Rethinking How We Develop Healthcare Leaders

Healthcare leadership education is at a turning point. As healthcare grows more complex, organizations need leadership capacity across professions, roles, and levels. Yet leadership development remains inconsistent, fragmented, and unevenly connected to the realities of clinical practice.

In The Future of Healthcare Leadership Education: A Consensus Vision and Research Agenda from an International Working Group, Gelber and colleagues bring together perspectives from an international, interdisciplinary group to identify a shared vision for the future of healthcare leadership education.

The authors call for several important shifts:

• Leadership as a core professional value: Leadership development should not be reserved for those who hold formal leadership positions. Every healthcare professional has a role in influencing teams, systems, and patient care.

• Longitudinal, developmentally aligned learning: Leadership should be developed over time rather than delivered as isolated courses or one-time programs.

• Followership as part of leadership development: Effective leadership requires understanding not only how to lead, but also how to contribute, challenge, support, and influence as a follower.

• Systems thinking and change leadership: Healthcare leaders need the ability to understand interconnected systems and lead through complexity and change.

• Psychological safety: Organizations need environments where people can learn, speak up, experiment, and develop without fear.

• Meaningful assessment: The field needs stronger approaches to evaluating whether leadership education actually changes behavior and produces meaningful outcomes.

The article also highlights a challenge highly relevant to healthcare leadership today: there is growing agreement on the importance of leadership development, but much less consistency in how it is defined, taught, assessed, and evaluated. The authors therefore call for greater collaboration, shared competencies, longitudinal evaluation, culturally responsive approaches, and international research.

Why it matters for healthcare leaders

Leadership development cannot be an add-on to healthcare education. It needs to be intentionally woven into how healthcare professionals learn, work, reflect, and grow.

The article offers an important invitation to think beyond individual leadership programs toward a more connected developmental ecosystem. Developing better healthcare leaders requires alignment across educators, organizations, professions, and career stages.

Reflection Question

What would change if leadership development were treated as a continuous part of professional development rather than something people receive only when they enter a formal leadership role?