The Physician Leadership Institute

In your professional life, you may face many obstacles, such as struggling to make meaningful change at work, conflicting with different personality types or feeling disengaged. The solutions ― all of which require creativity, innovative thinking and collaboration ― must start with self-awareness. In this course, you will begin to develop a profound sense of self through examining your personal vision and values, personality attributes, emotional intelligence skills and intrinsic strengths. These personal insights will help shape your leadership development plan.

This course is accredited for 30 hours.

This is a 6-week course that combines 3 to 4 hours of self led activities and a 1-hour webinar* per week

Learning outcomes

• Recognize the critical importance of personal mastery as a foundation for effective physician leadership.
• Achieve a more complete view of yourself as a leader — with respect to your personal values and principles, personality style, emotional intelligence and strengths.
• Develop strategies to leverage your strengths and manage your limitations.
• Establish a professional development action plan that includes setting personal leadership goals.

*We always recommend attending webinars live whenever possible however, should you be unable to attend a session live a recording will be made available to you. Please note webinar days are subject to change based on holidays and faculty availability.

Faculty

Paul Mohapel, PhD

In any workplace, it can be challenging to dialogue and engage with people when they don’t feel psychologically safe to speak up to share their perspectives, especially when their opinions may differ. The cost of not speaking up may be high, impacting decision-making, patient safety and employee wellness.

Crucial Conversations© by Crucial Learning© helps you and your team achieve alignment and understanding on crucial matters through open dialogue. Learn to set good intentions, build safety, speak honestly and approach tough conversations in a way where everyone feels heard.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 12 hours..

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Identify problems contributing to poor results and broken relationships.
• Keep composure when feeling angry, defensive or intimidated.
• Identify victim, villain and helpless stories you might be telling yourself to justify behaviour.
• Speak honestly and respectfully with colleagues even when you have differing opinions.
• Recognize when you’re at cross-purposes and take steps to bring colleagues back into dialogue.
• Cultivate mutual purpose with those who hold opposing viewpoints and move together toward action..

Various Faculty

Gillian Kernaghan, MD, CCFP, FCFP, CCPE

Monica Branigan, MD MHSc (Bioethics)

Louise McNaughton-Filion, MD CM, FCFP(EM), CCPE

Knowing how to work successfully across functions and cultures — and gain the commitment and cooperation of people inside and outside your organization — are essential to effective leadership and management within the health care system.

During this course, you’ll learn the core practical skills you need to successfully engage and influence others. You’ll also have access to the online leadership assessment tool Work Engagement Profile®.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 14.5 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Define engagement and assess your and others’ engagement in the workplace.
• Describe a strengths-based approach to building engagement.
• Discuss strategies for motivating others and building trust.
• Distinguish dialogue from other forms of discourse.
• Practise powerful listening approaches to discover common ground and mutual insight.
• Prepare the steps required for providing constructive feedback.
• Describe the major principles behind coaching.

Faculty

Paul Mohapel PhD

Emotional intelligence (EI) is considered a critical health care leadership competency. It has been demonstrated to impact effectiveness in all clinical settings — from the board chair’s office to the bedside. This course is targeted for all physicians, because emotional skills are relevant at all stages of a health professional’s career trajectory. Participants will take part in an in-depth assessment that will highlight their emotional strengths and derailers.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 11.5 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Discuss the research that underpins emotional intelligence and leadership.
• Analyze emotional intelligence along 15 subscales and assess the impact on your leadership.
• Discover and practise skills to enhance your emotional intelligence.
• Discuss how best to motivate and help others to improve their emotional intelligence.
• Examine your emotional intelligence strengths and address areas for development.

Faculty

Paul Mohapel, PhD

Effective management of conflict is critical in a high-stakes, dynamic environment like health care. Physicians and health care leaders who are skilled in navigating conflict can experience better decision-making and improved relationships, creativity and innovation and can enhance the patient experience.

During this course, you’ll learn how to successfully manage conflict, including using facilitation and resolution processes, to face the most complex situations and difficult conversations with confidence.

