Personal Blogs

I can potentially discuss this in two different contexts that i function within; the medical context, being the hospital i work in, and the educational context being the academic institutions in which i had been involved in the planning and management of surgical education. albeit seemingly very different, their sociocultural environments have been fairly similar. so i assume my view on their leadership/learning structures are applicable to both.

in both of these contexts, the old frame of leadership and learning is still very dominant. and interestingly, this is not necessarily cultural in the sense that i live and work in a semi-oriental country, i has been pretty much the same in the institutions and hospital that i had worked for in Europe and US as well. thinking on the possible reasons for this, i could identify several factors:

1. first and foremost a change or transition should necessarily be based on a need arising from challenges. this has been, so far, absent (within the extent of my personal context) in surgical education. it is still a very patriarchal domain and even from very different perspectives, has been very very successful as a model.
2. so far, over centuries, surgeons are trained (and perceived) as leaders, or i should rather say, as stars. i do understand that being a star is not the same as being a leader, even the contrary, but still by definition the star needs to be the leader.

so the adaptation of a new frame of leadership pretty much depends on the magnanimity of individual positional leaders. i have seen contexts in which leadership has been exercised as an activity but they remain to be exceptions.