How an Accounting Firm Convinced Its Employees They Could Change the World – Harvard Business Review

It’s a fabled story about a janitor’s exchange with President Kennedy during the early days of NASA: “What do you do?” the president supposedly asked the man with a broom during a visit to Cape Canaveral. “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”
This meeting may not have actually taken place. But there’s a good reason it’s one of the most commonly-repeated management anecdotes: it illustrates the idea that a workforce motivated by a strong sense of higher purpose is essential to engagement. This articles discusses surveys that show how employees will forego other benefits to work for an organization with an inspiring purpose.

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4 ways to get over the loss of a star employee – Chartered Management Institute
As the BBC’s Robert Peston heads over to ITV, this article takes a look at how companies can best deal with teh loss of leading staff and fill the void that is left behind.

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How I became a raising concerns champion – NHS Employers
This podcast details one person’s personal experience of what it was like to raise a concern in the NHS.

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How To Set Up A Staff Support Network – NHS Employers
This guidance is designed to help in setting up a staff support network group in your organisation. It provides ideas based on established good practice, and can be adapted to suit your organisation’s needs for non-commercial purposes. It can be adapted for any type of staff support network, and it has been developed as an example for black and minority ethnic staff networks.

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Quash Your Bad Habits by Knowing What Triggers Them – Harvard Business Review
Here’s the thing: It doesn’t take long to change a habit. But it’s hard. Really hard.  This article discusses a three step process that can help you quash bad habits.

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A Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals in 4 Steps – Harvard Business Review
Creating goals that you will actually accomplish isn’t just a matter of defining what needs doing—you also have to spell out the specifics of getting it done. By using what motivational scientists call if-then planning to express your intentions you can significantly improve your odds.
This tool will help you take advantage of how the brain works. To begin, break down your goals into concrete subgoals and detailed actions for reaching them.

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The Science of Sounding Smart – Harvard Business Review
When you’re trying to convey the quality of your mind to your boss, or to a company that’s considering you for a job, your best ally may be your own voice.
Although some people may assume that their ideas and intellect would come across much better in written form, it turns out that using your voice can make you sound smarter.

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3 Ways Managers Start Off On the Wrong Foot – Harvard Business Review
When you take your first leadership role, or find yourself at the helm of a new team, first impressions are essential to get right.  Come across the wrong way in those early days of working together, and the odds are good that you will be dealing with the negative consequences of that for a long time to come.

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Building a design-driven culture – McKinsey Insights & Publications

It’s not enough to just sell a product or service—companies must truly engage with their customers. Here’s how to embed experience design in your organization.

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Understanding power and communication relationships in health settings – British Journal of Healthcare Management

Understanding power and communication is key to any healthcare system. Political, organisational and administrative theories that ignore these two concepts are in danger of organisational failure.
The great divide between policymakers and those in the frontline of healthcare provision is well recognised in healthcare. The aim of this article is to explore and theorise the concepts of power relations and communication within the healthcare setting.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Trust Library Services on 01942 822508.

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The Triumphant Return of the Email Newsletter – Harvard Business Review
“No one cares about traffic anymore,” says Stacey Ferguson, founder of the social media community and conference Blogalicious. “Everything is so divided up — you’ve got your blog, then Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest.”
What matters instead is influence, and one way to build it is by guiding audiences through the chaos of so much content. Today’s there’s no better way to do that – and demonstrate influence — than producing an email people will actually open.

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Strong Patient-Provider Relationships Drive Healthier Outcomes – Harvard Business Review

“The proper goal for any health care delivery system is to improve the value delivered to patients … To properly manage value, both outcomes and cost must be measured at the patient level,” Harvard’s Robert Kaplan and Michael Porter tell us. But, why do we only define patient value by outcomes and cost?

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Integrating empowerment evaluation and quality improvement to achieve healthcare improvement outcomes – BMJ Quality & Safety
While the body of evidence-based healthcare interventions grows, the ability of health systems to deliver these interventions effectively and efficiently lags behind. Quality improvement approaches, such as the model for improvement, have demonstrated some success in healthcare but their impact has been lessened by implementation challenges. To help address these challenges, we describe the empowerment evaluation approach that has been developed by programme evaluators and a method for its application (Getting To Outcomes (GTO)). We then describe how GTO can be used to implement healthcare interventions. An illustrative healthcare quality improvement example that compares the model for improvement and the GTO method for reducing hospital admissions through improved diabetes care is described. We conclude with suggestions for integrating GTO and the model for improvement.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Trust Library Services on 01942 822508.

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Losing the stiff upper lip: resilience for practitioners – British Journal of Healthcare Management

This article explores resilience in the context of busy healthcare environments, and raises the question as to whether there is another way of looking at it.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call Trust Library Services on 01942 822508.

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The science of organizational transformations – McKinsey Insights & Publications

New survey results find that the most effective transformation initiatives draw upon four key actions to change mind-sets and behaviours.

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The habits of an improver: Thinking about learning for improvement in health care – The Health Foundation
Improving the quality of care services is an imperative for the NHS.  This paper offers a way of viewing the field of improvement from the perspective of the men and women who deliver and co-produce care on the ground – the improvers on whom the NHS depends. The paper describes 15 habits which such individuals regularly deploy, grouped under five broad headings:

• Learning
• Influencing
• Resilience
• Creativity
• Systems thinking

It goes on to suggest that there are certain teaching and learning methods which best develop skills and knowledge for understanding and implementing improvement.

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