This is a 2 day course accredited for up to 13 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Differentiate between types of conflict and conflict management styles.
• Discuss strategies for recognizing and managing conflict situations.
• Practise a model of creative collaboration to address conflict with individuals, teams and organizations.
• Develop strategies for managing constituencies and building coalitions.
• Prepare the steps required for providing constructive feedback.

Faculty

Scott Comber, MD, MA, PhD, FRCPC

Workplace politics exist in every leader’s world. How health care leaders navigate regular interactions with stakeholders — while maintaining autonomy, integrity and sanity — can either help or hinder their objectives.

In this course, you’ll gain the skills to influence at work, build alliances and achieve consensus to meet your objectives. You’ll learn how to craft clear, effective messaging, improve your advocacy skills and build confidence working with the media to impactfully deliver your message.

This is a 2 day course accredited for up to 13 hours.

This course is delivered in virtual format.

Learning outcomes

• Assess the health care environment.
• Work with matrices and networks as platforms of influence.
• Describe the nature of health care decision-making processes and influence at the local, provincial, territorial and federal levels.
• Navigate the points of entry into political environments.
• Demonstrate strategic advocacy skills.
• Present persuasive messages more effectively.
• Practise effective skills in working with the media and receive feedback.

Faculty Team

Janice Stein, PhD, FRSC, LLD, MOC

Peter Kuling, BSc, MSc, MD, FCFP, CCPE

In a fast-paced health care environment, the ability to effectively manage change is critical. Yet implementing change, even on a small scale, can be difficult. You may encounter challenges, such as fear and resistance from colleagues and administrators.

In this course, we will draw on evidence-based research and explore the levers that impact organizational change. We’ll look at how to garner support for your change initiative and prepare your organization, department or team to successfully execute and sustain change.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 13.5 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Develop and apply a systematic approach to analyzing and addressing change challenges and opportunities.
• Identify organizational design impediments and enablers to change and to influence organizational culture.
• Apply tactics to minimize resistance and influence stakeholders.
• Identify networks of relationships and discuss how to build and maintain partnerships when leading change.
• Anticipate, accept and learn from failure as part of leading change.
• Reflect on your leadership style and develop the ability for resilience in leading change.

Faculty Team

Mamta Gautam, MD, MBA, FRCPC, CPDC, CCPE, CPE

Scott Comber, BMEDS, MBA, MA, PhD

Brian Golden, MS, PhD, FCAHS

Joshua Tepper, MD, FCFP, MPH, MBA

Physicians play a pivotal role in catalyzing positive change within the health care landscape. Recognizing that advocacy and leadership are critical skills, this course is designed to empower physicians to proactively inform, shape and influence at the local, provincial/territorial and federal levels

In this course, participants will use a case study to explore the levers of change within the health care system, learn how to effectively frame an issue and strategically choose advocacy approaches to advance an issue.

This is a 3-hour accredited course that is delivered virtually or in-person.

Learning outcomes

• Apply an advocacy framework to a scenario relevant to your organization and province and territory.
• Explain how to navigate institutional and government pathways to advocate for positive change.
• Explore and share different strategies, tactics, challenges and barriers to influence and how to overcome them.

Faculty

Shazma Mithani, MD,FRCPC

A top concern of health care leaders is the well-being of their teams. Although dealing with suffering is part of the work of health care providers, the experience of moral distress among health professionals has intensified with the post-pandemic backlog of care and workforce shortages. In our strained health system, we're seeing more reports of interpersonal conflicts at work. These stressors are adding to the burnout of health care providers, affecting both their well-being and their performance. When affected by trauma, people look to their leaders and health care organizations for support. What new skills do health care leaders need to foster a healthy team culture? What practices help to protect the well-being of people who work in trauma-exposed professions like those in health care?

