Evidence-based Leadership During Uncertain Times

CAWS Notable Quotables on Local Leadership:

Long before it was on our radar, leadership has been widely viewed as very important and very difficult to measure/promote.?Since the 1990s, we have conducted leadership research, trainings, and coaching, and through trial and error, we have honed how we assess and promote effective leadership. Every year, Vizient, Inc and CAWS ask over 250,000 people about leadership, well-being, safety, and intentions to leave their current role. This has taught us a lot about a tricky topic.

Here are our top 5 leadership behaviors that are highly diagnostic and highly actionable:

• Is available at predictable times.
• Communicates their expectations to me about my performance.
• Regularly makes time to provide positive feedback to me about how I am doing.
• Provides useful feedback about my performance.
• Provides frequent feedback about my performance.

Together these items make an excellent metric (i.e., psychometrically valid scale) that is easy to interpret, feed back, and act on.?We recently published 2 articles related to leadership, and here we want to summarize some of the Notable Quotables across those findings.

In the first article , lead by K. Carrie Adair, PhD , we demonstrated the excellent validity of the Local Leadership scale, shared benchmarks for a large sample, and detail the links with other important metrics.?Specifically, assessments of positive local leadership were strongly linked to psychological safety (feeling safe/having a voice), as well as less absenteeism and reports of fewer restricted activities.?From an HR perspective, this is pretty handy stuff in our post-pandemic world.?What guidance do you have for your leaders with low scores on this metric??The face validity of the verbatim items provides leaders with insights into actionable behaviors they can engage in to improve their leadership scores.?In particular, leaders that provide feedback to staff are highly effective if that feedback is assessed as frequent, useful, and includes positive feedback.?This is linked with better safety culture, lower burnout, and lower absenteeism.

In the second article , lead by Daniel Tawfik, MD MS ,

The perceptions of leader feedback are further highlighted to show that the link between leadership and Intentions to Leave is strongest when feedback from leaders is seen as useful and positive.?There is significant overlap between assessments of local leadership and assessments of safety climate, emotional exhaustion, teamwork climate, and intentions to leave. For every 10 point increase in local leadership, there was a 28% decrease emotional exhaustion, 20% decrease in intentions to leave, as well as a 52% increase in safety climate and a 36% increase in teamwork climate.?In other words, local leadership is a big driver of norms, with small changes in leadership correspond to big shifts in workplace norms and workforce well-being.

People reporting positive local leadership also reported less frustration with their jobs; getting appropriate feedback about their performance; learning from errors; better handling of errors; resolving conflicts; better ability to ask questions; and less frequent intentions to leave the job.

This is similar to studies by Shanafelt et al. that found a similar widespread pattern of correlations between 12 leadership items and burnout domains, focused largely on empowerment and satisfaction with leadership.

We believe that leaders who are able to provide effective feedback may be driving improved outcomes via improved psychological safety.?Maybe we will do a Notable Quotable article on that topic in the future...

These studies were done in healthcare, but we found similar effects for respondents that were clinical and non-clinical.?As with all of our publications, the local leadership articles are open access, free to download, and free to use.

So what is one thing you should go do right now after reading this??Reach out and provide positive feedback to someone about the work that they are doing, it makes a difference, and the post-pandemic world desperately needs leaders that make a difference right now. For more information on our well-being informed leader coaching look here .

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