Background

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has invested in the development of health and health care leaders since its inception. In the past, most of its work on leadership development has focused on growing the talent of and boosting the career trajectories for health and health care professionals (e.g., clinical scholars or health policy fellows) or building and strengthening specific fields (e.g., epidemiology or nurse educators).

As the Foundation began recently to explore “enterprise-level” work—the priority issues that cut across its program areas—the role of leadership and the skills leaders need to be highly effective emerged as an area of focus.  In order to deftly navigate today’s shifting and highly charged policy and health care environments, and address the complex challenges they present, we realized that leaders will need new skills, approaches, and allies. Indeed, we’ve come to understand that improving the health and health care of communities requires leaders who can work both within their own organizations and sectors and also across the wide array of disciplines, backgrounds and outlooks to be found in any community.

RWJF, therefore, began to define an enterprise-level leadership strategy. This strategy would build on the Foundation’s existing commitment to leadership development and take it several steps further; it would target the skills and capacities necessary to bridge the range of professional, economic, cultural, and political divisions affecting most communities.  

What models exist?  

To help focus and shape its proposed strategy, the Foundation asked the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) to scan and summarize the field of leadership development. CCL reviewed the research, interviewed experts, and investigated case studies, identifying six emerging trends in leadership development.

Among these was the concept of “moving toward ‘across group’ versus ‘within group’ leadership”—an approach that dovetailed directly with the Foundation’s interests and goals. CCL described this concept as “boundary-spanning leadership,” defined as the capability to create direction, alignment and commitment across boundaries, fields, or sectors to achieve a higher vision or goal (Ernst & Yip, 2009). To RWJF, boundary-spanning leadership emerged as a key way to develop the leadership capacity of its grantees to do their work and solve pressing health and health care problems most effectively.

CCL reported that researchers have identified five boundaries that impede the effectiveness of organizations and systems:

• Vertical boundaries: the hierarchical barriers within organizations.
• Horizontal boundaries: the barriers across organizations and, within a given organization, across disciplines, products lines, or departments.
• Stakeholder boundaries: the different needs, outlooks, and roles of an organization’s customers, business partners, regulators, and other involved parties.
• Demographic boundaries: divisions arising from gender, race, age, religion, and education, as well as age, culture, personality, skills training, educational background, and life experiences.
• Geographic boundaries: the impact of different locations, cultures, regions, and markets.

The strength of each of these boundaries, CCL continued, is determined by such factors as:

• The number and type of opportunities emerging leaders have for cross-sectoral or cross-organizational work.
• The existing leadership culture within an organization (e.g., whether its leaders see leadership as derived exclusively from authority or instead view leadership as an activity that requires mutual learning and collaboration).
• The extent to which emerging leaders receive challenging assignments that teach them how to manage and adapt to change.

Any boundary-spanning leadership development effort, therefore, must incorporate concepts, methods, and tools that make cross-sectoral work more successful, increase the recognized value of collective leadership, and provide leadership development opportunities grounded in the complexities of real world experience.

The Foundation’s plans

To respond to these needs, RWJF is designing an enterprise-level initiative to incorporate boundary spanning leadership content into the design of existing RWJF programs and to impart these skills to Foundation staff, grantees and community leaders. This work differs from most of RWJF’s existing leadership efforts as the focus is not on developing individual careers but on building a cadre of leaders with the skills and competencies needed to be effective in today’s complex and polarized environment. The Foundation’s vision is that this type of leadership training will become a signature type of support that the Foundation offers to its grantees.

This effort will begin with two prototype programs:

• The Community Coalition Leadership Program (CCLP), a year-long, team-based training program for RWJF grantees who use coalitions and other multi-sector mechanisms to help organizations and communities fundamentally improve health and health care.
• The Boundary Spanning Leadership Program (BSLP), A 2½-day leadership training course offered to a broader set of RWJF grantees nominated from across the Foundation’s teams and portfolios.

CCL will develop and manage both of these programs in conjunction with the Foundation.

RWJF will also continue its research into and evaluation of boundary spanning leadership efforts, whether funded by the Foundation or others. We will also investigate how we might partner with other organizations on boundary spanning leadership, and we will be developing materials about what we learn, which we plan to disseminate widely.

The Foundation will pilot both CCLP and BSLP beginning in Fall 2012.