Values and impact: inspiring in uncertain times | Mr Simon Gillespie
Summary
This on-demand teaching session will feature three inspirational speakers and offer relevant insights for medical professionals. Simon Gillespie, a strategic advisor, will discuss how leaders can balance the short-term crisis management with planning for long term goals, Linda Orr, an internationally renowned scientist and professor, will speak about the development and implementation of new medical treatments, and Professor Mark Taylor will highlight the importance of collective leadership in healthcare. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear each speakers unique perspective and experience, as well as the chance to ask questions and engage in meaningful dialogue.
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Learning objectives
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the importance of structure and flexibility in exercising effective leadership
- Appreciate the role of stewardship in effective leadership
- Learn how to prioritize long-term objectives within daily activities
- Develop communication skills that are supportive of others -Grasp the importance of assessing and adapting to challenging circumstances.
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The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.
Well, good afternoon everybody. We hope you had a nice lunch and ready to hear some fantastic talks in our plenary session. Inspiring leadership. We have a brilliant lineup of speakers for you today and uh it is my pleasure to introduce them. In turn first, we have Simond Gillespie. It's a strategic advisor, Nonexecutive chair and board member with extensive international and national experience is currently Chair of Trustees of the Florence Nightingale Foundation, a specialist adviser on non communicable diseases to the World Health Organization. A strategic advisor marks off U K, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Strategy resilience and Strategy at UCL and a special inspector with Cheshire Police. Simul was formerly a highly respected and politically astute chief executive and senior executive with significant experience in high profile charities, charity and health regulation and the Royal Navy and recognized as UK CEO of the year in 2018 and 2019. He is an adaptable dynamic, strong empowering leader and agent for change delivered delivery focused with entrepreneurial approach. He is clear thinking strategist, an excellent communicator. Simond was awarded an O B in June 2019 for services to patient's and to medical research. Please give him a warm hand. Thank you. Okay. Um Next, I'd like to introduce Colonel Professor Linda or she was educated in Northern Ireland and Bristol University. And uh and an international squash career was put aside for academic studies and chemistry and then later medicine, later professor or completed a doctorate in Raman spectroscopy. And she continues to deliver a strong clinical portfolio in 2020 work done by Linda's team advancing the management of acoustic trauma was awarded the Cutler's Prize. She was awarded, oh be in 2021 was a finalist in the Women and Defense Awards and appointed a UK defense professor of surgery. Recently professor or has extended her work to be more closely involved supporting the World College of Surgeons of England Research Program as a surgical research adviser. So I'd like to welcome Colonel Professor Linda or yeah. Okay. And our final guest today is Professor Mark Taylor. Professor is a consultant HPB surgeon at the Matter Hospital, Belfast Health and Social Care Trust. He trained in Belfast and at the regional HPB and transplant unit in Edinburgh. His doctorate in philosophy was in pathophysiology of Obstructive jaundice. He is the president of G B I Hepatite Pancreatobiliary Association Association, President elect of the Pancreatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, lead for education research and training for the Association of Upper G Eye Surgeons and on the medical advisory board of bowel cancer UK. In 2016. He was appointed by the health Minister to an independent expert panel tasked with reconfiguration of health and social care in Northern Ireland. In 2017, he was appointed to the transformation implementation group TYG Department of Health. In 2018, he was appointed the Director of Professional Affairs Northern Ireland for the College of Surgeons of England. He has published extensively in the field of hepatobiliary surgery. He is passionate about innovation, change and collective leadership within the H S C N I. Please give him a warm hand. Thank you so much. We now invite our first speaker, Simon's to provide a fantastic talk. Thank you very much pressure there then. Is there a fantastic talk? And I was billed as an excellent communicator. Um You can make your own minds up about that after the end of my session. Um I've asked are co chairs because I can't see a clock here just to give me some idea of when I'm beginning to outstay my welcome and over, over on my time. So if you see them gesticulating behind them, please draw my attention to it. Um I'm Simon's Gillespie and it's a very great pleasure to be here this afternoon. Um It's also a great privilege and an opportunity for me as I suspect one of very few non clinicians and certainly non surgeons in the room to say, thank you to all of you for the work that you do on a day to day basis. You will know how much your individual patient's appreciate it. But I want you to know how much we as a society, appreciate your