EHMA Leadership Academy
8-11 March 2027 - Ghent, Belgium
€ 3,500.00 (Member) - € 4,300.00 (Non Member)
Overview
EHMA Leadership Academy – Leading health organisations beyond the ordinary
We know what it takes…
Health organisations, especially large teaching hospitals, are complex professional environments. They are among the most complex and challenging organisations for leaders.
Authority is distributed, expertise matters more than hierarchy, and high performance depends on people and professions who need to work together across physical and cultural boundaries.
Leaders cannot simply ‘manage’ these organisations: they need to create direction, generate vision and aspiration, facilitate collective sense-making, mobilise people and turn ambition into organisational goals. Their legacy reflects their capacity to navigate evolving social contexts, continuous technological innovation, hectic political interactions and confrontations with professional lobbies.
Coping with conflicting individual and group interests, multilateral stakeholder expectations, media constantly ‘in search of trouble’, and, last but not least, resistance and resilience to change augmented by the protected job tenure that doctors and health professionals often have, is part of what makes every other organisation a child’s game compared to health organisations.
This is leadership beyond ordinary management.
We work 360°
The EHMA Leadership Academy approaches leadership through three interconnected perspectives: Leading organisations. Leading teams. Leading oneself.
At organisational level, leadership means navigating complexity, setting directions that interconnect with emotions, building collective aspirations, and creating conditions for developmental and transformational change.
At team level, it means enabling people with different expertise, responsibilities and perspectives to work together and perform. Envisioning, engaging, enabling.
At individual level, it means understanding what kind of leader you are and could be. What distinguishes you. Why you have followers. What gives you credibility, recognition, status. What methods and tools can support your leap to the next level.
It is you before us
The Academy connects the three perspectives (leading organisations, teams and oneself) to practice. Participants will engage with instructors and leaders working in similar complex organisations, but above all they will share and challenge their experiences, assumptions and beliefs about leadership best practices and their own ways of making things happen.
Because “I did it my way” brings both lessons for everyone in the class and a personal challenge to learn from.
The purpose is not to provide a formula for leadership. It is to challenge participants to think beyond the ordinary, beyond what is usually taught in management schools, beyond “satisficing”.
We know that performing often requires getting back to basics. And health organisations do need robust ordinary management. But we also know that good leadership is about that additional step. And high-performing health organisations need to be nurtured by extraordinary leaders.
What we promise
By the end of the Leadership Academy, you will be better equipped to:
- Lead beyond formal authority, recognising how complexity, professional expertise and different interests shape leadership in health organisations.
- Create direction and translate it into action, connecting leadership ambition with the people, teams and organisational choices needed to make it happen.
- Lead multidisciplinary teams, understanding how different professional perspectives can be brought together around shared objectives.
- Build the conditions for high-performing teams, moving beyond individual performance to consider how teams are structured, supported and led.
- Connect leadership with service delivery, understanding how decisions about people, teams and organisation translate into the design and delivery of services.
- Develop a clearer understanding of their own leadership, reflecting critically on their behaviours, choices and discipline, and defining what they want to change, what they want to build, and ultimately what they want to leave behind.
Why us?
The EHMA Leadership Academy combines academic insight, practical application and direct exposure to organisations and leaders confronting real challenges. The Academy offers participants:
- A leadership programme built specifically around health organisations, recognising the particular complexity of professional environments where expertise, authority and responsibility are distributed.
- A comprehensive perspective on leadership, moving deliberately from leading organisations, to leading teams, to leading oneself.
- Learning grounded in practice, connecting leadership concepts with high-performing teams, service design and examples of how organisational choices are translated into reality.
- Direct engagement with leadership in action, through conversations with senior leaders and visits to organisations that provide concrete examples of complexity, organisational design and vision.
- Time and space to think, away from day-to-day operational pressures, with a small cohort of peers facing comparable leadership responsibilities.
