Step 1

Team Empowerment

We are passionate about providing real support for the change team

We partner with Senior Leaders and Change Teams to undertake their own change journey. The work focuses on supporting the Change Team to collect, analyse and question culture and leadership data, developing much more aspiration for their culture and presenting this in their findings and recommendations for culture change to the Board.

There is simply no substitute for first-hand experience of really listening to what staff say about the culture now, to inspire a new vision for it in the future. Our team recognise this can be hard for the Change Team to hear. We support them through a semi-structured process to collect and examine the data, learn about the proprietary, evidence based NHS culture tools and understand their own experience. We work flexibly, based on our experience of healthcare environments.

By the end of this step of the journey, Change Teams will have a report for the Board, ideas for organisational development, understand the different elements of the model for a healthy culture, how to raise the bar in how they relate to others.

Step 2

GUIDANCE FROM FACILITATORS

To develop a detailed plan for leadership development and culture change

Facilitated by people with a real interest in the evidence, who understand that how leaders make staff feel really matters to how committed and engaged staff feel.

The change team’s role is to build a picture of what their leaders need to do, to create a compassionate, inclusive culture in which staff feel high levels of commitment - to their team, to the purpose and values and to other teams, to lead collectively. At heart, their role is to answer the question ‘How could changes in leaders behaviour build a culture where the values of health care are lived at every level?’

By the end of this step of the journey the Change Team has a detailed plan to develop leadership which is focused on the future. The facilitators role is to ask questions to guide the development of this detailed plan for culture change.

This stage is informed by the Centre for Creative Leadership’s model of Direction, alignment and commitment, coupled with the growing evidence base for the impact of leadership on staff engagement. Combined, these help focus local change initiatives.

Step 3

Leadership Development

We develop thoughtful, motivating interventions for leaders

We believe transformational culture change needs leaders who can, above all, build commitment: our programs create more compassionate, inclusive leaders capable of inspiring others to lead differently for a more innovative and collaborative future.

In Step 3 of the change journey we support Senior Leaders and HR, OD or L&D Leaders to implement the leadership strategy.

We will often use experiential learning including visits to inspiring organisations and listening to lived experience.

Working with you in a different way: it means working more in your organisation, working more experientially and developing leaders in context so instead of taking leaders away and developing them in role it’s about developing them in organisations, with teams and as part of a wider organisation development.

• Listening to staff through a discovery process

• Empowering the change team to lead culture change

• Creating a detailed leadership strategy to support wider OD

• Developing leaders and teams in context

How do you change culture?

• It’s all about going out and listening to and talking to the staff and finding out how things are done around here now -

• ‘The link to feeling valued and respected is clear: if as a member of staff you feel respected, you feel your health and wellbeing is taken seriously, then it takes away some of the burdens that you carry in the workplace’ - Maggie Oldham

• ‘My staff are pivotal to outcomes for children and you can’t achieve outcomes for others unless you feel valued yourself’ - Andrea Bevin, 0-19 Public Health Nursing Service

• ‘It’s not just about clinical care it is about the human factor’ - Dr Tim Petterson, Care Director, Emergency Care

• ‘You get more impact when people own the changes’ - Jenni Edgington, Associate Dir of Nursing

Compassion and inclusion

In building collective cultures

We’re on a learning journey:

‘we have to focus on leaders’ ethics and behaviours and the organisation’s ethics, not just a checklist of skills.

What does that mean? Underpinning all our approaches is the notion of compassionate leadership, that is, we actively seek, to develop conscious leaders: those who embody a new type of listening and the practices which make them more resilient, attentive and reflective.

The organisation culture is made up of individual leaders. To change the culture requires changes in leadership behaviour at every level of the organisation.

Everyone makes a difference

when you start to build more collective cultures

What Trusts’ say:

‘We’re finding ways to translate values into behaviours at ward level so it’s less individual and all staff take responsibility for keeping the ward clear of rubbish’

‘We’re putting triumverates in against a background of more collective leadership and working with them on what this means culturally: build trust, be reflective, co-create, take responsibility, build relationship with other teams, identify what is within everyone’s responsibility and call this out for each other’

‘We want all staff to be confident to challenge and be aware that this is an expectation on them’