Family Physician-Administrative Leadership Partnership

Empowering Family Physician Dyads for System-Wide Impact

An immersive leadership program designed to strengthen healthcare leadership by fostering effective collaboration between family physicians and administrative leaders.

Program Details

About the Program

Ontario’s healthcare system is undergoing a profound transformation—one that demands not only innovation in care delivery but also a new model of leadership. At the heart of this transformation is the need for strong, collaborative partnerships between family physicians and executive leads.

The Ontario College of Family Physicians, in partnership with the Rotman School of Management, developed the Family Physician-Administrative Leadership Partnership , a program that provides a unique opportunity for dyads to step away from day-to-day pressures and engage in deep, collaborative learning together.

Through interactive sessions, real-world case studies and peer dialogue, participants will strengthen their collaboration, gain practical tools for leading in complexity and explore how to shape the future of healthcare in Ontario. This is more than a leadership program —it’s a catalyst for building resilient, high-performing partnerships that can lead change at both the organizational and system level.

Who Should Register

This program is designed for family physicians and executive leaders who are working together—or preparing to work together in dyad leadership roles across a variety of team-based care models, including: Ontario Health Teams (OHTs), Primary Care Networks (PCNs), Family Health Teams (FHTs), Community Health Centres (CHCs) and other integrated primary care settings.

Location

This program will be held in person at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto located at 105 St George St, Toronto, ON.

Program Dates

Join our waitlist to be contacted about the next program offering.

Fees

For those located in Ontario, the fee is $600 + HST per person, or $1,200 + HST per dyad.

For those located outside of Ontario, the cost for family physician-administrator pairs participating is $1000+HST per person ($2000 + HST per dyad).

The fees above include all program materials, meals and access to world-class faculty and facilitation over the 2.5-day immersive experience.

All participants are responsible for any additional costs they may incur, including travel, accommodations, locum coverage and other related expenses.

This is a pilot program, currently subsidized by the OCFP. Please note that future cohorts may not be offered at the same rate, as continued subsidy cannot be guaranteed.

Mainpro+ Credits

This program has been certified for 16.5 Mainpro+ credits by the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Ontario Chapter.

Program Highlights

Strengthen Your Dyad Partnership

Deepen trust and collaboration between family physician leads and executive leaders. This program provides a structured environment to clarify roles, align on shared goals and build a unified leadership approach that supports integrated care delivery.

Gain Practical, Actionable Leadership Tools

Learn and apply proven frameworks in strategic alignment, decision-making under uncertainty and leading with influence. Sessions are designed to be immediately relevant to the challenges faced by dyad leaders in Ontario’s primary care system.

Break Down Silos Across Clinical and Administrative Domains

Develop a shared understanding of each other’s perspectives, responsibilities and pressures. This mutual insight enhances communication, fosters empathy and enables more cohesive and effective leadership across organizational boundaries.

Explore the Future of Healthcare

Understand the key trends reshaping healthcare in Canada, from emerging technologies to shifting patient expectations, and learn how to position your organization to adapt and thrive in a rapidly evolving system.

Contribute to System-Wide Transformation

Be part of a growing network of physician–executive dyads committed to advancing leadership excellence in primary care. The program supports a scalable model for leadership development that can be replicated across Ontario to drive broader health system change.**
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Program Curriculum

Strategy, Vision & Alignment

One of the key challenges associated with success in leadership roles is the ability to facilitate collaboration across different groups and departments. We often hear about how “silos” develop in organizations, with each silo focused on its own objectives, challenges and opportunities. This session helps leaders get things done through people from different departments (different silos) working together to collaborate on challenges facing the entire organization.

Breaking Down Silos

An organization’s leaders are responsible for rapidly addressing and resolving competing claims for the organization’s limited resources. Critical, therefore, are the sophisticated leadership skills required to translate one’s technical knowledge into effective actions in order to implement strategy. In this session, participants will learn about aligning an organization’s strategy with its formal structure, human resources, reward systems, processes and informal social networks. In short, how to translate strategic intent into organizational action.

