Why is leadership important right now? Well, leadership is important every
single day and we have some brilliant leaders in the NHS. It's especially
important at the time of this national emergency because we need leadership
which is inclusive, which is distributed, not individual or heroic, and really
brings in voices and communities and stakeholders in making decisions. We need
leaders who take a moment to think about whose voices are we not hearing, whose
faces are we not seeing, and whose outcomes might we be ignoring. Leadership
needs to create psychological safety for leaders at all levels because leaders
are taking such difficult decisions and need to manage a much higher risk
threshold than before this pandemic started. And we need leadership to create
that psychological safety.
Where should leaders be putting their focus right now?
Well there's so much, and a lot of decisions need to be taken in the heat
at the moment. What that does is of course it amplify our biases and we
need to be conscious about which decisions absolutely need to be taken in
the heat of the moment, which decisions can wait for a couple of hours to bring
in other perspectives and other people and other views, and which decisions
could wait a couple more days so that we can have more data and more
reflection time to actually make those decisions. What seem like in the moment
decisions today have a very long term impact for lots of people and for our
health service and public service in general. There will be a world beyond the
pandemic and we need leaders who are looking at that horizon as well as
looking at today. Sometimes these are two different sets of leaders and that's
fine but we do need to prepare for the world because it will be very different.
The pandemic risks widening some of the health inequalities that the NHS and the
health and social care sector has been working hard to address and we must be
conscious of focusing on those health inequalities and ensuring that they
don't become wider, and see how we can use this moment to actually
address that inequality. The same is true for inequality within the NHS, with staff
who are from a BME background or from the LGBTQ+ community, women in leadership and
people who are working with disability. Urgency and command and control on the
one hand and diversity and inclusion on the other hand are not mutually
exclusive. We can be inclusive while we are leading a fast-moving
national emergency. We shouldn't accept this false dichotomy. This national
emergency can help us be more of who we want to be let's be intentional about that.
I've been asked to share my insights from my time of six years
working in the humanitarian emergency response as part of the United Nations, so
here are my three insights. One: that as a culture we will have to work hard to be a
learning and improvement culture and not a blame or fear culture.
Leaders will be taking very difficult decisions and we need to support them as
they do take those decisions. Those decisions and our response to them will
demonstrate what values we actually have as the NHS, as the public sector, as a
society and as a nation. The second insight is self-care for leaders. This is,
you know, everybody says this is not a sprint it's a marathon. It's actually a
series of sprints and just like elite athletes or great athletes, leaders will
exert a lot but we also need to build in and even schedule recovery time whether
that's physical - and it should be physical and mental. Leaders need to take
some time out to recover. The third insight from my time at the UN is about
team resilience because resilience does reside in teams. We need a plan for our
team and we need to adapt that plan as this emergency progresses. We need to
keep a lookout for each member of our team: those who are working remotely,
those who are at the front line, those who are putting in
lots of shifts: porters, nurses, doctors, lab scientists, everybody. We need
to look out for the health and wellbeing of everyone.