Course curriculum

Resilience isn’t a personality trait—it’s a skill you can build. In this session, you’ll explore how your body, thoughts, emotions, and behaviours interact under pressure, and learn practical tools to stay grounded, think clearly, and lead effectively in high stress environments. You’ll leave with strategies to shift from survival mode to growth mode, using your energy more intentionally to support both your well being and your leadership impact.

The Psychology of Persuasion and Influence

Real influence doesn’t come from authority—it comes from understanding people. This session equips you with evidence based strategies to engage colleagues, build coalitions, and move change forward even when resistance is present. You’ll learn how to frame issues, time your interventions, test the waters, and use ethical influence to mobilize teams and shape decisions across the system.

Dialogue with Leaders

Hear directly from senior leaders who have navigated the complexities of the healthcare system. Through candid conversations, you’ll gain insight into the realities of leadership, the pressures and trade-offs involved, and the diverse styles and approaches that successful leaders use.

Introduction to Co-Consulting & Lifelines

In this session, participants will be introduced to their Co-Consulting teams and will have the opportunity in the consulting groups to share, in a confidential setting, their personal lifelines and then use these groups to develop their leadership development action plans.

You’ll join your Co Consulting team—a confidential peer group that will support your growth throughout the program. Together, you’ll share personal leadership “lifelines,” reflect on pivotal experiences, and begin shaping your leadership development plan with the support of trusted colleagues.

Module 2: May 13-15

Dialogue with Leaders

Hear directly from senior leaders who have navigated the complexities of the healthcare system. Through candid conversations, you’ll gain insight into the realities of leadership, the pressures and trade-offs involved, and the diverse styles and approaches that successful leaders use.

Adaptive Leadership and Co-Consulting

A main theme in this program is Adaptive Leadership, a perspective that rejects the ‘great leader” model of leadership, where a charismatic figure with outstanding character traits envisions a way to tackle a difficulty and convinces a large followership to embrace their plan. Instead, adaptive leaders learn how to disappoint people at a pace they can handle. They develop in themselves and others a capacity for tolerating despair in the face of losses and failures and encourage a disequilibrium from within and without a group, rather than trying to extinguish it, to the extent that it’s productive for tackling the challenge at hand.

These skills are viewed as necessary for mobilizing progress on adaptive problems — for promoting learning.  It is the opposite of the typical picture of the heroic leader. 

Digital Health and AI

This session will discuss the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the health-care sector. The emphasis will be on recent advances in AI and analytics and which aspects of health-care workflow are most likely to be affected. The central insight is that recent advances in AI can be recast as a drop in the cost of prediction. Cheaper prediction will also impact the value of other things, increasing the value of complements — data, professional judgment and action. These complements will inform a discussion of the skills needed for physicians to be effective influencers and implementors of AI in health care.

Personal Development: Motivation

The motivational system sets the short and long-term goals that govern our lives. Because the wants system can be misguided and wants can be unconsciously internalized from our environment, we often find ourselves pursuing conflicting and contradicting goals. How are we to assess, evaluate and prioritize them? How do we evaluate the alignment of our goals with organizational goals? And how do we deal with areas of conflicting wants? In this part of the program, participants will learn how wants are generated and misguided, and practice a technique that will allow for a more rapid and clear assessment of one’s motivational direction. We will also discuss the possibility of personal and organizational goal alignment.

The Life of a Leader

The pressures within healthcare workplaces have been well documented, affecting all roles in the healthcare system. Several studies over the years have highlighted high rates of dissatisfaction and burnout among health professionals. Staff burnout, workplace stress and dissatisfaction have been magnified by the pandemic. The link between patient safety and healthy workplaces has also been well documented. Leadership roles within healthcare have very high degrees of stress and pressure yet leaders are often looked to as potential role models of work/life balance. Using primarily a panel discussion type format, this session will bring the experiences of three senior leaders as to how they have progressed through multiple stages and roles in their careers, found work-life balance in pressure-filled roles, and how they role model a healthy approach to work.

Emancipatory Leadership

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.

Module 3: Sept. 22-24

Design Thinking

What stops us from generating new ideas within our organizations? And what stops the ideas that do come up from gaining traction? Often, organizational culture is blamed, but the problem crops up in organizations with all kinds of cultures, good and bad. Often, the tools we use for innovation are really to blame.

In this session, we will explore design-based tools for generating new ideas — ideas that start with a real human need. We’ll also talk about prototyping those ideas to gain understanding and buy in. And, towards the end of the session, we’ll talk a little bit about connecting new ideas to the strategy of the organization. 

Storytelling as a Leadership Skill

Stories are not falsehoods. Stories are the root of all effective human communications; they motivate, animate and clarify. If you are not telling stories, you probably are not getting your point across. Participants will be challenged to increase their impact, effectiveness and clarity of how they communicate their most important ideas — for the benefit of their organization and their personal and professional development.

Negotiating for Results

Negotiation is part of everyday leadership — from clinical decisions to organizational strategy. In this hands on session, you’ll learn how to navigate the tension between cooperation and competition, avoid common negotiation pitfalls, and build agreements that strengthen relationships and outcomes.

Personal Cases

Bring a real leadership challenge and work through it with your consulting group using a structured process designed to deepen insight and improve your consulting skills. You’ll leave with a clearer path forward — and return in the next module to reflect on your progress.

Introduction to Reflected Best Self

The Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise is a four-step exercise that integrates external feedback and personal reflection about participants’ strengths and ability to contribute to their organizations. The RBS provides participants with a structured opportunity to consider who they are at their best.  

Module 4: Nov. 3-5

Dialogue with Leaders

Hear directly from senior leaders who have navigated the complexities of the healthcare system. Through candid conversations, you’ll gain insight into the realities of leadership, the pressures and trade-offs involved, and the diverse styles and approaches that successful leaders use.

Leading Change

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 in to 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 changed 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. 

Working with Government

Understanding the governance elements and priorities of the health system and how they are changing is essential to understanding the leader’s role and sphere of influence in it. This session will highlight key system directions — shift to community care, disease management, strategic alliances, shared governance models — and new funding models to help participants understand how government affects their work and how they can influence funders.

Reflected Best Self

The Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise is a four-step exercise that integrates external feedback and personal reflection about participants’ strengths and ability to contribute to their organizations. The RBS provides participants with a structured opportunity to consider who they are at their best. In this session, participants will identify and articulate their personal strengths and their capability to contribute to their organizations. They will gain a deeper understanding of the power and impact of a reflected best-self-portrait for personal development and for individual and organizational performance. 

_{*Scheduling of sessions within the modules is subject to change.}