MHA 542 Week 1 Authentic and Adaptive Leadership Self-Assessment Example

What My Team Saw That I Did Not: An Authentic Leadership Self-Assessment by a New Hospital Chief Operating Officer, With a Plan to Close the Gaps

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

MHA/542: Leading with Authenticity in the Health Sector

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The leader, the medical center, the feedback results and the plan are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources cited.

Three months after her promotion from vice president of surgical services to chief operating officer of a composite 240-bed regional medical center in western Michigan, the leader in this paper received the results of an anonymous feedback survey from her eight direct reports. She had rated herself highly on listening. Her team rated her lower on that than on anything else. This paper is her self-assessment against the components of authentic leadership and her plan to close the gaps.

Why Authentic Leadership

Health care leaders work in environments of uncertainty, high stakes and constant change, where staff must trust leaders' intentions and speak up about problems. Authentic leadership emphasizes being genuine, consistent and open, which supports that trust. Adaptive leadership adds the ability to help people face challenges that have no ready technical solution.

The Framework

A validated measure of authentic leadership defines four components: self-awareness, or understanding one's strengths, limits and effect on others; relational transparency, or being the same person in private and in public and telling people what one knows; internalized moral perspective, or acting on one's values rather than external pressure; and balanced processing, or weighing the relevant facts and the arguments of people who disagree before settling on a course. The measure predicted work attitudes and behaviors beyond ethical and transformational leadership and was positively related to supervisor-rated performance (Walumbwa et al., 2008).

The Feedback Process

The leader asked a human resources consultant to administer an anonymous survey to her direct reports, covering the four components with several items each, and to collect written comments. She rated herself on the same items before seeing results.

Self-Awareness

She rated herself 4 of 5; her team rated her 3.8. Comments described her as knowing her strengths in operations and finance but underestimating how her quick pace affected others. One wrote that meetings felt like decisions already made. She recognized this: her surgical services background rewarded speed.

Relational Transparency

She rated herself 4.2; her team, 4.1. Comments praised her for sharing budget realities openly and admitting when she did not know an answer. This was her strongest component, and the ratings matched.

Internalized Moral Perspective

She rated herself 4.5; her team, 4.3. Several comments cited a decision to delay opening a new unit until staffing was safe, despite pressure to open on schedule, as evidence that she acted on her values.

Balanced Processing

She rated herself 4.3; her team, 3.2. This was the largest gap. Comments described her as asking for input after forming a view, interrupting, and rarely changing course after hearing disagreement. The component I believed was my strength turned out to be the one my team most wanted me to change.

An Example of Falling Short

The clearest example came during planning for a new outpatient surgery schedule. She presented a plan to the directors of nursing, anesthesia and sterile processing and asked for comments. The sterile processing director raised a concern about instrument turnaround. The leader said the team would work it out and moved on. Two months later, instrument shortages delayed cases for three weeks.

A Servant Leadership Lens

A systematic review of servant leadership described it as an other-oriented approach, expressed through prioritizing followers' individual needs and interests and turning concern outward toward others in the organization and community (Eva et al., 2019). Seen through this lens, her pace served her goals but not always her team's need to be heard.

Why It Matters for Staff and Patients

Leadership behavior affects the people who work for leaders. In a study of 2,813 physicians at a large academic medical center, supervisors' leadership scores strongly correlated with the burnout and satisfaction of the physicians they supervised; every additional point on a supervisor's composite leadership rating went with 3.3% lower odds of burnout among that supervisor's physicians and 9.0% higher odds of satisfaction (Shanafelt et al., 2015). Her directors' experience of her shapes how they lead their own teams.

What the Team Valued

The feedback was not only critical. Several directors wrote that they trusted her because she told them bad news early, backed them publicly when decisions went wrong and never took credit for their work. These comments helped her see that her strengths in transparency and integrity gave her a foundation to build on, and that her team's criticism came from people who wanted her to succeed.

Where the Pattern Came From

Reflecting on the gap, she traced her habit of deciding quickly to years running operating rooms, where delays cost money and patient time and a manager who hesitated lost the room. That context rewarded speed. As chief operating officer, her decisions now affected many departments with knowledge she lacked, and the same habit shut out information she needed.

Adaptive Challenges

Several challenges facing the medical center are adaptive rather than technical: nurse retention, physician engagement and the shift to outpatient care. These require leaders to draw out others' knowledge, which depends on the balanced processing her team found lacking.

Goal One: Listen Before Deciding

For every significant decision, she will ask for views before sharing her own, summarize what she heard and state how it affected the decision. Her executive assistant will note in meeting minutes whether input was sought first.

Goal Two: Welcome Disagreement

She will ask at least one person in each planning meeting to argue the opposing view and will thank people publicly when they raise problems. She will follow up with anyone whose concern she did not act on to explain why.

Goal Three: Slow the Pace Where It Matters

She will distinguish urgent operational decisions, where speed is appropriate, from planning decisions, where she will allow at least one week for input.

Support and Accountability

She engaged an executive coach for six months and asked the director of nursing, who gave candid feedback, to serve as an informal accountability partner, meeting monthly.

Modeling for Others

As chief operating officer, her behavior sets an example for directors and managers throughout the medical center. If she listened more before deciding, she expected her directors to do the same with their managers. She planned to discuss her goals openly in leadership meetings so that seeking and acting on feedback became normal rather than threatening.

Measuring Change

The same survey will be repeated at six and twelve months. Her target is a balanced processing score of at least 4.0 from her team and a reduction in the gap between self-ratings and team ratings.

Sharing the Results

She shared a summary of the results and her goals with her team in a meeting, thanked them for their candor and asked them to tell her when she slipped. Sharing the feedback was itself an act of relational transparency.

Conclusion

The self-assessment showed a leader strong in transparency and moral perspective but weakest where she thought she was strongest: considering others' views before deciding. A validated framework, honest comparison with her team's views, a servant leadership lens and evidence that leadership shapes staff wellbeing turned that finding into three observable goals, support and a plan to measure whether she changes.

References

Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.07.004

Shanafelt, T. D., Gorringe, G., Menaker, R., Storz, K. A., Reeves, D., Buskirk, S. J., Sloan, J. A., & Swensen, S. J. (2015). Impact of organizational leadership on physician burnout and satisfaction. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 90(4), 432-440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2015.01.012

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89-126. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206307308913