Leadership demands creativity and vision--can they be taught?

Leatt and Porter offer views on the principles of leadership development for the future of healthcare and propose a "new model for developing healthcare leaders em leader that could transform the educational process and improve outcomes" for organizations as a whole. They maintain that the healthcare "educational process needs to be designed to enhance senior healthcare leaders' competency, prepare them for action and ultimately increase leadership and system performance and quality." As a tool to achieve these goals, Leatt and Porter present a model for learning based on 10 principles that, among other things, address what they see as the "need to increase our ability to identify, quantify, develop, measure and evaluate competencies for healthcare leaders." In the viewpoint of this commentator, written from his observations as a CEO, the most critical competencies in a leader, and the least susceptible to measurement, are creativity and vision. In the business world, as in the healthcare sector, these traits are absolutely necessary for leaders to deal effectively with known and unforeseen demands on their organizations, ongoing problems of scarce resources and, particularly in the Canadian healthcare sector, the need for leaders to negotiate with all levels of government to improve the system.