CHA is offering a program for new and emerging leaders in Catholic healthcare as well as others who are discerning a call to mission leadership.
Essentials for Leading Mission is a virtual program of eight monthly sessions. It will begin in November and last through June, and sessions will be offered from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET.
This is an evolution of a program that CHA offered in-person for many years, and then online during the COVID-19 pandemic. That program ended as needs and capacity shifted, and when Dennis Gonzales, CHA's senior director of mission innovation and integration, asked chief mission leaders what they wanted from CHA, they asked for such a program to return.
Essentials for Leading Mission will reach those who have not had an opportunity in recent years for such discussion.
Karla Keppel, CHA's associate director of mission services, said there may be many people in Catholic healthcare who have an interest in mission leadership or who have been identified as good mission leader candidates. "So let's give them the skills they need, especially when it comes to things like the Catholic social teaching, theological grounding, ethics grounding, to support them in that discernment," Keppel said.
Mentors will accompany each participant throughout the program, meeting in between each session. "During that time, they'll be working with their mentor to discuss the content from the sessions, and also to talk about their own professional development as new, newer or potential mission leaders," Gonzales said.
Updated topics
The program is based on the Mission Leader Competency Model and was developed with significant input from CHA's Mission Leader Advisory Council and Mission Formation Advisory Council.
The topics of the program's eight sessions are:
- Operationalizing Mission
- Mission Leadership & Ministry Formation: Key Relationships, Executive Presence and the Art of Explaining the Why
- Operationalized Ethics: Standardizing Integrated Discernment, Catholic Identity, & Organizational Ethics
- Finance & Operations: Ministry Sustainability
- Small "a" Advocacy, Big "A" Advocacy: Advocacy, Community Benefit, and Public Policy
- Spiritual Care Strategies & Well-Being
- Fireside Chat
- United for Change
The program aligns with the mission leader competencies, including operations, strategy, and advocacy, which have a heightened importance in the current Mission Leader Competency Model, Gonzales pointed out. New to the program is a healthcare finance component, he said.
Addressing a gap
Gonzales said he hopes the program will address the generational gap that exists not just in mission leadership, but also with other aspects of Catholic healthcare leadership. Baby boomers are retiring, Generation X is smaller, and the Millennial generation will have to quickly move into leadership roles, he said. "The runway that traditionally existed to learn and train and get experience is much shorter," he said.
Most of Catholic healthcare's original mission leaders were the founding sisters, and as that population has shrunk much of their work is now focused on governance and sponsorship, he said. Laypeople in mission leadership, Gonzales said, have the main responsibility "to do whatever they can to ensure that the ministries stay true to the mission, the core values and the charism and Catholic social teaching, to ensure that they continue as ministries of the church."
Keppel said that the ministry needs mission leaders to help empower and invite others to live those values, even if it's just with their presence. "More importantly, it's in the way that mission leaders invite folks to build relationships and engage in relationship in such a way that those values are ingrained," she said. "Mission leaders, to my mind, invite and empower (Catholic healthcare providers), along with their formation counterparts, to live those out in their day-to-day caregiving."