Leadership in today's NHS: delivering the impossible

Leaders in today’s NHS operate in a climate of extreme pressure. Staffing vacancies are rife, there are widespread challenges in meeting financial and performance targets and demands on services continue to increase. The nature of the challenges facing leaders of NHS trusts has also changed, with greater emphasis placed on working collaboratively as part of more integrated health and care systems. The task of being a leader in the NHS is not getting any easier or any less complex. 

Over the past three years, several reviews of NHS leadership have attempted to better understand and address the impact of these pressures. These reviews have identified the churn of senior leadership teams – characterised by short tenures and high vacancy rates – as a particular problem. But there is relatively little information on current vacancies and tenure in the NHS, and the factors that are influencing them. 

For this reason, The King’s Fund has worked with NHS Providers to review the current level of vacancies and tenure of executive directors in NHS provider trusts. Our report draws on NHS Providers’ annual quantitative survey of leadership vacancies and on qualitative interviews and a roundtable The King’s Fund conducted with NHS trust directors and national stakeholders. The purpose of our research was to better understand the pressures on NHS trust leaders and identify ways to address these pressures. 

Leadership vacancies in NHS trusts remain widespread with 37 per cent of all surveyed trusts having at least one vacant post for a board-level executive. The highest vacancy rates were for director of operations and director of strategy roles. 

Turning to tenure, 54 per cent of substantive executive directors were appointed in the past three years (2015 to 2017) and the average (median) tenure was only two years. Directors of operations and directors of finance were most likely to have been appointed in the past three years. 

Higher vacancy rates and shorter tenures were found in trusts experiencing the most challenged levels of performance. Trusts rated as ‘inadequate’ by the Care Quality Commission had 14 per cent of posts vacant, compared to only 3 per cent in trusts rated as ‘outstanding’. Our interviews and roundtable event highlighted the impact leadership churn can have on organisations. Short tenures can lead to too much focus on day-to-day priorities at the expense of longer-term strategy. A ‘revolving door’ approach to leadership also undermines the credibility leaders have with staff in their own organisations and with external stakeholders. The churn of leaders can stall organisational progress, which can be especially costly as trusts try to work collaboratively in local health and care systems to develop more integrated models of care. 

Several different factors contribute to high leadership churn. These include a high level of regulatory burden and a lack of autonomy. The constant pressure to report ‘upwards’ to national bodies has left directors feeling disempowered and with less time to focus on their day-to-day jobs. Several interviewees mentioned how recent regulatory or political interventions to remove leaders for failing financial or performance targets suggested that individual leaders are sometimes held to account for system-wide problems. The increasing personalisation of organisational performance by national bodies was making director roles less attractive. 

A reduced appetite for risk was mentioned as a factor in the appointment process by both applicants and decision-makers for director-level posts. This risk aversion manifests as a desire to appoint people who have ‘done the job before’, and less willingness to find candidates from outside the NHS or from elsewhere in the health and care system. This reduces the available talent pool and is exacerbating the difficulty of finding NHS leaders of the future. 

National data painted a sobering picture of how ethnically diverse NHS leaders are. Only 7 per cent of very senior managers were from a black and minority ethnic background, which is far lower than representation in the NHS workforce and local communities. There was some evidence that leaders were taking more action to pursue greater equality and diversity. These included ensuring recruitment panels have black and minority ethnic representation and developing in-house mentoring and reverse-mentoring programmes. 

There was little evidence that there is a coherent national strategy for supporting the most challenged trusts, which often have the highest levels of leadership churn. Holding a leadership post in these organisations was seen as an isolating experience, with incoming leaders facing a high chance of failure (in meeting performance or financial targets), but little forgiveness or understanding from national bodies of the difficulty of these leadership positions. Enhanced buddying arrangements between high- and low-performing trusts and more protection for leaders taking on these challenging organisations are needed. 

There are already effective national programmes that support aspiring chief executives. But more could be done to extend these leadership and development offers to the other professional roles experiencing high churn and where there are concerns about the pipeline of future leaders. The recent launch of a national support programme for aspiring directors of operations is a welcome step and could be built on with similar offers for directors of strategy, for example. 

But the most common suggestion for improving the development of future leaders focused on the need for better regional talent management, similar to that previously provided by strategic health authorities. Closer working arrangements between NHS England and NHS Improvement will provide an opportunity to rebuild this important talent management function. Local NHS trusts should also invest in seeking out and developing future leaders. This could include refreshing directors’ portfolios at regular intervals and exploring opportunities for less experienced members of staff to participate in projects that would develop their board-level skills. 

Ultimately though, interviewees cautioned against placing too much focus on formal talent management or development programmes, and several noted a more effective talent pipeline alone will not reduce vacancies as long as the current operating environment and treatment of leaders is unchanged. Interviewees noted that changing this culture would require national bodies to better model the behaviours they expect of local leaders, a clearer articulation of ‘what good looks like’, and for NHS leaders to be treated more humanely. 

Even if much of the discussion about leadership vacancies and tenure was framed as a problem to address, the leaders we spoke to viewed their jobs as a vocation and a privilege. Current NHS leaders were self-described ‘cautious optimists’ who believed that the route through the challenges of NHS leadership involved them, as senior leaders, promoting and demonstrating the behaviours that would make these roles attractive for subsequent generations of leaders.