Manager, Leader
Best Practice for Organisations Hub
The role of managers and leaders in contributing to organisational culture cannot be overemphasised.
Those who ensure a culture of wellbeing, continuous improvement, openness, and psychological safety will create healthy work environments where staff and therefore patients will thrive.
All staff have a responsibility for their impact on others, and an understanding of how their behaviours affect those around them. Whether they formally manage or lead, how they interact will affect their colleagues’ health and wellbeing.
Managers and leaders should be provided with development opportunities that will aid them in their role. We have curated a selection of avenues that can be helpful to achieve this.
- Managers should receive professional development to ensure they have the necessary skills, confidence, and compassionate and inclusive leadership behaviours to offer staff the support they need to be effective.
- Time and support should be given for essential tasks, such as preparing for Personal Appraisal Development Reviews (PADR) and revalidations.
- Ensure that this is a meaningful conversation where clear objectives are set, including wellbeing.
- Time and support should be given for professional reflection, mentorship, and supervision.
- Leadership development and shared professional decision-making should be enabled and encouraged at all levels.
- Managers and Leaders should have access to development programmes, coaching, mentoring, and buddying to support them in nurturing cultures of compassionate leadership, enabling high-quality, continually improving, compassionate care and staff support.
- Gwella’s Leadership Pathways
have a collection of pathways to help leaders identify resources, offerings, and programmes that are best suited to their development. - Managers and Leaders should be enabled and encouraged to review and register for the Gwella HEIW leadership portal to explore leadership development opportunities.
All systems and processes in the staff employment cycle need to enable a positive impact on staff health and wellbeing with no unintentional negative impacts.
- There should be support for newly appointed/promoted staff into management roles. Management, support, educational and clinical supervision should be included in the job plans/objectives of managers and clinical supervisors, and their workloads balanced to ensure they have protected time to provide these functions.
- Specifically for Nurses, quality preceptorship will ensure newly qualified nurses feel valued and inspired. This is an important foundation at this early stage. Clinical supervision is of equal importance to ensure nurses at all levels can reflect on the clinical practice they undertake.
- Managers and Leaders should be recruited against the Compassionate Leadership Principles and should be enabled and encouraged to be highly visible, approachable, and accessible to staff and enable effective two-way communication.
Additional Resources
Managers and Leaders should ensure that there are effective means to enable staff at all levels to shape decisions, policy, practice, work processes, and culture in their organisations.
To effectively manage change and create a stable working environment you need both managers and leaders to engage with staff in the decision-making process.
Systems should be in place to enable and encourage managers to deal with unacceptable behaviour. It’s important to use the skills of compassionate leadership courageously and lean into difficulty. Guidance is available through the Respect and Resolution Policy and Healthy Working Relationships. Support for mediation can be accessed via the All Wales Mediation Network.
Managers and Leaders should review and evaluate staff feedback to support a cycle of continuous improvement to support staff experience and health and wellbeing including:
- Speaking Up Safely Framework metrics
- Patient Experience/Putting things right metrics
- Quality and Improvement Metrics
