Health Service Focus

Value-based leadership

Karen Lynas, deputy managing director of the NHS Leadership Academy, speaks to NHE about the “largest ever leadership programme to transform NHS culture”.

There has been a growing recognition in the NHS of the need for staff who go beyond effective clinical care, and demonstrate values such as respect, compassion and kindness.

The NHS Leadership Academy is launching a new leadership programme to help staff from all specialties advance in their careers, centred on values, behaviour and the patient perspective of care.

NHE spoke to Karen Lynas, the Academy’s deputy managing director, about leadership fi t for the future.

“It’s principally a motivation to change the way we develop leadership in the NHS,” she said. “At the moment, we tend to focus on people already in leadership roles and providing them with some development in-post.

“We want to move to a position where we recognise that really great leadership requires development and skills and more structured training. We want to help people move into those roles in the fi rst place rather than wait until they’re in them and then ripen them with some development.”

Leadership for the future

The next 10 or 15 years will see some “very different” problems arise in the NHS, requiring a new programme of leadership to help make that transition. The development of new technology will require stretching people to think and work in different ways, combining real work experience, knowledge, skills and behaviour.

Recognition of the need for really good leadership is becoming “much more widespread”, she said. “The leadership task has always been very important; you only need to look at recent failures and what’s been evident from Francis to see what happens when you get leadership wrong.”

The programme includes entry-level training for people looking to move into their fi rst leadership role, regardless of academic background. It will lead to a postgraduate certificate.

The second two layers focus on middle-tier and senior level leadership, and are provided with Manchester Business School, Birmingham Health Services Management Centre, KPMG and Harvard.

Staff will complete training part-time, and this “absolutely” has to be integrated with their everyday work, Lynas added. “It’s got to be really relevant to what they’re doing now, based on real work rather than sat in a classroom.”

Transferable qualifications

The programmes build on a number of current and previous leadership schemes, among which Lynas said there had been many “really good examples”.

“We’re not starting from a blank piece of paper. What we’ve never done is make it universally available across the NHS, to have something that is really consistently high quality.”

This could help people demonstrate their suitability for jobs, as the programme offers “a consistent high quality, recognised and transferable qualification and it is also available to everybody, wherever they are”, Lynas said.

Consultation on the leadership programmes was “really favourably received”, she added, with many keen to get involved, particularly those who had been interested in leadership for a while but felt they didn’t have the necessary skills.

“This is a way of moving into a job they otherwise might never have thought was for them. In terms of access from broader communities, that’s been fantastic.”

Chiming with Francis

The creation of the programmes predates the publication of the fi nal Francis review, but the points of focus did overlap.

“Much of what he’s recommended chimes exactly with what we’re doing and he’s referenced the need for something like a staff college.

“These programmes focus on leadership behaviours required in the NHS and that’s the thing that makes us different from lots of other academic or industrial training programmes, which focus purely on skills and knowledge.

“Ours is all about the values and behaviour that we need to demonstrate in the NHS, what makes the NHS a unique place to work.

“We hear in Francis that we need to focus as much on who we are and how we behave as leaders, as what we know and what we can do. That is absolutely what these programmes reflect.

“How you behave as a leader is as important as your skill set.”

On the need for leadership training to refl ect different personality types and the need to take a flexible approach to management, she added: “We’re not looking for a whole load of leaders who are a homogenous lump, who all behave the same way.

“The most effective leaders are those who can flex their style depending on the situation they’re in and who they’re with.

“That’s what the programme will focus on; how do we help people become really fluent in developing different styles suitable for different situations?”

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