This interactive workshop introduces the S.A.F.E.R. principles of trauma-informed leadership and explores how to apply them at the individual, team and system levels to contribute to a trauma-informed workplace.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 11.5 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Explore the types of traumas experienced by physicians and health care teams.
• Examine the impacts of trauma at the individual, team and system levels.
• Reframe physician burnout through a trauma lens.
• Discover the S.A.F.E.R. principles of trauma-informed (TI) approaches.
• Explore how to translate TI principles into leadership practice.
• Recognize how TI principles apply at the system level to support trauma-informed teams and trauma-informed health care organizations.
• Develop an action plan to bring trauma-informed leadership principles to your leadership practice with team and organizational metrics to measure culture shift.

Faculty Team

Jodi Ploquin, M.Sc., Certified Workplace Traumatologist

Jennifer Williams, BSc, MD, FRCPC

How can health care leaders continuously improve patient outcomes? In today’s challenging landscape, it’s important to know how to monitor processes, analyze organizational structures and measure outcomes. A quality improvement (QI) framework can help.

Through lecture, small-group work and hands-on learning, explore the QI tools and methods required to lead system improvement and develop a plan to improve an area in your organization.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 14.5 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Describe the theory and science of Quality Improvement (QI) in health care.
• Discuss common sources of waste in health care.
• Apply tools that reveal and explore patterns and processes within your system.
• Explain and apply the Model for Improvement in health care.
• Discuss techniques for identifying ideas for improvement/change in health care.
• Apply course content to creating or refining a quality improvement agenda in the context of your organization.
• Apply Creative Thinking techniques to QI work.

Faculty Team

Katherine Stevenson, BA(Hons), BScPT, MSc

Kishore Visvanathan, MD, FRCSC

Inclusive leaders recognize and embrace diversity, build trust and foster a sense of belonging where team members feel respected and empowered to speak up and contribute to improving organizational well-being and patient care. Inclusive leaders are curious, are aware of their own biases and blind spots, demonstrate cultural humility and actively seek out different perspectives to inform their decision-making. Inclusive leadership is a critical capability to increase engagement and well-being, develop a positive organizational culture and improve patient outcomes.

In this course, you will work with other physicians and/or health care leaders to identify moments of intervention and learn practical approaches to effect positive and sustainable change within your team or organization.

This 2 day course is accredited for up to 11.5 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Describe how psychological and cultural safety connects to improving engagement, well-being, organizational culture and patient outcomes.
• Explore the importance and impact of advocating for increased psychological and cultural safety practices as well as representation of historically marginalized groups on health care teams.
• Examine your own biases and power that may be hindering safe experiences for people in health care.
• Establish individual and team communication practices and commitments to foster psychological and cultural safety and allyship through meaningful team engagement and collaboration.
• Practise skills to address psychological and cultural safety challenges, microaggressions and/or conflict within your team or organization.
• Apply trauma-informed approaches to your leadership.
• Apply practical approaches to create inclusivity and bring others along to effect positive system-level changes in your organizational culture.

Faculty Team

• Lisa Richardson, MD
• Janelle Syring, BMR (PT), MD - CCFP

Paying attention to culture when leading change initiatives and implementing strategy is an often-neglected yet critical aspect of leadership.

This course will reveal how organizational culture impacts most aspects of leadership and targets physicians or health care professionals in formal or informal leadership roles. You’ll learn to assess and impact organizational culture and explore strategies to design and shape the culture in more intentional directions, while managing the risks of culture dynamics. You’ll also examine leadership skills and processes that cultivate healthy cultures and promote innovation in a variety of contexts.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 12 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Discuss how the (physician) leader connects strategy, culture and leadership.
• Lead change initiatives through a cultural framework that identifies the current and ideal future states.
• Leverage culture to enhance workplace relationships and promote innovation.
• Create a culture sustainment strategy to align the system, build (leadership and front-line) capability, integrate a culture measurement system and manage misaligned behaviours.

Faculty Team

Paul Mohapel PhD

As health care continues to evolve at an accelerating pace, health care practitioners continue to be confronted with numerous dilemmas, or polarities, that need to be managed. Balancing standardized practices while meeting the individual needs of the patient. Implementing new technologies while protecting the personal touch that is so important to patient care. Striving to maintain stability while embracing the change needed to move forward. Many of these dilemmas are an inherent part of the system’s structure. Polarity Management™ is both a method and a framework that supports individuals and teams to effectively identify and manage these naturally occurring polarities.

