Leadership Styles in the NHS

Earlier this week I ran a half-day awayday session for an executive team of an acute Trust,  titled "The Leadership Challenge for the NHS. I thought I'd share the slides I used.

Topical as ever, especially since leadership development in the NHS is being reviewed, again, at the moment - see this week's HSJ -  NHS is a Brutal Place for it's Leaders

The key point is partly expressed in Slide 15 - Leaders need to be able to make use of several styles of leadership inorder to increase the chances of getting effective results, on or ahead of time. However, most leaders either can't recognise when to switch between these styles or can't use more than one style. To make matters worse, the NHS system is led, nationally, in ways that mitigate against the most useful leadership styles being used at local level.

Do you think this is right? I wonder what magnitude of 'performance gain' might be achievable if NHS leaders at local level were consistently using the most effective style for any given situation?  Perhaps getting appropriate leadership styles in use at the right time might be just as fruitful an idea to pursue as the miriad of 'transformational service landscape' changes that are being proposed all over the place at the moment?

Btw - the ideas contained in the slides are not mine - "Really" I hear you say!

I pulled them from 3 sources (and mainly the first one):

Leadership that Gets Results: Daniel Goleman, Harvard Business Review, March/April 2000

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done: Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan, Random House, 2002

The Leadership Challenge: James Kouzes & Barry Posner, Jossey-Bass, 1987

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