HCLI 2017 Highlights

Open to new ideas. Empathetic. Adaptable. Consistent. Entrepreneurial.

These are all essential qualities of health communication leaders, according to participants at the 2017 Health Communication Leadership Institute (HCLI). On the first day of the three-day conference, attendees from every sector of public health, healthcare, communication, and marketing set the tone for what the next few days of training, teamwork, and reflection would be like by offering what they believed to be characteristics of effective health communication leaders. Speakers from campus and beyond offered a variety of perspectives that weaved in these concepts, with room to apply learnings to each individual’s respective professional goals.

HCLI began with an ‘applied improv’ session, intended to ease attendees into to the day and begin connecting with one another immediately. Session co-leader and improv coach Shana Merlin noted “You improvise every day as a leader. Why not get good at it?” A series of out-of-your-seat activities had people finding rare things in common (like attending the same middle school in Missouri) and battling to be the rock-paper-scissor champion with a hoard of fans following them around the room.

The agenda was the just-right mix of health communication best practices and leadership building. Brenda Berkelaar led the group through their personalized results from the Leadership Practices Inventory, with participants creating realistic action plans for after the conference. Charlee Garden lead a dynamic, participatory series of sessions where attendees were challenged to examine the type of leader they are and how we are responsible to help set the culture of our organizations. Visual communication expert and scholar Allison Lazard reframed how we tap into this aspect of communication, inventively encouraging us to think inside the box. Presentations from the founding and current CHC directors outlined the importance of and difficulty in doing good health communication, as well as the ways in which our Center is poised to be a leader in the evolving field.

In the final session of HCLI 2017, Dell Medical School’s inaugural Dean Clay Johnston spoke about communication as the most important frontier in medicine, providing examples of how good doctor-patient communication can objectively improve clinical outcomes. The doctor of the future doesn’t thrive on memorized medical knowledge, but instead on positive emotional interactions with patients: something leaders in our field will be challenged to study and measure. At the helm of the country’s newest medical school with the charge to ‘Rethink Everything’, Dean Johnston emphasized that among the ways in which Dell Med is retooling and reimagining every facet of healthcare and medicine, communication is at the core of it. “Doctors are communicators first and scientists second,” he said.

A real value of HCLI, now in its third iteration, is that the high-quality curriculum is standardized for the group, but the space for individualized application to your own role as a leader is profound. This is demonstrated in the varied takeaways this year’s 35 attendees noted in the final HCLI session: enabling others to be leaders, learning how to really listen to your audience, daring to fail more, creating a personalized leadership action plan, and reigniting commitment to health communication as a career, among many others.

This was our best HCLI yet, and the CHC team has already begun planning for HCLI 2018. We hope you’ll join us, and in the meantime, sign up for our mailing list to stay connected.