Breaking The Mold: How DEI Builds Successful Public Health Leaders

April 10, 2024 | Kimberlee Wyche Etheridge

Experts have written tomes that outline the “essential characteristics” of a successful public health leader. Top traits often include theoretical knowledge, an ability to manage a large workforce, good interpersonal, problem solving, and communication skills, and effective systems thinking. If all these boxes are checked, the theory goes, then a stellar leader s/he shall be.

Respectfully, I disagree.

Fitting the mold does not always produce a good leader. Instead, it may make a good follower of norms and encourage people to do what they have always done.

One of the most important traits that often is not recognized when pontificating on the merits of good public health leadership, is the ability to study the present and a willingness to admit when it is not working—the lesson of failure. Understanding that continuing to do the same thing while expecting the results to change, is unsustainable.

Successfully managing outdated tactics is not leadership, but rather complicity. A good public health leader is one who steps away from the well-oiled machine, away from traditional expectations, and admits that a new way of functioning is paramount to changing outcomes. Addressing the most difficult public health challenges requires the tenacity to bring others into a new and bold vision, and to collectively move forward with the shared expectation of success, defined by those most impacted, as the desired outcome.

Often, the shift in perspective needed to travel the “road not taken” comes not simply from a brazenness to choose the other, but rather a willingness to lead from a different perspective. Alternate views often come from a multiplicity of thoughts that can only be achieved when the decision table includes all voices with each one given the chance to speak. Diversity counts!

Health equity has long been approached from a traditional deficit model. It has focused on the need to highlight the root causes of inequity instead of focusing on the factors that lead to health equity. It is much easier to pinpoint what is not working—what is wrong in or with a community—then to highlight the community’s strengths. We will never know this if the community is not represented. Achieving public health should be the goal instead of just lessening public disease. We need a new way of training the next generation of public health leaders that embraces different affinities, seeks out underrepresented and historically marginalized decision makers, with a willingness to change direction.

Take, for example, infant mortality. For generations, public health has framed its work around the number of infants who dies before his/her first birthday. We study the risk factors, and the maladies that contribute to the loss of each infant, and as public health does, we focus entirely on mitigating those risks. Rarely do we focus on the number of infants born that celebrate their first birthday, nor do we study what protective factors were in place that helped keep each of them healthy and alive through the first year. We follow the beaten path of negative determinants of health, while rarely acknowledging the positive indicators of health.

Imagine a population where 990 infants out of 1,000 celebrate their first birthday. What if we interviewed those 990 sets of parents in the same under-resourced communities with the goal of building a knowledge bank of survival factors. Take it further and imagine a public health funding mechanism that would support the research that studies success stories and works with communities as the experts to fund the discovery of best practices.

Admitting that what we have been doing is not going to get us where we want to be is a call to change our public health perspective. The most advantageous way to do this is to embrace a diversity of thought. Programs like DELPH are key to helping to make space in the room for those other voices, with other ideas, and new ways of doing things, which ultimately can lead to different results. Two divergent paths—choosing to take the one less travelled may be what makes all the difference.

This article first appeared in the Diverse Executives Leading in Public Health (DELPH) Magazine, Issue 2. Learn more about DELPH’s leadership development initiative by visiting DELPH program page.