The Executive Leadership Institute provides current and emerging leaders in the school with training in the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that make up strong leadership, management, and administration. Each group of participants in the institute progresses through six sessions taught at intervals over about nine months. Topics include “Understanding Self in Leadership,” “Implementing Strategic Thinking and Practice,” and “Empowered Leadership: Setting and Achieving Goals.”

“The intent of the program is to grow our own leaders and develop leadership skills,” said Morris J. Blachman, assistant dean for continuing medical education and faculty development in the School of Medicine. “Good faculty development needs to be institutionally based and take into account the whole organization.”

One of the principles of the institute is to help faculty become better leaders by connecting with other faculty in the medical school and with the larger medical and University communities.

“The world is very complex,” Blachman said. “If you’re in the medical school, you’ve got relations with the University as a whole, the medical profession, hospitals, and the community. The institute helps leaders make sense of, and be more effective in working, with those connections.”

School of Medicine Dean Larry Faulkner, said he expects the investment in the Executive Leadership Institute to yield real world dividends.

“The course of instruction for the institute is not just didactic instruction, it is quite interactive and presented in such a way that participants address real day-to-day issues that affect the School of Medicine,” he said, adding that he believes the curriculum improves participants’ abilities to engage in effective projects, in particular long-range, strategic planning, one of the most critical processes in administering the School of Medicine.

Having groups of faculty and staff members attend the institute fosters mutual support groups and helps everyone learn together. “To be effective, you can’t just send faculty members off by themselves to pick up some information and then expect them to come back to the same situation and bring about meaningful change,” Blachman said. “On the contrary, having a cohort of key faculty and staff go through the institute helps the participants both to learn the individual skills and knowledge they need to be effective leaders and also creates a natural support group, mutually reinforcing what they learn.”

Spreading the institute’s sessions out over several months gives participants a chance to put their new leadership skills into practice.

For example, the first session examines the personal side of leadership management and professional development. At the beginning of the second session, about two months later, participants discuss how they’ve reinforced what they’ve learned.

“Adult education is much more effective when you work on things that are direct and relevant to people’s lives,” Blachman said. “With time between sessions, people have the time to put what they learn into effect, see how it works, and come back and process it.

“After you create several cohort groups like that, you strengthen the whole school. That’s really what faculty development is about. It’s not only taking an individual and developing that individual, it’s developing leadership institutionally.”

Faulkner attends the first session and returns for the final class, at which participants share ideas from what they’ve learned.

“One of the important reasons for the program’s success is the support and encouragement we’ve had from Dean Faulkner,” said Elizabeth Baxley, director of faculty development and chair of family and preventive medicine. “A big part of the program is getting people to think outside their departmental structures. We’re trying to get people to work as a school and to give them a better sense of what the context of the school is and how each department can collaborate and contribute to the overall mission of the school.

“In the sessions, to get participants to understand the school better, they suggest some strategic initiatives and, at the final session, present their ideas to the dean. Those ideas can be used in future planning for the school. It really is a learning process but results in a product that is helpful to the school as a larger unit.”

Blachman called the Executive Leadership Institute “the cutting edge of best practice in strategic management.”

“Good strategic management recognizes that you develop your people,” he said. “The institute allows us to look at the kinds of things we need to do to develop ourselves and ask ourselves where are we going, how are we going to get there, and what can we do to take an extraordinary pool of talent and help channel and focus it so that it can be developed to a high degree.”

10/03