Leadership in Veterinary Medicine. Clive Elwood
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and Social Perceptiveness
Can you walk into a room and it feels like you could cut the atmosphere with a knife? Do you know that things are tense and that saying the wrong thing at the wrong time might be met with cold stares, tears, or worse? Can you lighten that mood with your presence, body language, careful choice of words and, maybe, an interjection of humour? Do you know intuitively what needs to be done to make things happen and move people in the direction they need to move? That is social perceptiveness and situational awareness. It means you can read the body language and verbal tone and understand what might be going on. It represents empathy and emotional intelligence on a group scale and requires an understanding of the potential interpersonal dynamics that might be in play. For leadership, this ability to read a room, to understand the alliances, antagonisms, friendships and tensions, as they ebb and flow in an organisation (be it in a staff meeting, boardroom, over time during normal operations or even over a colt castrate in a field) is a valuable skill, which means you can head trouble off at the pass and capitalise on the energy and enthusiasm that is present.
This does not mean you have to be the life and soul of the party to be an effective leader. Nor should you overanalyse, or fret over, all the social currents in a situation. They will be present and inevitable but should not override the need to ‘get the job done’. Excessive sociability and a desire to be liked are not beneficial leadership attributes.
Not ‘getting it’ is also a problem. Leadership is a relational activity and a failure or inability to understand the social situation means you will be missing important information upon which sound judgements are made.
3.4.2 Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Emotional intelligence has been a popular concept in recent years, and much of the popularity has been generated by Goleman (1998). He emphasises the importance of EQ, as opposed to other forms of intelligence in leadership and his broad definition of emotional competence includes factors such as empathy, self‐awareness, self‐regulation, and social skills (Goleman and Boyatzis 2017). A narrower and more psychologically based definition is as follows:
Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and their relationships, and to reason and problem‐solve on the basis of them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion‐related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them. (Mayer et al. 2001)
Whether you like a broader or more specific definition of EQ, without an ability to read and interpret emotions, which are themselves key to relationships with others, a leader lacks a valuable tool. Despite debate surrounding some of the less circumspect claims for the important of EQ, there is acceptance that EQ is an important contributor to leadership (Walter et al. 2011; Webb 2009).
3.4.3 Empathy
Empathy is ‘commonly defined as the ability to recognise the emotions of another person while maintaining one's own perspective’ (McMurray and Boysen 2017). Empathy is using one's emotional intelligence to step into someone else's shoes and see the world as they see it, without losing oneself in the process. It is a critical component of compassion. As a leadership function it assists in building a mental model of a situation and predicting responses to decisions, as well as being able to react in the moment to how someone else is feeling.
Too much empathy, allied with compassion, can overwhelm us and lead to a failure to look after ourselves, putting others needs before our own and becoming self‐destructive.
For some people, such as those with poor connection with their own emotional needs (e.g. narcissists), empathy can be a more difficult competency to achieve. Where this is the case, those in relationship may feel poorly understood, overlooked, or unimportant. Note that empathy and compassion are not the same thing; psychopaths can understand the feelings of others but do not truly care.
3.4.4 Embodied Awareness
This the ability to notice your physical responses, e.g. tension in the shoulders, shivers down the spine, a sense of relaxation and ease. Our bodily sensations may be telling us something about the world around us and can be comfortable or uncomfortable. These responses, representing our autonomic nervous system, are aspects of the bidirectional connection between body and mind that represent unconscious responses to the myriad of information that is received from the environment and others around us (Van der Kolk 2015).
We have varying levels of embodied awareness; some of us are more connected than others, and more able to notice, in the moment, what our bodily responses are. But this capacity can be developed (or re‐learned) through training and techniques such as mindfulness. A note of caution – some embodied responses can be representations of past trauma, and reawakening them may not be wise without appropriate support (Van der Kolk 2015). Mindful meditation, for example, for all its popularity and benefit, may not be without risk for some groups (Farias et al. 2020).
3.5 Conclusion
There are many different conceptions of attributes and skills for those in leadership that can be overwhelming. This reflects that leadership situations are complex, leadership is not an exact science, and is created in relationship with those around you. For veterinary professionals who have been trained to work with data, problem solve, and find the ‘right answer’, this can be difficult to adjust to.
Nevertheless, there is broad agreement on the competencies that can help the leadership function and which, with self‐development and reflection, can be enhanced. Those in leadership can work within a repertoire of competencies that is true to themselves and with which they are familiar, although maybe being comfortable is not helpful. Over‐ or underplaying competencies and behaviours can be associated with adverse consequences and, the wise leader will know how much is ‘enough’ for the situation at hand.
Questions
1 When have you been trusted before you have earned that trust? How did that feel? What was your response?
2 You have sweated and agonised over a challenging task, but you got there in the end. Your boss does not even acknowledge this. How does that feel?
3 Think of a situation where there was no easy answer. Where maybe you had to disappoint someone. How did that feel? What resources did you draw on to help you negotiate an outcome?
4 In your experience of leadership situations so far, can you identify simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic challenges and the different leadership actions needed?
5 When have you used, or been impressed by, someone else's intuition in a group setting? What happened and what was striking about it?
Further Reading
1 Goleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury.
2 Syed, M. (2016). Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance. London: John Murray.
3 Van der Kolk, B.A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, New York: Penguin Books.
References
1 Cacciope, R. (1997). Leadership moment by moment! Leadership & Organization Development Journal 18 (7): 335–345.
2 Cohen, S.P. (2007). Compassion fatigue and the veterinary health team. Veterinary Clinics of North America – Small Animal Practice. Elsevier Inc. 37 (1): 123–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cvsm.2006.09.006.
3 Dweck, C.S. (2016). What having a “growth mindset” actually means. Harvard Business Review