Dynamic Leadership for Health Leaders: Navigating Through Crisis and Complexity

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Welcome to Dynamic Leadership for Health Leaders: Navigating Through Crisis and Complexity.

In an era of rapid global transformation, social upheaval, and financial instability, the role of leadership has never been more crucial. Leaders today must develop a distinctive skill set to successfully navigate their organizations through periods of turbulence, crisis, and change.

This course provides an in-depth exploration of dynamic leadership, a style distinguished by its ability to respond effectively to crises and adapt to ongoing changes. In environments marked by uncertainty and disruption, traditional leadership approaches may fail to adapt to rapid change and disruption, leading to stagnation, information overload, and an inability to build cohesive teams.

Dynamic leaders, however, excel under pressure. They recognize that crises demand swift action, clear decision-making, and precise direction. These leaders maximize the potential of their teams, form functional groups, and craft coherent strategies. Most importantly, dynamic leaders recognize that they are the solution to effectively navigating change. Dynamic leaders are adept at communication, negotiation, and developing new strategies and teams to address evolving challenges and opportunities. The skills and insights offered in this course are applicable from local to global - across diverse settings in healthcare, public service and in the humanitarian sector.

 

 

Course Overview

This course is designed to be a hybrid course with the majority of the course to be completed asynchronously. Registered students in the course will have the opportunity to attend virtual live working sessions with the course instructor, Dr. Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH, Lavine Family Professor of Humanitarian Studies, Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Alumni of the course will be invited to join an exclusive, annual Dynamic Leadership Summit.

HHI courses aim to facilitate social learning, enabling participants to enhance their comprehension and expand their viewpoints by exchanging perspectives, thoughts, and concepts. This holds particular significance in classes with a varied mix of students, potentially joining from global locations. You might encounter unfamiliar social learning tasks in this course. We encourage you to engage meaningfully with every opportunity to interact with peers and the instructor. This is your leadership journey. Engage thoughtfully in every activity to get the absolute most from this experience.

Course Title: “Dynamic Leadership for Health Leaders: Navigating Through Crisis and Complexity”

Course hours: 8 weekly sessions = 24 hr total class activity

Monthly Group meetings: Meet with Dr. Michael VanRooyen (optional)

Case Studies: 9 Case studies and required case study responses

Discussion Threads: 17 required threads to complete, including case study responses

Guest Interviews: Over 40 guest interviews with real-world leadership insights and stories from global leaders in the humanitarian, health, and public sectors

 

Mission of the Course

The target audience for this course are emerging and established leaders in the public sector across all disciplines that seek to develop high-impact and actionable approaches to lead through uncertainty and change.

The course will help prepare professionals from government, international organizations, health care, industry, and humanitarian and development organizations to manage change within their domains. The course will seek to provide relevant guidance for leaders at all levels. Even if you do not yet manage a team or an organization, the lessons learned in this course can be applied throughout your career and prepare you for your future. Early career professionals can build and demonstrate strong leadership skills, which will ultimately strengthen their abilities and their organizations as a whole.

In this course, students will explore the unique characteristics of a dynamic leader and identify and explore the skills necessary to lead effectively in times of rapid change. The course will explore the conditions that create a need for leadership and how to recognize a crisis or a complex situation. The course will draw upon a wide variety of case studies and examples, from addressing smaller-scale threats on an individual level to large-scale crises on an international scale. Together, we will help you identify your own strengths and opportunities for growth as a leader.

 

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, the participants will be able to:

1. Define and differentiate the concepts of crisis and dynamic leadership

2. Define the characteristics of leaders who succeed (or fail) in rapidly evolving contexts

3. Develop approaches and strategies for negotiations

4. Understand attributes of personal and organizational preparation

5. Understand the stages and strategies for effective change management

6. Develop the ability to build a team and create a strategy for responding to a crisis

7. Understand the importance and components of effective urgent communications

8. Understand personal and team resilience and adaptability in high-stakes situations

9. Develop a “Playbook” of skills and approaches to be used in leading through crisis

 

Click here to enroll!

 

Course Instructor

Michael VanRooyen, MD, MPH is the Chairman of Emergency Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Enterprise Chief of Emergency Medicine for the Mass General Brigham health system. He leads all academic, education, and clinical services for ten the emergency departments with over 500 medical providers and serving over 500,000 patients per year.  He has served at the executive level of healthcare in the MGB system for over a decade and has led teams through major organizational change and throughout the COVID epidemic.  He is also the J. Stephen Bohan Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Lavine Family Professor of Humanitarian Studies and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 

Dr. VanRooyen is the founding director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), an interfaculty initiative at Harvard University focusing on advancing evidence and professional development in humanitarian aid.  He has led humanitarian work with numerous relief organizations in over thirty countries affected by war and disaster, including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, North Korea, Darfur-Sudan, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine and Ukraine.  He has worked in the field as a relief expert with several non-governmental organizations, including CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, and Physicians for Human Rights.  In 2012, he founded the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard to advance professional development of humanitarian leaders globally.

Domestically, Dr. VanRooyen has led responses to a number of local, national and international events.  He was on the American Red Cross Team that responded to Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.  He led emergency medicine teams responding to the 2012 Boston Marathon Bombing, mobilized medical support for the 2014 Ebola epidemic and lead his emergency medical teams through two hospital shootings and the Covid epidemic.

Dr. VanRooyen teaches courses at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Public Health on humanitarian leadership and in humanitarian operations in war and disaster. He has authored the textbook “Emergent Field Medicine” and his most recent book, “The World’s Emergency Room” describes the evolution of modern humanitarian aid and the threats to healthcare workers in conflict.

 

Certification

To achieve the certificate for completion for this course, you will need to successfully complete all requited discussion threads and the final capstone project.

 

Click here to enroll!

About Continuing Medical Education Credits for Medical Doctors

Disclosure Information
Since the content of this activity is non-clinical, disclosure forms do not need to be collected for planners and speakers.

Accreditation Statement for Overall Website:

Accreditation 
In support of improving patient care, Mass General Brigham is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.
 

AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™

Mass General Brigham designates this enduring material for a maximum of 24 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ per session. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Accreditation Statement for Each Sessions’ Website:

Accreditation (per session)
In support of improving patient care, Mass General Brigham is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.

AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™

Mass General Brigham designates this enduring material for a maximum of 3 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ per session. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the course, the participants will be able to:

  1. Define and differentiate the concepts of crisis and dynamic leadership.
  2. Define the characteristics of leaders who succeed (or fail) in rapidly evolving contexts.
  3. Develop approaches and strategies for negotiations.
  4. Describe attributes of personal and organizational preparation.
  5. Define the stages and strategies for effective change management.
  6. Develop the ability to build a team and create a strategy for responding to a crisis.
  7. Describe the importance and components of effective urgent communications.
  8. Define personal and team resilience and adaptability in high-stakes situations.
  9. Develop a “Playbook” of skills and approaches to be used in leading through crisis.

Target Audience

This activity is intended for emerging and established leaders in the public sector across all disciplines that seek to develop high-impact and actionable approaches to lead through uncertainty and change.