Authentic and Compassionate Leadership Masterclass

Tracy Neville MBE, provided a fascinating exploration of the power of authentic and compassionate leadership. She described her leadership journey from player to coach, to leading England’s netball team to medal success at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

She highlighted the key attributes and learning in her career and coaching role that form a successful and compassionate leadership approach.

• Togetherness – Having the vision is the easy part of leadership story, bringing people along on the journey, owning and selling the vision is the key to success. Surround yourself with people who can echo the vison.
• Belief – it is important to have belief in the team, to recognise each individual’s worth and their skills and find the common ground amongst the team members.
• Adaptability – change the leadership style to meet the needs of the team and events that are happening, be open to change in planning and decision-making.
• Fight – leaders have to fight every day to win, to succeed, bring your own personality to your leadership role and know the personalities of your team, be aware of your body language and the signals you may be inadvertently sending when you are under pressure.
• Own it – strive to be better than your personal best, you can’t ask the team to be better if you are not demonstrating your best and owning some improvements you are asking of the team
• Dismantle pressure – ensure the team is prepared, using continued development and a make sure the right team members are in the right places.
• Passion – create an environment that drives excellence by tapping into people’s passion to create a team that will naturally excel.
• Coachable – create an honest, safe space to receive feedback

We heard from Donna Hall, the former Chief Executive of Wigan Council who implemented The Deal, a radically different, holistic approach to public service delivery based on Hillary Cottom’s book, Radical Help

• NHS and local government leaders need to acknowledge the broken nature of public services in UK, and work to develop different ways of providing services, moving to addressing the needs of a 21^st century society.
• Leaders need to become enablers and move the culture from top down, transactional, siloed services and relate to people in a human way.
• The Deal describes a relationship and a social contract and has continued to evolve over time.
• Kings Fund Evaluation, Lessons learned from the Wigan Deal attributed its success to consistency and simplicity of purpose, key attributes for a successful leader to communicate and embed.
• Strategy and vison are not about the current leader, but about the longer term needs of the place.
• Key to selling the vision is listening to people and then taking action on the information received and spotting the ‘spark plug’ people who can make change happen and giving them agency.
• Triangulate information received to make sure you have an accurate picture of what is happening in the organisation.
• Public service leaders now need to be bold, be courageous and take risks.

Final speaker, Sue Holden, Chief Executive of AQUA, who in her previous role as National Director for Intensive Support at NHS England and NHS Improvement, has carried out research analysing the role of a CEO in leading the improvement of challenged NHS organisations.

• It is important for leaders to stick to their personal values even when working in a context which isn’t as enabling as you’d want it to be.
• Build credibility and trust by following up on what you say you are going to do.
• Being in ‘Special Measures’ was a toxic label, ‘support offers’ were seen a punitive.
• Sue brought a change of approach, listening at a senior level and working in collaboration with leaders in challenged organisations to design an improvement approach, now called ‘Recovery Support Programme’
• Building trust with senior leaders by acknowledging the good work happening in organisations.
• Leaders should enable the active listening to citizens with lived experience, staff and user voice now need to drive new values around health and care.

Feedback from the breakout sessions

• In today’s session it was refreshing to hear leadership conversations being real and no glossing over uncomfortable truths. Public sector staff do experience a cycle of strategy and change fatigue and can associate change with loss.
• Authenticity means honest and engaging stories and leaders should focus on what’s going well and what’s right as opposed to what’s wrong.
• If you invite honest feedback you need to follow through which is sometimes incredibly hard but even the little things can make a difference.
• Compassionate leadership is not “being soft”.

Watch the full webinar here.