Leading with Quality
as a Strategy
An approach to building healthcare organizations that deliver results and meaningful work
April 2, 9, 16, 23 | Limited Seats Available
Leading with Quality
A virtual leadership series for senior healthcare executives
Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in quality and improvement for decades. Dedicated roles, training programs, and projects are now common across the industry. And yet, results often remain uneven, progress can feel slow, and spread is difficult to achieve.
This leadership series is designed for executives who are accountable for quality and system performance and want a clearer, more disciplined way to lead improvement at the organizational level.
Grounded in improvement science and built on Quality as an Organizational Strategy (QOS), this program helps leaders make sense of their current reality, envision how quality should function as a system, and design practical next steps—starting from where they are today.
Secure Your Spot
Format
Live, cohort-based virtual series
Dates
Thursdays — April 2, 9, 16, and 23
Time
1:00–2:30 PM ET (10:00–11:30 AM PT)
Price
$695 per participant
Who This Is For
Designed for leaders ready to think differently about quality
Participants typically have prior exposure to quality and want to move beyond tools and projects toward organization-wide results.
Senior Healthcare Executives
Leaders with responsibility for quality, safety, excellence, or system performance
Chief Quality Officers
Both new and experienced CQOs looking to strengthen their leadership approach
Improvement Leaders
Those asking: “Why does improvement feel harder than it should?”
The Challenge
Why this series addresses a real gap
Healthcare has made real progress in quality over the past 40 years. Organizations have invested in capability, supported improvement teams, and launched countless initiatives. There are many examples of success.
At the same time, common realities persist:
Many projects never achieve their aim
Results vary widely across units and sites
Spread is inconsistent and difficult
Leaders inherit responsibility without a clear playbook
The challenge is rarely effort or commitment. More often, it is the absence of a coherent leadership approach for building an organization-wide system of continuous improvement.
How this series is different
Instead, the series helps leaders:
- Diagnose how their current quality system actually operates
- Clarify their implicit theory of how improvement leads to results
- Understand how leadership decisions shape execution and learning
- Design a practical path forward grounded in improvement science
Quality as an Organizational Strategy builds on familiar improvement methods but integrates them to a level that supports whole-system leadership, not just local projects.
Program structure
4 live Zoom sessions
90 minutes each
Weekly over one month
Interactive & discussion-focused
Light between-session reflection or application invites participants to test ideas in their own context. Sessions start and end on time, with brief breaks as needed.
Agenda Overview
Session 1 — Making Sense of the Current State
Understanding your quality system as it really operates today
Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in quality and improvement, yet results remain uneven and progress slow.
This session focuses on making sense of the current state:
- The accumulation of models, tools, projects, and roles
- Why CQOs and executives inherit responsibility without a clear system design
- How good intentions create friction and dilution
- Using QOS as a lens to diagnose—not judge—the system
Outcome:
Participants develop a clear, shared understanding of why their current quality approach produces the results it does.
Session 2 — Envisioning Quality as a System
From fragmented activity to a coherent organizational design
Before leaders can change their system, they must be able to see what a well-functioning system would actually do.
This session explores:
- What it means to pursue quality as an organizational strategy
- How improvement science informs system design at scale
- The five core leadership activities in QOS
- Developing a conceptual view of how quality should work in your organization
Outcome:
Participants can describe a coherent vision of quality as a leadership approach—not just a set of initiatives.
Session 3 — Designing for Getting Started
Turning vision into practical leadership decisions
Most leaders know where they want to go—but struggle with where and how to begin without overwhelming the organization.
This session focuses on:
- Translating the conceptual system into actionable leadership choices
- Identifying leverage points based on current reality
- Aligning improvement methods with intent and results
- Avoiding common traps: overprogramming, tool-chasing, and bottom-up drift
Outcome:
Participants identify a small set of high-leverage starting moves grounded in improvement science.
Session 4 — Learning and Building in Parallel
Sustaining progress through leadership and peer learning
Building quality as an organizational strategy is ongoing leadership work.
This final session explores:
- How leaders learn while executing
- Working in parallel: improving results while strengthening the system
- Using peer leadership as a learning resource
- What “good” looks like in the first 12–18 months
Outcome:
Participants leave with a defensible path forward and clarity about how to continue learning, adapting, and building capability over time.
The Faculty
David M. Williams, PhD
Senior advisor, author, and scholar-practitioner of Improvement Science with more than 25 years of experience working with healthcare leaders.
Co-author, with Lloyd Provost, and Cliff Norman, of Quality as an Organizational Strategy and The QOS Field Guide. Dr. Williams partners with executives to turn quality strategy into results and build organizations where people can take pride in their work.
Secure Your Spot
Format
Live, cohort-based virtual series
Dates
Thursdays — April 2, 9, 16, and 23
Time
1:00–2:30 PM ET (10:00–11:30 AM PT)
Price
$695 per participant
What You’ll Leave With
Practical outcomes, not just insights
A clear diagnosis of their current quality system
A shared leadership language for quality across the system and results-driven improvement
Confidence in making early, high-leverage decisions
A practical starting point for moving forward
Space is limited to support meaningful discussion and peer learning.