Ducimus: We Lead. “To Know Soul”

For the past several years I have been using a model for leadership based on the Latin word “Ducimus,” meaning “We lead, “  borrowed from the motto of the Royal Canadian Infantry.  Perhaps my own roots drew me to this phrase.  On the wall of the U.S. Army Infantry school at Ft. Benning in 1980 was slogan I have found myself returning to since I left there at the age of twenty: “Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.” (Pardon the language, but that’s what it said.) The idea captures the essence of leadership in any domain: to lead from the front and to step forward when your natural inclination is to run away.

We approach leadership opportunities with three areas of focus.  Regardless of the task, we must lead self, lead others and lead work in the unique context of the place or the mission we are responsible for.

In the first case we must know and understand ourselves, to be able to really look in the mirror.  It is a matter of developing and refining character throughout life, seeking feedback and harnessing our talent, temperament, “timber” (what we are made of) to influence “trajectory” (where we are naturally inclined to go).

Leading others is largely a matter of developing emotional intelligence. According to the work of Golmen and others, this includes self-awareness and self-management as well as empathetic awareness of others and skill in relationship management.  Emotional intelligence helps us to understand the importance of situational leadership as we learn to use the right leadership style with the right person under the right circumstances.  Most leadership challenges I have seen have been failures in this kind of situational leadership.  Frequently, for example, it is the application of the “commanding,” directive style in situations where an affiliative, collaborative approach would have been more effective.

Each work situation is unique, and thus we must also learn to lead differently in each organization.  This means that we will assess where the organization is in its own life cycle and apply the appropriate approach to leadership based on that assessment.  We will prepare for and respond to organizational change; adapting the organization and its people to meet the strategy and not letting the organization’s structure drive the strategy instead.  And finally we work to achieve “resonance” as we labor to shape the “invisible architecture” of the organization, those intangible factors that shape the culture and climate of the people and place.

Thus it is the responsibility of the leader to “know soul.”  The soul is the moral, emotional nature of a person or an organization that gives it its nature or sense of identity.   We must know and possess our own souls.  We must be able to know and to touch the souls of those whom we have the privilege of leading.  And we must know the soul of our organizations, and in this latter case we must take specific steps to shape the organization’s soul: its culture and climate.

For those of us leading in medicine “Ducimus” is first a statement of condition:  we lead.  By default those of us in the medical professions – physicians, providers, nurses and medical administrators – are expected to be the leaders of our Nation’s health care system.  Our patients and their families look to us to be the stewards of their care and the systems that provide them care.  We need to move our systems from healthcare to health, away from the “disease-industrial complex” toward patient-centered well-being.   All too often to date, we have not been successful.

Second, Ducimus  is a declaration:  we will lead.  We will not surrender our patients or the heath care systems we know that they need to assumptions or to business models that make medicine profitable – even for us – at the expense of those entrusted to our care.

And finally, Ducimus is an imperative: we must lead.  American medicine needs leadership – now more than other.  If we are going to create a system that is efficient and convenient, results in the highest patient experience and health outcomes, provides quality care, yields health and well-being when and where patients need it, and is still economical then things will have to change.  That will take leadership.

It will not be easy.  We are going to fail.  We will go through difficult seasons where we see no growth. There will be periods and settings without progress in the frozen ground of “just the way we’ve always done things.”

But if we are willing, if we step up, if we will be the men and women we hope those with whom we work will become, if we embrace change with courage and humility we will see change, slowly and gradually. And we will come to a day where we can look back with the satisfaction of knowing that when it was our time, our moment, when it was up to us – we led.

Chuck Callahan  Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front  https://henryv43.wordpress.com/