The Science of Leading Yourself: A Missing Piece in the Health Care Transformation Puzzle

Personal transformation is a prerequisite for sustainable transformation of our health care system. Integrating research from the language sciences, phenomenology, psychology and neurobiology, this article reviews the science of leading oneself. Because this “inward” journey can be alien and disorienting, the Language Leadership Performance Model is helpful in illustrating the relationship between the circumstances the leader is dealing with (the leadership challenge), the context (point of view) the leader brings to that challenge, and the leader’s way of being and acting (the definitive source of the leader’s performance). Using language, effective leaders reframe their leadership challenges such that their naturally correlated ways of being and acting provide them with new opportunity sets for exercising exemplary leadership. Using a house metaphor (The House of Leadership), a foundation for being a leader and a framework for exercising leadership are constructed. Laying the foundation of the model involves mastering the four pillars of being a leader. Erecting the framework entails building a contextual schema, which, when mastered, becomes a construct that in any leadership situation gives one the power to lead effectively as one’s natural self-expression. Both of these activities—laying the foundation and erecting the framework—involve a deconstruction of one’s existing leadership paradigm. Finally, A Heuristic for Leading Oneself is offered as a useful guide or owner’s manual as one embarks on this inward journey. Leading oneself is a uniquely human activity—studying it and how it works is a vital piece in solving the health care transformation puzzle.