Over the last five years, the Center's consulting services team has served more than 1,000 health professionals through 52 open enrollment courses as well as dozens of customized trainings, which typically include workshops, psychometric assessments, surveys and coaching services.

This spring, these traditional services are emerging with an edge: tailored specifically to a health care system in dire need of change and the people who are at the core of this transformation. The Center is offering several new workshops connecting its leadership content to relevant health care reform themes, such as accountable care organizations, interdisciplinary teams, and quality improvement initiatives.

In March, for example, the Center will offer a new course format that provides participants with a full day of content (in this case relating conflict management styles to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) plus an additional three hours of personal coaching afterward. They can take what they learned back to work, try new techniques, and then reconnect with their coach. This creates a richer experience: try it, evaluate it, re-set, try again. Innovations in health care organizations are often running into roadblocks when clinicians are asked to be managers without the proper training, therefore translating conflict management directly into the scenarios clinician leaders are likely to encounter makes the experience more relevant.

Coaching at the Center is quickly becoming a high-demand service and Brett Penfil is the on-site certified coach and Director of Coaching. She has developed rigorous standards across all Center provided coaching, and has recruited 20 coaches with interesting, unique and distinguished backgrounds.

This brings us to activity based learning, a point Center Director Ed O’Neil often makes when explaining how it is that participants often find Center workshops more effective than other seminars they have attended: “The programs we like to deliver are interactive sessions with about 30% didactic and 70% active content; this involves roll play, group activities or lab sessions. Participants are up and moving around the whole time. People learn better that way. Studies consistently show how little people retain when being ‘talked at’.” This philosophy has proven successful in many settings, one being the so called Scientific Leadership and Laboratory Management Course – supporting bio medical researchers who were given new leadership responsibilities to start managing their labs. The Center’s 1.5 day workshop that began at UCSF over five years ago is now also being implemented at UCLA.

Jake Blackshear, Center Services Program Manager sums it up as follows: “The marriage of applied content and active delivery makes Center workshops more exciting and helps advance the transformation of healthcare by allowing people to better retain what they learn.”

For a list of upcoming workshops, please check the Center website.