Assessing Leadership

There can be little doubt that ‘leadership' is now a top priority within the NHS - whether clinician or manager, primary or acute care, provider or commissioner, foundation or community trust.

The pressure to innovate and drive change; to commission and deliver quality services; to work across organisational boundaries; to set up new organisations and to become world class - and ultimately to improve patient care - require every individual to lead the agenda.

In the current environment, the quality of service that you want to provide to your patients, the enhanced productivity and increased innovation, cannot be delivered without top quality leadership.

What should trusts be doing right now to ensure that they have the leadership capacity and capability to deliver sustainable, high quality patient care?

GatenbySanderson has been speaking to leaders of NHS trusts across the UK, who say that securing top quality leadership talent - attracting it, spotting it and nurturing it - is undoubtedly keeping them awake at night. Yet we also know that most busy managers and clinicians don't have sufficient time to dedicate to this important activity. This is where we can help.

GatenbySanderson's in-house national Assessment and Development Team has put together a package to enable you to assess essential leadership qualities. We think these include the resilience to cope with change and ambiguity; the confidence to question, challenge and innovate;  first-rate influencing skills; the flexibility to respond quickly; commerciality; and the vision to think beyond immediate operational demands to shape the population's health for the long-term. However our package will also measure qualities from the NHS Leadership Qualities Framework.

Our intention is to offer our clients a workable, flexible yet best-practice solution to assess an individual's leadership capability - to help you to identify whether someone has the qualities and skills that are critical to leading effectively in today's NHS. The core package can be adapted to suit any organisation and any specialism, because it focuses on critical behaviours and personal qualities, rather than knowledge or professional qualifications.

There are a variety of situations in which you may need support to assess leadership qualities:

• Recruitment
  
• Individual development
• Team development
• Re-organisation
• Identifying high potentials
• Understanding capability and capacity within a team or tier of management
• Embedding new ways of working

The menu on the left-hand side illustrates how our leadership assessment package could be applied in each of these situations. Case studies show where we have done this before.

If you would like to learn more about how GatenbySanderson can help you, contact us on Leeds 0113 205 6071, London 020 7426 3960 or Birmingham 0121 644 5700.