Open Mindsets: Participatory Leadership for Health
The importance of leadership in bringing about change to improve health and well-being is increasingly emphasized — especially with the shift to SDGs — and there is now a need and opportunity to act to strengthen leadership for health. In November 2014, at the Third Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, the Alliance set out to understand how leaders define and qualify leadership by asking a selected group of leaders in public health a single question: ‘What are key attributes of leaders that create effective health systems?’
In 2015, a survey was conducted across 65 countries and in-depth interviews were carried out with 22 prominent leaders, touching upon various components of leadership for health, ranging from the make-up of teams and organizational culture, to the use of evidence and the role of a guiding vision. While key individual traits are useful and even necessary in creating good leaders,