Leading in Health SystemsNavigating Crisis and Change

Program Overview

A High-Impact Health Care Crisis Leadership Development Online Program

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most dire public health crisis the global population has faced in recent times. Health care leaders are facing unprecedented pressure to effectively oversee response efforts, provide appropriate care – often with limited resources, support anxious and overstretched staff, and help prove their organization’s resiliency.

Being an effective health care leader during a crisis requires you to engage stakeholders across your system and often influence people over whom you have no formal authority. You need leadership, conflict resolution, and negotiation skills to build stakeholder buy-in up, down, across, and even beyond your organization. This online program will not only develop your leadership skills with a focus on crisis situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, but will also teach you how to engage partners enterprise-wide to leverage cross-functional capabilities in your response efforts, stimulate innovative thinking in challenging times, and ensure your organization’s resiliency.

Crises are too frequently over-managed and under-led. Unlike managers, leaders influence and guide others beyond traditional organizational boundaries. They think broadly and drive action. Strong leadership will allow you to help your team reach optimal outcomes and remain agile, while seizing opportunities and overcoming system-wide challenges to increasing productivity and value.

In this online executive education program, the faculty will draw on decades of experience of engagement with health care professionals and field research on crisis situations, including the current coronavirus outbreak. Through this frame, you will learn proven, pragmatic frameworks, tools, and techniques developed by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health faculty for bringing together partners with opposing points-of-view, uncovering shared interests, and forging unity of effort. You will build leadership skills to get the right stakeholders to the table, involve them in creating innovative solutions, and create buy-in to make agreements succeed in the face of a crisis.

Crisis Leadership, Conflict Resolution, and Negotiation Skills in Health Care

Many health care executives are selected based on clinical expertise or individual contributions, but may not have had the opportunity to hone leadership skills, particularly for a time of crisis. With the health care system in the midst of a global pandemic and in a time of great uncertainty, you need focused leadership training to meet the interpersonal, system, and problem-solving challenges you face as a health care leader. This executive education program will help you make more effective decisions, allocate scarce resources, engage diverse stakeholders, and shape change in your organization during challenging times.

By intentionally connecting and leveraging diverse talents and assets, you increase the likelihood of achieving and sustaining positive outcomes. Throughout the course, you will develop proficiency in meta-leadership and the Walk in the Woods–distinctive frameworks and practice methods for leadership and complex problem solving not found in other executive education programs.

You will develop your ability to lead effectively in health care now – and in the face of changes to come.

What is Meta-Leadership?

Meta-leadership is a conceptually rigorous and field-tested framework to enable you to foster innovation, anticipate change, and address dynamic, complex, and risk-laden challenges. It helps you close the gap between great idea and great execution. Meta-leadership equips you to effectively lead down to your team, up to your boss, across to your peers, and beyond your organization to other stakeholders.

The meta-leadership framework draws from research in leadership, health care, conflict management, neuroscience, negotiation, and emergency management. It provides an action-oriented tool set that you will be able to deploy right away. The program emphasis is on making you a more effective leader from day one back on the job.

In this online program, you will learn from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health faculty members who developed the meta-leadership method for building enterprise-wide connectivity of effort; the Walk in the Woods model for complex problem solving and interest-based negotiation; and the swarm intelligence strategy for building collaboration during times of crisis. They together are authors of Renegotiating Health Care: Resolving Conflict to Build Collaboration, Second Edition and You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most.

At this program, you will:

• Build your leadership for times of crisis and change by anticipating decisions and actions, sensibly guiding your team members and supporters
• Develop your leadership skills for steering your health system adeptly through both prosperity and uncertainty
• Learn methods to exercise influence well beyond your authority, extending your reach and engaging otherwise uninvolved stakeholders
• Develop strategies and methods to flexibly lead up, down, across, and beyond your system in differing scenarios
• Gain tools of emotional intelligence to discipline yourself and others to best identify priorities and lead effectively, no matter what you rank or position within your organization
• Understand your and your team members’ risk profiles to balance and integrate different perspectives
• Sharpen your vision and capacity to link, leverage, and forge connectivity of effort, shaping themes and purposes to improve your organization’s position in the ever changing health care marketplace

Objectives & Highlights

Learning Objectives

• Understand how to best navigate the distinct dynamics and leadership challenges of times of crisis, such as the coronavirus outbreak, and significant change
• Effectively lead and motivate the full range of stakeholders in your health care system
• Increase your leadership impact by extending influence beyond your authority
• Get ahead of the decision and action curve to guide and direct a wide range of followers
• Motivate and move your organization through the “arcs of time” that delineate the phases of crisis and change using public health principles and meta-leadership practices
• Improve personal and organizational ability to negotiate, resolve conflict, and solve complex problems
• Hone your vision and capacity to link and leverage people and resources to achieve shared goals
• Build robust system connectivity by applying the emerging insights in “swarm leadership”
• Instill and inspire leadership as a core competency throughout your system

Program Highlights

• Highly interactive learning through a provocative leadership laboratory designed to disrupt and challenge
• Cutting-edge curriculum that takes on the opportunities and predicaments of a changing health care system and the contingencies with which health care system leaders must cope such as those presented by the coronavirus outbreak
• Program faculty are engaged with leaders in the coronavirus response and will integrate up-to-the moment insights into discussions and exercises
• Pragmatic and tested set of meta-leadership tools and strategies to further develop your skill set and career
• Proactively address systemic productivity issues and build unity of effort using innovative problem-solving methods
• Reap value with topics, tools, and techniques immediately useful at your organization

Credits and Logistics

Continuing Education Credit

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health will grant Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for this program. Specific credit counts will be published when available; please check back for updated information.

All credits subject to final agenda.

All participants will receive a Certificate of Participation upon completion of the program.

Faculty

Current faculty, subject to change.

Leonard J. Marcus, PhD

Program Director

Director
Program for Health Care Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Co-Director
National Preparedness Leadership Initiative
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health & Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Lecturer on Public Health Practice
Division of Policy Translation and Leadership Development
Department of Health Policy and Management
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Eric J. McNulty, MA

Program Director

Associate Director
Program for Health Care Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Agenda

Who Should Participate

This program is designed to meet the interpersonal, system, and problem solving challenges now required for career advancement. Participants are leaders and those ready to assume leadership positions from across the health care system, including:

• Chief administrative officers
• Chief executive officers
• Chief medical officers
• Chief nursing officers
• Clinical department chairs
• Clinical division chiefs
• Clinical service directors
• Deans of academic medical centers
• Executive directors
• Group practice administrators
• Health insurance executives
• Health policy advisors
• Medical directors
• Nurses and nurse leaders
• Physicians and physician leaders
• Vice presidents