the within human healthcare. And due to the increase in complexity and the rapid evolution of practises and processes, and it's understood that allowing staff to lead in the areas that they demonstrate excellence is advantageous. So this comes back to when we did that strengths and challenges exercise where we know that there might be other people within the team that might be stronger at certain areas and recognising their strength and asking them to lead in that moment is advantageous.
So within the NHS, the leadership framework forms the foundation of leadership behaviours that all NHS should aspire to, and it is based on the concept that leadership is not restricted to those formal leadership roles, but there's a shared responsibility for the success of an organisation. The third type of leadership that I want to mention is compassionate leadership. We know that there are many benefits of compassion.
It improves communication, staff wellbeing, and it contributes to staff willingness to go that extra mile. We know that a study performed in a large population of nurses from 17 countries showed that practising compassionate leadership provides positive outcomes at all levels, from individuals and teams to the system as a whole. And we know that Cochrane describes compassionate leadership behaviour as assuming the responsibility for supporting, guiding, and communicating about compassionate care.
We need to reward success, we need to motivate staff and clinicians and create a fully aligned culture of compassion. We know that a culture of compassion and compassionate leadership is a top down commitment, and it extends through all of the organisation levels. Exercising compassionate leadership and modelling compassionate leadership in veterinary workplaces can involve setting an example of compassion towards employees and paying careful attention to their needs, and by recognising and celebrating compassionate behaviour of among team members, leaders can reinforce these interactions, which then helps the compassionate culture become long lasting and a natural part of veterinary practise.
Where leaders model a commitment to high quality and compassionate care, this impacts everything from clinical effectiveness and patient safety to staff health, wellbeing, and engagement. And it's tempting to think that compassion and compassionate leadership is a little bit soft and fluffy, and it always takes away the easy way out. However, when we adopt compassionate leadership, it means that challenging conversations will still happen.
Compassionate leadership requires courage. The courage to listen to tough messages from those we lead, to explore their understandings of challenges they face, and to be prepared to have our own interpretations challenged and rejected. Compassionate leadership means creating the conditions.
Through consistently listening. Understanding, empathising, and helping to make it possible to have tough performance management and tough conversations when they are needed. Staff complain frequently that they only see their leaders when something goes wrong and that even if they do listen, nothing changes after the conversation.
Compassionate leadership, however, ensures a collective focus and a greater likelihood of collective responsibility for ensuring high quality care. So compassion is an act. It's what we do, and there's many different types of compassion, self compassion, compassion towards others, and compassionate leadership.
We know that there are many benefits. We know that demonstrating compassion to colleagues improves the quality of communication between the team and therefore its effectiveness. We know that compassion is a powerful therapy for those people practising it and for the recipients.
And compassion improves staff wellbeing and it reduces the incidence of burnout and absenteeism. And as a result, staff are likely to be more motivated and stay in their positions longer. So we need to foster this compassion to ensure that our staff are willing to go that extra mile, and when they do, we know it's likely that we will see that in our client satisfaction as well.
So it's, it's a win-win throughout. To practise compassion, the first step is to recognise when we see somebody who we suspect is suffering. They might be demonstrating irritability, a sense of hopelessness.
They may be more cynical than they normally would be. They may seem exhausted or lack motivation or hint to drug or alcohol overuse. When we recognise this type of suffering, we need to be generous in our interpretation.
We need to feel empathy towards those who are suffering, and we need to act to alleviate it, to make time to listen and give them a chance to talk. And sometimes this might be making a cup of tea or sending a carefully worded text. So now that we've mentioned the three different styles that are really important to being a leader of that practise and how we can use them.
I wanted to dive a little bit into communication because I, as I've mentioned a few times already, I truly believe that communication is hugely important in being a great leader and being an effective leader. So When we look at how communication is broken down, we know that over half of the way we communicate is through body language. So 55% is thought to be around body language.
38% is the tone of our voice. And actually only 7%. When we're communicating is the words that we need .
To to use and it might not always be as simple as this. The values of these areas have been found to differ depending on the context and the content of communication, but what this does demonstrate is that in fact the words that we use are meaningless if our body language or our tone does not marry up with them. And this was a a a an idea, a theory proposed by Albert Moabian, who was professor Emetrius of Psychology at the University of California.
And We know that some of his findings have been misquoted and misinterpreted, but what we need to learn from this is that there might be incongruence between verbal and nonverbal communication, and this can mean that the receiver of the communication interprets the message incorrectly. So We need to consider what this means. We need to consider how our nonverbal communication impacts what we're saying, so our gestures, our facial expression, our body posture, our body contact, all of the things on this slide really, really impact how we're perceived.
And as you can see from this fave Italian football referee. His body language, his nonverbal communication is screaming the words that he's not saying, and you know, we would immediately associate this kind of gesture, body possession position and facial expression to mean, you know, something when that might not be the case. We also need to consider the tonality of how we speak.
If we imagine Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty and playing God, we imagine this smooth, soft way of speaking that's very encouraging, very calming, and, you know, very rational. So if we imagine Morgan Freeman asking us to pass us a pen, we imagine that as a smooth, you know, please pass me the pen. However, if we consider someone like Gordon Ramsey, his tonality is frequently clipped short.
Blunt And if we imagine him asking us to pass him a pen, we can imagine that it would be similar. It would be clipped short, potentially more aggressive, and maybe more like just pass me the pen. So the request is the same, but how we pick up on that request is very different given the tonality and the body language of those people who deliver it.
We also know that emails . Are the least rich way of communicating and in fact 56% of emails are misunderstood, so we frequently remind people to go and pick up pick up the phone and speak to somebody or better than that actually get up and go and speak to that person so that they can hear your tone, hear your body language when we. Have difficult conversations by email.
