The health system tends to favor highly technical, individualistic, data-driven, outcomes-oriented approaches to change. This approach can be effective for simpler, concrete problems.

However, the challenges we face as a health systems today are highly complex, requiring approaches that are foundationally relational, collective, values-driven, process-oriented—ones that re-humanize each other as we work together.

Relational Leadership can be readily taught and implemented, unlocking transformation.

Systems are made up of people, and policies/practices within those systems emerge from the relationships between people in them.

Until relationships dramatically shift, both individual behaviors and system policies within that system will persist. Because targeting systems-level policies or individual-level skills alone overlooks the significant impact relationships have on people’s beliefs and behaviors.

Relational Leadership addresses a significant gap in systems change: creating conditions in which authentic connections happen.

For systems to transform, we need to transform how we work together.

Highly technical systems overly reward objectivity—engaging our “heads” and being “right.” People and relationships transform when we work to understand—engaging our “hearts” and working to get our relationships “right.”

Relational Leadership engages people with both the head and the heart, to appreciate our unique lived experiences and connect to the overarching human project of seeking our shared humanity.

We believe shifting relationships means striving not simply to be right, but striving to understand—striving to re-humanize one another.

This means listening openly to each of our diverse lived experiences and beliefs, creating containers where we all feel psychologically safer to share those experiences and beliefs, and creating common ground so that transformational relationships can emerge .