work as well. So, thank you all very much. Indeed. I'm going to run through a little bit of my career and just pull out some snippets for you. And there's an opportunity for questions at the end of all three of the presentations. Um, I started my working life joining the Royal Navy and I was a ship driver by trade. Um I navigated three ships. I was a warfare officer in two and I was a captain of one as well. And I left the Royal Navy after 23 years service. It was a privilege to me to serve in the navy. I really enjoyed my time and some of the key learnings for me were not just about the importance of structure because structure is important, but also the importance about flexibility and listening into some of the talks this morning. One of the key points that came out to me was how as a profession, how as individuals, we can all learn and be flexible about our approach is because the situation that confronts you is very often not the one that you've seen online or in training or read about in a book if such things exist anymore. One of the things I thought was most important from the navy was using the structure actually to engage and involve people you can be a very didactic, very directive leader and you will get a time to peak, which is often very short, but the effect will often be very short lived. One of the things that we all need to do in our leadership roles, the roles that you're in at the moment, the roles that you will have in the future. But about how you can balance the need to make an impact early in particular circumstances, to avert a crisis or deal with the crisis with the need to build for the future so that everyone around including yourself can learn from that experience. One of the key things about that and it was a lesson that came out later on in my career as well, was about making sure you focus on the important thing or things. When I left the Navy, I worked in the Charity Commission and then the Healthcare Commission. And then I spent two jobs as chief executive in the charity sector, the Multiple Sclerosis Society and then the health uh then the British Heart Foundation at the M S Society. We had a series of issues about a very fragmented organization that seem to be wanting to fight itself all the time. Some of you might recognize some of these descriptions from departments you are currently working or have worked in in the past. One of the things that my very excellent chair of trustees said to me then and one that I've learned from and focus on now. I am myself a chair of trustees of a charity is his words to me, which were, what on earth is any of this doing for people with M S? He actually said it's sometimes a little bit more strongly than that when we were sort of in a room together or over a beer or two. But the most important thing to come out of that was an important focus that gets you through the short term crises and helps you build for a future that in your case is looking to the best interests of both current patient's but future patient's as well. And for us getting through that was to have a remorseless sharp focus on the needs and interests of the 120 130,000 or so people across the UK who have multiple sclerosis. That was a really, really important lesson because we can all of us, whatever our backgrounds, wherever our skill sets get tied into the minutiae a of the day to day, we can always have something that's really got to be fixed right now. How you fix that needs to be tempered by where you want an organization to be a department to be where yourself, you want to be in the next five years or the next 10 years. And one of the things that I was really important lesson for me is the role of stewardship in leadership. We can all be that totemic leader. Come on, follow me over the top. If nobody follows you, even out of curiosity, then you're not a leader. If you can bring people with you, focusing on what is really important, a shared sense of value that you're adding to society in this case and two individuals as well, then you have the ability to make decisions in the short term that will help you focus on that. Again, we've seen organizations, some of them in the healthcare sector where that sense of priority of that medium to long term goal and ambition has been lost in the froth of the day today. And that can cost people's lives. And we've seen some of the issues that have risen, for example, around maternity services across the UK but other examples as well where a focus on some form of dispute, what's going on, it's not really focusing on it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, ends up with people being harmed. Nobody. When you ask them as an individual will want that to happen, everyone will say we're acting in the best interest. But most important actually is to really identify as a group, what those best interests are and what those longer term goals and ambitions need to be. And that to me speaks to the values that we all share as leaders about being authentic, about being honest about being engaging. And one of the reasons why we're all here actually, because your leadership journey never ends is about learning how we all learn from each other. You have specific skills that I can only dream of. You have a technical knowledge that I could never aspire to, that gives you an authority. But with that authority also comes a responsibility to engage the wider team around you to make sure that they are brought into the picture and that actually you listen to them as well because they will be experts in their own field. Now, I know