Meta-leadership

Meta-leadership

Meta-leadership is an overarching leadership framework for strategically linking the efforts of different organizations or organizational units to “provide guidance, direction, and momentum across organizational lines that develop into a shared course of action and commonality of purpose among people and agencies that are doing what may appear to be very different work.”

The framework was developed by Dr. Leonard J. Marcus and Dr. Barry Dorn of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI), a joint program of the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Colonel (Ret.) Dr. Isaac Ashkenazi formerly Surgeon General of the Israel Defense Forces Home Front Command and now a professor of international disaster management and the Director of Urban Terrorism Preparedness at the NPLI, and Joseph M. Henderson Chief of Staff at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. It is “derived through observation and analysis of leaders in crisis circumstances” starting with the September 11 attacks in the U.S. It has subsequently been distilled for more general application.