NCHL's "Best Organizations for Leadership Development" Program: A Case Study in Improving Evidence-based Practice through Benchmarking and Recognition.

Increasingly, addressing healthcare's grand challenges requires complex system-level adaptations involving continuously evolving teams and leaders. Although leadership development strategies have been shown to improve individual leader effectiveness, much less is known about how organization-level leadership development affects organization-level outcomes. To begin building an evidence base as well as encouraging evidence-based practices, the US-based National Center for Healthcare Leadership developed a program capitalizing on leaders' demonstrated interest in organizational competitiveness: the biennial Best Organizations for Leadership Development (BOLD) program. In this chapter, we describe the philosophy behind this unique survey program and summarize research to date on relationships between survey dimensions and organizational outcomes such as patient experience and financial performance. We conclude with a description of promising areas for future study.

Bridging worldviews: Toward a common model of leadership across the health professions.

BACKGROUND: As the pace of health sector transformation accelerates, the importance of leadership continues to grow across all health professions. Advances in a variety of disciplines can inform effective leadership development. However, at present, most health sector leadership competency models do not incorporate these advances and are instead developed using consensus-based methods within specific professions. An interprofessional approach to leadership competencies could help incorporate these advances and support better interdisciplinary leadership development. PURPOSE: This study was pursued to revise and revalidate a widely used health sector leadership competency model and assess its potential for providing greater interoperability across the professions. METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Using the National Center for Healthcare Leadership's interprofessional competency model Version 2.1 as the starting point, we developed a revised and revalidated model in four phases: (a) we completed a future scan using methods described in Garman et al. [Garman, A. N., Johnson, T. J., & Royer, T. (2011). The future of healthcare: Global trends worth watching. Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press.]; (b) we collected behavioral event interview data from pairs of leaders representing different organizational and performance levels, using methods developed by Boyatzis [Boyatzis, R. E. (1982). The competent manager: A model for effective performance. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.]; (c) we conducted a validity study via electronic survey of 145 working managers and calculated content validity ratios using methods described by Lawshe [Lawshe, C. H. (1975). A quantitative approach to content validity. Personnel Psychology, 38(4), 563-575.]; and (d) we used natural language processing to assess the extent to which existing leadership models in the health professions will crosswalk to the new model. FINDINGS: All competencies in the revised model successfully met criteria for validity. The revised model also successfully crosswalked against, on average, 85% of the competencies in the other five health professions leadership models. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Based on the results of this research, we conclude the revised model can provide a "common language" framework in support of interdisciplinary leadership development. The availability of such a model may also assist human resource and development executives in better aligning learning resources with organizational goals.