Fostering the leadership of a continually improving healthcare organization

Governing board members and other healthcare leaders naturally want to see their organizations improve, but they often have difficulty connecting leadership functions to daily work in the organization in order to produce improvement. This article offers a framework, including a series of self-assessment questions, to help leaders foster continual improvement within their organization. Such improvement becomes possible when people join professional knowledge with a new body of knowledge called improvement knowledge. Continual improvement results when leaders enable everyone in the organization to build new knowledge, to test changes in daily work, and to learn from these tests. Essential to building and applying knowledge in this way are a leadership policy that fosters a shared sense of purpose and promotes learning, tools and methods that accelerate the development of new knowledge and improvement, and systematic strategies for building and applying that new knowledge to the process of daily work, and to the functions of leadership itself.