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Unlocking Leadership, previously Leadership 2020, is a podcast helping leadership lead in a world that is changing ever quickly. Join us as we interview even more inspiring people who provide information and skills on how to tackle the big questions affecting today’s leaders.
We blend real-life leadership experiences of our guests with the latest management theory to provide practical, relevant tips for anyone in a leadership position.
Unlocking Leadership asks the big questions about being a better leader in the modern workplace. Hosted by Clare Carpenter.
[00:00:00] Clare Carpenter: Welcome to Unlocking Leadership, a podcast about leading in a changing world, brought to you by Corndel, your strategic skills partner. I'm your host, Claire Carpenter.
I'm joined today by Catherine Abrey. Catherine is the Group Head of Organisational Development and Leadership at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. Catherine, welcome, thank you for joining me today.
[00:00:34] Catherine Abrey: It's my pleasure.
[00:00:35] Clare Carpenter: Lovely. Before we do anything and get into the content of our conversation today, let's find out a bit more about you, please, tell us who you are, how you are, how have you arrived here?
[00:00:49] Catherine Abrey: So I have been on quite a long journey. I'm not going to reveal to you how long, because that's a bit of a giveaway on the age side. But I have worked in the NHS specifically now since 2004. You know, coming up for 20 years. My early career was in local authorities and the charity sector and then for a long time I was self employed. Initially as a training consultant. Offering management, supervisory, development, customer service, those sorts of things. That of itself is a sign of the times, training consultant, because it soon morphed into learning and development. And I worked with a number of organizations in terms of developing their strategies to support business and finally, I came across this thing called organizational development and I was much intrigued and I wanted to find out more about it. Again, having worked as an independent consultant for a number of years, I began to wonder why certain things didn't stick. Why leadership development and training and skills and things people reporting they're going back into organizations and they're just not able to put that into practice and that led me down the route of organisational development and what was happening in organizations and the culture that might prevent people from putting those skills into practice. So that's kind of that side of the journey coming to being a organisational development leadership consultant. And then I reached a point about 20 years ago now, I think, give or take, when I had been working independently for a long time outside of organisations and I just had a feeling that it might be time to go back inside to see what is it like? Things have moved on exponentially in terms of how organizations were operating and structured and not least in terms of technology. As well as operating models. So I felt a credibility gap. I felt the need to go back in that I'd been talking from the outside for a long time, and that's what I did and I went back in as an OD consultant to a local authority. And then I went in as a leadership development consultant to a NHS trust. Then I moved to the Royal Free as a organizational development and leadership partner, and during that period, I moved up the greasy pole and to the role that I'm currently in now.
[00:03:42] Clare Carpenter: Lovely, and yeah, it feels obvious to me the link between organisational development and leadership development. How does that unwrap in an organizational setting for you?
[00:03:54] Catherine Abrey: Well, again, I am, my colleagues who work in the ODL team are very passionate about the link between leadership and organizational development. The organisational development has to come through the leaders. It can't be done to, it must be done by, and so the link, the two sides of the coin for us are very key. So developing leaders to take on that role, participate in the development of an organization is very much, I think, where we come from, in our thinking.
[00:04:31] Clare Carpenter: I'm wondering what sort of challenges you have faced in bringing that together.
[00:04:37] Catherine Abrey: Oh! Multiple and long term. So it's been a long journey and when I first started, people probably got to grips with the concepts of leadership. They understood that leadership development, although not a great deal was happening. But organizational development was just an unknown quantity, just wasn't on people's vocabulary, part of their vocabulary, really and so I used to do what I called my elevator pitch in the lifts, because people would lean across, particularly medical students. And look at my name tag and it said ODL Consultant on it, and they would say what type of consultant is that then? And I would say think about an organization as if it's a patient.
It presents symptoms. It comes to you, it presents symptoms, it acquires diagnosis. You gather data. You take a history you put forward an intervention and then you evaluate to see whether it's had any beneficial impact. And that would be my elevator pitch, just linking into the medical side in particular, into the clinical bit to help them understand.
[00:05:49] Clare Carpenter: Really see how that would work. I'm thinking about how much leadership development, and OD have changed and themselves developed in the last 20 years. What do you think have been some of the really key developments that you've seen over that period of time that have had a big impact?
