Leadership

Developing Strength-based Leadership in the Department of Health

The Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) is a highly innovative programme designed as a preventative intervention in prenatal and early childhood development. Currently being trialed in 70 sites across England, the FNP is a systemic approach to solving long-term inter-generational problems, focusing on communities and service users with multiple deprivations. The programme aims to have an impact on the quality of parental care of babies and young children, with long-term implications for health, social care, education and a range of other public services.

Bath Consultancy Group has been commissioned to develop and deliver a strength-based leadership development Programme for senior managers in PCTs and Local Authorities from the test sites. This programme is currently being delivered to 10 cohorts of senior managers from the test site areas who hold a variety of roles from PCT’s, and Local Authorities, including commissioners and providers of health and children’s services. The programme is designed to be both a leadership development and culture change intervention. The senior managers are supported and challenged in their professional development to develop their personal authority through influencing, communication and coaching skills. They are identifying areas of improvement and implementing changes in their wider health management environments, in order to better support the success of the FNP programme within them.

The programme utilises action learning sets, coaching and dynamic group experiences to explore and integrate learning in key areas of their leadership development, such as:

• Understanding systems dynamics and thinking systemically
• Leading in complex and uncertain multi-stakeholder environments
• Recognising their own cognitive biases
• Personal authority and influencing skills
• Negotiation skills
• Strategising skills
• Coaching and developing other people in their organisations 

Engaging Leaders in Change at a Leading British Airline

In 2007 Bath Consultancy Group worked with the 1500 senior leaders, at a leading British airline from two layers below the executive team, as they embarked on a new business strategy requiring extensive change.  This followed the arrival of a new CEO and linked to the planned move to a new airport terminal, the need to change processes, reduce costs and cut through some of the existing silo patterns of working. Engaging this layer of management was seen to be key to the process and they recognised they needed to respond to these change challenges in a different way than in the past. 

BCG delivered a one day workshop for groups of these managers that helped them understand the personal challenges, consider the implications for their teams and how they will take a lead in communicating and engaging their teams.  The process included an introduction from one of the Executive Team about the strategic challenge.  They then stayed in the workshop throughout.  Much of the workshop helped managers to really express and share how they felt about the plan and the required changes, working through some experiential exercises. 

By the end of the process they each had a plan for how to engage their teams.  Many used some of the materials from the workshop to follow-through on this, often using the same processes in a shortened form with their own teams.  The outcome has been to create some real focus on delivering the business plan and speed the rate of change in the company.

Leadership Development for a World Leading Imaging Products and Solutions Provider

This growing and successful client operates in a very competitive market place.

Bath Consultancy Group has been working with the leadership team at this imaging products and solutions provider for over a year, supporting them as they strive for their goal of being acknowledged as a world-class company.

This means aiming for ambitious achievements in customer satisfaction, financial performance and the engagement and commitment of their own people. As part of the strategy the European business has recently combined their national sales and marketing operations into an integrated but distributed European entity, generating cost efficiencies and increasing market and service effectiveness.

BCG has worked with the leadership community across Europe as they have stepped up to these challenges, helping them to recognise the ways they need to change themselves to create the change they want in the business. Through a series of developmental workshops BCG has enabled them to explore their collective and individual leadership.

The workshops involve building a common understanding of their challenges and enabling them to explore the changes required. A key element is the use of intense, peer coaching on real, current business challenges and opportunities, which we facilitate in small learning groups. This is not simply about skills development but also brings alive the shift required, making it live in the room. Participants commit to changes in their leadership approach to respond to the changed structure and the new demands in the business.

Local Strategic Partnerships - Engaging the Community

All councils are required to develop a Local Development Framework which describes a spatial strategy for the locality and needs to be integrated with the local community plan. The local strategic partnership needs to own this plan and feel that there has been genuine participation.

In previous years the Council had not succeeded in winning the support of either local stakeholders or the community in its local strategic plan. As a result, development had been fragmented and ad hoc, lacking the sort of sustainable ambition that was needed to tackle major issues facing the town. Previous attempts had relied on questionnaires or council led meetings to which very few people turned up. 

The Council worked with a BCG consultant who facilitated a series of sessions with local planning agents, public service representatives and interest groups. These were aimed at identifying ways of improving the dialogue between stakeholders before the draft framework was developed and offered for formal consultation.

This led to a community wide café conversation in which local citizens were engaged in small groups in high street locations, exchanging ideas and views on four key challenges facing the community.

The benefit was a renewed confidence on the part of the planning team and the Local Strategic Partnership in engaging with the community in imaginative ways, transcending the ‘us and them’ mindset and enabling genuine collaborative generation of strategy.