- An opportunity to turn reflection into personal direction, leaving with a clearer understanding of what participants want to do differently in their own organisations and leadership roles.
Why you?
The EHMA Leadership Academy is designed for the very top leaders of health organisations — what would commonly be described as the C-suite: CEOs, CMOs, CFOs and clinical leaders of divisions and departments. Managers and professionals who already hold significant organisational, managerial or clinical responsibility. And those who are internally burning to reach that level of responsibility. The next great leaders of health organisations.
What we really look for is:
- Experience
- Curiosity
- Ambition
- Determination
- The humility of Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing.”
We know we do not have lessons for you. But we can share frameworks and possibilities. And with you generate suggestions and insights that matter to you.
Practical Information
Duration: 4 days (8-11 March 2027), residential
Location: Ghent, Belgium
Format: Interactive sessions, executive conversations, reflections, site visits
Cohort: 12–20 senior participants
Detailed Programme
Day 1 – Leading organisations
- Welcome and cohort introduction: An informal opening allowing participants to meet, establish the cohort, and prepare for the intensive learning experience ahead.
- Leading organisations beyond ordinary management: What we know, what we don’t know, what we should know. How to leave your mark doing right things and things right. Methods, tools, and your magic power.
- Leadership talk: navigating within complexity: A conversation with senior leaders responsible for navigating a complex organisation or system. The discussion will light-up and challenge the organisational leadership themes explored during the afternoon.
- Free time
- Social dinner
Day 2 – From organisations to teams
- Site visit – Ghent University Hospital: Participants will visit UZ Ghent and explore its new hospital environment, with attention to how architecture and design can shape the experience and wellbeing of patients. The visit offers a concrete example of how organisational choices and a particular vision of healthcare can be translated into the physical environment in which care is delivered.
- Sense-making. Why any health organisation is more than its professionals, but it will never be better then what they want it to become: Rather than formally introducing the theory of team leadership, the conversation will provide a practical entry point into the people dimension of organisational leadership and set the scene for the afternoon’s work on leading teams.
- Lunch and transfer back to Univerisity of Ghent
- Leading people across the team lifecycle: Leading a team means taking responsibility for the people who join, grow, contribute and evolve within that team. The session will explore how leaders manage the full lifecycle of their teams, how they make their people feel important, how they cope with the sense of fairness in balancing individual incentives with team-based recognition. A conversation with a team leader will explore how can leaders create the conditions for an engaging and meaningful lifecycle within a team.
- Free time
- Guided tour of the city
- Social dinner
Day 3 – From teams to oneself
- Leading teams [continued]: Continuation and completion of the Leading Teams component, complemented by discussions on performance evaluation plan.
- High-performing organisations – Part 1. Operations and value-based healthcare: What makes some organisations consistently outperform their competitors? What distinguishes excellence from mediocrity? Great from good?
- Lunch
- High-performing organisations – Part 2. A Service Design Thinking workshop: How do we generate the best patient experience? How can services be deliberately designed around their purpose and the people they are intended to serve? The emphasis will be practical: how do you design a service, and what can participants take back to their own organisations? The devil is in the details.
- Leading oneself: What makes a leader? If you don’t have the interior fire, can you still be a great leader? And by which metrics do we define a ‘great leader’?
- Site visit – Leadership in practice: vision and the experience of living: Participants will visit a residential facility for older people that has challenged a conventional care-centred model by starting instead from the experience of living. The visit provides a setting to explore vision in leadership: what it takes to question established models, translate a different idea into organisational reality, and create something that can endure beyond the individual leader.
- Free time
- Social dinner
Day 4 – Leading oneself: from reflection to direction
- Leading oneself [continued]: A few pragmatic reflections on leadership styles, good practices and organisational cultures.
