Wisdom leadership in academic health science centers: leading positive change

In their book, Wisdom Leadership in Academic Health Science Centers: Leading Positive Change, editors Margaret Plews-Ogan and Gene Beyt illustrate how leaders of academic health science centers can cultivate a more humanistic culture of health care that connects healer to patient and teacher to student. The answer lies in emphasizing qualities of leadership that are grounded in wisdom and maximize the inherent potential of interprofessional healthcare teams. Wisdom Leadership inspires readers to become their best selves by reconceputalizing attributes of leadership to reflect and integrate wisdom. Wisdom transcends intelligence; it embraces knowledge, emotion, and moral behavior. It represents the pinnacle of human development. Drawing on work of business leadership gurus Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, PlewsOgan and Beyt propose that wise leaders in health care are both thinkers and doers who bring people and their ideas together to exchange knowledge and resolve conflicts. They nurture wisdom development in others, from boots-on-the-ground workers to high executives, creating an interprofessional environment of pervasive leadership. In short, by actualizing capacities of wisdom – by reflecting, by demonstrating compassion, and by increasing one’s tolerance for ambiguity and complexity – every practitioner can become a transforming force in reshaping a healthcare environment that is more positive, collaborative and patient-centered. The editors espouse that leaders in Academic Health Science Centers (AHSC) can harness aptitudes for wisdom development, and demonstrate this by weaving together stories, experiences, and insights from distinguished contributors from fields of medicine, management and leadership, and ethics. Each chapter begins with a poem, story, or interview to spark moral imagination and connect on a human level the concepts explored within. This book is organized into three parts. Part one familiarizes the reader to the complexities of leadership within complex AHSC, and justifies wisdom as a worthy construct for framing an exploration of leadership. Part Two focuses on capacities of wisdom leadership: ‘‘finding and understanding the deeper meaning of things, reflection, compassion, understanding and applying right action in difficult circumstances, seeking out and fostering the best in ourselves and others, and understanding and embracing complexity’’ (p. 25). Each of the seven chapters identifies helpful, practical techniques to operationalize these capacities. Part Three provides a glimpse into what the journey to wisdom leadership might look like. First, readers are given an overview of wisdom leadership across stages of one’s career from fledgling to seasoned practitioner. The final chapter offers a theoretical perspective of the phenomenology of wisdom, showing ways in which personal change precedes cultural transformation. Wise leaders personify changes they wish to see in their institutions. This book speaks especially to readers who provide care in complex dynamic healthcare settings where collaboration among interprofessional care team members is essential for safe, efficient, high-quality patient-centered care. This volume blends the theoretical with the practical. It generates positive mental images of benchmarks in progress, and contains practical skills that instill confidence. Wisdom Leadership should be required reading for all health care executives who wish to sustain the thread of humanity and promote interprofessional leadership in their organizations.