Leslin, The Leslin Healthcare Leadership Foundation, understands and champions the importance and impact of healthcare management leaders on the delivery of care, service, and experience. We work to create a new paradigm for the education and development of healthcare leaders so that they can create a more compassionate and responsive healthcare workplace. We focus on students considering healthcare management as a career, people transitioning from other sectors into healthcare management, and entry and mid-level frontline leaders working in healthcare. Our approach is cross-sector and interdisciplinary. We aim to build an “unbounded” new approach for educating healthcare leaders who work from an inner drive within the healthcare systems creating new ways of working. We believe that the “Leader is Within.”
Leslin embraces the knowledge and best practices of the business, service, technology, and medical fields and builds upon them. However, relying solely on the knowledge of one industry sector or discipline and developing competencies for success in siloed areas no longer meets the needs of the twenty-first-century workforce or workplace. The future workplace demands leaders who can flex to change, and actively contribute to organizational goals while satisfying personal ones. New leaders want and need the agility to move between industry sectors and disciplines and need the confidence and skills to do so. We believe that a new curriculum is needed for developing healthcare managers and a new paradigm for the entire healthcare sector. Wholesale overlaying and borrowing from other sectors has proven to be insufficient and perhaps even damaging. This is evident in staff burnout, high rates of resignations, patient satisfaction scores, and financial instability, to name a few.
For us, the humanities, such as history, philosophy, art, and foreign language, offer a way to develop healthcare leaders and a new healthcare delivery system. Our work embeds the study of the humanities into healthcare management education, practice, and research. By integrating the humanities into healthcare management education, students expand their knowledge of the human condition, connecting people, igniting a sense of purpose, and deepening their compassion. Studying the humanities promotes critical thinking and develops respect for different viewpoints, and different cultures; studying the humanities demonstrates the power of language and communication.
The skills that are developed by studying the humanities allow students to broaden their perspectives, their skills, and their opportunities. They develop needed marketable and transferable skills for the current and emerging workplace and move beyond building transactional, industry, and discipline-specific competencies that serve short-term needs. Our approach will reduce burnout and the disconnection between achieving personal and organizational goals.
We prepare students for the opportunities available today and for the jobs and fields of tomorrow. We develop people with insights and competencies that can flex with the changing environment, enabling them to achieve both organizational and personal goals. We partner to develop a new type of healthcare leader who is worldly, resilient, kind, skilled, innovative, and ready to succeed in both local and global careers.
We understand that some are driven to the field by a sense of purpose; others pursuing a career with strong growth potential. All will have a major impact on the future healthcare delivery system and the people who receive care and work in it. Through their work on the frontlines and within the system, they effect real, positive, and sustainable change. The change agents we seek are not outside of the system, they are within it. All we need to do is listen, learn, and co-create. “Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakes. “The Leader is Within.”