Sir Steve Lancashire is Chair of Forum Strategy’s National #TrustLeaders CEO network. He also provides mentoring for CEOs across our network and through the Being The CEO programme. In this month’s blog, Sir Steve shares his thoughts around sustainable improvement at scale, including the importance of what he refers to as ‘institutional memory’ in ensuring we don’t keep reinventing the wheel as a system and we continue to learn from already established practice and thinking. Steve spends some time reflecting on how the 7 pillars of improvement at scale have supported sustainable growth of trusts.
One of the outcomes of mentoring the number of CEOs and trust leaders that I do through Forum Strategy is that you get a really good insight into what is on people’s minds and what challenges and obstacles they are trying to overcome.
Sometimes this is a unique problem or set of issues that are specific to the particular CEO and trust and need a bespoke solution. Mentoring in this context usually requires a nuanced understanding of the interconnected variables at play. These variables are usually around professional relationships, culture, stakeholder dynamics, etc. Often, because of the context of those signing up for mentoring – such as through the Being The CEO programme, it is about a CEO getting to grips with the role and learning to do it more effectively. As a mentor it is hugely rewarding watching the professional and personal growth of people in this aspect.
One of the other, possibly unintended, outcomes of working with a number of CEOs is that you get a great insight into what’s on the sector’s collective mind. By this I mean the issues or challenges that many leaders are seeking to solve and are therefore ‘sector issues’ as well as trust specific issues. These show themselves to me when, in moments of reflection, the penny drops that I’m having the same conversations over and over again with many people.
So what are we all talking about right now? Well, politics obviously intervenes, and we are wondering what a new government will bring; money and resources are really tight, and many are thinking about how to balance the books; we are waiting to see how we will be held to account by Ofsted going forward and what changes, if any, Martyn Oliver and his team will introduce (worth noting anecdotally that hardly any leaders have confidence that anything meaningful will happen here); we are all dealing with what is being seen as a crisis in SEND; and on a very large percentage of people’s mind is what is happening to the MAT landscape in terms of the growth of trusts and mergers between trusts.
