Leadership and vision

This chapter explores leadership and what it means for managers of care services. Frontline managers have a role as leaders, and they also look to their senior managers to provide leadership in their organisation. Previous chapters have already pointed to some of the leading and in ̄uencing that managers can do. This can be, for instance, through promoting to senior managers the dilemmas and concerns faced by practitioners; dealing with crises and making professional or strategic decisions; or inspiring a team to work effectively together. There is an abundant literature on leadership: some from a management training perspective focuses on `how to do it', while other work observes effective leaders in their jobs (for the former, see, for instance, Blanchard et al., 1986; Goffee and Jones, 2000; and for the latter, Kouzes and Posner, 1987; Hartley and Allison, 2003). Government policy for modernising services places great emphasis on the need for leadership, although not always with a clear de®nition of what this means. The requirement to be a leader can appear daunting, bringing to mind the `great men' of history. Early theories about what being a leader means often focused on the traits of leaders as though leadership was a characteristic that resided in them (Goffee and Jones, 2000). More recent work has focused on the potential for leadership to be developed in a range of people and distributed throughout organisations (Hunt, 1991; Tichy, 1997; Greenleaf, 1996). This implies that it is the job of leaders to encourage leadership from others the followers. There may be some tension in leading from the front, attempting to inspire staff, while at the same time promoting their leadership skills. The aims of this chapter are to: