Shaping The Future Of Health: Supporting Leadership Development

leadership program

How are leaders prepared to change the trajectory of healthcare? Our client, a global healthcare organization, takes its leaders on a 15-month leadership development journey where humanity is front and center.

The Immersion Lab was approached by our client to provide immersive experiences as part of a development program. Their objective? To “go beyond yourself to change the trajectory of health for humanity”. 

Our challenge? To create an experience that supports the continued learning and expansion of scope in service of the brand and mission. We did this by running a series of online immersions that tied in with both the program and the brand.

The Client  – A Multinational Healthcare Company

Our client is a familiar brand that many of us reach for on a daily basis. This global giant puts leadership development high on its strategic agenda: without nurturing future talent, how can an organization innovate and thrive?

The Program

This program targeted at leaders with high potential. Run over 15 months, it allows for real-time application of learning as well as personalized development experiences. The annual cohort of 40 participants comes from various organizational branches, all across the world.

The aim is to encourage transformational leadership for those who will have the responsibility for leading on healthcare, while promoting, as the program phrases it, “paying attention to the whole person in the whole system”.

The Challenge

With this ethos and the underlying objective in mind, our challenge was to design immersion experiences that focused on leadership in extraordinary situations, towards shaping the future of healthcare. The leadership journey would demonstrate:

    • Entrepreneurship: by experimenting with opportunities and innovations that shape the future of health for humanity

    • Energy: by driving individual and team performance by managing energy and paying attention to the whole person as part of the whole system

    • Transformation: by transforming their business through the inspiration of movements that foster inclusivity and resilience, and executing with excellence

    • Ecosystem Leadership: by collaborating and connecting across their internal and external ecosystems to accelerate progress across their value chain and healthcare systems

We’d planned to run the immersions in South Africa, then a new challenge arose: South Africa’s COVID regulations meant that in-person sessions weren’t possible. While we’re all used to managing sessions online now, how would our ethnographic focus transfer to remote immersions? 

What We Did

We designed three immersions, that were held on 29 and 30 March, and again on 14 July. Two further sessions were arranged for later in the year.

The virtual sessions were made up from three parts: preparation, immersion, and reflection. Between the sessions, smaller break-out activities (“action learning teams”) kept the momentum flowing.

The first two sessions challenged the participants to understand unmet needs in healthcare, against the background of South Africa’s healthcare challenges. The third session introduced the teams to extraordinary leaders who achieve results in high-stakes situations.

The Immersion Learning Experience

Session one. The theme for the first immersion session was “Understanding unmet needs”. The participants would explore their hosts’ passion for problem-solving, tolerance of failure and comfort with uncertainty, and their ability to learn, pivot, and innovate quickly and under pressure every day of their lives. 

Divided into seven small teams, our participants met with hosts who are exemplars of “understanding unmet needs” in both physical and mental health. These were patients and healthcare workers, and the issues addressed included pediatric HIV, the mental health system, and COVID vaccinations. Emotive issues 

Session two. The second immersion stayed with the theme of unmet needs. This virtual session looked at “Entrepreneurial thinking in response to unmet needs”. In contrast to the first day, this wasn’t about everyday life but how leaders are responding to unmet needs through tech, business models, and innovation. We sought hosts for this session who were determined, curious, and adaptive, who could combine leading-from-the-front with remaining externally focussed.

We again divided the cohort into seven smaller groups, and they met with leaders who were:

    • Responding to unmet needs via new business models

    • Using digital in a novel way in response to unmet needs

    • Increasing access through a new business model

    • Examining the mindset and challenges of scaling the business

    • Creating value by responding to unmet needs

Session three. As the saying goes, and now for something completely different. The July session invited the participants to “explore the mindset of leaders who inspire others to achieve extraordinary results in high-stakes situations.”  For the first virtual session, we divided the participants into six teams to take part in informal exchanges with these extraordinary hosts.

These leaders had achieved results through collaboration, fostering trust, and being accountable. They work or have worked in teams that operate with the speed and precision of a Formula One team. 

We met with elite military personnel, emergency services in the UK, an NGO based in Ireland, related to Age Action, a member of the Canadian Paralympic Team, an activist, and a healthcare trailblazer. The participants gained insights into collaboration, communication, inspiration – and trust.

What did the participants take away from their sessions from The Immersion Lab?

The Impact – The Importance of Sharing Experiences

The client was extremely positive about the hosts we had found for all three immersion sessions. The participants were especially impressed with the patients and healthcare professionals from the first session, who had shared their everyday experiences of unmet needs so openly and honestly.

A scenario that stayed with everyone was the account of the man from a rural area who needs to travel for three hours each way to the nearest mental health provider. As we all know, mental health care needs regular touchpoints: how can this be managed in remote communities? The solution was to teach people in rural communities to serve as an extension of mental health care provision. This was an example of innovative solutions to keep people on the trajectory of good health.

While ideally, an ethnography-based immersion experience should be in-person, the caliber of the hosts and willingness of the participants transcended this. From our perspective, we’ve learned how to support online ethnography sessions, opening up new approaches.

Our work with this client on this program continues.

Immersion experiences can enhance an organisation’s leadership and organizational development programs. To find out how The Immersion Lab can support your programs, platforms, and learning, please get in touch with us.