Decision-Making in Uncertainty

In this session, we will turn our attention explicitly to the topic of crucial decision making under uncertainty. Many of the most important decisions that managers and leaders face are choices that must be made in the absence of knowledge about how things will turn out. How do people typically make these types of decisions, and how should they decide? We will use a case as a vehicle to discuss decision making under uncertainty, as well as to discuss some of the pitfalls that commonly characterize group decision making. We will conclude with some advice about how to minimize your, and others’, susceptibility to the groupthink problem in collective judgment.

Leading with Power

As you advance in your career and assume greater and greater responsibilities for your organization and its impact on society, you are increasingly faced with the challenges of acquiring and using power.

In this session, we will uncover what power really is, how it’s gained and lost, and how you can use it for good. You will see how power changes the behavior and the very thoughts of both the powerful and the powerless, and you will develop personal strategies to map the distribution of power in your environment and use your power not to control and dominate, but to inspire and energize all those whose resources and skills you need to lead change and have positive impact.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration

In today’s increasingly complex healthcare environment, delivering high-value care requires more than clinical excellence or operational efficiency—it demands the seamless integration of diverse expertise across clinical and administrative domains. Yet, collaboration across disciplines is challenging.

This session explores the essential leadership capabilities needed to foster a culture of collaboration within dyad partnerships. We will highlight four distinct skill sets that enable leaders to build trust, navigate differences, and co-create value that neither partner could achieve alone. Participants will leave with practical strategies to strengthen their own dyad relationships and lead more effectively in a system that increasingly depends on integrated leadership.

Dialogue with Dyad Leaders

This session offers participants a unique opportunity to hear directly from a practicing family physician–executive dyad about their real-world experiences leading together. Through storytelling and reflection, the guest speakers will share insights into the challenges, breakthroughs, and lessons learned in building a high-functioning leadership partnership.

The Future of Health(care)

Healthcare in Canada is shifting from facility-based treatment to a more decentralized, patient-empowered model—driven by unsustainable business practices, emerging technologies, and evolving user expectations. This transformation affects everyone from patients and providers to policymakers and the nearly two million professionals in the healthcare ecosystem. In this session, participants will explore six key shifts shaping the future of healthcare and learn how dyad leaders can position their organizations to thrive in a rapidly changing landscape.

Program Faculty

Brian Golden Academic Director, Chaired professor in health sector strategy at the Rotman School of Management and UHN

Showing biography of Brian Golden .

Brian Golden is the academic director for The Rotman-OCFP Dyad Leadership Academy and is the Sandra Rotman chaired professor in health sector strategy at the Rotman School of Management, The University of Toronto and The University Health Network. He is the founding academic director of The Sandra Rotman Centre for Health Sector Strategy, a policy, research and leadership development institute. His research has informed policy around collaborative leadership, system design, funding models and primary care.

From 2005 to 2010, Golden was board chair of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). He is former board chair of Rise, a non-profit micro-finance organization providing business development funding as well as funding for individuals with mental health and addiction challenges. Among his published work are articles in The Harvard Business Review, The Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Strategic Management Journal, Healthcare Quarterly, Healthcare Papers, The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, Management Science, Clinical Oncology and Health Policy. Golden’s Healthcare Quarterly article, “Transforming Healthcare Organizations,” was that publication’s most downloaded article, with more than 200,000 downloads.

As an adviser and director of leadership development programs, Golden has worked with a variety of organizations, including the Canadian Medical Association, provincial and territorial medical associations, Canadian provincial governments, Britain’s National Health Service, several Local Integration Health Networks, and hospitals and agencies, including The Hospital for Sick Children, The University Health Network, Hamilton Health Sciences, London Health Science Centre, Sunnybrook College Health Sciences Centre, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, British Columbia Cancer Agency, Cancer Care Ontario, The King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Baylor Medical Center. Private-sector clients include Tieto (Finland), General Electric, and Baxter. He is the founding academic director of The Rotman School’s advanced health leadership program and the global executive MBA in health care and life sciences. Golden was the founding director of The Judy Project, Canada’s premier program for senior women leaders in the private and public sectors.