- Wrap-up… and hopefully the sharing of epiphanies: The Academy concludes with dedicated time to connect the different elements of the programme and consider their implications for participants’ own leadership. Drawing on the progression from organisation → team → self, as well as the leaders and organisations encountered throughout the Academy, participants will reflect on what they want to take back into their own leadership practice. Ultimately, the discussion returns to the question: what do you want to change, what do you want to build, and what do you want to leave behind?
- Light lunch and fly out
What our Members say
I have been active in EHMA since the first years of the '90s and I have seen its evolution from a small association of members interested in sharing knowledge on health management practices to the current status of reference and advisory key player for EU, health systems and organisations, stakeholders associations, industry and universities. EHMA is now a unique knowledge hub, policy advisor, community of practice and network of best in class organisations involved in health policy and management. A place where health managers can build their competences, policy-makers and stakeholder associations envision how to implement and sustain change through health management, industry leaders understand how to engage more effectively with health organisations and systems. The right place to nurture and grow health management capabilities and capacity for every stakeholder of health systems.
Prof Federico Lega, University of Milan, Italy
Health management has a crucial function in shaping public health and health system challenges. The Medical University of Varna, Bulgaria had success in collaborating with EHMA on EU-funded projects that has resourced us to create new health management competencies for the future workforce. In addition to all classical definitions, health management is a science dealing with individuals, groups, and society at large. It is an art contributing to the beauty of our lives and an interactive communication process at all levels of institutions and human energy. I have also had the pleasure to chair the South Eastern European Special Interest Group which gives members a space to discuss and tools to address how health systems are managed in our regions.
Prof Todorka Kostadinova, Medical University of Varna, Bulgaria
I enjoy the high level of interaction and engagement in EHMA’s activities, in particular during the annual conference where the panel discussions are rich and well prepared. As a hospital manager and professor of health management, EHMA motivates and inspires me to be creative. You go back home feeling energised from seeing old friends and making new connections, as well as being convinced of serving as EHMA’s ambassador. It’s a strong feeling of interdisciplinary engagement, but it also feels like being part of family-like community.
Prof Sandra C. Buttigieg, MD, University of Malta, Malta
Health workforce has become more essential in operating, managing and maintaining health systems lately, particularly in crisis and emergency situations. European healthcare professions and the workforce need to be high on the agenda of managers and decision makers. The Health Services Management Training Centre, Semmelweis University in Hungary is a longstanding EHMA member, because it connects us with collaborators and experts, with whom we can have complex debates, from whom we can learn and at the end find solutions in various challenging fields of healthcare management.
Dr Eszter Kovács, Health Services Management Training Centre, Semmelweis University, Hungary
As a hospital administrator and health management professor, I see on a daily basis that the healthcare challenges require talented and skilled managers to transform it. the EHMA membership has been beneficial to bring healthcare management research and education to the demanding healthcare services world, promoting healthcare management competencies and knowledge creation.
Dr Alexandre Lourenco, APAH - Association of Portuguese Hospital Managers, Portugal
Many healthcare systems in Europe and beyond are facing similar challenges which require innovative and creative solutions. EHMA’s annual conference, webinars, Programme Directors’ group and other activities and resources provide incredible opportunities for networking, connecting and sharing experiences. A distinct feature of EHMA is the diversity of members with representation from many countries, sectors and different communities of practice – academic, policy-makers, practitioners, managers, leaders and students. The annual conference is a highlight in the calendar year, offering a friendly, fun and learningful environment for emerging and established members to engage, collaborate and meet up with old and new friends. I am proud to be a member of the EHMA Board.
Prof Ann Mahon, University of Manchester, UK
Society evolution, pandemics and ageing modify health needs. So, health policies and services are to change dramatically. EHMA, through webinars, workshops and annual conference provides an excellent insight to a professional changing world, favouring closeness to management innovation and the protagonists of these changes. As a primary care services’ manager, participating in EHMA activities is really worth it and allows to involve oneself in the innovation processes.
Antoni Peris-Grao, MD, Consorci Castelldefels Agents de Salut (CASAP), Spain
