Case study:

DHU Healthcare

Creating a coaching-led leadership culture for an NHS frontline care provider.

Our client

As a commercial frontline care provider to the NHS, DHU Healthcare has grown significantly over the past five years, through business mergers and acquisitions, to provide round the clock healthcare for over seven million people across the wider Midlands area.

As part of their vision to provide compassionate high quality patient care, they place a very high commitment on the engagement of their staff and therefore wanted to develop a culture of inspirational, compassionate, empowered and visible leadership across the whole organisation.

However, the result of the mergers on the organisation’s culture was a lacking leadership alignment and high levels of escalation, rather than decision making at the point of need. They needed to develop a more coordinated approach and a ‘One DHU’ culture that would deliver its values, release staff talent and improve overall performance.

Our solution

To meet this need, we designed a coaching-led leadership programme. This created a common language of empowered leadership, enabled leaders with improved coaching skills and confidence, enhanced morale and teamwork through supported applicable experiential learning. We called the programme Inspire and rolled it out to 15 cohorts across 16 months to 180 leaders. In parallel we delivered a team coaching version of the Inspire programme to the executive leadership team and also provided a short programme to give an understanding of the culture change impact to NEDs.

The Inspire programme focused on creating a ‘coaching-led’ culture of intent-based leadership. Intent-based leadership empowers people closest to the problem to find solutions and make the most effective decisions, enabling a culture where leaders can tap into the collective brilliance of their staff at an individual and team level by asking more than telling, empowering more than directing. This style of leadership not only leads to increased organisational performance and focus but also encourages increased employee engagement, a key driver for success, retention and recruitment.

Our approach

We had a systematic approach to this work. We started with a deeper diagnosis of the requirement through interviews and surveys. In total we interviewed 35 senior leaders across the organisation we captured and analysed this data before feeding the key themes back to the Board. This led to us running two pilot programmes with 20 participants in total to hone and evaluate the content. Building on this, we pulled together an experienced associate coaching team who delivered 4 – 5 programmes each, gaining a close understanding of the client culture and support for change. Our regular meetings provided a consistent capture of key themes from the sessions, and we used this to feed back to the management team. We also provided a dedicated programme management team to work closely with the internal project team on all aspects of administration, coordination and evaluation. To support the wider culture change we consulted with key individuals within the organisation including the People and Organisation Development Director on the alignment of HR policies to the cultural change themes.

In addition, we also trained four internal coaches on our public accredited Coaching Mastery programme and an Inspire ‘train the trainer’ programme so they could not only support the development of an internal coaching pool, but also specifically co-facilitate with our professional coaches to allow savings and longer-term sustainability for an internal roll out of the programme.

Hear from some Inspire participants

What made you reach out for this support?

“Professionally I now have a very different outlook, particularly in relation to the more challenging parts of my role such as having difficult conversations and managing conflict…..Since Inspire, I have incorporated the learning from the course in my everyday work and I feel calm and confident when dealing with these issues."

What was the experience like?

“Inspire has had a huge impact on the way in which I speak with people, how I encourage and motivate them and how I approach courageous conversations.”

What did it enable?

“Inspire is making teams within our organisation more effective and understanding, there is less friction and frustration amongst managers due to the insight of Inspire methods.”

Our impact was so significant that we were asked to present the Inspire Award for outstanding leadership at their annual awards ceremony. The impact of the programme was always intended to go beyond the delivery and influence the culture of the organisation as a whole.

The Inspire programme has also been nominated as a finalist for the British Training Awards for the Not-for-Profit Initiative of the year award.

We established a baseline of engagement in a staff survey questionnaire prior to the start of the programme. We intend to remeasure engagement at the next annual staff survey at the end of 2024 to further measure impact. While we wait for this to happen, we have received encouraging initial feedback from many operational heads of departments.

Get in touch if you want to know more about how you can develop a sustainable culture of empowered & compassionate leaders, who motivate their people and enable resilience in a world of change and challenge.

The impact

Our client was very clear that they wanted a measurable impact of the programme on the effectiveness of their organisation and people. To meet this need, we set up a qualitative assessment of the programme by each cohort and their satisfaction with the content, delivery methodology and facilitator performance. Our feedback was consistently outstanding and the change of leadership behaviour within the organisation recognised, supported and encouraged. Over 80% of attendees said that the programme had a significant or positive influence on their leadership approach and effectiveness. 96% felt the programme had a significant or positive influence over their ability to impact the culture (within their area of influence and control) to be more coaching led.

We established a self-assessed baseline for each cohort’s level of capability and confidence in key competencies. Each cohort completed a self-assessment at the start of their programme and upon completion. The results of this show increased confidence and frequency across every key indicator. For example, before the programme 12% of leaders felt very confident to use a coaching approach as a manager, and now following the programme that number has shifted to 70%’.