Environmental Health Leadership and Leadership Deficits in the Crisis Economy

Leadership is the act of leading a group of people toward a common vision. It sounds simple enough, but is extremely challenging to manifest and implement. Are you waiting for things to return to normal in your organization? Sorry! Leadership in this new millennium will require new skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty. This presentation addresses characteristics of successful leaders, attributes and principles of effective leadership, and critical new skill sets that today’s leaders must develop and implement to achieve true success. The environmental health profession is both diverse and dynamic, and its leaders must vigorously excel in the management of innovation and change in a crisis economy. Our workplaces have an abundance of managers and administrators, but leadership deficits are endemic across the profession and the nation, and the successful leader must resolve to lead and not merely manage. Many organizations are well managed and poorly led as executives address routine, status quo issues while ignoring or not even recognizing rapidly emerging critical matters. They allow themselves to become buried with details, focus on trivia and “office politics,” and march firmly into the past. Today’s successful leader must encourage dissent, disagreement and truth from associates and search for self-truth by spending time in the field, analyzing their own operations, and speaking truthfully with both employees and customers. Today’s leaders must balance career and personal roles, and use vision, ambition, talent and learning ability to serve rather than enslave. They must embrace flexibility, self-awareness and self-direction. As constant as change has been for decades, and as vital as it is today, it’s still difficult to bring about. People in leadership positions must be agents of adjustment, who face things as they are and prepare for things as they will be. If competence, conscience and innovation are to be restored to government, business and society alike, that restoration must start with those who propose lead our organizations. It will require new and innovative skills to foster adaptation, embrace disequilibrium and generate leadership in all levels of the organization — and it must begin with you.