This report gives detail of my experience as a Florence Nightingale Foundation and Council of Deans for Health Leadership Scholar and offers an account of how the scholarship facilitated my development as a leader. The distinctive nature of the program is that it is individually determined following a very intensive profiling exercise. This has led it to be a highly impactful experience enabling me to recognise areas of strength to celebrate and use; and those to further strengthen or develop. This is a very personal journey, one that I believe has increased my personal resilience, improved by personal effectiveness in working with others and enabled me to build and improve my political and strategic awareness and impact. The journey is perhaps best summarised in three areas as follows:
- Personal leadership development: Following my Diagnostic Assessment, I engaged in a number of activities aimed at improving my personal leadership behaviours and style including; mentorship, the Leading Change Through Organisational Renewal course, lots of reading, the Co-consulting group, Communication Skills for Leadership at RADA, the Higher Education ‘Hustings’ at Church House Westminster, with the CoDs, the Westminster Experience; and finished with Personal Transformation for Leadership at Cranfield. This list demonstrates the unique nature of the scholarship as each of these activities worked together to build on specific identified development needs and constructed a distinct pathway of development. The diagnostics helped me to identify my areas for development- and build on my strengths (something which we forget to do sometimes), and really think about how to make the adjustments I needed to further build my leadership potential. Co-consulting helped me to reconceptualise and ‘own’ a particular problem I was facing, and RADA helped me to both identify and practice different approaches, using the tools to help address them though examining my communication skills. Personal Transformation for Leaders helped me to recognise why I find specific scenarios difficult and again develop some tools to build the resilience to do something about it!
- Career leadership objectives: at the commencement of the scholarship I was a Head of School and considering my next career move. I undertook some career coaching which enabled me to reflect on my strengths and recognise what the next job should be. I have since taken an oppertuntiy to apply for and secure and internal promotion to Associate Dean- strategic planning and development in a very exciting time for our university due to the appointment of a new Vice Chancellor. In addition I met a number of key people in the sector including Professor Nicki Latham (COO of HEE); Nicholas Bradbury from the NHS Leadership Academy to talk about systems leadership; attended the Council of Deans meetings regularly to network and was nominated by CoD onto a national committee at Public Health England as their representative; visited the University of Hertfordshire; and also attended Belfast with Scholars to look at NI integrated care and health system.
- The ‘patient care’ improvement project I undertook was focussed on developing the university as an asset of the communities in which we are based in order to contribute to the collaborative effort in Leeds City to reduce health inequality and improve the health of the poorest fastest. To enable this we have developed community partnerships and collaborations as integral to the research, teaching and related activity delivered within our faculty and wider university. This community-campus partnership for health, has at its heart the concept of knowledge exchange – bringing community know-how together with academic know-how for the purpose of generating new insights, solutions and evidence to help improve health and wellbeing and reduce inequalities. Our focus is on building meaningful partnerships with local community and voluntary organisations, often working with some of the most disadvantaged communities in our city. This work positions the university as an asset within our community. Partnership building promotes a cross fertilisation of knowledge, skills and resources which helps ensure that our teaching meets the needs of our communities, as well as ensuring that our students gain the skills and experience demanded by future employers; and that our research has real world impact. The activities I undertook to support this work included: talking to Allison Trimble- Kings Fund, many partners visits (e.g. Bromley by Bowe and UCLAN). Studying through the Leadership for Healthy and Empowered Communities Course (TLAP) and the Community University Partnership Course at the University of Brighton.
Finally- the future? Personal leadership development is continual and much remains for me to learn. As an academic leader I feel that this position is also one that is important to share. Firstly by co-editing a book relating to leadership in nursing and how importantly this is applied- a ‘how to’ guide for nurses, with my fellow scholars as co-editors or chapter authors. Secondly as one who has experienced both the challenges and joys of publishing I have with a fellow scholar run a Florence Nightingale writing workshop and am planning to repeat this so more of my fellow scholars will feel confident to publish going forward.