Boundary Spanning Leadership and Multi-sector Partnerships: The Path to Healthy Communities

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program combines data and action to create solutions that make it easier for people to be healthy in their own communities. The Rankings document the factors that affect a community’s health, while the Roadmaps provide guidance and tools to support communities taking action to improve those factors and therefore, ultimately health outcomes in their communities.

In order to make a significant impact on the multiple factors that drive health outcomes, communities must engage leaders from many sectors, such as business, community development, government, and education, to make meaningful policy and programmatic changes that will ultimately result in improved health. Public health practitioners play a key role as strategists in convening and leading multi-sector efforts; however, many times they run into challenges or barriers in getting partners from other sectors to the partnership table or advancing the partnership so that it produces meaningful results.

Boundary spanning leadership (BSL), developed by the Center for Creative Leadership, is an approach that provides best practices for addressing these common barriers and maximizing diverse partnerships for real results. This session will introduce the key components of BSL, including managing boundaries, forging common ground, and discovering new frontiers. Examples of how public health leaders have used the practices of BSL to maximize the performance of multi-sector partnerships will be discussed. Looking to the future, as public health leads discussions of health in all policies, skill development in partnership development, such as BSL, will be essential.