Leadership Academy

Too often, systems, whether organizations or entire provincial health systems, fail to meet their objectives because of poor alignment among strategy and supporting systems (e.g., structure, people, rewards and decision support). Participants will develop an appreciation for the system environment in which they are working (complex versus complicated) and the causes and remedies of organizational and system misalignments.

The fast-paced nature of today’s world is placing increased demands on employees, triggering high levels of exhaustion, disengagement and illness. This means that strategies to replenish energy and increase personal resilience have never been more important. In this session, we will draw from top research findings and practical examples to examine resilience strategies that have been proven to work. These strategies focus on replenishing energy in four core areas: body, emotions, mind and spirit. The session will culminate in the formulation of a personal action plan that will enhance resilience, productivity and leadership skills.

Effective healthcare leaders know that engaging colleagues, staff, and other stakeholders to commit to change rarely involves pronouncements from on high. Rather, it typically involves working first with small groups of the “almost committed” or “weakly opposed” to gain allies and build coalitions. The objective of this session is to develop practical strategies, based on the psychology of teams and decision-making, to influence decision-making teams. This session will use the film “12 Angry Men” to increase participants’ capacity to influence teams, including using such tactics as coalition building, timing and agenda setting, persuasion, educated risk-taking and testing the waters. We will also explore the ethical obligations of the leader.

Effective leaders are self-aware. They understand their own emotional responses and the impact their behaviour has on others. We will explore the link between emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness and invite participants to take part in an exercise called “Lifelines,” which is designed to enable you to see trends and patterns in your own life and work experience and to use this understanding to reflect on your personal career and life goals.

Partnering Strategies

The unfinished business in health systems globally is “innovation.” A simple definition is – combining different things in new ways to create new value that is sustained. This implies collaborating across different teams, organizations, regions, jurisdictions, provinces and even countries in profoundly new and creative ways. Leaders that are good at this do partnering “as a contact sport.” This session will explore the key competencies required to partner well to ensure the needed transformation of our health system can occur.

Physician leaders negotiate every day – with other physicians, other clinical workers, administrators, governments, research funders and even their friends and romantic partners. Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more independent parties. It is a craft that must hold cooperation and competition in creative tension. It is difficult to do well. Even the most experienced (and confident) negotiators often fall prey to common biases, errors in judgment and bad strategies. During these sessions, participants will practice, analyze, reflect and practice again.

For most of us, the workplace includes many interactions that have the potential to create significant anxiety (e.g., addressing a staff member’s performance problems, dealing with the failure of a partner organization to deliver on its promises, managing a superior’s unreasonable expectations, explaining why you can’t follow through on a promise of your own). Meanwhile, human beings are generally conflict-averse. The deep-seated desire to avoid anxiety-producing situations often leads to deep managerial dysfunction: avoiding conversations that should not be avoided and botching conversations that we cannot afford to botch. This interactive session is designed to offer practical tools, approaches and frameworks for effectively handling those difficult conversations and reducing the anxiety that is often associated with disengagement.

This session is based on a Rotman experiential workshop that focuses on identifying and successfully seizing upon informal coaching opportunities for your employees. It will further develop the art of managing difficult conversations. Coaching, done well, can help build critical relationships and improve the performance of your team members and your team. Specifically, this session will involve a series of interactive coaching sessions developed by Rotman in an Ontario community hospital. All participants play the role of a superior (providing feedback) and subordinate (receiving feedback). All sessions will be filmed and participants will receive peer feedback based on session videos.

Over the past couple of years, there has been a timely call for greater demonstration of organizational commitment to and capacity for putting a strategic lens on the work of equity, diversity and inclusion. This important imperative constitutes the backbone of a leadership approach that is necessary to raise important questions about how leaders can address societal inequity and, at the same time, seize opportunities for greater organizational inclusion and engagement at all levels. In this highly interactive session, participants will work with five key insights on how leaders can assemble such a leadership approach in their organizations and the broader health system.

In this interactive and practical session, participants will explore the importance of teams and their need for leadership. Teams expand capabilities beyond what a single individual can do. Yet, as much as we hear stories that praise a team’s success, we see instances where teams have led to disastrous consequences. Good teamwork requires leadership. This session will give participants the opportunity to see leadership in action, in the context of practicing a core function that teams serve — making high-quality decisions. In this session, participants will conduct a team decision-making exercise. The discussion following each exercise will focus on helping participants understand how they can lead their teams to higher-quality outcomes.

What do you do when you feel forced to choose between two mutually exclusive, yet sub-optimal options (think of some of the assumed trade-offs of the quadruple aim)? That is the question we will address in this session. We will introduce the ways in which successful integrative thinkers have resolved this tension and then explore the process of integrative thinking for ourselves. We will ask how we can use the tension between opposing models – different views of the world – to create better answers. We often see such “model clash” between governments/payors and providers, between administration and clinicians, and even between providers. When faced with clear either-or alternatives – between ideas, perspectives or people – how might we do something other than to simply evaluate and choose? We will explore the concept of integrative thinking, discuss some of the key tensions we face in healthcare and together formulate ideas to create new, integrative solutions.

Presence is the great X-Factor of communication. Are you really there? What do your face and body say about the message you produce? Are you eliciting real, authentic presence from others? In this session, we will explore a framework for understanding the underpinnings of trustworthiness, rapport, and conveying competence in dyadic and group situations. Participants will be introduced to the principles of presence through a five-channel framework of expression, with a particular focus on body, face and voice.

Action learning is a powerful problem-solving and learning approach designed to foster individual and organizational growth. In this session, participants will collectively tackle real-life challenges in their co-consulting groups. It is a special opportunity to work in a confidential environment with colleagues who can apply their objectivity and collective expertise. Participants will engage in the process of inquiry, reflection and action to unlock innovative solutions while leveraging diverse perspectives and expertise within the group. This session will also enable participants to improve their consulting and advising skills, which are central to effective leadership performance.

Understanding the core elements of the overall health system and how they are changing and transforming is essential to understanding the leader’s role and sphere of influence in the system. This session will highlight key system directions – shift to community care, disease management, strategic alliances, shared governance models and others – and explore the impact on participant roles and strategies.

Numerous authors have written about the challenges of leading change, and most of their models are conceptually similar. Too often, however, these models and frameworks fail to take into account the unique challenges of leading change in the highly professionalized (and fragmented) healthcare environment. We will begin by examining best practices when leading anticipatory or planned changes in complicated systems when we know what to do, but the challenge is how to do it. The role of the leader as “system architect” will be presented, developing an appreciation for how the model for change can be deployed across a range of initiatives in complicated systems.

Leading change in complex systems requires the ability to innovate, learn and adapt again. That is, the change leader needs to develop an adaptive action plan not only for the “how,” but also the “what” — there is no recipe. This requires not only individual resilience but also team and organizational resilience and a keen sense of managing emotions and understanding one’s values. Our model of adaptive change prepares participants to solve complex problems with incomplete information and no historical solution. This session uses a newly developed team-based, interactive simulation in the context of pandemic planning.