In September, I had an opportunity and was supported by Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital to join an International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua)’s 35th international meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ISQua is a not-for-profit community and organization dedicated to promote the quality and safety improvement in health care worldwide for over 30 years. Surprisingly, there were more than 100 delegates from Indonesia which shows a strong will and eager for improving the quality and patient safety of health services in Indonesia. Even though this meeting focuses on quality improvement and patient safety in health care, I learn other important issue can be applied in any condition and organization, including scientific journal, which is about a leadership.
A leadership is pivotal issue in the organization management for the implementation of change, creating a future vision, explaining norms of the organization to the employees, making the plan, motivating subordinates, the implementation of team work, observing the plans for accomplishment, evaluating the change and vision to create the potential leaders from among the subordinates for a regeneration.1 Beside preparing the published articles, editor as a journal leader has a responsibility for implementation this leadership in the journal development for being presence and standing within the international community. In turn, the reliability of published articles will improve the patients care, the public health, the allocation of resources, and the standards of medical ethics and professional behavior.2
The main topic of recent ISQua congress is “Heads, Hearts and Hands (3Hs): Weaving the fabrics of quality and safety”. It highlights the importance of engaging all 3-H’s to bring about change in quality improvement and patient safety. There was a workshop about a leadership which titled “Head, Heart and Hands – Managing change in clinical quality improvement”. The term of “Head, Hand and Heart” is a concept to explain the transformational leadership which is needed for any changes in organizational management. This concept can be applied in any condition or any organization including scientific journal. Interestingly, this concept have also been developed to become a holistic approach to learn a transformative experience for developing a leadership skill. The model relates the cognitive domain (head) to critical reflection, the affective domain (heart) to relational knowing and the psychomotor domain (hands) to engagement.3
HEAD, refers to a “cognitive” domain in leadership, also related to philosophy, logic and profound knowledge of the leader. In this domain, editors should design and implement a strategic leadership which concerned with path‐finding and culture‐building to create an effective organization and achieve ultimate goals. Through path-finding, editors relate the journal organization to the business environment. At the same time, through culture-building, all personnel are being drawn into membership of the journal.4 One example that need a strategic leadership is to achieve a national and international accreditation and recognition. This achievement needs long and time-consuming efforts. Editor should “find a better way” (path-finding) and creating the climate for “getting it done” (culturebuilding) in this effort with a strategic leadership. Furthermore, editor has to gather evidence based data, resources, and make an innovation to create an effective efforts. This domain demands the editors continuously and consistently to learn and expand their strategic leadership skills.
HEART, refers to a “affective” domain in leadership, also relates to desire, commitment, hope, courage, and passion in organization. Editors need to create an inspiring leadership, which engages with people, including the personnel and reader, then provide them an energizing vision.4 As mentioned above, journal has grown to be involved in business environment which needs more personnel including editors and administration staffs. Furthermore, an increasing of number of submitted articles also need to be organized by more personnel. MJI has increased the number of full timer editor to overcome the double increment of submitted articles each year. All these personnel need to be organized and engaged with the vision and mission of MJI.
Another important issue in this Heart domain is the passion. Editing an academic journal is a vital and rewarding task, but also time-consuming and often frustrating.5 Editors have to evaluate both the content and editing of articles. Journal needs an editor who has a passion to deal with this task. In MJI, even though most of the editorial editor are a “part timer”, they have a passion to do peer review process. They are able to manage their time in both academic purpose and peer review process. In this editorial, I express my gratitude to all editors who still have a passion to works in MJI. However, MJI needs to find young editors which have similar passion like a senior editor for future regeneration.
HAND, refers to a “psychomotor” domain in leadership, also related to skills, methods and practice. This domain expresses a “real” works for achieving an efficient works. This domain implements a supervisory leadership, is concerned with adapting one leadership style to the given situation in order to achieve efficient performance.4 Editor have to make sure all members work together in team and efficiently to achieve a regular and on-time publication schedule. Editor has an independent to innovate new methods or practices in the article processing to achieve this goal. Furthermore editor should supervise all the member of journal to work toward the improvement of article or journal quality. In this domain, editor should endorse all personnel to improve their skill or learn new skill for improving journal quality or facing a new challenge in the future.
Any successful journal has been initiated by a strong editorial leadership. It is editor’s responsibility to execute and collaborate all these 3-H’s components for achieving a strong editorial leadership and solving the problem in journal management. Recent main issue in any scientific journal in Indonesia is a struggling to get a recognition by international community through an international indexing, i.e. SCOPUS, Pubmed or Clarivate Analysis. There are only several, medical, journal gain these international recognitions. It needs a editorial leadership which includes a strategic, inspiring and supervisory leadership to battle this struggle. Editor should evaluate and explore all local ability and condition which is a unique in each journal as a useful resources. Finally it hopes that this strong editorial leadership brings a better scientific climate in Indonesia and increases an international recognition for Indonesian medical journal.
REFERENCES
- Ullah I, Rehman K. Effect of gender of leader (transformational/transactional), satisfaction with the leader on employee turnover intention. Glo Adv Res J Edu Res Rev. 2015;4(6):97–104.
- Kassirer JP. Why be a medical editor? JAMA. 2001;285(17):2253.
- Singleton J. Head, heart and hands model for transformative learning: place as context for changing sustainability values. Journal of Sustainability Education. 2015;9.
- Nicholls J. The “heart, head and hands” of transforming leadership. Leadership & Organization Development Journal. 1994;15(6):8–15.
- How to be a great journal editor: advice from eight top academic editors. Downloaded from: https:// www.timeshighereducation.com/features/how-begreat- journal-editor-advice-eight-top-academiceditors# survey-answer.