[00:06:09] Catherine Abrey: Well, From a leadership development perspective, I think what you've had is a much greater understanding of self awareness, the importance of self in this and the impact of self. And I think for us at the Royal Free, the big change was taking into account the leadership pipeline and helping people in transition.
Or trying to, and recognizing that as people transition from leader of self, and what that might entail, to leader of others, to leader of leaders, to business or functional unit, To divisional and then up into the dizzy heights of CEO, there are different demands placed upon you as a leader and how you spend your time and what you value and in particular, the shift in your valuing of leadership as an activity. So you might start off as a physio, you know, and 80%, 90% of your time is about patient care. Your focus is on that. But as soon as you become a leader of other physios, you have got to shift your mindset into how you spend your time and what you value and that increases with each shift in transition from one level of leadership to another.
[00:07:35] Clare Carpenter: It's fascinating, isn't it, to think about how we focus on professional development in terms of expert skills to do the job, and yet have an expectation that because I'm an expert. You know, using your example. Physio, but I will also be an expert leader of physios. That's a leap, but faith, isn't it?
[00:07:58] Catherine Abrey: It is, and the damage that we do in taking such a leap of faith without preparing people adequately can be significant both to the individual and to the team of people that they lead. And if you're not clear on the change that's required, if you're not clear on the huge skill set and behaviours that go with becoming a leader then it can be very damaging, as I say, for all concerned.
[00:08:28] Clare Carpenter: Yeah. I'm thinking about two key skills in that space, which are learned often by osmosis, aren't they? What has been done to us or not done and what we take from that. Thinking in particular about leadership and people management, people development and also, on the other side of that, the way that we recruit and hire recruitment and interview skills, it's assumed that we know how to do it and that we'll do it in a useful way. It couldn't be further from the truth, could it?
[00:08:59] Catherine Abrey: Uh, No, you're quite right. It's a, as I say, it's the whole skill set and knowledge and behavior set in it's right. And to assume that people know how to conduct the recruitment selection process, from writing the JD and the person spec, through to interview appointment, and an effective induction, so that you keep people for more than a few months is absolutely vital.
[00:09:28] Clare Carpenter: Yeah. I wonder what you've noticed in the last few years when perhaps the NHS has found itself under More pressure than ever before. I don't know if that's true, actually. You'll have a better handle on that than me. Let's tackle that first, shall we?
[00:09:43] Catherine Abrey: Yeah, it's difficult to say really, it was ever thus and the pressure is, I think has always been there. Again, obviously this is a very personal view, personal experience. I think it's a bit, it has increased. As you can imagine, the impact of COVID 19 on all NHS staff was immense. And we had to adapt really quickly on how we could support our leaders during that pandemic and the pressure now is, of course, recovering from that, you know, still recovering from that with the increased waiting lists, the demands that are placed on you know, colleagues and how you meet those. And then the financial pressures that you have to do. So the tension between meeting demand, finding ways to deliver services and do those efficiently, effectively with costs that are reduced whilst at the same time, ensuring that your staff.
Have a good experience and your patients have a good experience. Now kind of moving into a charity that is probably outside minors, but again, I have a view as someone inside it. Very much from a leadership perspective, as we emerged from the pandemic, we kind of had to restart our business as usuals, but the changes that we had to make, particularly relating to technology and virtual learning during the pandemic.
It was a very steep learning curve. Lots of changes came out of that learning that meant that we approached our individual leadership development offer differently and have continued with that.
[00:11:25] Clare Carpenter: So what were some of the really important changes to make during that period and subsequently as well?
[00:11:32] Catherine Abrey: All normal business stopped, and so the fairly traditional leadership development offerings that we had, which was a series of face to face programs with what we called step up to lead for people who aspire to move into leadership. Leading others for people in their first line management, leading leaders and so on, we're all face to face.
They had action learning sets. They had all those sorts of things, supporting materials, and that's all had to stop and we then had to find ways to support our leaders very much in the moment, offering individual. You might call them coaching sessions, but just a space to come and look at the leadership challenges in that time, and the group sessions where people came together to look at that and share.
So that, that was one thing. When we tried to return to business as usual, we were still kind of in the grips of people not physically coming together. And also we saw the advantages of virtual learning, of not dragging people from one side of London to another, or. All those sorts of things, as well as the cost benefits of that and one of the things that we saw coming out of that was scaling up that could we use technology to scale up and offer to more people and get, reach more people out there, because we've got about 11, 000 staff of which 5, 000 probably have some form of leadership responsibilities. At varying levels, formal and informal.
