Building Leadership Skills Through Professional Development

by Lander Cooney, CEO, Community Health Partners, Livingston, Montana

"Leadership in the health center world involves a lot of action, and if I’m afraid to try something new, I’ll get left behind, and maybe my health center will too."  

I am an accidental CEO. That’s a real term, or at least I think it is. A lot of community health leaders are accidental like me. I didn’t go to school to learn how to prepare budgets or facilitate strategic planning sessions, write competitive grants or make tough personnel decisions. I came to work at a community health center because I connected with the mission and vision of the organization and wanted to work with a group of committed, motivated, like-minded individuals to change the status quo. 

Being an accidental leader isn’t that easy.  If you don’t know why you’re a leader, it’s hard to believe you can do it really well. In 2011, I had the privilege of being part of the second cohort of students in the NWRPCA-CHAMPS-sponsored Certificate in Community Health Leadership program at the University of Washington. Through that course I was exposed to relevant leadership theory, an understanding of the role of mentoring, and the value of learning by doing. The most important take-away for me was that I can learn to be a leader, a very good one.

On day one of the six-month combined face-to-face and online program, I met nearly 30 other students – CEOs, medical directors, financial leaders, and nurse coordinators –  all community health center leaders who share the same passion for eliminating health disparities AND the same challenges that come with wanting to be a better leader. And through exposing myself to academic perspectives on leadership, finding and maintaining mentor relationships, and opening my eyes to feedback on my skills, I am making progress.

The UW Certificate in Community Health Leadership (CHL) program included total immersion in a wide array of theoretical perspectives on leadership. Through lectures, readings, discussions, and team projects, I digested an overwhelming amount of content in a short period of time. I learned the value of self-awareness and practiced coaching techniques. I approached topics like appreciative inquiry, and brainstormed applications of those topics with my team, and then took those ideas back to put into action in my organization.

I consumed the Malcolm Baldrige quality award components and practiced using them as tools for organizational evaluation and improvement. I was exposed to an enormous amount of information, and I will no doubt be drawing on it, and a very long list of books I have yet to read, for many years to come in my ongoing effort to examine my own successes and opportunities for improvement and to build capacity within my own organization. 

Another lasting impression I took from the CHL program was a new-found respect for the value of mentorship. I’ve had some incredible mentors in my life, and some of them snuck up on me – I didn’t even realize they were mentors until many years later when, faced with a tough situation, I drew on an experience or piece of advice shared by that person in the past. But now I am seeking out good mentoring relationships and have actually approached a few people in my professional life to establish new lines of communication that I know will challenge me to improve.  I’m surprised how much I have in common professionally with leaders of for-profits, educational institutions, and governmental organizations, and I’ve begun to recognize that I need someone to mitigate my isolation, to challenge my way of thinking, to ask me wicked questions, and to listen when I just need to vent. Having a mentor will make me a better leader.

My final take-away from my experience at the CHL was confidence in my ability to learn by doing. If someone asked me the hardest part about my job, I would say it’s learning by trial and error. In my dream world, I would have been issued a “how to be a great CEO” book on my first day, read it, and then known how to do everything perfectly.  Unfortunately for me, that doesn’t seem to be the way it works.

Leadership in the health center world involves a lot of action, and if I’m afraid to try something new, I’ll get left behind, and maybe my health center will too. So, I’ve had to get over the fear of being imperfect, and the way to do that is to make every situation a learning opportunity, a personal “Plan Do Study Act” cycle. I try a new approach and then open myself or my team up to feedback about the results. Whether that feedback comes quantitatively as a run chart on process improvement or qualitatively as a conversation with a coworker, it is the key piece of the learning process.  I have to have an open mind and go out of my way to ask others to help me identify my blind spots about the results those actions created so I can try something new and improved next time. Learning by doing is essential for my leadership development and the success of our organizations.

With these new tools – exposure to leadership theory, belief in strong mentorship relationships, and commitment to learning by doing - I am more comfortable as an accidental CEO.  And, even though I still worry that someday I will be “found out” for not knowing all the answers, I’m embracing the process every day of getting better at what I do. In fact, I love being a health center CEO because my entire job is about learning how to be a better leader, how to create and maintain that same focus in my entire organization, and maybe even how to build a better healthcare system! And the tools to get there are completely within my reach.