Weeknotes s03e15
TL;DR: Jedi partial booking. Diversity and inclusion as an essential leadership competency
[week ending 23/04/2021]
Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? Jo, Bola, Josh and I joined a call with NHS Digital and NHSX to talk about progress in making the best use of the Digital Aspirant seed funding NGH recieved last year. We talked about the next steps towards applying for the larger sums of money this year. There’s still quite a few unknowns in the process, but the first step is getting it approved by our Board next week.
A really frustrating call with a supplier, who had failed to read the room in terms of expectations of the call and the organisation’s experience of their product. I don’t know if they were told by their legal team not to say sorry, but starting with that would have set a much better tone for what followed.
I joined a workshop session of the Midlands CIO group and we talked about collaboration across the Midlands and our roles in our ICSs.
Mike Emery and I managed to talk to Lisa Emery about the planning we’ve done with other colleagues about the Midlands Digital Health Skills Development Network. Lisa was interested in developing something for the London region, so there’s a good opportunity to share materials, thoughts and ideas to end up with a better solution for both regions.
It was the monthly EMRAD Board meeting this week. I was only able to be there for the first hour, before joining a call with Graphnet to talk about population health in Northants.
I finally attended my first ever East Midlands One Care SRO Board, which is about linking up the county shared records at a regional level. I saw a lot of familar faces on the call and surprisingly for one of these meetings there was a lot of laughter.
What would you have liked to do more of? I’m going a lot of work in a particular area, so lots of other things are sliding at the minute, which is really hard when I pride myself for keeping on top of things.
What do you wish you could have changed? I attended the funeral of a friend this week, who was only a few month older than me.
What did you learn? I’ve been learning a lot about outpatients — about outpatient waiting lists, partial booking and even something called partial partial booking.
I have new coaching arrangements, where I join a group of people as well as the individual coaching sesson. This week I attended a session run by Razia Aziz about diversity and inclusion. There was a lot of parallels in what we talked about and the work of Robin DeAngelo in White Fragilty, but Razia went beyond and talked about all forms of diversity and inclusion. She questioned if organisations should allow people to get the top who haven’t got competience in diversity and inclusion; there’s a lot in this that I can agree with. The damage leaders can do if they haven’t got a clue is immense, and even with leaders who have best intentions there’s still mistakes made, so competence is really critical and should certainly go beyond ticking a box that the panel asked the compulsory diversity and inclusion question in an interview.
What did you enjoy? Although I’ve known her through Twitter for a bit, I met Amanda properly for the first time in a session with System C, talking about outpatients. Not only did she show the depth of knowledge she’s got, but at one point she used the phrase “Like Yoda on Luke Skywalker’s back” to ask if she could join in a meeting with someone else. She said it with a completely straight face, which I reckon took some Jedi powers in itself.
It was the NGH-KGH Leadership bookclub this week — we discussed Radical Candor. Which talks about ensuring we’re caring for our teams, but at the same time are prepared to challenge them to do their best work. It’s a great little group and was an energising coversation after a hard day.
What did you achieve? Dominated this week by some work that it is not appropriate to write about now, which means everything else is taking a bit of a back seat. In the margins I prepared the draft agendas for the Group Digital Hospital Committe in May and a session we’re having as a digital leadership team on implementing the Group Digital Strategy.
What are you looking forward to next week?
- Reverse mentoring session
- First workshop to talk about a System PTL
- Board development
- Workshop talking about acknowledging results
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- Is now the time for the ‘Office of the CCIO’? — A State of the Nation Reflection on Digital Clinical Leadership by Mike Cavaye.
Books finished this week:
- Fiction: .
- Non-Fiction: An Introduction to Digital Healthcare in the NHS: Second Edition by Gary McAllister.
- Non-Fiction: Radical Candor by Kim Scott.
Currently Reading:
- Non-Fiction: Parliament: The Biography, Vol. 1 — Ancestral Voices.
- Non-Fiction: 50 People Every Christian Should Know: Learning from Spiritual Giants of the Faith by Warren W. Wiersbe
- Fiction: The Second Sleep by Robert Harris. Every time I wonder if Harris has lost his edge, he goes and writes something like this. Hooked after the first chapter.
