The Changing NHS

The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management was a series on BBC World Series radio examining the teachings of 13 business ‘Gurus’. The site has as summary of the main messages, with programme text and audio downloads available.

Gurus (don’t you hate that word) covered included Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Warren Bennis, Sumantra Goshal, Kenichi Ohmae, Gary Hamel and Michael Porter.

For me the best is the coverage of Warren Bennis's work on Leadership . Bennis suggests:

“there is no one right way to lead, that we each have to find our own best style, but effective leaders do have some common characteristics or competencies :
- the Management of Self - the need to be aware of one's weaknesses

- the Management of Attention - the need for a vision to focus minds

- the Management of Meaning - the need to communicate the vision

- the Management of Trust - the need to be consistent and honest

Leaders also need to be strong enough to accept criticism when it is valid, to know when to change and when to plough on regardless. ”

Spot on. And said in the mid 80s!

Interesting to compare this with the focus of the NHS Leadership Qualities Framework  which suggests effective NHS leaders need to be competent in 3 main areas (Personal Qualities, Setting Direction and Delivering the Service). These in turn break-down into 15 personal qualities and then 57 separate features!

The first two areas, Personal Qualities and Setting Direction do map very well with Bennis’s four characteristics. The biggest difference is the NHS’s inclusion of qualities associated with 'Delivering the Service'.

For me, this get’s us straight into the heart of one of the biggest difficulties for local leaders in the NHS. So much pressure is applied to ‘deliver the service’ that it’s all too easy for them to concentrate almost exclusively on leadership behaviours associated with 'getting the job done'. However, effective delivery requires the motivated and appropriately focused support of hundreds, possibly thousands of folk - and crucially they will only ‘show up’ if the leader is personally credible and excels at setting direction and managing meaning.

A case of the urgent squeezing out the important perhaps?

Steve

www.stevepashley.co.uk