How adaptive leadership can enhance health care ethics

In today’s health care systems, ethical considerations are routinely addressed on a wide range of topics, from bedside decision-making to institutional policy. Ethicists are well integrated into health care teams and often use decision-making frameworks and strategies to support health professionals in navigating tough decisions.

A recent article published in the Healthcare Management Forum, by the ORIHI Ethics Quality Improvement Lab, challenges this traditional model, proposing that ethical challenges are often misdiagnosed and mishandled if only technical tools are relied upon. Instead, Drs. Angel Petropanagos, Jill Oliver and Paula Chidwick, propose a shift toward adaptive leadership.

Many ethical issues are more complex than traditional models can support because they consist of adaptive challenges. Therefore, different kinds of solutions must be sought, developed through co-creation, dialogue, reflection and behavior change.
Adaptive leadership, a concept borrowed from organizational development, encourages leaders to:

• Sit with uncertainty and complexity
• Mobilize stakeholders to work through difficult value-based questions
• Resist the urge to “fix” and instead facilitate meaningful dialogue
• Lead through collaboration, not authority

For ethicists in the health care setting, this means shifting to become change facilitators and help others navigate the discomfort that often accompanies ethical growth.

The publication concludes with a clear message: ethical resilience in health care means that organizations must integrate adaptive leadership. Ethicists need support in developing these new skills, and health care leaders must recognize the limits of purely technical approaches.