Gregg Marson

NHS managers/team leaders at (Agenda for Change) bands 6-8a directly supervise up to 80% of our NHS people. These “frontline” team leaders have an outsize influence on NHS performance. Yet: - They don’t have a big collective voice in opportunities to improve NHS productivity - Only a small proportion of leadership development budgets in the NHS target them Tomorrow I'm spending the day with four NHS systems identifying potential opportunities to unleash the potential of frontline managers and team leaders to lead change. For more on the latent power of frontline leaders, see, eg: bcg.com/publications/2017/so… by @BCG.

Organisations are designed to produce specific, repeatable processes through specialised roles, norms, & behaviours. When we start working in a new organisation, we learn the social cues to start conforming & fitting in. It's why, when we set out to lead change, we're likely to find resistance. All of those subtle forces built up over time are designed to support existing behaviours & norms. For large scale change, we need to shift from a "manager mindset" rooted in the status quo, to a "changemaker mindset" that can move things in a different direction. Three shifts are needed: 1) From building consensus to building coalition: build a smaller coalition of people who are already enthusiastic about change & can begin to build new norms & expectations 2) From working in an atmosphere of predictability to one of uncertainty: we won't know if things will work until we've tried them - expect them to go wrong & leave room for testing & error 3) From a focus on implementation to exploration: if we don't explore, we won't find better ways of doing things - or better things to do We need both a manager & a changemaker mindset. We have to be able to mode shift between them: digitaltonto.com/2024/to-lea…. By @Digitaltonto

A further graphic that makes the powerful point that we have to think differently about "failure" if we want to build psychological safety for high performance in our teams & organisations. It's inspired by @AmyCEdmondson. The ideas are further developed in her latest book "Right kind of wrong". Graphic by @Adrien_Liard via @TheQI_Guy.