The art of leadership

Hanna Dinh Hsieh, ’14, ’16, likes to tell her mentees that leadership is an art and a skill that can be learned. It certainly was for her.

Today as she cheers on undergraduate mentees, she asks them to meticulously think about where and how they want to move forward. Dinh Hsieh invites them to question their concepts of what they think leadership is, and to imagine and envision how they can be leaders in their community. Watching student mentees evolve as leaders has only fortified Dinh Hsieh’s understanding of leadership; reinforcing collaboration toward shared goals.

Dinh Hsieh has always seen herself as a “helper.” This was the seed that planted her interest in public health and which tugs at her introspection in her role, outside of work, as a Husky Leadership Certificate mentor. She regularly considers, what does it mean to nurture spaces where others can achieve their own empowerment?

“Ethical leadership builds and sustains relationships to create positive impacts,” Dinh Hsieh reflects, paying attention to the responsibility and ethical weight of “paying it forward with mentorship to the next generation of leaders.”

In Dinh Hsieh’s experience, being a leader doesn’t mean one has to be in a “leadership position.” One can lead from any role, every day.

We all have a role to play

Dinh Hsieh’s pathway to the UW and eventual role as mentor began as a high school student searching for a home to a diverse and multicultural community. She sought an excellent academic education and a place that would best support her growth mindset with personal developmental opportunities. She wanted to expand her identity as a helper and develop the service and leadership skills needed to make positive impacts on the world. She desired a community that would allow her to contribute and grow by pulling from her rich cultural background and lived experiences.

Dinh Hsieh found her match with the University of Washington.

As she began her first fall quarter, her family said to her to “make the most of your experience.” She held that note to her heart and dove into a journey of self-exploration, discovering what “really gets her out of bed in the morning.” Her pathway of helping rooted her within a double degree in public health and medical anthropology and global health, and here she looked for new perspectives and lenses to see the world with.

“Looking back, I did a lot of things that I didn’t expect myself to be doing,” she said.

Slowly learning to see herself in positions of leadership, Dinh Hsieh expanded her own imaginings of what a helper was. Dinh Hsieh would become the president of the Student Public Health Association and lead committees for the Vietnam Health Clinic, preparing for and going overseas to support mobile health services in Vietnam.

Dinh Hsieh’s pivotal academic experience would prove to come from joining the Husky Leadership  Certificate program in its inaugural year, 2013-14. She saw the program as an opportunity to “engage in a continuous process of self-reflection, furthering not only my growth as a leader, but as an individual.”

Hanna Dinh Hsieh, ’14, ’16, earned bachelors degrees in public health and medical anthropology (global health), then returned to the UW to earn her master’s degree in health administration. Today, she is a project manager and internal consultant for the digital health office at UW Medicine, program manager for the Washington State Telehealth Collaborative, and a Husky Leadership Certificate mentor. Photo by Ian Teodoro.

Her time within the program fundamentally impacted her post-collegiate trajectory in the public health/health services field and impacted her service work in the greater community. Dinh Hsieh acknowledges that the experience of working with a designated mentor was a key factor in this. Through developing a long-standing, collaborative relationship, her mentor was able to offer insight, advice and guidance throughout Dinh Hsieh’s academic career. This relationship nurtured not only her leadership potential over time, but supported the expansion of her own sense of what she could accomplish. She was able to reimagine her own sense of self and to see her best pathway of leading in public health.

Learn, grow and lead

For Hanna Dinh Hsieh, learning is never finished. She returned to the UW after graduating to pursue graduate studies in health administration and cites the Husky Leadership Certificate program as having catapulted her to serve as a mentor during her return to campus. She felt called to give back to the program that gave her so much and swiftly found herself working with new undergraduates to help them, too, discover themselves in a new light.

“I learn from my mentees as much as they learn from me,” Dinh Hsieh said, “It’s definitely a reciprocal relationship as it equally benefits how we all continue to learn, grow and lead.”

These qualities and skills inform her role today as project manager and internal consultant for the digital health office at UW Medicine and program manager for the Washington State Telehealth Collaborative. Project managing telemedicine programs, coordinating across executives, administrators, program staff, and telehealth leaders and providing telehealth policy updates across Washington state, Dinh Hsieh reinforces collaboration toward a common goal. She champions colleagues to ensure that all programs are successful, leading to decreased inequities in health care access. She engages across stakeholders in support of collective and individual realizations that have real world impacts for patient-centered care. These impacts include elements like an increase in access to providers and care teams, an alternative language support system, and removal of transportation, language and equity barriers. She improves the patient experience with telehealth, while identifying evolving trends and places of growth opportunities for UW Medicine.

Together we are a world of good

Amidst the heavy workload serving communities around her with needed resources, she manages to continue to find time to mentor undergraduate students and cheer them on to their own leadership success.

Looking back at her time in the Husky Leadership Certificate program, Dinh Hsieh notes, “Everything is about learning together through the collective process. From the experiences that were really impactful, but also learning from the failures.”

Dinh Hsieh continues to make the most out of each experience this life gives her, from every win to every fail, she remains ever curious, an inspiration to each undergraduate student she works with and a Husky leader through and through.