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Enhancing leadership capability with the NHS North West Leadership Academy
Background: the need for strong leadership through change
The NHS North West Leadership Academy was founded by the area’s Strategic Health Authority as a ‘Centre for Excellence’ in senior leadership and strategy development. Its aim is to support the region’s senior leaders and their Boards to be the best they can be, delivering the most effective healthcare to their local populations. It provides a wide range of leadership programmes and development opportunities aimed at supporting individual development of senior leaders, Board development and talent management, as well as access to bespoke, high-quality leadership tools and resources to support innovation and thought leadership.
Following consultation with region’s HR Directors, the SHA identified the need for a development programme for HR Directors that would enable them to rise to the challenges of ongoing change, empowering them to lead the local organisation in nurturing a patient-centred approach. HRDs were also increasingly being asked to fulfil an organisational development function, so an overall strategic awareness was more necessary than ever.
Having already designed a competency framework for the Leadership Academy on behalf of NHS North West, OPP were well placed to advise Deborah Arnot, Deputy Director of the Leadership Academy, and her colleagues on possible development centres that would address these needs. Having won the tender, OPP set about putting together an event that would equip HRDs with a wide range of essential skills, knowledge and behaviours.
“Working closely with OPP on the development of the key competencies enabled us to co-create a bespoke development centre that would meet the needs of HR Directors in the North West. Coupled with our expert knowledge of the NHS context, OPP’s expertise in presenting and future agendas made for a cohesive, comprehensive product that was future-focused and tailored to the HRDs’ future role.”
Deborah Arnot, Deputy Director of the NHS North West Leadership Academy
Project set-up
The first development centre organised by OPP was a ‘Diagnosis and Discovery’ Event, which, as the name suggests, aimed firstly to describe the characteristics of the HRD population and identify their development needs (diagnosis); and secondly, to raise their awareness levels of their own style and give them some help improving their approach in their day-to-day working lives (discovery). OPP’s consultants first carried out a series of stakeholder interviews and competency mapping exercises using the NHS’s own framework, the LQF (Leadership Qualities Framework). This enabled them to identify a benchmark for performance on several criteria, against which the HRD participants could be compared.
The resulting event was a two-day development intervention comprising self-analysis, psychometric feedback and workplace simulations. It was attended by a total of 37 HRDs from across the North West region.
Diagnosis and Discovery Event
This development event took the following format:
Prework
Delegates were asked to complete their choice of the 16PF®, FIRO-B® or MBTI® Step I or II questionnaires, which look at different elements of personality, and are useful for raising self-awareness. In addition, they completed the Potentia assessment and the NHS’s own tool, the LQF 360-degree feedback questionnaire, which defines an individual’s performance against competencies that were also used in the development event.
Day One
The first day saw an intensive but stimulating programme of workplace simulations, including an in-tray exercise, a facilitation meeting with a GP and consultant (played by actors), a group meeting with HR peers and a briefing exercise with a non-executive director. These exercises were observed by OPP’s consultants, who later prepared reports based on individual performance against the benchmark competencies.
Day Two
The second day consisted of feedback on and consolidation of the results of the personality questionnaires and observations from the prework and Day One. OPP’s consultants worked one to one with the participants in order to make meaning of their personality results and feed back their observations, which helped participants to identify their own strengths and possible blind spots when working in the context of organisational development and strategic leadership. This learning was reinforced with peer feedback from the other participants, which was found to be especially useful.
Results and next steps
Feedback from the delegates who attended the Diagnosis and Discovery Events was very positive, with 94% of participants stating that the event would have a positive impact on their performance at work, all participants highly rating the levels of self-awareness it had helped them achieve, and 93% saying that they will use what they have learned back in the workplace “frequently” or “almost all the time”.
In addition, OPP provided an analysis of the overall group results on each of the LQF competencies, gleaned from across the psychometric data and observations. This report identified several distinctive trends across the HR Directors group, which were used to extrapolate overall development areas:
- Effective and Strategic Influencing
The data showed that whilst participants had the desire to influence others and oversee change, they were missing the means for doing this. In particular, they lacked an awareness of how they would adapt their approach to influence different stakeholders with different priorities.
- Drive for Results and Drive for Improvement
Again, the development area identified was related to bigger-picture leadership strategies, such as benchmarking initiatives against other organisations and seeking out partnerships in working to improve services.
- Seizing the Future
Results on this competency indicated a focus on short-term, pragmatic, action-orientated problem-solving, suggesting that long-term and broader organisational focus could be more of a stretch for much of this population.
Responding to the diagnosis: a focus on strategic leadership
As the analysis showed, the area of strategic influencing was a key development area for the HR Directors group – as well as being one of the key skills identified from the start of the project as central to the HRD role in the future.
In response to the analysis, the Leadership Academy followed up by commissioning OPP to create a bespoke solution addressing strategic influencing in the HRD group. Specifically, the development aimed to help leaders adapt their influencing style according to the situation and audience, and to raise their awareness of their own style and of the different ways of communicating in the context of their organisational culture. It was hoped that this would give HRDs a wider-ranging toolkit to dip into when thinking about and taking the lead on organisational development and other strategic initiatives.
Day One
The first part of the workshop was hinged on the advanced use of the MBTI instrument to explore the dynamics of MBTI type, which allowed participants to understand how the different elements of their type interacted, and what areas of their personality they were likely to rely on the most. This was then linked in with insights from the Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), as a means of addressing how participants tended to negotiate, and identifying different negotiation models that could be used depending on the context.
Day Two
The two days were bridged by a discussion about stakeholder management, where participants were encouraged to use their learning to work through real-life examples of those people they needed to influence and wanted to improve their relationships with. The philosophy of Day Two was to reap the benefits of experiential learning, with role plays (involving actors) set up to address specific types of influencing situation. The workshop finished with an action-planning session where participants were assisted in outlining how they would take their learning forward.
Taking the learning out into the workplace
Just like the Diagnosis and Discovery Event, the participant feedback on the strategic influencing workshop was very positive, with all participants agreeing that it was likely to have a positive impact on their performance at work, and that it would have a positive effect on the way they worked with others. To quote a participant: “It gave me time out to reflect on my practice and consider how I affect situations and the other people I wish to influence – and to work out how I might achieve my aims by understanding myself and them better.”
For more information about using and of these instruments in your organisation for individual, team or leadership development, please contact our Sales Team on +44 (0)845 603 9958 or by email at: enquiry@opp.eu.com.
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® Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Myers-Briggs and MBTI are registered trade marks of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust in the United States. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is published by CPP, Inc. OPP Ltd is licensed to use the trade marks in Europe.
® FIRO-B is a registered trade mark of CPP, Inc. OPP Ltd is licensed to use the trade mark in Europe. The FIRO-B instrument is published by CPP, Inc.
®16PF is a registered trade mark of the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing, Inc (IPAT). IPAT is a wholly owned subsidiary of OPP Ltd.
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