Learning from Health Care Exemplars: How The Best Produce Extraordinary Results

Health care is once again in the midst of turmoil, and the need for effective leadership in this domain is as strong as ever. We can intuitively understand that leadership in this complex system is hard and that leading through chaos and change is particularly challenging and difficult, potentially predisposing these leaders to burnout. There has been little if any research into flourishing health care leadership. I hypothesized that health care leaders who produce exceptional results would exemplify characteristics from which rising leaders could learn, and particularly these leaders’ attitudes, behaviors and values would exemplify constructs of human flourishing, the goal of positive psychology. A small sample of exemplar leaders were interviewed to learn what factors they perceive contribute to their success. The results identified the strengths of courage, humanity and transcendence as foundational to their health care leadership. These results open the door to further inquiry and to the development of a character strength-based model for flourishing health care leadership.