and a surgeon score the leadership styles of the physicians based on
these qualities:
• Passive. These leaders avoid taking action until it's absolutely neces-
sary or, worse, exhibit no leadership at all.
• Transactional. Leaders with this trait are good at identifying what
needs to get done. They make sure their teams understand what will
happen if the team accomplishes tasks, and what will happen if they
don't. This type of leader often puts a heavy emphasis on the conse-
quences of failure. While their ability to drive their teams to accom-
plish tasks is important, they do so through fear; they stimulate a self-
preservation instinct rather than truly inspiring others.
• Transformational. This is next-level leadership. Transformational lead-
ers fully understand the individual motivations of each team member.
They tap into both to inspire the people in their charge to achieve a
common goal. Their teams perform beyond, and not just to, expecta-
tions.
To understand how leadership style impacts team performance, we
counted the number of times these different surgeons' OR teams shared
information, cooperated and expressed their opinions. We wanted to
tell surgeons how they could modify their behaviors to change their
leadership styles, so we also assessed the degree to which these sur-
geons communicated, coped with pressure, maintained standards,
made decisions, managed resources, directed, trained and supported
other team members.
The findings, published in the Journal of the American College of
Surgeons (osmag.net/DcxU7F), unsurprisingly showed passive leadership
scores were low (try to remember the last passive surgeon you met).
Transactional scores varied little among the surgeons — they were all
pretty good at defining and delegating tasks. However, transformation-
al scores set some surgeons apart from their peers.
A P R I L 2 0 1 6 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 3 7