The health care industry has moved from an industry that was relatively static and stable to one that is regularly facing disruption. The well-worn playbooks for success are now in question, and as a result, leaders must be capable of adapting to changing circumstances. This demands a whole range of different competencies, capabilities, and mindsets.

First and foremost, leaders need to be extremely oriented to purpose, vision, and strategy. They should have a plan, but should hold that plan more loosely and be willing and able to notice how the world is different and how it may require us to change course at any given moment.

The other skill set that becomes important is developing awareness – awareness of self, of others, and of the larger world in which we live. In addition to rapidly changing ecosystem and market dynamics, leaders need to account for the complex human emotions that go along with leading change and transformation - things like vulnerability, perspective taking, adaptability, and awareness. We're operating within a complex human system, and human beings are the ultimate wild card.

With any change or transformation, we experience loss. Rather than just simply executing within our well-worn systems, as leaders have traditionally done, leaders must constantly question and calibrate the system itself relative to purpose. We are doing something deeply counterintuitive when we raise questions about the ongoing viability of the environment within which we built our greatest professional success and in which everybody with whom we work has also built their greatest professional success.

Why is this so hard? We don't want to tackle things for which there are no easy answers. And we certainly don't want to call into question a system within which we know we can succeed. There is a lot that a leader needs to account for in terms of their own loss associated with change. Leaders must notice the ways in which they are vulnerable to fear and reactivity in a complex moment.

We aren’t measuring the wrong things. It’s not that technical skills are no longer important – they are simply now table stakes. It’s the price of admission. Leaders don’t have a knowledge gap or skills gap – what is missing is supporting an awareness gap, which requires that leaders think critically about the ways in which they show up. This is a shift that really defies the traditional means of leadership development. You can no longer rely solely on packing people into classrooms and running them through large slide decks.

By way of illustration, I think you’d agree it would be challenging to think of a successful athlete who learned how to play from a coach who stood behind a podium and walked them through a didactic presentation. It doesn't work that way. Athletes get on the court or field, in game conditions. Leaders need the chance to actually practice these skills and do so with other people in a way that is totally immersive. This means creating a space in which leaders can get in the arena and practice thinking differently, about the actual challenges they are facing – in real time. This will give leaders the opportunity to practice the messiness of navigating human complexity and build skills like piloting through uncertainty and exhibiting vulnerability.

I’ve seen this done especially well with intact teams and in cohort-based experiences. Nothing that we're facing right now can any single leader tackle by themselves. It requires multiple perspectives, multiple voices, so as a result, leaders need to build and practice these new skills and capabilities with others. And as far as reinforcing these new leadership skills and norms, when there are examples of people leading differently, hang a lantern on it. Talk about how it's different and how it serves us well.

Well, it’s larger than that. Organizations need to realize this is a complete and total redefinition in what means to be a leader, period. For lack of a better term, what it requires in an organization is akin to a social movement. It’s not a single program or workshop, but instead a movement of people who are so strongly oriented to doing the really, really hard collective work of sitting in the discomfort of uncertainty and to practicing a different kind of leadership. Like any kind of larger cultural shift, this is going to take a long time. From an organizational standpoint, you know we have to go well beyond thinking in terms of what's our training budget for the year. This is a generational change to set up our organizations to thrive decades into the future. It will also be the single biggest point of differentiation and competitive advantage. In a rapidly changing world, advantage goes to the adaptive.

That's a great question. It’s clear this shift must start at the top. Senior leadership must recognize that the way they've been leading is not going to allow them to thrive in the future. Beginning with senior level leaders is imperative because if you start developing your frontline folks to think differently first, you will have a workforce with a growing awareness of the need to operate differently in an environment that is telling them that it's wrong to do so. We really do have to start at the top and then properly calibrate adaptive capacity at all levels of the organization.

We also need to recognize that investing in transforming leadership has to be a scaled effort. If you invest in developing just one or two leaders at a time, you risk creating cultural misfits that don’t have the agency and power to drive the cultural transformation they desire.

We as humans don't change unless we're uncomfortable, and therefore this type of leadership involves the willingness and ability to ask hard questions and face difficult truths. This is not easy, but absolutely critical.