Build confidence, influence and practical leadership skills to shape the future of primary care.
The OCFP Leadership Academy, delivered in partnership with the Rotman School of Management, is an immersive leadership program designed specifically for family physicians who want to lead with greater confidence, influence change, and make an impact across Ontario’s health care system.
Attend our Information Session on October 21, 2026 to learn more about the program.
At a glance Multi-module hybrid Program | 5 Full-days in-person days in Toronto | 4 half-days live on Zoom | Program fee: $3,950 + HST | 42 Mainpro + Credits
Why the OCFP Leadership Academy
Family physicians are leading in increasingly complex environments: clinics, teams, communities, academic settings, health system tables and emerging models of team-based care. Many are asked to lead while also managing heavy clinical demands, limited time, and competing priorities.
The OCFP Leadership Academy gives family physicians space to step back, strengthen their leadership toolkit, and connect with colleagues who are navigating similar challenges. The program is designed to support family physicians who want to lead with greater clarity, confidence, and influence, whether they are in a formal leadership role today or preparing for one in the future.
What You Will Gain
Enhanced leadership capacity to guide teams, programs, practices, and system-level initiatives through complexity and change.
Practical tools for difficult conversations, negotiation, coaching, and decision-making.
Stronger understanding of healthcare systems, government context, and change leadership.
Strategies to build coalitions, influence stakeholders, and move ideas into action.
Network of family physician colleagues from diverse practice settings across Ontario.
Intentional approach to personal resilience, executive presence, and purpose-driven leadership.
Who Should Attend
This program is designed for family physicians who want to expand their leadership impact. You do not need to have “leader” in your title to participate in the OCFP Leadership Academy.
Ideal candidates are family physicians who:
Have demonstrated leadership potential and interests.
Are currently serving or aspiring to serve in system-level or regional leadership roles within the healthcare system in the next five years (e.g., OHTs).
We encourage applications from family physicians whose perspectives have historically been underrepresented in healthcare leadership, including those who identify as Indigenous, Black or racialized, persons with disabilities, women, or members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, as well as family physicians from rural and remote communities and those serving marginalized populations.
Program Dates
Module 1
Dates:
February 4, 2027 (4:30pm-8:00pm EST)
February 5 – 6, 2027 (8:00am – 4:30pm EST)
Format: In person, 2.5 days
Location: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, located at 105 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Virtual Sessions
Dates:
March 31, 2027
April 16, 2027
May 28, 2027
June 17, 2027
Format: Half-day morning sessions from 8:30am-12:00pm EST, live online
Location: Zoom
Module 2
Dates:
September 8-10, 2027 (4:00pm-8:00pm EST)
September 9-10, 2027 (8:00am-4:30pm EST)
Format: In person, 2.5 days
Location: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, located at 105 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Program Fees
The program fee is $3,950 + HST per participant. This fee has been subsidized by the OCFP to ensure this high-quality leadership development opportunity is accessible to more family physicians.
Download our Justification Letter Template to help communicate the value of the Leadership Academy and request organizational support for your participation.
Group discounts are available for organizations registering three or more participants. For more information, please contact Sacha Roman, Manager, Professional Development, at ocfpcme@ocfp.on.ca.
Program fees include:
All program materials and resources
Meals provided during the in-person learning days
Access to world-class faculty, facilitators, and guest speakers
You are responsible for any additional expenses you may incur, including travel, accommodations, locum coverage, parking, and other related costs.
A Learning Experience Built for Real Healthcare Leadership
The Leadership Academy goes beyond theory. Each session is grounded in the realities of physician leadership, including system complexity, team dynamics, competing priorities, change fatigue, and the need to influence without always having formal authority.
You will learn alongside peers, apply frameworks to real healthcare challenges, and leave with practical approaches you can use immediately in your practice.
Program Highlights
Develop Management and Leadership Skills
Strengthen your strategic thinking, communication, decision-making, teamwork, and change management skills.
Foster Collaboration and Networking
Learn alongside family physician peers through interactive discussions, real-life case studies, and shared experiences.
Peer-to-Peer Mentoring
Work in teams to tackle real leadership challenges and learn from the experience of your peers.
Drive Innovation and Change
Build tools to foster innovation, adaptability, and continuous improvement within your practice and across the health care system.
Program Curriculum
*Topics subject to some modifications.
Too often, systems, whether organizations or entire provincial health systems, fail to meet their objectives because of poor alignment between strategy and supporting systems (e.g., structure, people, rewards and decision support). In this session, you will develop an appreciation for the system environment in which you are working (complex versus complicated) and the causes and remedies of organizational and system misalignments.
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 leadership approach helps raise important questions about how leaders can address societal inequity while creating opportunities for greater organizational inclusion and engagement at all levels.
In this highly interactive session, you will work with five key insights on how leaders can assemble such a leadership approach in their organizations and the broader health system.
Leading change in complex systems requires the ability to innovate, learn, and adapt again. Change leaders need to adapt both the “what” and the “how,” recognizing that there is no single recipe. This requires individual, team, and organizational resilience, as well as the ability to manage emotions and understand 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.
