MPH 508 Week 1 Leadership Self-Assessment Example

Leadership Self-Assessment: A Strong Score on Collaboration, and the Closed Dispensing Agreements I Let Lapse Because I Avoided One Hard Conversation

Student Name

Chamberlain University

MPH 508: Leadership and Administration in Public Health Systems

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Leadership Self-Assessment: A Strong Score on Collaboration, and the Closed Dispensing Agreements I Let Lapse Because I Avoided One Hard Conversation

My Role and the Instrument

I am the emergency preparedness coordinator for the Merritt County Health Department, a composite health department serving about 214,000 people with 64 staff. My main responsibility is the county's plan to give preventive medication to every resident within 48 hours of an event such as an anthrax release. The health department cannot do that through its own public dispensing sites alone, so the plan depends on closed points of dispensing: employers, long-term care facilities, colleges and other organizations that agree to give medication to their own staff, residents and families. I have no authority over any of them. Every agreement is voluntary.

The self-assessment assigned in this section rates leadership behavior across five practice areas. My profile was highest for enabling others to act and for encouraging the heart, and lowest for challenging the process. On its face, it describes a collaborative leader who builds relationships and rarely disrupts. I want to test that description against my own record, because the instrument asks me to rate my behavior and I know that my intentions are kinder to me than my calendar is.

Limits of the Instrument

Self-rated inventories measure how leaders see themselves, and research on leadership has long found that ratings by followers and peers predict outcomes differently from self-ratings. My instrument also assumes a leader with a team and a hierarchy. Most of my work involves partners outside my chain of command, and the instrument's items about recognizing staff or setting standards for a team fit poorly. Its strongest dimension for me, enabling others, may say more about my liking for agreement than about whether others actually became more capable.

Does My Conduct Match It?

I tested the profile against two years of my own work. In 2024 the county had 14 closed dispensing agreements, covering about 15,000 people. By mid-2026 it had 9, covering about 11,000. Five lapsed. I looked at why. Two organizations closed or moved. Three lapsed because the person who had signed the agreement left the organization and I did not re-engage the new contact within a year. In each of those three, I had an email from the successor asking what the agreement meant, and in each I replied with documents rather than a meeting.

That is the opposite of the collaborative leader the profile describes. Rebmann et al. (2022) found that staff turnover at partner sites and keeping sites engaged were the largest challenges reported by disaster planners managing closed dispensing networks, and that frequent communication and personal relationships were what kept sites active. I knew that. I did not act on it, because the follow-up conversations would have involved asking busy managers to recommit to something they had not chosen.

Table 1

Self-Assessment Profile Tested Against Two Years of Work

Note. Note. Composite figures from the writer's program records, 2024 to 2026.

Evidence From Two Situations

The first situation is the hospital. In 2025 the regional hospital's emergency manager, who had signed its closed dispensing agreement in 2021, retired. Her successor wrote to ask whether the hospital's agreement covered staff families. I sent the plan annex and the standing orders. The successor did not reply, and the hospital's agreement lapsed at renewal. A twenty-minute visit would likely have kept it. The second situation is a distribution center with about 2,400 workers, which I recruited in 2026. There I did hold the hard conversations, about liability, about shift coverage and about what the company's occupational health nurse would and would not do. The difference was that the company had approached me after a news story; the conversation was invited.

One Weakness, Examined

My weakness is not lack of skill at relationships but avoidance of uninvited conversations that might produce a refusal. It shows up in exactly the work where I have no authority, because in those settings a refusal ends the matter. The instrument rated me lowest at challenging the process, and I think the two are linked: I accept the agreement template, the annual renewal letter and the email reply because they let me avoid a conversation in which someone might say no.

Leading Without Authority

Most of the people I need to lead are not my staff. Crosby and Bryson (2005) describe leadership across sectors as the work of building shared understanding, sponsoring forums and keeping commitments alive through relationships, because no single organization can order the others. That is a description of my job, and it requires the uninvited conversation more than any other skill. The national picture suggests I am not alone: in a 2013 survey of disaster planners, three quarters of jurisdictions had at least one closed dispensing site, yet almost half had provided no training for dispensing staff in the previous two years (Rebmann et al., 2014). Signing partners is the easy part; keeping them ready is the leadership work.

What I Will Do Next

I will visit every one of the nine current sites in person by the end of 2026, starting with the two whose contacts changed this year, and I will ask each what would make the agreement easier to keep. I will also draft a one-page agreement to replace the eight-page template, and bring it to my director as my first deliberate attempt to challenge a process I have accepted for three years.

What a Colleague Would Say

I asked the department's half-time planner, who has worked beside me for two years, to read the profile and tell me where it was wrong. She said that I am generous with credit and patient in meetings I have called, and that I put off calls I expect to go badly, sometimes for weeks. She also noted that partners who call me get fast, careful answers, while partners who go quiet get nothing. Her account matched the record more closely than the instrument did, which is a reason to keep asking her.

References

Crosby, B. C., & Bryson, J. M. (2005). A leadership framework for cross-sector collaboration. Public Management Review, 7(2), 177-201. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030500090519

Rebmann, T., Foerst, K., Charney, R. L., Mazzara, R. L., & Sandcork, J. (2022). Challenges in managing, sustaining, and assessing closed point of dispensing sites: Findings from a qualitative study. PLOS ONE, 17(7), e0271037. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271037

Rebmann, T., Loux, T. M., Swick, Z., Reddick, D., Dolgin, H., Anthony, J., & Prasad, R. (2014). A national study examining closed points of dispensing (PODs): Existence, preparedness, exercise participation, and training provided. Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science, 12(4), 208-216. https://doi.org/10.1089/bsp.2014.0014