Leadership Mentoring Programme

NHS England

NHS England oversees the delivery of healthcare services in England, ensuring high-quality care and improving health outcomes for all citizens.

Overview

We collaborated with NHS England to deliver a leadership mentoring programme aimed at addressing workforce inequalities, supporting career progression, and fostering compassionate leadership. This initiative was designed to meet the objectives of the NHS People Plan, which prioritises creating a diverse and inclusive leadership pipeline, improving staff engagement, and building resilient, high-performing teams. The programme equipped leaders with the tools to address critical challenges such as resource constraints, team cohesion, and embedding psychological safety.

Approach

The programme was designed using IDC’s habit formation model, which focuses on embedding sustainable leadership behaviours through habit-centric learning. The comprehensive programme combined mentoring, coaching, and workshops to ensure practical application and sustainability of learning.

Our approach began with in-depth consultations with NHS stakeholders to align the programme with organisational goals, such as increasing leadership diversity and addressing workforce inequalities. The design emphasised balancing theoretical insights with actionable practices, ensuring participants could immediately apply their learning. Key components included:

Mentoring sessions: Group and one-to-one mentoring helped participants supported leaders to develop reflective practices, enhance decision-making, and create inclusive team environments. NHS-specific challenges, such as managing under financial constraints and addressing health inequalities, were central to the sessions.
Executive coaching: one-to-one coaching sessions offered participants specific strategies to strengthen emotional intelligence, enhance communication, and address individual leadership challenges.
Interactive workshops: workshops were designed in collaboration with NHS England’s team and delivered by two of our Leadership Psychologists. These workshops devolved into detail on topics, including compassionate leadership, fostering psychological safety, and managing diverse teams. After these sessions, participants were given NHS specific scenarios (designed for each group of roles e.g. nurses, Doctors) to provide worked examples that participants could then put theory into practice.
Habit tracking for behaviour change: Participants committed to habits such as active listening, providing regular feedback, and collaborative goal-setting. These habits were tracked over six weeks using IDC’s HabiTrack™ tool, supported by feedback from managers and peers.
Reflection sessions: Small group discussions of 12 were designed and all participants attended one of these sessions, which provide them with an opportunity to evaluate their progress, share challenges, and refine their leadership practices, ensuring sustainability of behaviour change.

IDC evaluation model

The programme’s success was measured using IDC’s five-stage evaluation model:

1. Knowledge acquisition: Post-session surveys showed an 97% increase in participants’ understanding of compassionate leadership and reflective practices.
2. Application of learning: Reflection data revealed 78% of participants consistently applied new leadership practices, improving team cohesion.
3. Behaviour change: HabiTrack™ data indicated that 80% of participants embedded habits such as active listening and proactive feedback into their routines.
4. Culture and organisational change: HR data highlighted a 15% improvement in staff engagement and retention metrics, demonstrating cultural impact.

Impact

The programme delivered measurable outcomes, 12 months following the programme, that met with the original objectives of the project and NHS England’s strategic objectives:

Leadership diversity: 23% of participants advanced into senior roles within a year, strengthening the leadership pipeline.
Team cohesion: teams led by participants reported a 15% improvement in collaboration and engagement.
Retention and satisfaction: a 10% increase in staff satisfaction and retention reflected enhanced psychological safety and trust.

Behavioural change highlights

Participants embedded habits such as reflective leadership, inclusive decision making and collaborative goal-setting into their routines, driving sustained improvements in team dynamics. These changes aligned with NHS England’s priorities, fostering resilience, trust, and inclusivity in leadership.

Comprehensive and effective programme

High satisfaction rates

Testimonials:

“Thank you please continue to run and offer this out to others for personal development, and growth and to better those conversations and strengths needed to make HEE the best place to work”