[00:13:02] Clare Carpenter: Thinking about the range of different roles that those 5, 000 odd leaders within the organisation do and the different challenges, of course, that there would be perhaps in a clinical leadership role to that which would be in a business unit, for example. How do you structure an L& D program to capture all of those different streams of your organization?
[00:13:26] Catherine Abrey: Well, Again, so I suppose this comes back to, to, to values and beliefs. My belief is that leadership skills are generic. It's the context that changes. And we are very keen to do multidisciplinary development. We understand that there are occasions when nurses need to be with nurses and midwives, doctors need to be, but you work together.
You know, you've got all sorts of people working to provide that service to the patients. And if you work together, you need to learn together. You need to understand each other's worlds and challenges. So I think what I would say for the clinical leaders that I'm familiar with, is that they often do have a particular challenge of still having to operate clinically, know, having patients that they deal with, as well as leading and so that can be quite a challenge for them. But I operate a similar way myself sometimes, I think, in that I might well be a leader with, you know, in the part of the ODL team, but I also have to design, deliver, coach mentor, you all of those things actually operating as a consultant. So there are those challenges, I think, for our clinical leaders, but I think there are just challenges for all our leaders.
Whichever they're in, be it finance, HR, you know, whatever sector, I can feel myself hesitating now because I'm thinking if I don't mention somebody, I'm going to get in trouble.
[00:14:56] Clare Carpenter: All of them are important.
[00:14:59] Catherine Abrey: Yes, all of them. All of them.
[00:15:01] Clare Carpenter: How do you involve the senior leaders in the organization in the development of less experienced or emergent leaders, for example?
[00:15:10] Catherine Abrey: What we have the moment is we have a talent pool specifically for developing matrons. And that is absolutely reliant on their line manager, the individual's line manager. Participating in that offer. I'm hesitating to call it a program. It has programmatic elements, but it's so much more than that.
It's so much more around stretch activities and individual learning plans. And the role of the line manager in that is absolutely crucial. And we, the ODL team and my nursing and midwifery education colleagues wrap our arms around that and provide some structure and process. And some workshops, it's absolutely vital that the line manager role in that to more senior level, we have engaged with them in what we call our framework, our leadership framework, which helps people transition from one level to another around what are the skills that we think are needed at these different levels.
What's the knowledge, what should you value, how should you be spending your time as you move through different transition points? And you know, doing some research with senior leaders around what do they see as key? But of course, that is constantly shifting in our shifting world and shifting priorities.
[00:16:37] Clare Carpenter: Yeah, I wonder what the appetite is in the Ness experience leadership space to take that level of responsibility on and embrace it. Seeing some of the challenges that their more senior leaders have experienced in the last few years.
[00:16:52] Catherine Abrey: Interestingly enough, I think there is quite an appetite. We have put out, you know, for interests expressions of interest, come and join our leading others pathway. We call them pathways now, rather than programs because they're much more self directed learning and they're designed in a particular way.
But we are oversubscribed, so people are still hungry for learning about leadership. We try and capture people early now with our new frontline leaders pathway, so we want to capture them before they've been here for more than six months so that we can introduce them to sort of leadership, our way of leading in order to prevent some of the things that you know, that can happen if you leave people to their own devices, introducing them to the habit of leadership and what that might involve.
[00:17:43] Clare Carpenter: I'm wondering about whether or not most of your management and leadership team are promoted from within or whether you hire. externally into the leadership space as much.
[00:17:59] Catherine Abrey: Sadly, I haven't any statistics to back this up, but my impression is that it's probably 50 50. It's it's quite mixed. We get quite a number of internal appointments. And we go outside and recruit and get people from other organizations, often from within the NHS, people moving across from one NHS organisation to another occasionally from you know, sort of non NHS side of things that might be more so obviously in some of the corporate functions, but yes I don't have a feeling that we are dominated by one more than the other.
[00:18:42] Clare Carpenter: Just thinking about the balance that brings in terms of new ideas and diversity of thinking and different ways of being and doing to really create a sense of movement in that team.
[00:18:54] Catherine Abrey: I think we do get people from the outside who bring different ways of doing things. I think we also, our own internal people, often I'm sweeping generalizations here because I'm trying to think what I'm basing this on. But you know, there are often people who are good ideas that they want to bring, you know, that they read and they have thoughts and innovations.
