MAXINE HAYES: It is a really a delight to be here and to be among my MCH brothers and sisters. You know, all of you are leaders and any one of you could be up here telling your story. It just so happened that we were asked to tell our story, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this story, because I want to quickly get to what I think are going to be critical for MCH training programs to focus on for our leaders for the future. We've had our stay and it's time for us to really get serious about those that will have to follow us, so I'm very delighted that MCH has really focused on a conference such as this. Leadership is extremely important but we're all leaders and you're leaders. You know, I'm a product of my past just like you are. We're who we are because of where we've been and my very first leadership experience was in my family. I was the oldest of five children. Many of you know I'm a native Jackson, Mississippi. I grew up in the 50's and 60's, very segregated community and I grew up in a family where it was just expected that we would be somebody.

And I had the pleasure of having one my classmates--I'll be celebrating my 40^th year from high school this year--and one of my classmates recently--very successful young man lives in Atlanta--he said Maxine, you know, when we were in high school, you were so driven and you were so competitive and I am who I am today because of what you did to me in high school. And so if that's a clue, you know, I was very competitive in high school and, you know, growing up in a segregated community like Mississippi, very segregated. I would never accept the fact that someone thought I couldn't be somebody, and so you know I think that drive and that tremendous fanaticism about doing the very best that I could do where ever it was. It wasn't arrogance. It was just really being very true to the commitment to be my very best, and so that was the start, and of course in a family of five children with both parents working I was often in charge. And you know being in charge, I could only go after what I learned from my father and that was the authoritarian type of being in charge. You know you do as I say and that was it with my siblings. And I think that going from that type of beginning and of course eventually going to medical school where in medicine, physicians are solo performers. They really are. You know we are trained to perform as physicians, and primarily solo performers.

I'm a work in progress because one of the things that I learned with all of the things that I was able to accomplish very early in my career out of just sheer commitment to and focus and discipline, I learned very early that yes, you can get things done that way, but in terms of whether they will last and that what's leaders really have to eventually learn. You know, it is very necessary to be focused and very necessary to be driven. But one of the things that I have been very fortunate to learn over the years is that it requires so much more than that and a focus not on the leader, but on the followers. I think that when I look back on my own career, I've always had more of a passion for serving than leading, and every job I've ever had has found me and it's been leadership that's basically finding me, rather than trying to really be the leader. I can truthfully say that looking back. Some of the things that I have learned over the years is that politics shaped what and how far you can go in anything, and it's so important to build a team of individuals that really understand and can really be committed to the vision, whatever it is, and be committed to it in a very strong way.

Understanding and navigating the authorizing environment is essential because we can all have visions. If we don't understand the context in which these visions have to be played out, you're dead upon arrival. There's no way that these visions could ever come to fruition. I think some of the most important skills are communication, listening and being silent, negotiating, having very highly developed powers of persuasion, learning how to read the environment and being very aware. Not only aware around but aware within. Self-awareness is one of the key ingredients to being successful, aware of where you are in spirit and we haven't talked about spirituality but I think there is an essential component of every leader is the spirituality. And you can go and look at the lives of people who have been very successful leaders and that's a part of their history. I think that the leadership model that I have evolved into and I'm still a work in progress is a move from the hierarchical model with the pyramid--the leader being on top--and reversing that with the leader being deliberately on the bottom. And that is supporting people around them to do their work and create an environment in which the best that those people can give is brought out in the environment that the leader helps to create. It really means that I'm working for my team instead of them working for me, and seeing myself as truly working for them.

Getting out of the way and giving them the tools that are necessary for them to do their work. It's not about me, attitude. I think in the future--because this is what this conference is all about. I don't know if you've seen the (inaudible) of medicine the future of the public's health, but this new publication, basically, will challenge the public health community in areas of action and change. And what I really envision for our community of maternal and child health leaders is that we have to show the rest of the system the way we always have let systems change. And I see that we have to see ourselves as the boundary spanners, people who are willing and able to think globally, and to really integrate and get out of the individual silos. Multi disciplinary approaches to multi faceted very complex issues. This is the 21^st Century and none of the problems we're trying to resolve in public health are simple. They are very complex and they will require complex solutions, many disciples, and that is why public health I think is the best place to be the integrator of many of these problem solutions. Building partnerships. Bill (inaudible) who I consider one of the father's of public health says that the future of public health belongs to one's who know how to form coalitions, and that's building partnerships because nobody will have the wherewithal to do it in and of themselves. We need the philanthropy, we need the business community, we need academia in medicine, but we also need media. Media was one of those pieces within the future of the public's health that was highlighted and that's about communicating and taking truth to power and action. That's it. Taking truth to power and action. That requires courage. Rosalind Carter once said, "A leader takes people where they want to go, but a great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go but ought to be."  That's it.