Breaking Through: Leading Unified Change Across Health Care Professions

If you're leading a cross-functional team of health care professionals, you likely already know this story. You present a critical challenge facing your organization, and the room falls silent. Heads nod in agreement—yes, this needs to be addressed. Then comes the question: "How do we solve it?" Suddenly, the unity fractures. Different groups, each with valuable perspectives and experience, propose conflicting solutions. The consensus that a problem exists dissolves into a maze of misaligned approaches.

At our Reimagining Health Care Leadership event, we polled the audience on the statement, “There is consensus between different health care professions regarding solutions.” The results showed that the majority of respondents (68.6%) disagreed or strongly disagreed.

Why does this happen? Each professional group brings:

• Unique training and educational background
• Different approaches to risk assessment
• Varying perspectives on resource allocation
• Distinct professional cultures and values
• Specific regulatory and practice requirements

Finding consensus is made even more difficult because differences of opinion are not limited to the dividing lines of professions. It would be wildly inaccurate to say that all occupational therapists or dentists define and solve problems the same way.

This challenge is not unique to health care. Whether you are a publicly owned transport company, a non-profit that supports education in Africa, or a family-owned restaurant, every organization of any size comprises professionals with varied educations, functional skills, and backgrounds. As a result, many lessons have already been learned about solving the challenge of creating consensus across differences.

This diversity of perspective, which can feel like an obstacle, is actually your greatest asset as a leader. The key is not eliminating differences but harnessing them to build stronger, more comprehensive solutions.

I've seen transformation happen when leaders shift their approach. Instead of seeing differences as barriers to overcome, they begin viewing them as essential ingredients in a richer recipe. This shift changes everything – from how teams interact to how solutions emerge and take root.

The path forward requires a different kind of leadership. It's not about having all the answers or choosing between competing professional viewpoints. It's about creating spaces where different professional perspectives can combine into something new and more powerful than any single approach. This needs to be your approach both within your organization and across the wider community of stakeholders you engage with.

Successful leaders embrace this complexity by:

• Defining and maintaining focus on shared goals 
• Building solution teams that cross professional boundaries by design
• Facilitating conversations that explore the deeper wisdom each profession brings
• Celebrating tension between different approaches as a source of innovation
• Building trust through consistent, inclusive processes

Think of it like conducting an orchestra. Each instrument has its own distinct voice, and trying to make them all play the same note would result in something pretty bland and uninspiring. The magic happens when the different voices these instruments create come together, each playing their own part of the composition. The result is a performance of a piece of music greater than the sum of its parts.

The next time you face seemingly intractable professional disagreements about solutions, take heart. It may require more patience and creativity, but the path to consensus and the meaningful transformation it can bring about in your organization is real.