What we find is that we associate someone's name with a feeling, and if that person we've butted heads with them before, it's likely that if that feeling is not good, then we will overlie a sense that They are meaning something that perhaps they're not on this occasion, so we always talk about the example of when somebody's name pops into your inbox and you immediately start to hear Darth Vader's death march, you know, we assume that something bad is going to be contained within this email and it clouds our judgement on the actual content of it. It means that when we read it, we overlay what we anticipate to be their tone or their body language, and we can misinterpret entirely what's meant by that. So it's really important that we develop open and inclusive ways of communicating, and we need to encourage our staff to speak up and so we need to embrace the principles of psychological safety.
And these ideas were brought to us as key messages from the clinical human factors group about working under pressure. And so that's a fantastic source of information if you want to look at their their guidelines and key messages. We also know that there's many barriers of effective communication, and we need as leaders to recognise these and do our very best to overcome them.
So we know that when we've got listeners' capacity or workload, if somebody is feeling very stressed, they're not going to be able to listen so easily to people and they're not going to be able to communicate so well if they're stressed. We also know if somebody's been constantly interrupted. If you're having a conversation with somebody and they're being interrupted, the conversation won't flow as easily.
We may miss out chunks, and that can really affect how good our communication is, as we've already mentioned, our tone and our volume and our body language can be hugely influential, but also our voice and our accent can be impactful as well. In fact, if we're concerned that there might be A language barrier, a lack of understanding of different languages that can be a huge barrier which we need to work out how we can overcome. We also need to make sure that we try to flatten any authority gradients that we have or we perceive we have and remain curious so that people feel that we would like to hear their questions and in fact their thoughts to maintain that authority gradient because if there is a huge authority gradient that can really stifle communication as well.
Culture is also hugely important, so it's background noise. Background noise can be really difficult to have effective communication. So when we're communicating with others, we need to employ active listening.
We make sure that we communicate as effectively as we possibly can, and we do that by focusing on the speaker. We ask questions and then paraphrase the speaker's statement so that we're demonstrating that we have a good understanding of of their, you know, what they're saying. We must make special efforts to not interrupt the speaker.
That's really important and we need to be honest and sincere. We also need to be brave enough to say that if we're upset we need to ask to reschedule. That's fundamental in communication.
We know that if we're upset, and if we're triggered in some way, then our bandwidth will squeeze and reduce a huge amount. So we're not going to be able to have that conversation or listen as well as we should, so we might need to ask if we can reschedule. Another area I wanted to have the opportunity to mention in this session was how we build trust as leaders, and I think this is fundamentally important.
We build trust by creating positive relationships. Demonstrating our expertise and judgement and being really consistent, so we need to stay in touch on the issues and concerns of others within our team, and we need to always be balancing the hope of results with our concern for others. And we need to work hard to generate cooperation between others and resolve conflict that might occur between others from time to time.
We need to make sure that when we give feedback, it's honest and helpful and that when we're demonstrating our expertise and judgement, we do this by seeking other people's opinions as well and trusting their ideas and opinions and using this expertise to contribute to achieving results and to be consistent. We need to make sure that as leaders, we are doing what we say we'll do and be a good role model, and walking the talk and honouring commitments and keeping promises and following through on those commitments is really important. So if you've, you know, wanted to have a meeting with somebody, you've set a time and you know, you need to try your very best to keep that promise, that commitment.
And we also need to demonstrate that we're willing to go above and beyond what needs to be done on the occasion that that's necessary. I also love to talk about the concept of an emotional bank account. An emotional bank account was a a metaphor that was described first by Stephen Covey in his seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
And The idea of this is really powerful and really graphic, and it talks about building relationships based on trust, and the basic tenet of this simple yet profound principle is that we maintain a personal emotional bank account with anyone who works or relates to us. The account starts on a neutral balance and just as with any bank account, we can make deposits and withdrawals. However, instead of dealing with units of monetary value, we deal with emotional units.
We know that this concept is really powerful because it transcends time, space, and hierarchy, and it doesn't matter where you are within your workplace, where you perceive you are, where you are within a hierarchy. We know that a kind word from anyone in the office or offering us a lift when our cars being serviced is any level of deposit is at any level is a deposit and We know that when we're relating to people and ensuring that our clients feel seen and acknowledged and each other feel seen and acknowledged, then again, we're making a deposit. So We know that after work we can also do this with our friends and our loved ones.
We know that there are lots of different ways of making deposits in our emotional bank account, and some of those ways I'm just going to describe. So understanding the individual, attending to the little things, keeping commitments, clarifying expectations, showing personal integrity. And apologising sincerely when you make a withdrawal.
So we want to imagine that occasionally we might have to ask somebody to do something that we know they're not going to want to do as leaders. We know we might have to ask them to work a shift or a weekend where, you know, it wasn't their turn to do so. However, When we've built up an emotional bank account with them already, we're more likely to have a good build up in our emotional bank accounts so that making a withdrawal, asking for something for them to help us with is going to be less impactful because they trust us to attend to the little things, to understand them, to look after them and be a good leader the rest of the time.
So in this session, I hope you agree we've looked at a lot of the elements we need to introduce the concept of leadership. And we've looked at some of the challenges and how we might overcome those challenges. Such as communication barriers and the dynamic and changing nature of our work and how to build emotional bank accounts, we've looked at the attributes of effective leaders, what's necessary to be a great leader, and we've looked at the crucial role between leadership and communication and some of the practicalities of being an effective leader.
I really, I really hope that you've enjoyed this session and please do feel free to reach out to me if you'd like any further information on leadership for veterinary nurses. Thank you very much.
