Personal Leadership Development Plan for Healthcare CEO

Theoretical Foundations

During this course, I have gained immense insight into my own leadership capabilities. I have learned my preferred leadership styles and those I tend to avoid. I have learned about my strengths and about my weaknesses. It is important that I continue to grow and develop as a leader, especially in my need to reconcile caring for people with caring for my organization's uniformity of purpose, and in my ability to persist toward a real solution in times of conflict.

In order to facilitate that growth, I propose the leadership development plan below, based on my goals, self-assessments, and feedback from people who know me well. This plan is not just a one-time task or assignment, but an expression of my values that I will revisit from month to month and year to year. There are several distinct parts to this plan: its theoretical foundations, its relationship to my career and personal goals, a thorough self-assessment, and a time-lined plan of action that addresses weak points identified in the self-assessment. At the end of this plan I have summarized the projected development outcomes I expect as a result of executing the steps in the plan.

The most useful leadership framework I have encountered for my purposes is the Scholar-Practitioner-Leader (SPL) model. This is a model of organizational and individual behavior that I would like to follow for the rest of my life. It emphasizes the equal roles of knowledge, expertise, and social contribution, alongside the ability to lead by influencing others (Avolio & Yammarino, 2002). Using this framework to assess particular leaders' styles, we can see that some organizations privilege one dimension over another. Depending on the organization's needs at the time, this may be appropriate. Many educational and healthcare organizations have adopted this model as an ideal on which to base their hiring and development practices (Thomson, 2007). It appeals to me because I recognize the importance of knowledge and social action in building and leading an organization, especially a healthcare organization. Personal influence, charisma, and transformational actions alone will not be enough to create and sustain an organization whose goal is the permanent personal transformation of clients' lives.

Career and Personal Goals

My guiding goal is to become the CEO of a nationally recognized addiction treatment center with multiple facilities. This goal grows out of my own personal history, my deep interest in human well-being, and my recognition of my abilities as a leader. A close member of my family has had a long struggle with addiction and has successfully maintained sobriety for the past twelve years. Part of his extraordinary transformation took place in a rehabilitation center, so I am very well acquainted with the good that these centers can do. I fully believe in the mission that an addiction treatment center must embody, and I know that it takes a strong, charismatic, and knowledgeable leader to successfully oversee such a program.

One key element of this goal is further education. In the healthcare field, attainment of the terminal degree for one's specialty is essential. It confers respect, prestige, and confidence in a leader's foundational knowledge and capacity for sustained self-directed effort. Doctoral programs in public health, organizational behavior, and psychology can all serve as ideal preparation for running an addiction treatment center. Although education itself is not a certain indicator of drive, charisma, or influence, it is critical for a thorough understanding of the vision I wish to lead my organization toward. Building an organization that can successfully treat and ameliorate addictive behavior requires an understanding of the most recent research on addiction, as well as an understanding of best practices in healthcare administration and organizational management. My graduate career may culminate in a Doctorate in Healthcare Administration (DHA), but my educational development will continue for the rest of my life.

My strengths as a leader are my emotional intelligence, my concern for people, and my ability to collaborate and reach compromise on solutions. These strengths have made me a strong "people person" and a respected manager. Coworkers and friends describe me as organized, prepared for change, able to make critical decisions, and someone who leads by example. It is important that I leverage these strengths in the development of my career and personal goals. For example, these qualities will serve me extremely well in building a team of dedicated professionals, donors, and administrators. They may also open pathways into a healthcare administration career in human resource planning, a context in which I would build my knowledge base about healthcare organizations in general and addiction treatment specifically. Putting knowledge into practice in the field is facilitated by learning in practical settings (Wren, 1995).

My weaknesses as a leader include an imbalance between task-orientation and people-orientation, a tendency to seek stability over innovation, and difficulty leading people who expect a more directive, "male-typical" leadership model. I tend to be more people-focused than task-focused, which can result in a happy team that has not accomplished as much as it should, or has not accomplished tasks as well as possible. I am inclined to give people more time to learn than they may need, and I avoid applying pressure on my team even when a degree of strategic pressure would be appropriate.

Self-Assessment

I am also concerned about how my leadership style affects innovation. As a leader, I know that I need to foster innovation in the structure and function of my organization, but I am less inclined to encourage competition among team members than I am to seek collaborative solutions. Lastly, my biggest leadership challenge to date has been confronting sexism. In the world of healthcare, a gendered division of labor and expertise persists, with men holding the plurality of high-prestige expert positions and women occupying mostly lower-prestige administrative and support roles (Riska & Wegar, 1993). Although this is changing, I still find that my leadership style must accommodate team members who respond best to the competitive, directive, ego-driven style more typically associated with male leaders.

The explicit goals of my leadership development plan are to develop into the kind of leader who:

1) Fosters an innovative environment for my team

2) Is able to lead in both a "feminine" and a "masculine" mode as circumstances require

3) Maintains an appropriate task focus rather than defaulting to a people focus