Staff and leadership culture - it’s never been more important
Our Chief Executive Dr Sara Munro shares her thoughts on how culture is more important than ever during this pandemic, and that our work on improving culture and improving lives is far from forgotten.
Hello
Since we entered into our Coronavirus emergency response, so much of the work that had previously occupied us has changed, been stepped down or hibernated – a bit like a hedgehog for the winter!
The need for adaptability and rapid change is going to be with us for some time as we continue to focus on delivering the best possible care to our service users whilst we keep everyone safe from the risk of coronavirus.
This includes the work I was leading on culture. Through the work of the culture collaborative and the Improving Culture: Improving Lives conversations over the last six months, we’d built up a clear picture of what was important to colleagues across the Trust and what we needed to focus on to improve our organisational culture to benefit everyone.
We’d come up with six themes which, in order of importance to you, are:
- We need a diverse group of inspiring managers and leaders across the organisation, and to develop them in a consistent, supportive and fair way to positively influence culture.
- Everyone should be treated fairly and with respect. Bullying and harassment needs to be addressed properly, with policies and procedures that work for everyone.
- Everyone should feel empowered to make decisions and improvements in their teams, using their knowledge and creative ideas.
- We need clear pathways that help us fulfil our career progression and development ambitions.
- Everyone needs to be appreciated for their hard work, valued for their skills, and recognised for their achievements.
- Flexible and agile working should be easy to implement across all levels of the organisation.
A few of us met (virtually of course) a couple of weeks ago to think about how we want to continue our culture work through the pandemic. What was really clear is that our culture is now more important than ever, and we should not let go of the progress we’ve made.
We agreed we need to refocus, and in doing so, ensure the culture we want is at the heart of our approach to managing and leading over the coming months.
Compassionate Leadership – wise words from Prof West
I was inspired by a blog by Professor Michael West (pictured) entitled Covid-19: why compassionate leadership matters in a crisis and what to share some key messages from it as I believe it chimes with the culture message I’m trying to get across.
He states this is “an opportunity to collectively improve the leadership culture across the NHS”, and that leaders and managers should “model and promote compassion in an enduring way, including self-compassion”.
It is vital that we look after ourselves and each other during what is a fast paced and uncertain environment, of which few people really have any directly relatable experience. Whilst some of us have managed NHS services through extreme events, like widespread flooding in my case, this is different. There is no crystal ball and the nature of Covid means we are adapting day by day. So we need to be kind, and forgive ourselves if we don’t always get it right first time.
A common conversation I have at the moment is managers describing their concern for others and ensuring they are supported. So my question is what about you – what support do you need, how are you looking after yourself?
This has extra importance because as leaders we are role models for our colleagues so we should role model self-care and self-compassion – something I talk about each week on my webinar.
Prof West goes on to talk about empathising with your colleagues and teams, feeling their “fears, stresses, uncertainties, anxieties and exhaustion” which leads to us ask the most important question any leader can ask: how can I help you?
He talks about being guided by appreciating and meeting the core ABC of human needs at work, which are:
- Autonomy and control – giving staff a voice and influence over decisions that affect their delivery of care and their own workplace environments.
- Belonging – for example being a member of a ‘home team’ (preferably multidisciplinary) that provides support, enables a shared focus on the task and provides the medium for collective learning and innovation.
- Competence – staff need to meet with their fellow team members (perhaps more virtually than physically in these times of lockdown) to review, to share learning, to develop innovative responses to the crisis and to simply recover together.
Remembering our purpose
In the heat of pandemic response, it’s important to remember our purpose.
For me, we exist to serve our population, to help them improve and recover mental health and to live the best life possible with mental illness and learning disabilities. It may be that this feels a bit obvious and does not need to be said, but understandably we can sometimes lose sight of this.
Listening to comments from staff both before and during the pandemic, we need to focus on inclusive leadership and compassion – including staff wellbeing – in service of our purpose as a Trust.
In order to serve our purpose we need all to contribute – to feel valued, to engage in development, to feel safe to speak up. For safe, effective, reliable patient-centred care to happen, leaders and managers have to work within a culture of psychological safety. That means to be included, to learn and develop, to contribute and to “disagree well”. It’s no good if, in the act of “getting the job done”, we spoil or ruin our working relationships.
The focus on BAME staff
Hopefully you will have already seen some of our cultural approach in action through our daily and weekly communications which have received good feedback; our approach to redeployment; the rapid adoption of flexible and agile working and our increased focus on staff support and wellbeing.
What’s come sharply into focus now is how COVID is disproportionately affecting our Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority (BAME) colleagues and service users who I know are feeling especially vulnerable.
I wrote to all our BAME staff on 1 May setting out what I hope was a message of reassurance and empathy – that we are taking this seriously and we are listening. We are also establishing a new group to take a particular focus on the impact of Covid on BAME communities and our staff who have disabilities. You can read the full letter on our website.
Showing our values
The way we have come together as a community in the past two weeks to support one another and pay tribute to the loss of our colleague Khuli Nkala (pictured) shows our values and our culture at their very best. This sense of community and mutual support is something I want us to continue.
To help with this we have a well-established health and wellbeing group within the Trust to provide leadership and focus, and bring it all under one roof so that staff are not left to wade through the myriad of resources springing up online. They have just published a simple and accessible guide which you can find on our website here.
If you haven’t already please have a look at our website to see it all for yourself. You can also join our closed staff Facebook page where you can share ideas, resources and, well, anything you like if you think it would improve the health and lives of colleagues, service users and carers during these difficult times.
At the heart of this work is our approach to inclusive leadership and the importance of individual conversations to discuss and respond to people’s personal risk factors and support needs. We are all human, we are all unique, and we all need to feel valued and supported. Indeed, to try and better understand what it feels like across the Trust, we’ll be looking at using our Your Voice Counts platform to offer a mechanism for staff to share their experiences in a safe and confidential way.
Thank you for all that you are doing, today and every day, each and every one of you. I could not be more proud of our team here at LYPFT right now and through this crisis we have seen the very best of our colleagues coming together as one. We need to keep our values at the centre of our decision making and in doing so we will be continuing the work of our culture collaborative because people need it, now more than ever.