Curriculum

Cultivating Presence & the Inner Side of Leadership

Introduction

In October, 2005, the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation created the Massachusetts Institute for Community Health Leadership (MICHL) to help build the leadership capacity of dynamic senior and middle management professionals in Massachusetts health care organizations that serve or advocate for the needs of low-income and uninsured residents. MICHL is an 18-day educational program that takes place over the course of nine months. The goal of MICHL is to help you increase your own personal impact, strengthen your effectiveness in your organization and enhance your organization’s influence in addressing challenges and opportunities in the health care system.

The MICHL experience is designed to transform your perceptions of yourselves as leaders, inspiring you to even higher levels of motivation, learning, steadfastness and efficacy, and to develop practical, hands-on leadership capacities and skills. In addition, the experience is designed to build a network of colleagues from across the Commonwealth who are dedicated to addressing the health care needs of low income and uninsured people. Back to top

Curriculum & Faculty Overview

The MICHL experience is organized around four tracks of activity that are woven across nine two-day workshops with individual and group assignments in between:

Cultivating Presence and the Inner Side of Leadership
Exploring Leadership Practices
Exploring the Health Care System
Action Learning Practicum

The content and learning objectives associated with each track are described below in detail. Content from each of these tracks will be featured in an integrated way in each MICHL workshop session and the homework assignments between sessions. In addition, several special sessions will devote focused attention to one or more of the tracks.

Cynthia Silva Parker and Gibran Rivera, from Interaction Institute for Social Change, will serve as lead faculty members for the MICHL experience and will lead the MICHL sessions except as indicated below.
Ellen Harris and Matthias Mokros, from Thompson Island Outward Bound Professional (OBP), will lead two experiential programs (October 2, April 8-9).
Carla Kimball from Riverways Enterprises, will lead a session on Cultivating Leadership Presence (November 12) and will offer ongoing presence resources and be available for half-hour individual coaching sessions throughout the year.
Tawara Goode, from National Center for Cultural Competence at Georgetown University, will lead a session on the role of leadership in achieving cultural and linguistic competency in health care (January 7-8).

Learning Track: Cultivating Presence & the Inner Side of Leadership

Presence isn't something that we pull out of the closet and wear on special occasions. It's a way of being and a practice that we cultivate in every aspect of our lives. This state of being is an absolutely key, but often overlooked, quality for effective leadership. The inner reflective work that we do as human beings is communicated outwardly in the form of an authentic leadership presence. In this track you will experience a combination of intensive personal and group activities with time for reflection and learning that are meant to cultivate your ability to trust yourself to speak and lead with clarity, authenticity and confidence. These lessons will be viscerally grounded in experience rather than learned only through traditional classroom teaching.

Leading from the inside out, you will set out to uncover a broad range of possibilities for your own leadership in order to maximize your strengths as a leader, while also developing complementary roles for others. You will survey traditional and evolving paradigms of leadership as you seek to re-imagine the role of leader for yourself and your community. You will be invited to create your own theory of leadership in a way that responds directly to health care challenges and the work of serving low income and uninsured communities.

We will use a variety of methods to explore the inner side of leadership, including:

Workshop presentations and discussions
Experiential and interactive exercises
Outward Bound Professional programs
Readings
Journaling
Peer coaching
Self-reflection and planning for personal growth and development

By coming together to explore and examine the inner side of leadership you will build a community that supports your own development while strengthening your capacity to engage your organizations and communities.

Learning Objectives

Through the year, you will learn to:

Demonstrate leadership presence by slowing down, connecting with your own deepest sense of purpose and creating deeper access to your own thinking, physical presence, emotions, values and aspirations
Understand your Myers Briggs personality type and that of others, and integrate that understanding into your leadership practices
Notice the impact of your cultural identity on your leadership practice
Speak in front of a group comfortably, powerfully and in ways that connect with the group
Engage in self-reflection that yields deeper self-knowledge and strategies for “getting out of the box” and “getting out of your own way"
Integrate concepts and practices learned in workshop settings through hands-on leadership activities

Particularly during the Outward Bound Professional programs, you will have opportunities to integrate leadership concepts and practices through a variety of challenging and engaging experiences to:

Raise to a level of awareness your strengths and areas for development as a leader and a follower
Become aware of your and others’ contributions and hindrances to the processes of finding collaborative solutions
Give and receive feedback to gain understanding of your roles and those of your colleagues

Learning Track: Exploring Leadership Practices

Collaboration is more than simply bringing people together, or even bringing the right people together. It’s also about creating safe and constructive environments in which all can participate and thus generate the synergy necessary for resourceful thought and action. Strong collaborative leaders know when to go beyond getting input from others and actually engage them in the deeper work of defining problems and solutions collaboratively.

Many of you are trained as experts in specific fields and your roles frequently call you to analyze problems and provide answers. Facilitating the thinking and work of others requires different skills and leadership capacities. You will explore a set of leadership skills for working with others—both within and beyond your organizations—to convene, catalyze and facilitate collaborative efforts to understand and address the challenges you face in health care. These leadership practices will be learned and practiced in workshop settings, practicum project groups and Outward Bound Professional programs.

