On 9 and 10 October 2012, Blue Cross leaders from around the world gathered in Sibiu, Romania, to participate in a high level multinational engagement event on leadership, organised by the Secretariat of the International Blue Cross (IBC) and hosted by Blue Cross Romania.
The purpose of the event was to provide an interactive platform for participants to dialogue, reflect and agree on the foundations of, and best practices in, collective leadership, and, by doing so, to significantly strengthen and promote the organisation in the coming months and years at the international, national, and local levels.
At the same time, the event offered participants the opportunity to reconnect with each other, rekindle virtual relationships in person and form new relationships and networks. Together they made sense of the past, current and future reality and challenges of the Blue Cross worldwide and explored what strategic and operational implications this had for their personal leadership practices at the national and/or local level.
The importance of leaders to be visionary, accountable, inclusive, engaging, respectful and highly professional, while being able to interpret from global to local and from local to global, underlined some of the values that Blue Cross adopted – next to a new strategy – as its backbone at the succeeding IBC General Assembly, on 12 October 2012. One of the prominent aspirations that surfaced was that of staying connected not only to share knowledge, best practices and support each other but also in a common vision to make the newly adopted Blue Cross strategy and values a reality on the ground.