Military Leadership Looking at My Own Cooperative

Military Leadership

Looking at my own cooperative work in a hospital as a leader for an intensive care unit, I can see how I use all three types of leadership that have been covered in the lessons on the American experience of the Vietnam War: strategic thinking, tactical planning, and logistics. In fact, not only do I incorporate all three of those skill sets in my daily work in a mission-driven organization, but I also feel like any successful leader must be willing to incorporate all three of those leadership approaches. Furthermore, a leader must have sufficient personal insight to realize when he or she is unable to fully and appropriately implement a component of leadership and be able to ask for assistance in instituting that component. I feel that as a leader, I am able to recognize the need for all three types of leadership, am able to employ all three types of leadership, and have recognized that my strengths are most heavily concentrated in strategic thinking so that I can delegate responsibility for much of the tactical planning and logistics required for my unit.

Describing the Vietnam War, Colonel Gregory Daddis has said that "conventional language failed to capture the political, cultural, religious, and regional complexities of a country and a conflict which were unfamiliar to contemporary Americans" (Daddis, 2012). Interestingly enough, his statement can be said to apply in an intensive care unit. Medical science and standards of care evolve rapidly, particularly in an intensive care environment. In addition, while the medical team can control treatment, there are many things outside of the medical team's control that impact not only treatment protocols, but also outcomes. To me, the most critical thing that a leader in my position can do is recognize that, as with the Vietnam War, there is no simplistic shorthand to describe what my team encounters in the intensive care unit. We have to make life or death decision in a quick timetable and frequently without all of the knowledge that we would need to make the best decision, but postponing the decision can have fatal consequences for patients. Therefore, it is critical to have a well-established strategy for dealing with specific presenting conditions, but also to have a protocol for deviating from those strategies.

Strategic thinking is the process to plan a course of action. As a team leader in an intensive care unit, I work with others to develop the course of action for patients. To do this, we looked at our goals and the best way to operationalize them. For intensive care, rapid transition to the unit, quality medical care and continuous supervision while on the floor, and appropriate step-down to lower levels of care were all important considerations in looking to develop our processes. However, the idealized process that we would have wanted was not possible; we lacked the funds and personnel to implement everything that would have optimized our strategy. That is when tactical planning became important. Tactics refer to the specific actions needed to implement a strategy. "These actions comprise what is to be done, in what order, using which tools and personnel" (Brydson, 2014). Given the knowledge of what we could work with, the team was able to see how to best utilize resources to meet our strategic goals. Moreover, this is a fluid process; when it became clear that some strategic goals could not be accomplished with the set resources, that required revisiting and revising those goals.