interviews

Having what it takes to lead

Sue Mortlock, project lead for the Leadership Framework at the NHS Leadership Academy, talks NHE through the latest roll-out of the organisation’s self-assessment tool for current and future health service leaders.

The NHS Leadership Academy has just released its Medical Self Assessment Tool, which is designed to help current and future leaders assess their own abilities and qualities.

The multiple choice self assessment is based around core leadership qualities, such as ‘working with others’, ‘improving services’ and ‘setting direction’, while also being specifically targeted at the NHS as it is based on the wider Leadership Framework and Medical Leadership Competency Framework – whose ultimate aim is improving patient care and outcomes.

Sue Mortlock, who has led the work on the project for the NHS Leadership Academy, told NHE: “We know from much of the research around how people learn and what’s helpful that personal reflection is actually a really powerful way to stimulate people’s development. The Self Assessment Tool was designed based on those principles; it takes people through a series of questions to really prompt their thinking around their own development needs, linked to the Leadership Framework.

“Even if people are working in an organisation where the Leadership Framework hasn’t been adopted across the entire organisation, the resources are available for people to download and do some personal reflection – perhaps about their own development, or in preparation for a job. It could also be that they download the PDF and they ask a trusted colleague, maybe a mentor or manager, to complete it on their behalf and then have a conversation without engaging in the cost and resource implications of a full 360.”

The 360 tool is a wider and more in-depth analysis reflecting all seven domains of the Leadership Framework, primarily aimed at leaders already at stage 3 or 4 of the Framework – meaning middle managers and above.

The Self Assessment Tool, however, is particularly well suited to people with leadership ambitions or those who want to develop their leadership skills in the future. Mortlock explained: “The Self Assessment Tool has been used with a variety of different levels of staff and is really about how much insight you’ve got into your own performance, and how much you understand the questions that are being asked and about thinking in the broadest terms. It’s a really valuable tool that can be used by aspirant as well as existing leaders.”

We asked Mortlock how good people are at assessing their own skills in this way, and she said it was ultimately a “very personal” tool for people to use themselves, rather than an objective performance management system.

She said: “Inevitably, there may be some blind spots with people, which is why we’re encouraging people to undertake this as a personal activity and talk it through with a trusted colleague, manager or mentor, to actually get a different perspective.

“My experience of people is that we’re often very tough critics of our own performance, and sometimes we find through the 360 profile for example that people actually have some really positive feedback about behaviours they display that are really powerful. They feel ‘I take that for granted, I didn’t realise I had such a positive contribution to the workplace’.”

The medical Self Assessment Tool sits alongside the general and clinical versions, and together the various resources have already been downloaded more than 21,000 times by NHS staff in just six months, Mortlock said.

She said: “We’re at pains to communicate that leadership is context-specific; there will be variances between different leaders, and it would be dependent on the area in which somebody’s working.

“You can see this when people are promoted or moved across to other projects, and they’ve been excellent leaders in their existing context, been promoted, and some people step into those new environments and really fly, and other people are less successful. Much of that is contextspecific. I wouldn’t say those individuals change overnight as a result of that move, but actually there are many factors at play here – different personalities, different stakeholders, different resource implications, different dynamics. All of that plays into the leadership that’s required.”

When staff have completed the Self Assessment Tool, they can then choose to generate an ‘action plan’ to further develop their skills, and can access a wide range of additional material to inform their further development.

Mortlock explained: “That points you to further reading, gets you to think about development opportunities for each of the seven domains, and that’s a free resource available to people to help them think through their identified development needs.

“If you’re from the clinical workforce, you have the opportunity to go onto the learning materials and case studies: examples have been written around that clinical setting to help people with their development."

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