About Leading Sheffield

Leading Sheffield flyer (pdf, 1.40MB)

Overview of Leading Sheffield

Leading Sheffield is a leadership development experience that offers some tools and techniques for adapting to and applying system leadership. Leading Sheffield gives the opportunity to work with colleagues from other organisations through addressing a specific challenge affecting the people in their community. These challenges develop relationships and agree ways of working across the partners of the HCP and other relevant organisations e.g. policing and education.

The aims of Leading Sheffield are to:

  • Disrupt leadership thinking: facilitate the disruption in the thinking of Sheffield’s leaders to propagate and nurture different approaches to learning.
  • Open up our doors and share the challenge: to ensure wider collaborative working, we need to get to know each other, understand the challenges we all face and appreciate the value that everyone brings.
  • Empower leaders at all levels: to ’empower leaders at all levels’ we introduce a wide range of analytical tools and techniques to embed service improvement, staff engagement and operational design approaches.

The focus of Leading Sheffield is on how participants work with colleagues to explore how they can enact change in an ambiguous, complex, continually changing environment to Meet_Think_Lead together. Whilst this is challenging, it gives a great insight into working and influencing across a system.

Challenge Groups

Each Leading Sheffield cohort is split into Challenge Groups containing 8-10 participants from across Sheffield’s Health and Social Care System. The aims of the Challenge Groups are to:

  • Develop system leadership capability through practical experience
  • Raise shared awareness of the role and valuable contribution of all organisations involved in health and social care
  • Develop relationships between different teams operating in the same geographical areas
  • Create transformational change in working practices in neighbourhoods to impact positively on patient/service user experience
  • Change behaviours and working practices and maximise all opportunities for preventing the prevalence of identified health conditions.

Each Challenge Group is specifically asked to identify a health challenge that is important to their Primary Care Network (PCN). Considering their chosen health challenge, participants are asked to address the following:

How will you, as a group, agree to work differently together, and influence others in the neighbourhood (or more widely) to work differently to:

  1. Improve patient/service user support, experience and outcomes
  2. Reduce the prevalence of this health condition in this PCN?

Each Challenge Group is allocated a Coach, who will work with all members to ensure that there is regular reflection around system leadership throughout the process.

Impact of Leading Sheffield

Case studies to read showcasing the impact of Leading Sheffield from previous participants.

Insights taken from Leading Sheffield Cohort 1 participants: 1. Decision influencer 2. Confidence 3. Challenging relationships 4. Reflection 5. Be less processed focussed 6. Understanding how I fit in the whole of Sheffield & how I can influence 7. Patient and public involvement 8. Forget organisational barriers 9. Challenging systems 10. Active listening 11. Cultural understanding 12. Be bold about networking 13. Influencing relationships 14. Everyone's opinion is valuable 15. Understanding where others are coming from makes a big difference in communicating.
Insights taken from Leading Sheffield Cohort 1 participants
Insights taken from Cohort 2: 1. Link with the voluntary sector 2. Confidence to ask questions across organisations 3. Communication across organisations 4. Importance of building trust 5. Developing networks 6. Working across the health and care system to address health challenges 7. Recognition of how behaviours can influence each other 8. Patient and public involvement 9. Overview of the health and care system
Insights taken from Leading Sheffield Cohort 2 participants
Quotes taken from Leading Sheffield participants six months after completing the programme under the programme aims: 1. Disruption of leadership thinking - "Learned how to work alongside others and hear people well"; "I've been doing conscious things to help connect the system together, which has been really valuable and I can see it benefitting the system, which has helped motivate me as well" 2. Open up our doors and share the challenge "It's about the process, not about the outcome. It's about how we get people from different areas to collectively look at a problem and work together in a different way to find ways around it", "I didn't understand the role of the advocacy service or the voluntary sector, and were using them a lot more now. We're trying to utilise them for signposting patients, relatives and families to the right service" 3. Explore leaders at all levels - "I have taken a lot of value from the work on coaching and the wicked problems approach; when playing to people's strength in a team it eases the responsibility on you, and it empowers the team" "It's about giving you the confidence to walk into a room with a load of strangers, not knowing whether you've got the skills to contribute, but actually listening and thinking 'I've got loads I can contribute here, don't worry about it'
Quotes taken from Leading Sheffield participants 6 months after completing the programme.

Leading Sheffield Alumni – Tom Holdsworth

Leading Sheffield Cohort 2019 Alumni Tom Holdsworth, GP and Clinical Director for Townships 1 Network explaining: Why did you take part in the Leading Sheffield experience? How did you find it compared to a traditional leadership programme? What have you taken from the experience?

Page last reviewed: 21/12/2023