Develop Shared Leadership and Support Innovation

How public health departments can leverage shared leadership to advance innovative strategies for health equity and racial justice

To advance health equity and racial justice in health departments, leadership is necessary to set vision and strategy, initiate ‘the work’, sustain it over time, and navigate the rocky political terrain that will inevitably arise. Leaders with positional authority have enormous ability to create supportive environments for their staff to lead and innovate or, conversely, avoid risk and hinder innovation. Positional leaders should use their platform to normalize health equity and racial justice as a priority and encourage bold and courageous action.

At the same time, health departments need to cultivate ‘leaderful’ environments — or shared leadership — where people at all levels of the organization are enabled, empowered, and supported to do work that challenges the status quo. Inherent to this kind of ‘leaderful’ approach is an opportunity to support innovation across a department. The more people brought into planning and decision-making spaces — particularly as related to advancing health equity and racial justice — the more opportunity there is for new perspectives, approaches, and talents to be heard and acted upon.

Sharing responsibility, power, decision-making, and bringing new ideas and perspectives requires taking strategic risks. Public health practitioners need to challenge the tendency to play it safe, be risk-averse, and not speak up when confronted with the status quo, in order to transform the practices and policies of organizations. While our experiences and identities influence our freedom to take risks, and the consequences we face, sharing leadership and distributing responsibility across a team can help mediate risk, and support people as they grow into this practice.

Action Steps health departments can take to develop shared leadership that supports innovation and strategic risk taking

• For people with positional authority, explicitly give permission and normalize a culture for all staff to bring their ideas, experiment, and innovate.
• Develop and hold a shared leadership practice. Experiment with new collaboration and decision-making frameworks and tools that explicitly normalize sharing power and shared decision-making. Repeatedly create spaces for staff and teams to ideate and bring new approaches to the work and, importantly, to allow for experimentation and failure.
• Model and build capacity more broadly for consensus-based decision-making, principled disagreement, and conflict transformation.
• Build your container as a team and focus on strengthening the depth of relationships, and developing agreements about how you will work together.
• Learn how to identify which strategic risks are worth taking and overcome the tendency to play it safe. Routinely ask whether you’re overestimating the possibility of something going wrong, exaggerating what might go wrong, or underestimating your ability to manage the consequences.
• Take strategic risks in teams where there is some level of group processing, assessment of conditions, and accountability, and where the power of the group provides important cover for people who feel less confident and safe in trying this out.