NHS North West Leadership Academy HRDs

The Myers-Briggs Company began by organising a ‘Diagnosis and Discovery’ event aimed firstly at describing the characteristics of the HRD population and identifying their development needs (diagnosis), and secondly at raising the HRD’s awareness levels of their own style and giving them help to improve their approach in their day-to-day working lives (discovery).

The Myers-Briggs Company’s consultants carried out a series of stakeholder interviews and competency mapping exercises using the NHS’s own LQF (Leadership Qualities Framework). This enabled them to identify a benchmark for performance on several criteria, against which the HRD participants could be compared. The resulting event was a two-day development intervention comprising self-analysis, psychometric feedback and workplace simulations, which was attended by a total of 37 HRDs from across the North West region.

Before the event, the participants were asked to complete their choice of the FIRO-B^® or MBTI^® Step I or Step II questionnaires, which look at different elements of personality, and are useful for raising self-awareness. In addition, they completed the Potentia assessment and the NHS’s own tool, the LQF 360-degree feedback questionnaire, which defines an individual’s performance against competencies that were also used in the development event.

The first day of the event saw a programme of intensive but stimulating workplace simulations. The exercises were observed by The Myers-Briggs Company’s consultants who later prepared reports based on individual performance against the benchmark competencies.

The second day consisted of feedback on, and consolidation of, the results of the personality questionnaires and observations from the pre-work and day one. The Myers-Briggs Company’s consultants worked one-to-one with the participants to help them understand their personality results and feed back their observations. This helped participants to identify their own strengths and possible blind spots when working in the context of organisational development and strategic leadership. This learning was reinforced with peer feedback from the other participants, which was found to be especially useful.

Feedback from the delegates who attended the event was very positive, with 94% stating that the event would have a positive impact on their performance at work, all highly rating the levels of self-awareness it had helped them achieve, and 93% saying they would use what they had learned back in the workplace “frequently” or “almost all the time”.

In addition, The Myers-Briggs Company provided an analysis of the overall group results on each of the LQF competencies, gleaned from across the psychometric data and observations. The analysis showed that strategic influencing was a key development area for the HRDs. As this was also a key skill identified at the start of the project, The Myers-Briggs Company was commissioned to create a bespoke solution aimed at helping leaders adapt their influencing style according to the situation and audience, and raise their awareness of their own style and other ways of communicating in the context of their own organisational culture. It was hoped that this would give the HRDs a wider-ranging toolkit to dip into when thinking about, and taking the lead on, organisational development and other strategic initiatives.

The two-day workshop focused on a deeper understanding of the MBTI instrument and insights from the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI™ ), followed by a discussion on stakeholder management where participants were encouraged to use their learning to work through real-life examples of people they needed to influence and wanted to improve their relationships with. The workshop finished with an action-planning session in which participants were assisted in outlining how they would take their learning forward.

Just like the Diagnosis and Discovery event, the participant feedback on the strategic influencing workshop was very positive, with all participants agreeing that it was likely to have a positive impact on their performance at work, and on the way they worked with others. To quote a participant: “It gave me time out to reflect on my practice and consider how I affect situations and the other people I wish to influence – and to work out how I might achieve my aims by understanding myself and them better.”