Leading Public Health

This book is a guide to the values and traits, knowledge, and competencies needed by public health professionals to mobilize people, organizations, and communities to effectively tackle tough public health challenges. This competency-based leadership book is designed specifically for students and practitioners in public health, highlighting those aspects of leadership unique to this field. The book is divided into four parts. The first part of the book deals with the call for public health leadership. It introduces a framework for the book based on the values, traits, knowledge base, and competencies of effective public health leaders. The framework builds on four complementary perspectives on leadership: servant leadership, complexity leadership, integrative leadership, and adaptive leadership. The second part is devoted to preparing for public health leadership. Chapters here survey the values, traits, and knowledge base of effective public health leaders. Seven values of public health leaders are particularly critical for their effectiveness: social justice, reliance on evidence, interdependence, respect, community self-determination, transparency, and the requisite role of government. Along with behavioural skills, these values, traits, and knowledge base are the foundation for mastering the competencies. The competencies for public health leadership are discussed in Part III. The five competency sets are invigorating bold(er) pursuit of population health; engaging diverse others; effectively wielding power; preparing for surprise; and driving for execution and continuous improvement. Each chapter highlights the public health leadership values, traits, and knowledge that contribute particularly to effective performance of the competency set. Then, each of the five competencies in the competency set is examined in turn. The last part of the book provides guidance for intentional actions to improve leadership competencies and to sustain effectiveness.