Leeds choose to focus on leadership development
FMLM is delighted to be delivering the Advanced Medical Leadership Programme for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT). The programme is aimed at doctors taking on a leadership role at Speciality and Clinical Service Unit level within the Trust.
The research evidence points to a clear and positive relationship between medical leadership, engagement, and organisational performance. As a result, LTHT is committed to strengthening clinical leadership.
Karen Vella, deputy director of HR at LTHT, said:
“Following the Keogh report, which highlighted the need for clinical leaders to effectively drive quality improvement and showed a clear and positive relationship between medical engagement and organisational performance, the Trust embarked on a comprehensive programme of medical engagement and leadership development.” This programme included a course aimed at clinical leaders who already had some management and leadership experience.
The programme is running for six months: May – November 2018 with twenty-one doctors signed-up. It is designed to meet five important dimensions of leadership development:
- Personal development: understanding better our impact and strengths; this is founded on using FMLMs 360 leadership assessment tool
- Understanding and utilising core concepts and frameworks, particularly in an adaptive systems approach to leadership
- Embedding a set of leadership practices that help us move our ideas for improvement and change forward
- Becoming more skilled at assessing context and conditions in determining the best leadership approach
- Putting in place a stronger set of productive relationships within, and around, the group of medical leaders
FMLM will be doing this through an integrated set of experiential and skills workshops, individual coaching and action learning sets.
The sessions utilise the following learning strategies:
- Participative classroom methods
- Skills development (see one, practice one, do one, review approach) and peer-based learning
- Application Learning Groups (action learning through application)
- Workshop sessions – structured theory sessions (taught), evidence and ideas that will support the work, including specialist speakers
- Shared experience sessions with other managers and clinical leaders in LTHT and the wider Integrated Care System
- One-to-one coaching, and mentorship arrangements
The programme is short and focused, with a total time commitment of around seven days away from the workplace.
The sessions will make the most of the difference in perspectives among participants in order to build a consistent and effective understanding of applied leadership. Underpinning the whole programme is the theme ‘leading as peers’. The sorts of challenges facing clinical leaders are rarely ones that can be solved in isolation. Working together is critical for improving patients' experience and outcomes.
Participants bring their own work challenges in to all the learning activity and commit to working with ideas from the programme to address them. The programme culminates in a number of ‘offers’ that the group makes to the executive team to move medical leadership and service delivery forward within the Trust.
The leadership team at Leeds have valued the benefits that these approaches bring. Karen continued:
“It’s crucial that our Consultant Medical Staff lead services which put patients at the centre of decision making. The medical leadership development programmes are designed to grow the right values, culture and compassion in our leadership behaviours. They provide access to executive directors and senior managers in our bid to see more visible and approachable leadership across the organisation.
“The Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management has developed and published standards for medical leadership and the Trust has adopted and embedded these standards in its medical leadership development programmes. The standards align with the Trust values, and give a recognised model for excellence in leadership and management for doctors”.
The programme is being run through FMLM Applied, by our associate team of Duncan Ross and Penny Jones. All of our associates intimately understand the leadership challenges faced by doctors, indeed Duncan is a GP himself, and commit to developing a programme that is uniquely suited to the challenges present at each site.
If you would like to find out more about the programmes and services that FMLM Applied undertake, please email applied [at] fmlm.ac.uk or call 020 3075 1241.