In 2016, he was made a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences — the first business school professor to be recognized by the academy for his contributions to health care and life sciences. Additional honours include Canada’s Ted Freedman Innovation in Education award and the Canadian Medical Association’s first Eureka Award for Innovation in Physician Education.

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Maja Djikic Associate Professor, Organizational Behaviour & HR Management

Showing biography of Maja Djikic .

Maja Djikic, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and HR Management,
the Executive Director of The Self-Development Laboratory, and the Academic Director of the
Rotman Executive Coaching Certificate program at the Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto. She is a teaching fellow at The Institute for Gender and the Economy.
As a psychologist specializing in the field of personality development, Dr. Djikic examines the
processes and methods of developing a balanced and flexible self. She has published more than
35 scientific articles and book chapters on personality development, and her research has been
featured in over 50 media outlets (including the New York Times, Salon, Slate, and Scientific
American Mind) in 15 countries.
In addition to teaching MBA students, at Rotman she teaches leaders in the Executive MBA
program and custom executive programs. Her government and corporate clients have included
Health Ontario, United Health Network, McKinsey & Co., Deloitte, Eli Lilly, CSL Behring, Sun Life
Financial, Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank, Aird & Berlis LLP, Hyundai Canada, Microsoft,
Celestica, Right to Play, Open Text, Reach Out Centre for Kids, and others.
Her first book, The Possible Self: A Leader’s Guide to Personal Development, was published in
March of 2024 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

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Headshot of Avni Shah. Avni Shah Assistant Professor of Marketing

Showing biography of Avni Shah .

Professor Avni Shah is an Associate Professor of Marketing in the Department of
Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross-appointment to the
Marketing area at the Rotman School of Management and the Munk School of Global
Affairs. Using field and laboratory data, she investigates how payment influences consumer
decision-making and consumer well-being particularly in financial and health contexts. Her
research has covered a broad range of topics, such as looking at how paying with different
forms of payment influence purchase behavior and how paying a surcharge on unhealthy
food items influences unhealthy food consumption. Her work has been published in
the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences: Nexus, Journal of Urban Economics, Psychological
Science, and the Journal of the Association of Consumer Research. Professor Shah is also
the Academic Director and site lead of the Creative Destruction Lab-Toronto, a startup
accelerator program which focuses on commercializing science for deep tech companies.

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Headshot of Geoffrey J. Leonardelli. Geoffrey J. Leonardell Professor of Organizational Behaviour & HR Management

Showing biography of Geoffrey J. Leonardell .

Geoffrey J. Leonardelli (Ph.D. in social psychology) is Professor of Organizational Behavior and
Human Resource Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and
cross-appointed in the Department of Psychology. He seeks research discoveries that assist people
in their personal growth, assist businesses in diversifying their leadership, and help organizations,
communities and society at large become a better “Us”.

He has over 41 publications and a co-edited book detailing his contributions. Dr. Leonardelli translates social-science research into how
people can improve their interpersonal (e.g., leadership, team, and negotiation) skills and create
organizational change. As a reflection of these efforts, he has created two MBA courses and
created, co-created, or redesigned over 15 executive training programs, for open-enrollment or
custom clients. In 2019, out of his entire Faculty, he was awarded the Excellence in Teaching
Award. He has given invited talks in Canada, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the
Netherlands, Singapore, and Australia. Geoff regularly contributes to the university and academic
communities, and the public. He is the Academic Director of the Rotman Executive Programs on
Negotiations, Leading Change, Directors Education Program (DEP), and one on Power, Emotions,
and Social Influence. He is the Research Director of the Self and Identity Lab (SAIL). He is an
Associate Editor at Group Processes and Intergroup Relations and sits on the editorial boards of the
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology

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Contact Us

For questions or inquiries about this program and/or future leadership offerings, please email us.

Cancellation Policy
The OCFP reserves the right to cancel sessions due to unforeseen circumstances or insufficient advance registration. In the event of a cancellation made by the OCFP, a full refund will be given to the registrants. However, the OCFP cannot accept responsibility for out-of-pocket expenses due to cancellation of a session. Cancellations made more than 15 business days prior to the date of the event will be refunded, less a 25% administration fee. No refunds will be provided after this deadline.