The challenge is the highly regulated environment, the financial restrictions, the pressures. To deliver and introducing change and leading that change and all that's involved in that. And again, that's very much what we want to prepare people to be able to do, to lead change, to engage with the staff, you know, in order to get new and improved ways of working implemented.
Again
[00:19:46] Clare Carpenter: Thinking about some of the really important skills for your leadership team to both learn, demonstrate, pass on. Where are you focusing your energy? In terms of development.
[00:20:02] Catherine Abrey: I reflected on this and I thought, this is huge, you know, absolutely huge, but I think. You know, in terms of people who aspire to be leaders or are currently leaders looking to develop their capabilities and make a positive impact. Again, what I'd reiterate, it's a journey. Know thyself, self awareness.
There's so many tools and models out there. Get insight into your style, your approach, your impact on others that you're leading or collaborating with. Compassionate leadership is very much in the forefront. Looking at things like the King's Fund and Michael West and, you know, and the list, the importance of listening.
I think again, key is considering what your responsibilities are as a leader in terms of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and how you can meet those. Systems leadership, I think, particularly for those people at a a middle to senior level is particularly important when that, when you're part of a system and, you know, understanding that system and how you link into it and the wider system with primary care and local authorities and all of the partners in the delivery of healthcare. So understanding systems leadership and where you fit in and what you do to that collaboration and the ability to, particularly as you move, I think, from one level of transition to another, coping with uncertainty and ambiguity that should just keep you busy for a day. Nevermind all the rest of the more crunchy stuff.
[00:21:43] Clare Carpenter: That's a tricky one, isn't it? Coping with ambiguity and uncertainty in what is quite an uncertain environment we find ourselves isn't it?
[00:21:53] Catherine Abrey: Yes. I don't think the NHS is alone, but it does seem to be particularly challenged, you know, with some of the uncertainty and ambiguity around, and tensions, the tensions between achieving the task, whatever that may be looking after your team because you're not doing this in isolation.
You can't achieve the task. In isolation, you're doing it through others, if you're a leader you know, and looking after the individuals as individuals within your team you know, and the tensions between that and you, yourself, also from the, in the squashed middle, being pulled below, pulled from above, all of that that you.
You have to manage, I don't want to make it sound like, Oh gosh, you know, let's not go there. I don't want to do it. Cause some people love it. They love the challenge and they just need some help to acquire some key skills, key understanding and the double sided coin of skills and knowledge with behaviors.
You know, I can have lots of skills, knowledge, but if I'm not behaving in a way and the impact I'm having is not getting the outcome, then what is that? What's happening? You know, the opportunity to reflect and pause and think which is again, is not something I think that is necessarily ingrained in leaders.
[00:23:19] Clare Carpenter: We're thinking about the additional scrutiny that seems to be on the NHS at the moment. The additional level of public interest in the way that NHS organisations are both led and how they operate. I'm really interested in your view on the environment of psychological safety, where leaders have the opportunity to learn by failing, what's that like in your experience?
[00:23:49] Catherine Abrey: I think that can be quite challenging, you know, in an ideal world, you would say, wouldn't you, that, you know, failure should lead to learning. We're very keen. on you know, governance and on reporting incidents and reviewing those and looking what can be learning. But it's still hard, whether you're patient facing or finance or anything else.
If things don't go as you expected them to or wanted them to, you don't get the outcome that you wanted and how your colleagues, your line manager, your staff react to that in terms of your level of responsibility and accountability for that. But it is important, you know, I think failing is important in terms of learning or just, you not things don't go the way that you want to, you know, we can all have wonderful plans and then things knock us off course and that ability to adapt and be resilient are all things that we should be aware of and supporting each other and helping leaders at all levels be skilled in helping. But a lot of these things are easier to say than that they are to do in the heat of the moment.
[00:25:05] Clare Carpenter: Sure. It's interesting, isn't it? The go to expert on psychological safety, Amy Edmondson, did most of her original research, I believe, in the health environment of two big university hospitals in the States. I think that's where her first research was done. It's fascinating that it sort of was born in your environment, actually.
