With the help of the CFE’s Faculty Learning Community on Strategy and Leadership, Psychiatry Professor John Gilmore organized and strengthened an innovative program of service, research, and training.
John Gilmore is the Alice and Thad Eure Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. He is Vice Chair for Research and Scientific Affairs and Director of the UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health (CECMH).
The Center provides evidence-based care for patients with serious mental illness in Orange, Wake, and Chatham Counties, and also provides a variety of consultative services throughout the state. In addition, the Center provides training opportunities for students, is a research site for faculty, and offers models of care and innovative ideas for mental health providers and policy makers in North Carolina. CECMH aims to be a national model for comprehensive, community-based, behavioral medicine.
John first sought assistance from CFE to help him design and carry out a process of strategic planning that would aid the CECMH in managing the rapid growth of programs, clinics, and sites. With the help of CFE, the staff held a half-day highly interactive workshop that brought together the leadership of the CECMH’s programs for information sharing, reflection, and planning.
John then joined the CFE’s Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Strategy and Leadership, a cohort program of 20 faculty leaders from all parts of Carolina that met monthly during the 2014-15 academic year. FLC participants heard presentations from and dialogued with experts on various aspects of strategic management including innovation, entrepreneurship, engaging stakeholders, strategic analysis, strategy execution, communication, resource development, and measurement.
Using ideas from the FLC, John and his senior staff created a situational analysis, a vision statement, and a plan to engage external stakeholders in order to sustain and manage growth over the next three years. Speaking of his yearlong experience in the FLC John said:
“The FLC was great. It provided basic information about strategic planning that I never had the opportunity to be exposed to in my previous training.
It can be lonely doing strategic planning for the first time and it was great to have a peer group when you are going through this process with your own organization. Every month I took what I learned from the FLC back to the process in the Center and it really informed how our strategic plan formed over this year.
It was very valuable also for CFE Leadership Coordinator David Kiel to come and do a workshop for our group that helped everyone feel included and to feel a part of the process at the beginning. He also gave us guidance when we began to put our strategy documents together. In general he helped shepherd us through the various steps of the process and this was extremely useful for me and my staff.”