The Development of Leadership Communities of Practice

This paper introduces the concept of leadership communities of practice (COP) as a strategy to enhance succession planning and leadership development within the Canadian healthcare context. Drawing upon Prosci’s ADKAR methodology as a foundational change management framework, this paper explores the adaptation of COP, originally developed by Lave and Wenger in 1991, to foster collaborative learning. While COP have a long history in business and education sectors, their formal integration into healthcare, specifically leadership development is relatively recent. This paper highlights the necessity of a robust change management approach to effectively introduce COP as a mechanism to enhance leadership development in healthcare settings, highlighting their potential to facilitate knowledge exchange and support social learning among healthcare leaders.