Learning Objectives

As you explore leadership practices, you will learn to:

Nurture the development of groups and foster a collective sense of shared responsibility for the whole, devoting conscious attention to the process of how people come together and the quality of relationships
Recognize the difference between adaptive and technical challenges and design processes that are appropriate for addressing different types of challenges, balancing the desire to find solutions quickly with the need to first explore the issues more deeply
Use and model for others seven practices of Facilitative Leadership that will enable to you to:

Share an inspiring vision and inspire the creation of a shared vision
Balance dimensions of team success: results, process and relationship
Identify stakeholders and involve them in decision making
Facilitate meetings that lead to understanding and agreement
Design collaborative planning processes and effective meetings
Coach others to deepen their capacity and commitment
Celebrate accomplishment

Learning Track: Exploring the Health Care System

The challenges and opportunities inherent in health care take place within a context. Most of the challenges you face are characterized by layers of complexity that tend not to respond to technical fixes. You will take a systems-thinking approach to gain a better understanding of that complexity and how it affects your field, identifying adaptive shifts that are necessary to make significant change. You will apply network theory to gain a deeper understanding your work in the context of an interconnected field so that you are better able to identify partners and promising interventions that could move that field forward. These approaches directly challenge modes of leadership that place too much value on the role of the expert. You will explore the health care field in a ways that strengthen your capacity to see patterns, make connections and value ongoing inquiry.

The health care field also will be explored through a structural lens to deepen your understanding of power and the importance of developing cultural and linguistic competency. Achieving cultural and linguistic competence requires strong and informed leadership to spur necessary changes within systems, organizations, mindsets and daily practice. There is a need for leaders with the commitment, energy, knowledge and skills to do the difficult work of advancing and sustaining cultural and linguistic competence in systems and organizations that develop policy, provide services and supports, conduct research and/or advocate with and on behalf of culturally diverse populations that are underserved, vulnerable and disenfranchised.

Learning Objectives

As you explore these issues, you will learn to:

Take a systems thinking approach to understanding health care system by:

Mapping the system in Massachusetts, identifying connections among stakeholders and issues
Applying principles from complexity theory and network theory to enrich your understanding of the health care system and strategies for catalyzing change
Identifying adaptive challenges within the system and use those challenges as a starting point for your practicum project

Articulate the importance of and the role of leadership in pursuing cultural and linguistic competence for achieving significant changes to the health care system through:

Describing cultural influences on the beliefs and practices of individuals and groups seeking or needing mental and physical health care, as well as systems and providers
Citing four root causes of health care disparities and inequities
Applying a cultural competence framework that is grounded in systems thinking to the US and Massachusetts contexts
Articulating characteristics of organizations and personnel who demonstrate cultural competency, and describing the particular role of leadership in moving health and mental health care organizations toward deeper levels of competency
Developing action plans for advancing cultural and linguistic competency within your own work setting

Learning Track: Action Learning Practicum

On an individual basis, you will each practice and apply what you are learning in the context of your ongoing work. In addition, you will work together in teams to apply the principles and practices learned during this program to real-world issues through a small group practicum project. These projects will provide a laboratory for you to incorporate the collaborative leadership skills you are learning with an opportunity to respond creatively to a real and challenging health care issue affecting low income and uninsured people in Massachusetts. The practicum experience will provide opportunities for you to practice your skills in framing issues, facilitating dialogue among “unusual suspects,” and reaching consensus. In the spirit of creating a learning laboratory, team members will share feedback and support throughout the process. The practicum will involve identifying an issue and working with a small team of peers to:

Analyze the organizational and community context and the challenges and opportunities the issue presents
Frame an inquiry or series of questions about the issue that a could, if addressed creatively, yield important new insights about the issue and how to address it
Design and facilitate a process for engaging and involving a wide range of stakeholders in an inquiry about the issue
Capture the insights and learnings from this shared inquiry and disseminate them to participants
Identify potential next steps, including disseminating the insights to others whose work might benefit from them

Some time will be devoted to work on your practicum projects during the monthly workshops. You can also expect to work on your projects with your team for an average of four to six hours per month between sessions. If your group chooses to spend more time due to the nature of your project, you may need to seek approval from your sponsoring organization.

Learning Objectives

Through the work of the practicum project teams, you will learn to:

Apply systems thinking, complexity theory, and network theory to frame and analyze health care challenges and the context in which they are embedded
Use collaborative planning and facilitation frameworks and skills to design and facilitate dialogue and planning with multiple stakeholders
Sharpen your use of the frameworks and tools you are learning learned about leadership, feedback, diversity, dialogue, problem analysis, and stakeholder involvement
Hone your ability to make useful observations and share insightful, actionable feedback with your colleagues
Expand your capacity to reflect on your own thinking and leadership practice, hear and make use of feedback, and pursue your ongoing learning and development

Throughout the MICHL experience, you will learn at least as much from one another as you learn from the faculty. So, we, the MICHL faculty and staff invite you to enter in with open minds, open hearts and open hands. Here’s to a wonderful learning journey!

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