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With the growing body of evidence that links good leadership to positive compassionate cultures, added to our recent research into the worryingly high levels of senior leadership vacancies, I have begun to ponder if the lack of leadership talent is another long-term condition for the NHS?
Developing leadership that is ‘fit for purpose’ is often cited as the most common workforce challenge facing all sectors – and the health service needs to take this challenge seriously. One way to do this would be to take a strategic approach to talent management, a concept that first emerged in 1998 in response to a paper entitled ‘The war for talent’ (McKinsey 2001) and that we explore in a paper published today.
Talent management is a set of integrated organisational workforce processes designed to attract, develop, motivate and retain productive, engaged employees. In short, talent management is a strategic human resource issue, but it is much more than a function of the human resources team; it is a distinctive capability that needs to be embedded throughout the organisation. And the board’s job is to own and manage that broader capability by developing a collective approach to leadership.
There are a number of different approaches to developing a talent management strategy: an inclusive approach where everyone in the company is considered part of the talent management programme; the executive talent pool approach where the focus is at senior management level; future leaders approach focusing on staff at all levels who are identified as having leadership potential; a succession planning approach that identifies key roles that will need staff with the skills and abilities ready to take the position when someone leaves or retires; and a blended approach, where two or more of the first four approaches are used in combination.
In my opinion, the health service should adopt the blended approach. As health care becomes more complex and the NHS five year forward view moves us towards new delivery models, we need to cultivate an agile leadership workforce. There are particular issues that the health service needs to be aware of – diversity is an Achilles heel, with a chronic absence of members of black and minority ethnic groups and women in senior and board leadership roles and also a lack of diversity of thinking – recruiting ‘mavericks’ who think and possibly behave differently from others and who will change the system. There is also a difficulty in encouraging clinicians to consider managerial roles.
If you’re lucky enough to have a decent succession programme, you know the reality. Unless you heavily invest in the concept of talent rotations and offer stretch opportunities, it’s hard to keep people with high potential talent interested and motivated to stay. I will leave you with an idea – shadowing. Amazon have just announced the appointment of a new ‘shadow’ for their CEO, Jeff Bezos. This long-established post is given to an up-and-coming executive, who gets the chance to go with Bezos to daily meetings, talk over problems, and learn from him on the job. Shadows usually last about two years in the role and go on to lead big projects within the organisation.
Now most of you will come with an automatic objection – that the NHS isn't Amazon, followed by another – ‘our CEO isn’t Bezos.’ Fair enough. You might also say that the roles you really need successors for aren’t at the CEO level, they are three to four levels below that. All that is true, so why not think about this as a way of developing a collective leadership approach where all leaders and managers at every level of the organisation model leadership behaviours that tomorrow's talent can learn.