Leadership has been fundamental to our accomplishments for as long as we have shared stories of our successes and failures. Coordinating work or rather making the best use of an organization’s assets and the skills of its people, along with engaging everyone to advance a better future, drives us as human beings.

So why is effective leadership for positive change so challenging?

Frequently we hear people express their dissatisfaction with leadership. It’s hard to recall anyone writing about the thousands of exceptional leaders we have in the public or private sector. We tend to focus on the few outlier examples, positive or negative.

Different stakeholders express their expectations of leadership from their varied vantage points.

• Clients/Patients/Customers no longer tolerate organizations that do not engage effectively with them, understand their needs and make a difference to their lives. We need to identify which principles guide our interaction with these priority stakeholders, particularly as this is our reason for being in health care or a service industry.
• Employees are seeking a different work experience. The workplace is filled with different generations but it’s time to stop labelling them. Yes, we need to understand trends but each employee brings a unique contribution and their own expectations within a multigenerational team. In her “Body of Work,” Pamela Slim describes a workforce who sees their work and personal lives aligned with their drive, passion and values. How will we learn to lead in this environment? My experience in public service and complex environments, such as health care, suggests that it’s crucial for leadership to enable this alignment. This alignment creates a culture that retains talent, which is essential to success in any service or care industry.
• Boards of Directors are challenged to understand a dynamic environment where they are expected to have their “nose in” but “fingers out” of the business. Can boards deliver on their accountabilities without duplicating the management function? Stakeholders are quick to lay blame if the organization fails to deliver on its mandate, as we have seen time and again. Balancing the governance accountability with the management/CEO role requires leadership in itself.
• Funders expect their constituents to be satisfied. However, we have just begun to scratch the surface of understanding, through dialogue and big data, what constituents expect. How will we rapidly gain a better understanding so that we can be strategic and thoughtful about the changes we implement?

In previous posts, I have shared my teams’ successes, from working in a complex health care environment. These learnings also apply to other settings.

In upcoming posts, I am going to focus on what I believe are the important considerations for leaders to succeed in their roles. As Ontario’s employee demographic shifts during the next 10 to 15 years, leaders will need to get much better at rapidly learning how to effectively lead others and employees will need to ramp up their ability to collaborate.

I believe the following three attributes are keys to success, which I will focus on in upcoming posts

1. Listening to gain insight – In my last post, I shared my perspective on how important listening is to our work with patients and families. A key part of listening is having meaningful conversations so that we can uncover what’s really important to our patients, so that we are in a better position to meet their needs. These listening strategies and approaches can effectively guide engagement with other stakeholders. I will explore how these strategies and approaches can improve interactions with boards, funders, residents and employees.
2. Learning to adapt what we know to the context – Learning is a skill that must be mastered by individuals and organizations. In his book “Getting Everything You Can Out of all You’ve Got,” Jay Abraham addresses the issue of how to avoid the costly learning curve. He recommends we master the ability to borrow success practices from other industries and then apply them to ours. We need to understand that there are well established, proven ways to work with people to deliver what they as individuals need. The methods can be transferred. It’s coordinating the intervention or support and its outcomes that are unique to each individual. “Agile” is a term used frequently these days to describe how organizations learn and improve. It also describes the culture and leadership practices of successful organizations.
3. Leading with authentic intention – In any business/sector/enterprise, leadership is essential to deliver on the mission or mandate its stakeholders set. In a guest Leadership Lab column I wrote for the Globe and Mail earlier this year, I described ways a leader can engage with their stakeholders to steer their organization through complex change.

Leaders will be successful if they listen and learn and apply that learning with their skills to lead an organization.

Recently Andre Picard wrote in the Globe and Mail about Dr. Philpott’s move from the health file to Minister of Indigenous Services. He listed the strengths she brings to her new, even more complex role. Among those strengths are many that all leaders need today. Most significantly for me he noted that: “her unofficial title will certainly be Minister of Social Determinants of Health.” Given our success locally incorporating this perspective into our strategies, I am excited to observe how this will impact outcomes for our Indigenous People and other areas of our health services. She will continue to “Listen, Learn and Lead.”

Please watch for upcoming posts where I will explore these three critical attributes.

What do you think about these three attributes? I’m particularly interested in hearing how, as leaders, we can more effectively lead multigenerational teams. What challenges do you face?