Throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Leadership development in uncertain times

During these challenging financial and political times, it may seem counter-intuitive, risky even, to be making the case for why leaders should continue investing in leadership development, or even increasing this investment.

Organisations, services and teams are being cut across all parts of the system including ‘the centre’, but little is being said about how to support and retain those leaders who manage to stay in role during these uncertain times (apart from potential top-down regulatory approaches, including shifts back to performance management policies for individual leaders). Given the gravity of the political, financial and operational situation facing the health and care sector, shouldn’t this be a time to be supporting leaders and teams rather than scaling back?

This may not be an ‘easy win’ in terms of balancing budgets, but I am curious about the possibility of resisting this swing to short-termism. In the face of what is going on around them, how do leaders hold their nerve and continue to invest and support in the people and teams who are holding services together?

The King’s Fund recognises that investing in developing leadership capacity and capability over the long term is a strategic choice just like any other and so making that kind of investment is clearly not neutral but comes with consequences. We have seen the benefits of such investment from our work developing senior clinical leaders, especially during exceptional times (for example, during potential mergers, the Covid-19 pandemic, strikes, increasing demand and financial pressures).

In my work as a Leadership Development Consultant, I have had many conversations with overwhelmed, unsupported and burnt-out leaders who recognise the need for space to learn and reflect in order to ultimately lead better, despite the challenges faced in creating the time and support to do this. But they also report facing increasing scrutiny around funding decisions to support this development for themselves and their leaders, and how to justify this in the current context. Yet there are many valid reasons for maintaining this investment, including keeping people motivated, releasing energy and innovation, containing anxiety by providing space to reflect and review, enabling growth during a period of potential paralysis, and enabling a space to deal with the inevitable personal and interpersonal difficulties that arise during periods of uncertainty and turmoil so that these do not impact on patients and services. Indeed, this tension was explored in the Messenger Review on leadership with the recommendation that ‘..a well-led, motivated, valued, collaborative, inclusive, resilient workforce is ‘the’ key to better patient and health and care outcomes, and that investment in people must sit alongside other operational and political priorities. To do anything else risks inexorable decline.’

At The King’s Fund we value the notion of providing space for leaders in times of difficulty – to offer support, the opportunity to step back, to take stock and to have the space to think in order to become better and more effective leaders. The idea of slowing down may seem antithetical to what leaders in most public sector organisations are currently being asked to do, but leaders cannot endlessly be expected to keep ‘doing’ without the support and proper investment to also help them ‘think’. The King’s Fund has been warning for many years that this heroic leader model, which continues to be the prevalent leadership model in public services, has long been unfit for purpose.

The notion that the public sector needs to move beyond this outdated model of leadership to one that recognises the value of leadership that is shared, distributed and adaptive, and to support leaders to work better relationally and in an uncertain context, is something we share and work with explicitly on our Top Manager programme (TMP). This is our flagship leadership development programme and offers the space to do this and so much more as a leadership community. It offers the opportunity to build solidarity, and for leaders to reflect on their current challenges and to think about how collectively as a human system it may be possible to move forward and make progress, even in a state of flux.

On TMP we help leaders work with complexity and to think about the possibility of holding and working with multiple truths. We work with expanding complexity as a way of understanding what might be going on in systems and working realistically with dilemmas rather than simplifying or reducing them to either/or scenarios as a way of managing them.

We work with a wide range of ideas and practices on the programme, such as thinking about what’s possible when we scratch beneath the surface of what’s going on in human systems, identifying how your relationship to anxiety shapes the way you (and others) work, how to develop a willingness to recognise and work with the unknown, helping leaders view their current context through a joined-up, interconnected system, and working with unconscious processes to develop alternative explanations for what might be going on in human systems.

If you are interested in resisting the current short-term narrative and discovering more about how to lead humanely and relationally in complex times, then come and join us on the Top Manager programme to explore this in more depth with senior leaders from across health and social care.

For those reading knowing that development and support is something that is out of reach (for the time being, that is) then I want to express solidarity with you and hope you are finding alternative spaces to do this important work.