[00:25:24] Catherine Abrey: What are a leader's responsibilities in terms of supporting people who may have failed? And what skills do you need, skills and knowledge do you need to do that? What behaviors do you need to support people in acknowledging that, but accepting that it happens and learning from it and that opportunity to learn.
So after action review is a good technique tool to employ, but managing an after action review, leading, facilitating that. You know, it gives you a nice structure and it's all good, but you know, you get people in the room, you get hierarchy in the room and all that goes with it. And so that's quite a skilled undertaking to genuinely get the learning out of that
[00:26:10] Clare Carpenter: I agree with you.
[00:26:12] Catherine Abrey: And and leave people still feeling, you know, able to go on and not too bruised by it.
[00:26:19] Clare Carpenter: That capability of facilitating a difficult discussion, that's a skill set, isn't it, for our readers that is, relatively Outside of their comfort zone in some cases, especially if they're working with a team of people who otherwise might, they might see as more peers than actually direct reports.
[00:26:42] Catherine Abrey: Yeah. The challenges between leading effectively a group of peers and leading a group where there's a clear hierarchy, again, I think they can be different. I think we may be fooling ourselves these days that, you know, hierarchy and power, leadership power, you know, the power that individual leaders have that they might once have had.
I think it's a whole different thing. And again, we're moving into an area that I read about, but I'm not an expert on. So the whole sort of generational side of things and generational expectations. So it's so much more now about moving away from command and control and expecting people just to jump when you ask them to and working with them and engaging them and motivating them and giving them stuff to do and delegating effectively and I could go on. The list is enormous. And that versus working with a team of peers and the collaboration required and the negotiation and all those skills, but essential conversations is one of the key things for us, that, that have being able to have essential conversations because it's applicable in so many areas and so we, our team offer that up. As one of our central leadership modules.
[00:28:02] Clare Carpenter: Yeah. So as we bring our conversation to a close, I wonder what, from your experience, both recently and in the past, you might offer to somebody approaching their first leadership role. Perhaps being promoted from within a peer environment, perhaps coming from a place of expert knowledge in their field, know, the CMI Chief Exec, Anne Francke, I likes to call them the accidental manager.
You know, they got to that place because they were really good at whatever they were good at. What advice might you give them in summary of their first areas to focus on for self awareness development perhaps?
[00:28:44] Catherine Abrey: So I think, as I said before, it's, it is know thyself. So getting on to understand yourself and the impact that you have on others that you're leading and collaborating with. And again, paying attention to compassionate leadership, paying attention to equalities and diversities. What impact am I having on others? And I try to identify what are your key leadership learning needs. And because it's such a huge field, that can be quite difficult to pin down sometimes, but the sorts of things that you might want to pay attention to, as I said before, how do you prepare for those essential conversations? And aquiring the skills that go with that. How do you lead and facilitate change? How do you lead the team, understand and create positive team dynamics, a coaching style, adding a coaching style to your leadership toolkit is not appropriate for everything, but it is more appropriate in many circumstances than, you know, you think.
Then there's all the sorts of things that some people call hard, I call crunchy are understanding finance and budgets. What's that? You know, what's the context in which I'm operating? Understand my context and then setting objectives, planning and monitoring. That should be enough for someone who's just starting out in leading others.
I think, and as you say, for those people who were a band six nurse on Friday. Or a band five nurse on Friday, and on Monday are now in charge of other band six nurses. What's the difference? What is it that you'll be doing differently, and how will you be spending your time differently? Know, that, those are the things I might offer up. I'm sure others have other views, you know, in terms of... What might be best for people moving into their first line leadership role?
[00:30:48] Clare Carpenter: I think any and all of those skills would be a tremendous toolkit to build, wouldn't they? I love that last reflection from you when you think on Friday you were this and today you were this and what's the difference? What's the change? What are you noticing? Thank you so much for your insights today. It has been an absolute pleasure to listen to your years of experience and insights into what it's like to work in a really tough environment sometimes, but one that I think leaders from any organization can really learn from, so Catherine, thank you so much for your time.
[00:31:27] Catherine Abrey: Grand thank you so much. I've enjoyed myself.
[00:31:30] Clare Carpenter: Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode of Unlocking Leadership, you can subscribe through all the regular podcast channels and please do leave us a rating and review there. We'd also love you to share any episodes you found interesting so that others can join the conversation and share their experiences.
This podcast was made in association with. It was produced and edited by Story Ninety Four.