Public Health Leadership Challenges with Dr. Ursula Bauer

Although this is the second episode in the series, this one is really the framing episode.  Our conversation highlights why focusing on leadership and management now is important.  This episode is less about specific tools and more about context-setting and forecasting.

We start out taking a longer view about public health leadership in the 21st Century.  We cover the concept of “vision” in an unexpected way. The public health community has a long tradition of articulating the vision of what type of world we are working towards. Ursula, however introduces us to a different way to think about vision, that is, the vision of “how we want to get there.”  This framing puts a decidedly operational bent on “vision” and helps us to surface some foundational issues around public health work in the face of uncertainty.

Uncertainty was a big theme in our conversation and we spent some time discussing the types of adaptive leadership skills that are needed going forward such as agility, flexibility, storytelling, and deeper partnership engagement.

In the second half we get in to the distinctions among the “4Cs:” Connection, Cooperation, Coordination, and Collaboration.  It struck me that this conceptualization around how we work together could apply within teams, among teams and with external partners. 

We end the episode talking about leadership lessons learned from our recent engagement with health systems and forecasting the leadership implications of upcoming opportunities such as CDC’s HI-5 initiative.

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