Some Reflections on Chess and Hospital Leadership
Jul 7, 2016 -
Author: Tony McNamara, CEO, Cork University Hospital GroupThe lesson here is one of respect. We must always respect the role and contribution of each and every member of the team and recognise that everybody has the potential to excel and should be supported in this endeavour.
By 2005 when he retired from playing competitive chess, Gary Kasparov had been world champion for 15 years and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.
In his book “How Life Imitates Chess” he provides insights that are both interesting and incisive into the relevance of the principles of chess to everyday life. His observations are a prompt for us to reflect on the application of these principles to management and leadership in the context of the hospital setting. This short piece provides one or two such thoughts on this theme that I hope prompt further reflection.
If we use the chess board as a proxy to describe the key stakeholders in hospitals, one might conclude that the pieces of highest value, the Knight, Bishop, Rook and ultimately the Queen represent varying orders of power that are evident in hospital hierarchies. I will leave it to the reader to substitute chess pieces for the specific power players but offer a word of caution and it is this. In chess, the apparently lowly Pawns which numerically dominate the board, have the potential to assume the highest and most powerful status of a Queen, upon successfully reaching the opponents final line of defence. The lesson here is one of respect. We must always respect the role and contribution of each and every member of the team and recognise that everybody has the potential to excel and should be supported in this endeavour.
To pursue this analogy a little further we would do well to reflect on the incredible contribution that Pawns make to the defence of what are perceived to be pieces of a higher order and importance. Those who study and reflect on such matters will have an appreciation of the strength of purpose that exists when Pawns are aligned in a way that maximises their power and resilience. In a sense we are all Pawns in a larger game and this sobering thought might profitably condition our leadership philosophy.
Anybody familiar with the game will appreciate the emergent nature of the game and the difficulty in assessing, with the information available, the strategies and tactics employed by one’s opponent. Indeed it is one of the fundamental facets of the game that understanding tactics are essential to formulating one’s own strategy.
So it is in leadership where the challenge to understand and predict the future action of individuals is further complicated by multiple other factors such as organisation dynamics, differing personalities and motivations for example. Yet to be emotionally intelligent, aware of one’s own feelings and the feeling of others and to be able to interpret situations accordingly, are key traits of good leaders.
As a game of chess evolves, choices have to be made as to how aggressive or defensive one wishes to play. Either way a player cannot recklessly let themselves open to serious challenge by not protecting those most valuable pieces and ultimately of course the King. In this process, a range of pieces – from Pawns to the Queen – work in unison, as if in a team, to fortify defence and at the same time to opportunistically benefit from any weakness in the opponents tactics. Similarly in leadership and management it is essential that strategies are employed to provide appropriate fortification while at the same time incrementally advancing key goals and objectives.
Chess games ebb and flow depending on the tactics of the players involved and their inclination to apply sharp decisive strategies or longer term incremental and patient ones. So it is in hospital leadership where executives must make judgements on the most appropriate pace with which to pursue strategies and to determine the tactics to be employed based on a combination of analysis and experience. It is critical that as leaders, we have the capacity to understand the dynamics at play in our organisations and our ability to influence patterns of behaviour.
Kasparov has brilliantly provoked us to think about these issues in the context of that great game providing us yet another reason to be grateful to this genius of our time.
Comments and feedback welcome. Thank you.