Team and board development
Course Introduction
We provide team leadership coaching offers that develop more effective and cohesive leadership teams and Boards. Coaching is rooted in the real work of the team. It develops individual and team awareness of process and dynamic issues in real time. This helps teams to learn to work better together in the face of complex challenges.
We support Boards and teams working at a variety of levels within health. Sometimes this might be for just a short one-off programme to help them develop their team cohesion and capability when they become a new team, or it may be a longer programme to support them as they lead complex change.
Who are bespoke Team of Board Development Programmes for?
We work with a variety of Boards and teams working in healthcare. The below are a few examples of the types of groups we currently work with:
• Boards of acute hospitals
• Integrated Care Boards and Integrated Care System leadership teams
• Boards of multi-agency transformation programmes
• Hospital Leadership Teams
• Senior Commissioning Teams
• Leadership Teams of Clinical Services
The purpose of bespoke board or team development
Our initial engagement is often due to a team wishing to ‘improve’ in some way.
This includes element that are:
Generative
A new team wishing to get off to a good start by developing good practices in both the content and process of their work.
Developmental
An existing team that wishes to go from ‘good to great’ or feels it needs to ‘shift into a higher gear’ to meet new/increased demands.
Reparative A team that is not functioning the way it wants or needs to due to one or more historical/current issues
The impact of bespoke board or team development
Through helping teams become more aware of how they work together, they are able to identify areas that will help them to improve.
Effective team working can:
• Enable teams to communicate more effectively, reducing tension, mistakes and costly delays to patient care as a result of mis-communication.
• Enable teams to make better and more timely decisions, having understood the wider context first, and factored in a diversity of views about the best ways to proceed and reducing costly mistakes.
• Develop mutual accountability that enables teams to take greater ownership for issues so that they are addressed, rather than ignored and allowed to fester – often leading to costly mistakes.
• Provides greater clarify, direction and autonomy for leaders further down the hierarchy which enables them to make better decisions at the front line that are aligned.
• Reduces confusion for direct reports, wasted efforts and errors.
Our Approach
Senior leaders are often engaged in wicked problems. We define these as highly complex problems to which there is no obvious or neat solution. Therefore, our focus is on the processes of leadership and how people find a way through persistent, and often stubborn, areas of concern.
A key element of team coaching is that the team works on real issues and not case study material. By helping a group gain better insight into how they currently work together, on the real challenges they face and in real-time, we can then provide the necessary support and challenge to help them work better together.
“Staff College initially supported and helped Barts Health in its early days of great challenges. The key recipe we benefitted from was the SC focus on both content (what is done or said) and process (the unspoken dynamic of how leaders and teams engage).
SC was adept at helping us safely confront challenges especially in process and directly facilitated senior teams – including the Executive team in the early post-merger period.
Meanwhile, their cohort development for individuals was also very powerful and impacted colleagues in a way other development interventions seldom do. The learning that leadership is doing the right thing on a difficult day has stuck with many of us since.”
Michael Pantlin | Chief People & Digital Officer
Surrey Heartlands Health & Care Partnership