Jennifer Tucker, RN,MN, has spent more than twenty years leading in long-term care - one of the most demanding, most under-resourced, and most consequential leadership environments in healthcare. This book is what she learned. It is written from the journey, by someone still very much on it.
This is a leadership book. Not the kind that tells you what leadership should look like from a theoretical distance, but the kind that tells you what it actually feels like from inside the work: the fear, the weight of it, the moments that tested her and the ones that built her stronger.
Set a Course offers five interconnected areas of leadership:
The millenial leader: on leading from a generation that was told it could not, navigating imposter syndrome, introversion, the slow work of building trust, and the mentors who made the difference.
Risk: on calculated courage in a high-stakes enviroment, the difference between clinical instinct and values-based decision-making, and what it actually means to own an outcome.
Emergencies: on wildfire evacuations and labour disruptions and the particular leadership that crisis asks of you, and on how relationship is the whole method, not just a style.
Building the crew: on hiring for character, promoting from within, succession planning, and what it takes to build a team that can go the distance rather than just fill a roster.
Relationships: on the connective tissues of everything: the hard conversations, the accumulated grief, the unexpected friendships, and why the depth of the relationship is the measure of leadership.
Runing through every chapter is a surprising guide: Captain Katheryn Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager. Janeway led a crew of over a hundred people through seven years of uncharted territory, constant threat, and profound isolation, with no backup, no resupply, and no guarantee of ever getting home. She did it with a diverse crew, through crises she could not have anticipated, relying on values she refused to compromise. Each chapter opens with a moment from Janeway's journey before returning to Earth; to the long hallways, the night shifts, the family meetings, the things that keep LTC leaders awake.
Central to the book is a conviction Jennifer Tucker has tested against two decades of evidence: relationship is not a leadership style among options. It is the whole method. Everything else - every outcome, every crisis navigated, every moment of genuine teamwork grows from it.
Set a Course is written for leaders at every stage. It is honest about priviledge, about the particular challenges leading while young and a woman, about the weight of caring for people at the end of their lives. And it is deeply, stubbornly hopeful because Jennifer Tucker has seen what is possible when the right leader is in the right building, and she believes it is worth every hard thing it takes to get there.
"Somewhere in a long-term care home right now, someone's grandmother needs the best leader you can be."
So let's set a course.
