Table of Contents
Leaders Focus on Turning Challenges into Opportunities
More than 200 executive, administrative and faculty leaders of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston gathered in September for what UT Health Science Center President James T. Willerson, M.D., called “an important opportunity to discuss our future plans and how we may best work together to bring those plans to fruition.”
UT System Chancellor Mark Yudof
addresses the UT Health Science Center’s
first Leadership Summit.
Photo by Pamela Lewis
Meeting at the Crowne Plaza Hotel for the university’s first Leadership Summit, participants heard about challenges, leadership and opportunities.
“There is no end of challenges,” said Kenneth I. Shine, M.D., executive vice chancellor for health affairs at the UT System. But, he suggested, the health science center – with its six different health professional schools – “is positioned in a way to carry out the promise of multidisciplinary systems in a manner that is relatively unusual in the United States.”
Multidisciplinary systems are increasingly important in solving the problems of patient care and in competing successfully for research funding, Shine said. Education also must be reshaped.
“We need to rethink educational activities so they are not only about problem solving, but also about multidisciplinary experiences within a system of care, about understanding how to use the system for the benefit of patients,” he said.
UT System Chancellor Mark Yudof focused on the challenges of good leadership. “Leaders have to articulate and most importantly exemplify and embody” the values of the organization, he said. He outlined values that he believes contribute to a successful organization:
- a climate of innovation and excellence;
- use of reason, persuasion and evidence;
- diversity;
- actions aligned with strategic objectives;
- continuous and deliberate improvement;
- focus on service; and
- decentralized power but centralized accountability.
Willerson challenged the health science center’s leaders “to hear, see and undertake the opportunities that stand before us.”
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here today,” Willerson said, “for being part of this health science center and for committing to make this the very best academic health science center it can be.”
— By Pamela Lewis, Public Affairs