Effective healthcare leaders know that engaging colleagues, staff, and other stakeholders to commit to change rarely happens through top-down directives alone. 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 your capacity to influence teams, including tactics such as coalition building, timing and agenda setting, persuasion, educated risk-taking, and testing the waters. The session will also explore the ethical obligations of the leader.
Primary care is where AI is arriving fastest and with the least preparation. Scribes, triage tools, and inbox assistants are already in practice, often adopted by individual family physicians rather than by the organization. At the same time, patients arrive having already consulted a model, wearing a device that generates data no one has agreed to own.
This session moves from the Now, the tools already changing the visit, to the Edge, where agents act across the panel rather than answer within the encounter, to the Future, where family physician leaders decide what to adopt, what to govern, and what to refuse. You will look at what improves, what remains brittle and whose work changes. The recurring question is where clinical judgment must stay, and whether the person accountable for an AI-assisted decision has the knowledge, time, authority and real ability to intervene.
Discussion runs throughout, with a hands-on session that intends to empower both clinicians and patients.
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. You 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.
Resilience – the ability to rapidly recover from stressful and unpredictable circumstances – consists of intrapersonal and interpersonal qualities that can be developed and cultivated over time, like any other skill.
Times of disruption highlight our own resilience skills, and provide a unique opportunity to build them rapidly.
In this session, you will be introduced to a framework and practical tools for strengthening resilience and will explore how to respond more effectively to challenging internal and external pressures.
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, you 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 you will receive peer feedback based on session videos.
This session equips family physicians with practical facilitation skills to lead meetings that are focused, productive, and inclusive. You will explore the critical role of the meeting facilitator in guiding discussions, fostering psychological safety, and creating an environment where all voices can contribute effectively. Through practical strategies and examples, you will learn how to navigate conflict constructively, build consensus, and enhance engagement in both in-person and virtual settings. By strengthening your ability to facilitate high-quality conversations, you will be better prepared to lead teams, support collaborative decision-making, and achieve meaningful outcomes in clinical and organizational environments.
Presence is the great X-factor of communication. Are you really there? What do your face and body say about the message you are communicating? Are you eliciting real, authentic presence from others?
You will explore a framework for understanding trustworthiness, rapport, and how competence is conveyed in dyadic and group situations. You will learn the principles of presence through a five-channel framework of expression, with a particular focus on body, face, and voice.
Healthcare leaders increasingly rely on strategic partnerships to address complex system challenges, improve patient outcomes, and accelerate innovation. In this session, you will explore the role of partnerships as a core leadership capability and strategic lever within healthcare organizations. Participants will examine how partnerships are defined in a healthcare context, why they are essential to achieving organizational goals, and how primary care leaders can leverage system-level collaborations to drive greater impact. Through practical examples and discussion, attendees will gain insights into identifying, building, and maximizing partnerships that support key initiatives and improve care delivery across the health system.
Program Faculty and Speakers
Showing biography of Brian Golden .
Brian Golden is the academic director for The OCFP Leadership Academy and is the Sandra Rotman chaired professor in health sector strategy at the Rotman School of Management, The University of Toronto and The University Health Network. He is the founding academic director of The Sandra Rotman Centre for Health Sector Strategy, a policy, research and leadership development institute. His research has informed policy around collaborative leadership, system design, funding models and primary care.
As an adviser and director of leadership development programs, Golden has worked with a variety of organizations, including the Canadian Medical Association, provincial and territorial medical associations, Canadian provincial governments, Britain’s National Health Service, several Local Integration Health Networks and hospitals and agencies, including the Hospital for Sick Children, UHN, Hamilton Health Sciences, London Health Science Centre, Sunnybrook College Health Sciences Centre, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, British Columbia Cancer Agency, Cancer Care Ontario, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Baylor Medical Center. Private-sector clients include Tieto (Finland), General Electric and Baxter. He is the founding academic director of the Rotman School’s Advanced Health Leadership Program and the Global Executive MBA in Healthcare and Life sciences. Golden was the founding director of the Judy Project, Canada’s premier program for senior women leaders in the private and public sectors.
Showing biography of Nouman Ashraf .
Nouman Ashraf is an associate professor, teaching stream within the organizational behaviour area at the Rotman School of Management.
He possesses a broad range of professional, academic and research interests, with a specialized focus on enabling inclusive and innovative practices within teams, organizations and boards. For the last decade and a half, he has held progressively senior roles at the University of Toronto. He is a recognized thought leader in governance, and has taught thousands of directors in the national Rotman program on Not for Profit Governance in partnership with the Institute for Corporate Directors since its inception in 2007.
Winner of numerous teaching awards, Nouman teaches Emancipatory Leadership within the OMNIUM GEMBA program, Leading Social Innovation with the 2 and 3 year MBA program and Leading Across Differences within the Rotman Commerce Program.
