Leadership in Practice: Essentials for Public Health and Healthcare Leaders

2024 Prose Award Winner for Nursing and Allied Health Services Category!

"This book is a comprehensive, well-researched, and well-presented guide for nascent and existing leaders of public health care who navigate the complex, fragmented, often underfunded, and rapidly changing system. It is a most valuable resource." ---Doody's Review Service, 5 stars

Leadership in Practice prepares leaders for the unpredictability, complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty they will face while leading public health and healthcare organizations and teams. It equips leaders with practical, sustainable, and universal skills, abilities, and intangibles needed to thrive in a constantly-evolving environment.

Building on a solid theoretical foundation, Leadership in Practice addresses the challenges leaders face in many contexts by exploring the skills and behaviors necessary for the effective practice of leadership. Integrating the most relevant leadership theories, their history, evidence, and application in public health and healthcare, chapters focus on the essential competencies that leaders in public health and healthcare must master, including effective dialogue, ethical leadership and moral courage, systems thinking, strategic thinking and analysis, and emotional intelligence. The textbook discusses the many challenges leaders face, including change leadership, developing an equity mindset, effective leadership during organizational crises, and meaningful engagement with the communities served. Case studies relevant to public health and healthcare examine topics such as leadership during COVID-19, Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, community engagement and team building, hiring diverse personnel, preventing burnout, and more to provide lessons learned from real-world examples.

Leadership in Practice brings together a diverse array of leaders and a wide range of voices to impart wisdom and share unique perspectives and experiences from public health and healthcare settings. This authoritative resource is essential for anyone training in public health, healthcare management, and related health professions, and illustrates why it is critical to learn from leaders who possess different worldviews, experiences, and training backgrounds. Leadership in Practice provides you with expert insight on building the right leadership framework and developing a meaningful leadership style for your own leadership practice.

Key Features:

• Describes the core principles, skills, traits, and behaviors for effective leadership in practice
• Includes engaging case studies demonstrating leadership intangibles, applications, and real-world context in public health and healthcare settings
• Builds self-awareness through self-assessments and reflection exercises
• Provides wisdom and insight from notable and diverse leaders in the field
• Leads students and professionals to the development of their own framework upon which to build and continuously evolve their leadership practice

Susan C. Helm-Murtagh, DrPH, MM (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches strategic management and leadership in the DrPH program, and leadership/workforce management and US healthcare system structure and policy in the Executive Masters’ Program in Health Administration.

Helm-Murtagh has over a decade of experience in nonprofit leadership and board governance, health systems and health policy, and over twenty-five years of experience in health care financing. She is Principal of DreamWork Consulting, LLC (a nonprofit leadership and strategic planning consulting firm), and co-founder and director of The Ellie Helm Foundation (a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of depression and preventing suicide among youth and bringing social engagement to the elderly). She has served on several non-profit boards and currently chairs the board of directors for The Davis Phinney Foundation for Parkinson’s.

Helm-Murtagh holds a BS in psychology and management science from Duke University, an MM (with distinction) in marketing and finance from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and a DrPH in Health Policy and Management from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Paul Campbell Erwin, MD, DrPH, is Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Organization.