Why Healthcare Needs More Creative Leaders

Creativity has consistently been at the core of every business. Yet only as of recently, has it been top of mind for the healthcare industries boards as a requirement for leadership recruitment. By definition, the capacity to create or conceptualize something novel requires creative minds and leaders and is not only fundamental to the innovations and entrepreneurship that kicks new organizations off, but it now necessary for legacy organizations who need to thrive, survive and sustain themselves as they try to reach the global market.

Yet, maybe on the grounds that creatives were viewed as unmanageable, mavericks—excessively tricky and elusive to nail down—or on because focusing on creative new ideas delivered a less than quick acceptance from the old-guard, regardless of execution, it hasn’t been the focal point or major consideration of most leaders in healthcare.

For quite a long time, U.S. hospital leaders and clinical experts have worked within a problematic, quickly changing, and divided health care framework that is resistant to change. Today, this condition is significantly more mind-boggling as sweeping healthcare reform and market forces change the manner in which medical care is delivered and managed.

This significant shift is both structural and social. New alliances, technologies and once impossible partnerships and associations are starting to develop at light speed. Belief systems, qualities, and mental models are transforming. Creative reasoning and agile, versatile leadership will be needed to make clinical advancements, healthcare businesses, and provider organizations sustainable as the landscape of the US health care system remodels whether they like it or not.

“As this obscure future state unfurls, one thing is guaranteed: Reactive vs creative leadership won’t be sufficient. The abilities expected of leaders and their organizations must focus on advancing, iterating and being creative with the goal for both to flourish,” says Leonard Achan, a globally recognized creative leader, working exclusively to bring forth cutting edge innovative models to the US health care sector, during a lecture this fall.

Achan has most recently been appointed President of the Innovation Institute at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in NYC, where he served in a prior role as Chief Innovation Officer since 2016. With over 20 years of executive, academic, and clinical healthcare experience in various leadership roles spanning clinical, operational, digital, strategy, marketing and communications, branding, venture, innovation, and business development, Achan is a celebrated thought leader and creative leader.

Achan has won awards for clinical excellence and leadership as well as civil service, including the William H. Barfoot Award, the highest honor given by the New York State Troopers. Recently, he has been granted the 2020 Award of Distinction, the highest honor given by the Healthcare Leaders of New York of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). Also included in Crain’s New York Business “Notable in Healthcare 2020” for work related to New York’s Covid-19 response, Leonard Achan is the right wellspring of information to elucidate the need for creative leaders in the health care sector.

The Need for Creative Leaders

Rapid innovation and its implementation require a communitarian, reliant culture and solutions that cut across function, expertise and business needs. Leaders must figure out how to shift away from the “Single Leader” model so typical in the present US healthcare systems and move towards a model that uses creative groups and small teams that span disciplines, knowledge levels, generations, and functions.

These new creative communities will have the ability to challenge convention without retaliation, coordinate information across verticals and to envision and explain great difficulties in simple formats—all with the pursuit of conveying proficient, high-caliber, compassionate patient care across the continuum.

Leonard Achan, a maverick healthcare thought leader in NYC stresses in his teachings that providing opportunity for others to be creative leaders inspires support and confidence from the entire workforce. It reveals to them that what everyone brings to the table is esteemed and essential to the organization’s prosperity and they don’t have to hide their creative talents. “Healthcare needs more creative leaders because it is required for the development and advancement of all members of the organization,” he says.

“Where reactive leaders see risk, failure and difficulty, creative leaders see value, education and challenge. To grow and bring value to your organization, you must allow your staff to stretch their wings, be given space and plunge into new regions and navigate and benefit from the uncertainty around them,” says Achan.

Leonard Achan further discusses in lectures that creativity is an essential healthcare mandate today more than ever. “With patients and consumers setting new demands on providers and requiring services that to this point were either nonexistent or inaccessible, there is an onslaught of new ideas that individuals believe may bridge or cure their consumers demands,” he says. Only an authentic creative leader can create an all-inclusive environment that welcomes insights from all the people, diligences them quickly and leverages all those ideas to build new solutions for the organization that satisfy everyone’s needs, while simultaneously improving access, outcomes and the bottom line”

Creative Leader Is Necessary to Draw in The Right Minds

The main goal of the creative leader is to engage the right individuals, for the right cause, at the right time, to execute the right solutions to otherwise thought impossible puzzles. That commitment begins when a leader dynamically reworks the roles of staff and resources to make something a success. Instead of basically rolling up their own sleeves and executing a top-down strategy, motivating and inspiring and supporting staff to contribute their creative mind to a cause is key. Only a creative leader could make it happen. If there was ever a time that was needed for healthcare, it is now, therefore, the healthcare sector needs more creative leaders than ever before.