Nouman has advised numerous clients such as Shopper’s Drugmart, Tory’s, the Canada Pension Plan and Investment Board, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, United Way Toronto, and numerous post-secondary and healthcare institutions. Nouman serves as Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Gender + the Economy. He is also an Associate at Trinity College within the University of Toronto.
At lunch time, he can be found at Massey College within the University of Toronto, where he mentors exceptional post-graduate students in his capacity as Senior Fellow Emeritus.
Showing biography of Maja Djikic .
Maja Djikic, Ph.D. is a personality psychologist specializing in adult development. She is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and HR Management, the Executive Director of the Self-Development Laboratory, and the Academic Director of the Rotman Executive Coaching Certificate program at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
Her research has been featured in over 50 media outlets (including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, and Scientific American Mind), in 15 countries.
Maja has been selected by Thinkers50 as one of 30 thinkers around the world whose ideas have the potential to shape the future of organizations. Her first book, The Possible Self: A Leader’s Guide to Personal Development, was published in March 2024 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. The book won the Gold Award in Psychology from the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) in May of 2025.
Showing biography of Mark Weber .
Mark Weber is Special Advisor to the Provost on Leadership Strategy and Development and Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Waterloo.
Prior to his current role, Mark was the inaugural Director of the Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation at UW and served on the faculty of the Rotman School of Management and UTM at the University of Toronto for several years. He earned his PhD in Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and also holds a masters degree in social psychology and an MBA.
Mark’s research focuses on leadership, cooperation, negotiations, decision-making, and trust. His work has been published in outlets like Research in Organizational Behavior, Organizational Psychology Review, Culture and Negotiation: Integrative Approaches to Theory and Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Trust and Distrust across Organizational Contexts: Dilemmas and Approaches, and Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Mark is an award-winning teacher and researcher who has been on faculty and taught courses on negotiations and organizational behavior to students at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, INSEAD and at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He consults extensively and has provided training to executives and professionals in the automotive, education, healthcare, pharmaceutical, broadcast media, entertainment, telecommunications, technology, and financial services industries, and in government at all levels. He also facilitates strategic planning for not- for-profit and for-profit organizations alike. Mark’s early achievements included both national and international awards for public speaking and debating. His previous professional experiences included managerial and leadership roles in local government, the financial services sector, and in not-for-profit organizations
Showing biography of Dr. Tara Kiran .
Dr. Tara Kiran is a family physician and a health systems researcher with nationally and internationally recognized expertise in primary care policy, quality improvement, and health system evaluation. She holds the Fidani Chair in Improvement and Innovation at the University of Toronto where she also serves as Vice Chair, Quality and Innovation for the Department of Family and Community Medicine.
Dr. Kiran’s research focuses on understanding and addressing gaps in access, equity, and quality in primary care, with recent work examining shifts in the physician workforce, the impact of team-based care, and public priorities for reform. Dr. Kiran is the founder and national lead of OurCare, Canada’s largest public engagement initiative on the future of primary care, which has shaped policy direction in multiple provinces and informed Ontario’s Primary Care Act. She also hosts Primary Focus, a podcast that explores innovative primary systems and clinics— in Canada and around the world. She practices family medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto where she is also a Scientist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions. Throughout her work, she is motivated by a deep commitment to improving access to high-quality, equitable, and patient-centred care.
Showing biography of Dr. Joseph Cafazzo .
Dr. Joseph Cafazzois the inaugural Wolfond Chair in Digital Health, Executive Director of Biomedical Engineering and Senior Scientist, Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the University Health Network, a state-of-the-art research facility hosting 80 staff and students devoted to the evaluation and design of healthcare technology.
Over his career, he has built a network of clinicians, designers, engineers, researchers, that challenge the norms of healthcare and to empower patients and their families. Together they push the boundaries of what’s possible, which has led to the creation of technologies that act to facilitate patient self-care of complex chronic conditions. He’s received the Stanford 2.0 Award and the People’s Choice Award at the World Congress of Health Innovation for his work in digital health for children with diabetes. His body of work has also recognized by the Canadian Health Informatics Association, with their Excellence in Telehealth Award and the Dr. Mo Watanabe Lecture.
Dr. Cafazzo is the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee in Digital Health for Health Canada, is a Professor at the University of Toronto, in the areas of clinical engineering, human factors, and health informatics and is the recipient of the Career Scientist award by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care .
Showing biography of Dr. Pauline Pariser .
Dr. Pariser is Associate Medical Director, Primary Care Lead for the SCOPE Provincial Program at University Health Network (UHN) and Women’s College Hospital (WCH), Senior Advisor to the Social Medicine and Population Health Program at UHN and Strategic Medical Advisor for the Akwesasne Project, Ganawishkadawe, the Center for Wise Practices in Indigenous Health, (WCH).
Her research interests include advancing primary care integration and co-designing compassionate models of care with people with lived experience.
As Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, she has contributed to educating trainees and faculty in health system leadership within the Department of Family and Community Medicine, the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Rotman School of Management. Dr. Pariser has been recognized with teaching and leadership awards from her department, the Ontario Medical Association, the College of Family Physicians of Ontario and Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care.
