Currently serving as President and CEO of North Bay Regional Health Centre, Paul Heinrich is one of Canada’s most respected healthcare leaders, having spent his career guiding hospitals, health systems, and healthcare organizations through periods of significant change and complexity. After experiencing the Basadur Process through McMaster University’s Directors College over 20 years ago, he recognized the power of Basadur Simplexity Thinking to bring people together around difficult problems and innovate solutions.
Paul consistently uses the Process to navigate the ambiguity and competing priorities common in healthcare leadership and to create alignment across diverse stakeholder groups while leading meaningful organizational transformation. His background spans healthcare administration, finance, governance, law, education, and especially leadership development, giving him a uniquely broad perspective on how complex systems function. Colleagues know him not only as a skilled executive but as a leader who values collaboration, continuous learning, and thoughtful decision-making.
Paul shares his knowledge about leadership in the trenches in the following article:
Influence is Power
By Paul Henrich, President & CEO of North Bay Regional Health Centre
As leaders of large, complex organizations, we often find ourselves in situations requiring strong collaboration with many partners across multiple sectors. It can sometimes feel impossible to integrate and share decision making when collaborating with multiple partners.
After many years in leadership, I can tell you that the answer is realizing that no one actually has power – we only have influence. And influence is where the real power is.
A common misconception is that those with perceived ‘power’ in formal management positions within the largest organizations have control to ‘fix’ the problems of the system. I would argue in most circumstances, formal leaders have very little control over the change that is needed.
As the President and CEO of a large healthcare provider, I have to consider accountability to my board, staff, doctors, volunteers and the populations we serve. Layer on heavy regulation, intense standards and sometimes paradoxical expectations from government and you start to realize that even the leaders in our biggest institutions have little control.
What I am now practicing is leading from behind, while not being seen.
If I identify an important need or change, I often bring the concept in question to the subject matter experts. If the idea has value, momentum will naturally build from there. Buy-in for good ideas happens faster when it comes from the front line’s most respected leaders rather than trying to implement ideas from the top down.
For this to work you need the right processes, the right fit for purpose team of experts and the right problems to solve identified. This is when a leader helps in the background to make sure the right nimble structures are in place and that the right people are made available at the appropriate time to support shared improvement processes. You can also use influence to suggest the right creative problem solving tool or process improvement tools to reach good collaborate decisions.