Leading at your Edge: In Conversation with Ed O’Malley

On Tuesday 24 March, we gathered at the Royal Children's Hospital for a conversation with Ed O'Malley, Founder of the Kansas Leadership Center and CEO of the Kansas Health Foundation. He is also co-author of books "Your Leadership Edge" (the green book) and "When Everyone Leads" (the yellow book), which sit at the foundation of what we do at Leadership Victoria.

Hosted by Associate Professor Tom Connell (WCLP '23), Chief Medical Officer at the Royal Children's Hospital, the evening drew on Ed's work to explore what it actually means to practise leadership as distinct from holding authority. Most of us grow up assuming the two are the same thing. Ed's work starts by pulling those apart.

Ed's central idea is that "leadership is an activity. It's not a position." We often move through our roles and communities meeting expectations rather than exercising leadership. The two feel similar from the inside, but they are not the same thing.

A key distinction running through the evening was between technical problems, which expertise can solve, and adaptive challenges, which require something different. Many people reach leadership positions because of their technical expertise, and then find themselves in roles where that expertise is no longer enough. When the challenge is adaptive, applying technical solutions tends to make things worse. The skill lies in knowing which kind of problem you are actually facing.

On what it takes to make leadership safe to exercise in a hierarchical environment, Ed was direct. People need to be told their leadership is wanted. But the harder part is what happens next. When someone steps up and the system pushes back, those in authority need to protect them. If they don't, the lesson spreads far beyond that one person.

The room also explored self-awareness and ego, what progress looks like when it has to move across organisations rather than within one, and what it means to lead in a time when trust in institutions is under real pressure. 

Tom closed with a reflection the room leaned into. "Leadership, a lot of the time, is less about having answers and more about creating conditions where the right challenges can be seen and addressed together."

We are grateful to Tom and the Royal Children's Hospital for hosting, and to Ed for the generosity of his thinking.