Leadership qualities framework

Now that you have a clearer picture of what is important to you in relation to being an excellent leader, we will introduce you to qualities and behaviours that you can evaluate in your daily work.

A co-produced framework

We have developed a framework to describe what we mean when we talk about leadership for personalised care. It should help you understand the qualities and behaviours that are needed – what to focus on yourself and what to encourage in others to achieve a system-wide shift toward personalised care.

The framework draws on the expertise and practical experience of our leadership for personalised care team and partners, who have been running the in-person Leadership for Empowered and Healthy Communities programme since 2013.

Crucially, it was co-produced with people who have lived experience of using services. This exemplifies the ‘nothing about us without us’ approach that is central to personalised care.

A themed approach

The framework groups leadership for personalised care qualities into four themes. Some of the qualities and behaviours may be familiar to you if have heard about systems leadership before. However, leadership for personalised care is about more than just leading across sectors and disciplines. It has co-production, person-centred approaches and community building at its core.

The themes are:

• Being
• Relating and communicating
• Leading and visioning
• Delivering

By using this tool as a way to assess your own and others’ activities you will be able to look at what is happening now and think about what you would like to do in the future. Each of the four themes contains statements to articulate what you should be seeing and doing to create the conditions for personalised care.

• The being theme is about how you show up as a leader. It’s about authenticity, resilience, flexibility and genuine commitment to change.
• The relating and communicating theme is about how you connect with others as a leader. It’s about collaboration, listening, empathy and joining the dots.
• The leading and visioning theme is about how you see the bigger picture of place and community. It’s about bringing people together, challenging established ways of working and creating momentum for change.
• The delivering theme is about your knowledge of complex systems and people. It’s about building co-production into the system, creating opportunities for others to act and galvanising them to work collaboratively to make change happen.

In the following sections of this module, we will look in more detail at how these qualities are expressed by leaders in their work and leadership. We encourage you to think about how you apply these qualities in your own work.