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Last week I was out with my friend Jason Wong for dinner, scheming and discussing what is going on around our worlds of dentistry and what might happen in the future.

Jason is very, very high level in dental politics and commissioning and is always an extraordinary guy to speak to about what is going on, particularly in the world of NHS dentistry contracting and the future movement in NHS funding.

Jason has been instrumental in introducing leadership training for his team and for people associated with high level dental politics and we were discussing how people end up in positions of authority and leadership without actually really wanting to be there or having limited skills to be able to actually preform in those environments.

From my point of view, leadership seems to be this trendy thing that has taken over from entrepreneurship which is taken over from any number of variations of what it used to be.

It was funny last year that I was asked to lecture four times on leadership, having never, ever been asked to lecture in leadership again and having not been asked to lecture on leadership since then.

I think the truth is that every time we speak to an audience we’re talking about leadership.

We introduce leadership training as a concept in the business course from the very outset and it turns out that this week is a 2 day module in leadership and strategy for our business course delegates.

I was just preparing some stuff today only to realise that I have to introduce two pretty special people to the group next week to speak on the concept of leadership and I was just reflecting back on why we booked these guys and what their value was.

In our disposable world you want to attend a one day course on leadership and become a leader and then go on to lead people and be paid well and be recognised for that.

This is the difficulty of the instant gratification society.

Of course leadership doesn’t work that way as so many other things don’t either. Your ability to lead or inspire or to provide an example to a group of people is something that develops over years and years and is a combination of many different factors assimilated over that time.

You can choose to build a leadership capability by finding out what is involved in leadership and by going to see examples of brilliant leadership being carried out and learning from those. You can then figure out what aspects of your personality are deficient to allow you to do that in which aspects of your personality are not. You can choose to lead in different ways and you can reflect on different situations that have arisen during your leadership work and decide whether you handled them well or not and what you might do better in the future.

In amongst that though, you can be inspired by people whose journey has been one of development in leadership to reach high levels where they’ve inspired other people to greatness.

Sara Symington is one of those people.

She is not from dentistry she is actually from sport and sport is often used as a leadership metaphor.

Say that as a former Olympic athlete of triathlon and cycling but she fell into that almost by accident and the story around that is fascinating and inspirational.

She went on to be the Performance Director for Archery at London in 2012 Olympics and has now risen to some extraordinary levels in sports administration. At present she is a Performance Director for England Netball having been the person responsible for leading the Roses to Commonwealth gold glory in Australia. She also works with the Premier League, the English Cricket board and the Football Association and sits on the National Executive board of boxing and interestingly skateboarding.

In amongst that she continues to be a very (self-effacing) athlete who competes at triathlons and runs marathons and who participates in the rapidly growing sport of adventure racing.

Sara is also a brilliant presenter and to listen to her story and the way she present’s it, to learn about leadership and to wonder how you might be able to do just a fraction of the things that she has done.

On top of that, next week Professor John Gibson will do a clinical Masterclass and an ITI study club for us and then a leadership day of “Know yourself to lead yourself to lead others”.

Even the title of that lecture is an inspirational title because it pushes back against the principle that people were born to lead or that you’re somehow “gifted as a leader”.

It’s very “Stephen Covey” in order to inspire people and to develop a culture you first need to understand yourself and inspire yourself and be disciplined in yourself. If you cannot do that it is unlikely in this day and age that you will be able to inspire a group of people.

Interestingly, last year we opened up the Sara Symington talk to anybody who wanted to come – and nobody did.

I was amazed at that because if you wanted to hear her speak in London at an Inspirational Speaker Day, you would pay a bomb and in a small group like this you could get to speak to her.

This year she will bring along the sports personality of the year award that the Roses won just for our guys to see them too. It is hard to believe that anybody who sits on the business course this week, be Practice Managers or principles alike can fail to be anything but inspired from the people that are going to speak and share their stories and explain the lessons they’ve learned trying to set cultures within their organisations and suggest how people might do it in other places like dental practices.

This leadership module will happen next year too on the business course in the new Practice.

If you like the sound of it, the whole course is like this and if you’re interested in coming why not give tom an email here and he’ll give you a shout.

Blog Post Number - 2128