Leadership
What is leadership?
Excellent leadership involves being able to articulate a vision in such a way as to align both hearts and minds of individuals, teams and organisations in achieving this vision.
Leadership is based on the crafting of relationships that:
- empower people to act in line with the vision and to learn from mistakes
- enable individuals, teams and organisations to adapt to constant challenge in order to grow
- provide an environment of collective action and mutual support.
For the Health Foundation, leadership is centred above all on improving the quality and safety of care.
Theories of leadership
A number of theories of leadership have developed over time. Some focused on the traits of successful leaders and how these could be taught to others (trait theory), and some on how leaders emerge under certain situations. Yet others have focused on the differentiation between leaders and managers – managers being those in positional authority in relation to operational delivery. Some, but not all, managers may also be leaders and vice versa.
More recently, effort has been put into understanding effective leadership as being about transforming behaviour of self and others, rather than simply issuing instructions and transacting power in a hierarchical way. The notion of emotionally intelligent leaders and leadership being a relational act builds on these ideas, as does 'distributed' leadership which focuses on leaders being enable to emerge at all levels and from all disciplines across an organisation.
Much of this thinking is embraced by leadership development programmes designed and commissioned by the Health Foundation, for example Generation Q and the Quality Improvement Fellows scheme
Current priorities
Recruiting and developing high-quality leaders and managers is a priority for the NHS. Around 4% of the NHS workforce is involved in managerial or senior management roles that shape priorities locally and nationally (source: NHS Information Centre).
Many managers enter the health services through the NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme, which targets university leavers, or the Gateway to Leadership programme, which recruits managers from outside the NHS.
The past five years have seen unprecedented investment by central government in leadership development in the NHS across the UK. In England, the National Leadership Council was set up two years ago to develop and celebrate leadership in the NHS, including the development of programmes for NHS boards, and clinical leaders.
