Goal Setting – Nourse Leadership Strategies

Stepping it Up: Your First Leadership Role

Steve is a high-potential analyst in his hospital’s finance department and interested in launching his leadership transition. He was selected for a high potentials leadership program I was facilitating, including 360-degree assessment and executive coaching. With the awareness he gained from the assessment, Steve made great gains in enhancing his performance and addressing the feedback issues. He felt ready for a promotion to a leadership role. However, when I asked Steve what he would say in an interview to promote what kind of leader he wanted to be or his vision for a leadership role, his eyes glazed over.

What can high-potential leaders do to set the stage for a promotion to their first leadership role?

Leadership Platform

A leadership platform consists of clarity about your unique and authentic leadership practices and philosophies. Ideally, these practices are based on your core values. In doing so, you are better equipped to enhance trust with your team by demonstrating authenticity and genuineness. I recall working with a leader hired to into a large healthcare organization. One of the first things she did was to share her leader platform with her direct reports. Among the elements she identified:

The best ideas come from people doing the work.
Approach me with solutions, not problems.
Transparent communication about our successes and failures.
I hold myself accountable to the expectations I have of you.
We address conflict directly and openly.

So how can you identify your authentic leadership platform? Here are a few strategies:

Reflect on effective past leaders you worked for and identify explicit or implicit values they embodied in their leadership.
Interview two managers you admire to learn about their core values and how they embody them in their leadership practices.
Consider your deepest core values, and they would be manifest in your leadership practices.

Leadership Vision

The other element – a leadership vision – is an essential ingredient for any current or future leader. It represents your true north in describing the future you want to create and the strategies you will use to create it. One of the key factors that distinguish a manager from a leader is an authentic vision anchored in one’s sense of purpose and values. One nurse leader I coached identified her vision: Facilitate collaborative interdisciplinary relationships that result in lower cost and higher quality healthcare for lower-income patients.

A well-constructed vision contains several elements, including your purpose, the future state of what you want to create, and your unique approach to attaining it. Action verbs are essential!

A great way to formulate your vision is to anchor it in peak professional or volunteer experiences:

Identify three experiences where you felt a high impact, alive, and engaged; debrief the experiences to identify your impact and the unique skills or strategies you used.
Reflect on issues or challenges that trigger anger and frustration in you; these may be great indicators of the kinds of challenges that will inform your vision.
Ask four trusted colleagues the following: What are the situations when I am at my very best?

Successfully advancing into your first leadership role is a combination of timing, sponsorship, having the right skills and experience, as well as demonstrating leadership potential. By proactively clarifying your leadership platform and vision, you will be better positioned to leap from individual contributor to leader.

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or info@nourseleadership.com.

(c) 2021 Kevin Nourse

Achieving Goals: The role of self-efficacy and action orientation

It’s that time of year when so many of us endeavor to set goals and resolutions for the New Year. Despite best intentions, many people never actually achieve their goals. While there are many factors that enable goal achievement, two of the most important ones are self-efficacy and an action orientation.

Self-efficacy, a concept identified by psychologist Albert Bandura in the late 1970s, are the beliefs you hold about your ability to achieve a goal or manage a challenging situation. People with high self-efficacy are more likely to set higher goals, procrastinate less, and demonstrate greater tenacity in working toward their goals.

Psychologist Joachim Brunstein identified action orientation nearly 20 years ago consisting of a trait enabling decisive and rapid action to achieve a goal. People who posses this trait have the ability to regulate the emotions that might keep themselves stuck overanalyzing an issue or planning how to achieve a goal.

Consider the following options to build your self-efficacy:

Reflect on past challenges you faced or goals you achieved to identify the skills, mindsets or abilities you tapped to create success.
Recite positive affirmations aloud when facing a goal or setback to shift your mindsets and self-beliefs (e.g., “I have all the skills I need to conquer this challenge successfully”).
Ask three people who know you well to describe your biggest strengths and the impact of using those strengths.
Surround yourself with highly accomplished people who have a strong belief in their capabilities.
Read biographies about people who have achieved great things to understand their process and approach better.

Here’s some tips on building your action orientation capabilities:

Set concrete time limits for your planning and goal setting.
Engage friends and colleagues to hold you accountable for taking action, such as designing a consequence if you do not take action (e.g., write them a check for a substantial dollar amount they will cash if you do not take action by the agreed upon date).
Experiment taking action without any planning; learn to trust your instincts.
Chunk your big goals into microgoals – small actions you can take with minimal effort and resistance.
Identify the conditions that cause you to get stuck in analysis paralysis (e.g., exhaustion, overwhelm, frustration, etc.).

People who achieve a lot in life and work do so because they set stretch goals, take action and celebrate their achievements. Self-efficacy and an action orientation are integral to effective goal setting. The good news is that everyone can enhance these skills and achieve greater levels of success.

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