Claire Ritchie

For many years, I have collaborated with (& learnt greatly from) leaders from Jönköping Region in Sweden & with Jönköping Academy. Jönköping has so much to teach the world about building integrated leadership development for a high-performing system. A key aspect of the Jönköping approach has been continuity of leadership approach & leadership purpose over decades. We can follow their journey which has seen: 1) A shift from siloed to system-wide leadership development: moving away from unit or area-specific interventions toward approaches that foster learning & leadership growth across the whole system. 2) Reframing the purpose of leadership development: from traditional personal leader development to anchoring development in real improvements for the people that the system serves. 3) Integrating leadership development into daily work: from a reliance on separate or targeted leadership programs to integrating leadership principles (using “simple rules”) into the daily work of leaders. The Jönköping experience demonstrates that effective system leadership emerges when development is integrated, adaptive & continuously aligned with both user/citizen needs & organisational needs. A big lesson from Jönköping is that we need to normalise leadership development as an everyday, lived, system-wide practice, not a sporadic activity: journals.sagepub.com/doi/ful…. Via @goranhenriks. See this in the context of “the Nordic way of leadership”: bradenkelley.com/2025/08/the… Via @SteLindegaard @innovate.