Recent news headlines have been dominated by 'leadership issues'. In early February, three 'leaders' were stripped of their status one way or another – all in the space of three eventful days. The leader formerly known as Sir Fred was stripped of his knighthood; a footballer was stripped of his captaincy of the national team, and allegations of perverting the course of justice resulted in a cabinet minister driving away (slowly) from his cabinet post.
It would seem an appropriate time to look at where the 'leaders' are in the dental profession, and it is difficult to know where to start because there are so many of them – in fact, they are all over the place (double entendre intentional). At Government level, there is the Chief Dental Officer and his deputy working hard to maintain a political trajectory, our professional association and trade union has at its helm a recently re-elected captain and the undergraduate and postgraduate dental deans responsible for educating tomorrow's workforce. At the cluster primary care trust level, there are clinical leads, non-clinical leads, managerial leads, talk of lead providers, lead nurses and so on and on the ground at practice level, we have decontamination leads, information governance leads, dentists who lead on CQC, ICT leads – to name but a few.
Everyone, it seems, is a leader or leading on something. Healthcare is awash with clinical leadership programmes, and leadership teaching and training is all the rage. To quote from the NHS leadership website (where you can take an off-line self-assessment test to assess your leadership potential), Leadership is for everyone. With all this leadership, you would think that the profession was in rude health with all its ducks arranged neatly in a row. No, actually.
The fact of the matter is that the ducks are disorderly and in disarray. If there was an underground situation room for dentistry, it is there you would find our leaders (working time directive allowing) - trying to contain and limit the fall-out from the current crises. For example, a situation concerning some dental schools who are allegedly flouting EU legislation when it comes to undergraduate training, a situation involving final year dental students who are disgruntled over the national recruitment process which has left well over 100 them without a job this summer, a situation where the architects of this initiative have been pilloried on social network sites by the students, a situation where the professional Regulator has been openly criticised, and a range of emergent situations with the contract pilots proposals - to name but a few.
At such times, we are at the behest of our leaders who face challenging times. The legendary guru Peter Drucker wrote that 'Leadership is not magnetic personality. It is not making friends and influencing a person, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.'
We need fewer leaders not more, but we need them to have the right credentials, knowledge and experience for the job; in them lie the hopes and aspirations for the next generation of professionals who deserve to be left a legacy that bodes well for their future, not the building site that currently tops the over-populated situation room.