Is the National Athletic Trainers'​ Association a management organization maintaining the status quo rather than providing tangible leadership to its athletic trainers?
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them." - Albert Einstein
While management is useful in stable & predictable environments, most managerial behaviors do very little to help navigate the uncertainty & turbulence in modern-era health care. The "new normal" of modern healthcare thrives in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). Leaders harness the VUCA environment & are agile in navigating new & ever-changing situations.
Management was introduced in the late 1800s to do anything but solve complex problems. It was created to mitigate risk, reduce creativity, establish routine, & create a status quo.
Using management tactics to solve the problems that management helped create is considered "Einsteinian blasphemy." Management is simply not capable of handling the emergence of a new reality from the complex integration of unrelated & unknown variables.
Leaders do not need to be experts, but they do need to be change agents. In times of emergence, experience can be a major impediment to navigating change successfully because it blinds us from seeing different options.
The entanglement between management & leadership is easy to do. In a non-VUCA world (a stable/predictable world) there are little to no consequences for the decisions & planning that need to be made. This unclarity between the two styles is common among organizations that were established during the "golden age" of strategic planning (1950s-1990s) when one could reasonably rely on a five-year strategic plan.
Becoming leadership literate requires a commitment to learning, unlearning, & relearning what we think leadership is, what it looks like, who can do it, & what outcomes should be expected from it. The willingness to change the way we think about leadership while challenging our own assumptions about what leadership is. It requires authentic honesty about our preferences relative to the value of management interventions vs leadership interventions.
This could be the cause of distress for ATs & their relationship with NATA due to the confusion on the definition of what NATA is supposed to provide to its members, is it managing the profession or helping lead the way?
"The NATA is the professional membership association for certified athletic trainers and others who support the athletic training profession... The majority of athletic trainers choose to be members of NATA in order to support their profession while receiving a broad array of membership benefits. By joining forces as a group, NATA members can accomplish more for the athletic training profession than they can individually."
Kutz, M. Leadership Literacy. NATA Leadership Column Series. March 2022
Shelby 8/2024
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