Leadership: The Catalyst for Learning Transfer and Impact

I have worked in human resources for health throughout the entire country especially for the past 10 years. Currently I am with the Last Mile Health Liberia Country Program. I am participating in the Healthy Communities Fellowship which was created to amplify the voices of frontline leaders and innovators spearheading initiatives that address health inequities around the world. Fellows engage in narrative and communications training, peer and expert learning exchanges, and space for reflection and connection – all to strengthen their ability to make change.  I am interested in learning about leadership, because I have come to realize that it is the key to sustainability and improvement of lives, especially in development of needed numbers of qualified human resources for health.

Principles/Description of Leadership

Learning about leadership in the Healthy Communities Fellowship has been one of my most profound learnings on leadership. I feel I really need to share what you do not learn so often about leadership.  The dynamic, thoughtful and excellent presenters and fellows presented and discussed the following as basic principles/description of leadership:

  • Leadership is collective in terms of cooperation and sharing, teamwork and collaboration.
  • Leadership is inclusive with completeness, comprehensive, all-encompassing, wide and broad.
  • Leadership is restorative and reminds me of our healing and reconciliation program started during the war with a focus on invigoration, yet soothing and essential for moving forward.
  • Leadership is courageous in that it is brave and stands up for justice and rightness; it does not turn a blind eye.
  • Leadership is abundant especially looking at its richness, wealth, and prosperity.
  • Leadership is joyful when it is elating, pleasing, ecstatic and thrilling.

I looked at what I have believed and worked on for the last few years and thought, yes those are impacts that we should expect, and managers who are leaders need to work on getting those embedded in their leadership.

Leadership is Key for Transfer of Learning

In my role these past years I have worked with many types of organizations working together to strengthen all aspects of a wholistic systematic approach. We have worked on education quality improvement, standards for teaching and assessment, infrastructure and management, curriculum and faculty development, as well as mentoring and monitoring for effective implementation.

Leadership from these organizations send staff to trainings and we send staff back home with action plans such as preparing lesson plans for each session, conducting skills assessment, etc. according to standards for quality performance improvement.

However, during monitoring, we noticed there were many things that staff had included in their action plans that they were not doing. We learned that when staff returned, leadership in the organizations did not make time or other resources available for transfer of the new learning to the work environment and did not follow up on implementation. We just expected that leaders who were professional health workers without leadership and management training, mentoring or monitoring would know what to do when their staff returned with new ideas, and how to do it.

Resources/Skills Needed for Leadership

Here are resources, skills and other factors needed to address quality performance issues using the acronym LEADER:

  • Learning Environment – leaders who manage, or managers who lead, must promote a lifelong learning environment.
  • Effective Communication – managers who lead use the right words in the right way with the right medium in dialogue of listening and speaking, also noting non-verbal communication and the golden silence.
  • Assertive Negotiation – living involves giving and taking. To have a quality life one must go about it smartly: gathering information, using the most appropriate tools, planning, etc.
  • Data Utilization – is essential for leaders who manage to make sure that decisions and actions are based on data and not arbitrary, because many times results are not what the intentions are.
  • Engaged Problem Solving – leaders who practice engaged problem solving involve all relevant parties, stakeholders, affected persons, look at gender and diversity in solving problems and usually get the best solutions.
  • Resource Mobilization and Management – Leaders must pay keen attention to be good stewards of resources including time, human, financial, and capital resources to get desired results that will make impact.

We All Are Leaders

Now working as a leader, I have realized that there are many categories of leaders at all levels of work from finance to cleaning, to transport to program, etc. Those six areas mentioned above are for all leaders who manage. Great leaders do leadership no matter where you are. I have expanded these descriptions to add SHIP, for Leadership:

  • Sustainability – leaders must always work in a way that promotes sustainability, keeping in mind continuation and expansions for growth and development. It is important to build on; not to start over every time and never complete a building because one is always starting at a new foundation.
  • Heart – a key to sustainability is to speak from or to the heart, as it puts feelings into leadership which promotes positive behavior. As the quote says, “No one cares what you know until they know that you care.” Leaders can have facts and skills as well as feelings and can work to ensure that their staff have them also.
  • Innovations – this work can only be done if leaders innovate, revolutionizing both what is done as well as how it is done, the process for improvement and quality.
  • Partnership – leaders must work in partnership with others who have these leadership skills also or who have what they do not have.

Most people think they know what being a Leader is: somebody in control, somebody who makes all the decisions, somebody who has the final say. But what I have learned from being a leader in the past few years and now from the Aspen Fellowship and experiences in the past year of COVID 19, is that authentic leadership requires Sustainability, Heart, Innovations and Partnership.

The “SHIP” is the vessel that carries the Leader forward. Without that vessel, a leader is merely a manager or a chief, a supervisor or a foreman. We as leaders must make sure that we do not only concentrate on quality improvement for followers; followers are leaders at their own level. Concentrate on LEADERSHIP as it can help learners translate what they are learning for the greatest impact.

 

How have you connected with Leadership to improve the transfer of learning from your learners?

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Marion K. Subah is a Certified Dialogue Education Teacher and a health system strengthening, public health specialist with over 40 years of experience. She has dedicated her work to bettering the lives of women and children, especially in Liberia where she has worked at all levels of the health system. Marion is a passionate trainer and uses Dialogue Education techniques and strategies; in Liberia, she is known as the “chief facilitator”.

Marion works for Last Mile Health, an organization with a mission to save lives in the most remote communities. As Country Director in Liberia, she manages the organization’s partnership with the Ministry of Health to scale up and sustain the National Community Health Assistant Program, leading the organization’s technical assistance to government, as well as it’s COVID 19 response, overseeing over 150 staff at four sites in the country. 

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