Research shows that high-performing organizations perform well because, in part, they have created systems and processes that help them manage polarities well. Effective leaders are both clear and flexible, and high-performing organizations both centralize for coordination and decentralize for responsiveness. It’s not about either/or, it’s about both!

This course is designed to help you effectively identify and manage naturally occurring polarities in your life, practice and/or organization and use adaptive leadership to make your strategies a reality.

This is a 1,5 day course accredited for 11 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Identify context factors driving transformation in our organizations.
• Explore and apply the construct of Zooming In and Zooming Out in systems, from the tactical to strategic and on to the systemic domains.
• Assess your personal leadership agility orientation.
• Differentiate between problems to solve and polarities to manage.
• Examine and apply polarity thinking at the micro, meso and macro levels in social systems, see polarities in different contexts, map polarities on a polarity map.
• Identify various resources for deepening capacity in polarity mapping.
• Implement a process for assessing polarities in a group setting.
• Manage polarities by identifying early warning signs of over-focusing on one polarity to the neglect of the other.
• Develop your own polarity maps at work at the micro, macro and meso level.
• Identify how to use polarity thinking when addressing conflict.

Faculty

Phil Cady, CD BSW MA (Leadership) DSocSci (Cand)

Physicians (and many other health care workers) act as experts — not only because of their training, but also because the structure and culture of the health system force them into the expert role. These experts can struggle to lead in the volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity of a complex system such as the Canadian health care system.

In this course, we demystify systems to help you gain a deeper understanding of how to navigate and influence individuals within a large, complex system. Through an organizational simulation, reflective exercises and conversation, you’ll build empathy and understanding as you explore the worlds of the Tops, Middles, Bottoms and Customers (Patients), develop strategies for working in your organization and within the health care system, and identify leadership opportunities to address systemic challenges.

This 2 day course is accredited for up to 15 hours.

Learning outcomes

• Describe the concept of VUCA [Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity] and apply it to the Canadian health system.
• Practise sense-making to guide decisions in simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems.
• Reflect upon and practise strategies which help leaders and teams to improve their functioning in systems with little certainty and/or agreement.
• Identify, reflect upon and discuss hidden possibilities and actions that can be taken in a seemingly chaotic simulation of a virtual ER overload on a late Friday afternoon.
• Apply skills to influence underlying archetypes and social systems patterns causing resistance to systemic changes.
• Describe the discipline of systems thinking as a resource for managing organizational change.
• Develop take home ideas and solutions to apply to real situations in the participants’ work systems.

Faculty

• Phil Cady, CD BSW MA (Leadership) DSocSci (Cand)

The culture of health care tends to view leadership as “solving problems.” But the conventional wisdom of fixing weaknesses (i.e., find what’s wrong and try to correct it) has been shown to be limiting and ineffective in the long term. It can lead to uninspired individual and organizational performance and contribute to decreased motivation and stress. Focusing on what works and paying more attention to what intrinsically energizes people is a much more effective approach.

This interactive course will help participants accurately identify their personal strengths and leverage them using pragmatic strategies. It also offers ways leaders can identify and leverage the strengths of their people and teams to increase work engagement and well-being and drive innovation.

This is a 2 day course accredited for 13 hours.

This course can be delivered in either virtual or in-person format.

Learning outcomes

• Recognize the value of a strengths-based approach to leadership.
• Complete a strength-based assessment to uncover your unique strengths, talents and gifts and those of your team.
• Describe how strengths-based approaches can facilitate improved engagement of health care professionals, reduce burnout and lead to better team and patient outcomes.
• Examine strategies to build a strengths-based culture that values the unique gifts that everyone brings to the team and fosters a culture of engagement, diversity and inclusion.
• Create a development plan to build on your strengths, while managing around your blind spots.
• Identify and encourage strengths-based approaches in peers and teams.

Faculty

Paul Mohapel ,PhD