Across healthcare organizations, leadership expectations continue to rise. Leaders are asked to engage teams, navigate complexity, and sustain performance in environments defined by constant change. At South Shore Health, one leader recognized that meeting these demands required a more intentional and structured approach to leadership development.
Under the leadership of Lisa L. Rabideau, Executive Director of Organizational Development, South Shore Health launched the Leadership, Education, Achievement, Development, and Success (LEADS) Program, a multi phased leadership development initiative designed to strengthen core leadership capabilities and build a sustainable pipeline of leaders across the organization.
Listening First Designing with Purpose
The LEADS Program was created in direct response to employee feedback. After years without formal leadership development offering, leaders across South Shore Health expressed a clear need for support, structure, and shared learning considering sustained change, competing priorities, and ongoing operational pressures. Rather than implementing a generic solution, Lisa partnered with an external leadership development firm to translate that feedback into a program grounded in the organization’s culture, priorities, and real-world leadership challenges.
LEADS was designed around nine essential leadership competencies (i.e., effective communication, building trust, emotional intelligence, team building, conflict management, leading change, coaching for success, performance management, and situational leadership), beginning with foundational skills, and gradually introducing more advanced and strategic topics. With clear short term, midterm, and long term goals, the program delivers immediate value while laying the groundwork for long term leadership growth.
Learning Through Engagement and Feedback
From its first session, the LEADS Program demonstrated strong engagement and momentum. The inaugural session, Effective Communication, drew more than two hundred participants, representing most of South Shore Health’s leaders. Participation remained strong across sessions, with more than seventy percent of leaders attending the first two offerings and feedback consistently positive.
Lisa’s approach to program design remained flexible and responsive. The virtual sessions were intentionally designed to be live and synchronous, with a more didactic format, and were recorded so leaders who could not attend in real time—or who wanted to revisit the content—could watch later, helping to build a growing leadership development library. Based on participant feedback, Lisa adjusted later topics to better align with what leaders needed in that moment and modified session design elements, such as replacing breakout groups with all-participant chat responses so everyone could learn from one another.
For the early sessions of the program, Lisa engaged a group of Change Champions—a diverse cross-section of leaders—who contributed insights through structured needs assessments. Their input informed the design of the first several sessions, shaping content focused on timely leadership challenges such as trust, humility, and accountability. As competing priorities increased, the Change Champions’ involvement concluded, and the program design continued to evolve based on participant feedback and emerging needs.
To deepen relevance and engagement, sessions incorporated healthcare specific examples, engaging visuals, and opportunities for reflection. Interactive exercises supported live participation, while reflective questions ensured meaningful engagement for asynchronous learners.
Building Capacity for the Future
The LEADS Program was designed as a nine-session experience delivered over nine months, and its impact was felt quickly. Feedback following the first session reflected leaders’ eagerness for this kind of learning, with many reporting increased confidence, stronger engagement, and greater clarity around leadership expectations early in the program. Over time, the shared experience also helped establish a common leadership language, supporting collaboration, continuity, and smoother transitions across the organization. While formal impact data continues to be collected, early feedback points to strong momentum and enthusiasm. LEADS is now positioned as a foundational element of South Shore Health’s leadership strategy, strengthening leadership readiness and supporting long term organizational resilience.
A Model for Sustainable Leadership Development
Lisa Rabideau’s work demonstrates how employee driven leadership development can create meaningful change, even in resource constrained environments. Through thoughtful design and ongoing refinement, South Shore Health transformed insight into a structured, scalable program that supports leaders today while preparing the organization for the future.
At The Leadership Development Group, we are proud to partner with leaders, like Lisa Rabideau and the South Shore Health team, who are intentionally investing in leadership growth that is practical, scalable, and deeply aligned with their culture.
Is your organization ready to turn leadership challenges into opportunities for growth? Let’s talk.