The Team
Our study team was composed of two clinician-educators with leadership roles (JS, TMC, both with decanal positions in education leadership), one health care administrative leader who also holds a faculty appointment (SR), one leadership and health entrepreneurship educator who also holds leadership roles within an incubator and several start-ups (SL), and a PhD professor of leadership studies, who is one of the originators of the LEADS framework and the head of a non-profit organization (GD).7,8 Throughout the process we empowered members of the team to challenge each other's personal assumptions and interrogated our selections of theories to ensure that we remained reflexive about the literature reviewed.
Discussions Within the Analysis Team
First, we conducted a pilot review of various leadership frameworks and theories (this was done by SR, SL, TMC). This step formed the basis of initial discussions. The most salient framework was felt to be the LEADS framework because of its prominence in Canadian healthcare.7,8 Kegan’s model of human development19 was selected to augment the LEADS framework because it seemed to provide the developmental framing that we felt was absent from the LEADS framework. These two frameworks continued to inform our discussions, similar to how sensitizing concepts are incorporated in other qualitative methods.20 Situational leadership 21 and the Cynefin22 frameworks inspired thinking about the adaptive nature of leadership and the advanced proficiencies required to discern among appropriate styles for a given context.