that many of you will all already do this and you've seen great examples of it. But it's one of those things that sometimes forgotten leadership is in my view, a far more democratic process than you might expect to come from somebody who used to be in the armed forces. It is that quality that we all bring and play a part in. And I'll give you one example going back to my time in the navy about how that can work out in practice. When I was a warfare officer. I was in a ship sailing from Gibraltar on the way out to the Gulf. I won't go into the technical details, but one of our junior Stokers, about 20 years old was on his rounds and discovered smoke coming from a piece of machinery. He did all of the right things that his training taught him to do the mechanical things. If you like, he got a fire extinguisher. Shouted fire, fire, fire, all of the rest of those things. But the spark and I used that term advisedly that he brought to that situation was the leadership he then gave in dealing with it. He took charge of often much more senior people who were running into the situation as well, telling them what to do, sorting it out. He knew what needed to be done as a result of which that incident was contained with very, very minor damage. But he didn't sit back and say my job is done. What he did was to make sure that the outcome that was required that fire being put out was achieved. And that was somebody who wasn't the brightest individual in the world. And in fact, it was probably a little less bright at one stage because he did get smacked around the head with a fire extinguisher as part of this um feet of bravery. Um But what he did do was bring leadership to a situation that he saw ahead of him. He knew what outcome he wanted to achieve and he got people on board with achieving it. Now, one of the things I think we face in the uncertain times, we have almost interesting times is about how we can bring people back together, how we can reconnect. We are dribbling towards the end of COVID. We see the impact of COVID, I think probably beginning to come through now and what it's meant to our society in another role that I have as a volunteer police officer. I see a generation of people who I suppose have lost some of their sense of values of how to interact with other people. People become maybe more angry as a result of being isolated and locked down. And that will take some time to work through. We see it in waiting lists increasing and uh and also we see it in the pressure that you and your colleagues in the health service are under. What that means for us in practice is not uh it's an opportunity actually for all of us in this room to take a role in what that future looks like. Now, I'm not going to go into huge detail about what I think that might be at the moment, but really to identify some of the challenges that we need to share together. And a few of them will mention in this morning sessions from speakers on this very stage. One of which is about sustainability and sustainability comes in. All sorts of guys is all sorts of fashions. There's the technical issue of of a carbon neutral, carbon zero health service, but there are also other issues about sustainability in terms of us as a workforce, how we sustain ourselves and how we build better for the future. There are big issues coming up about the sustainability financially of the health service against uh what would argue a stagnation or potential long term decline in the UK economy. And how do we deal with those pressures as professionals and as leaders? But there's also a challenge for us, I think in the final challenge, which is about how we build forward as individuals in an era where as we've seen from some of this morning sessions, the impact of A I machine learning, deep learning techniques of having such an impact on the world and your work. How do we reshape ourselves and refashion ourselves as individuals, as teams and as professionals and as a profession itself to make up, meet up to those challenges in the future. And for me, that is based on our ability to learn and adapt. One of the things that I have found as a transition from a military career into almost as long out of the armed forces now as I was in was the, it was the need to see things from other people's perspectives, but also we're appropriate to be firm. So what I'm not suggesting is that we have some of sort of amorphous mass. What I am suggesting is that we gather together to focus on the important outcomes of patient's and for society and build together, recognizing the abilities, strength and indeed weaknesses that we have at our fellow, our colleagues have as well. It's been my privilege and I think we should all regard leadership positions as a privilege. It's been my privilege to be in a leadership position and positions during my career, I would again focus on the view of stewardship of that leadership that you leave an organization, a team of department in a better state as a result of you being in it than when you arrived. And as a chief executive of an organization that has been a prime focus for me as well, dealing with the short term is very important, but a long term goal for me however long I have had in that organization is that people at the end of it say actually, that's better now than it was before and do that in a way that gives true credit and acknowledgement to those people that have being part of that journey as well. The totemic leader who is there shouting, follow me is not the one that will succeed in the longer term. The leader that will succeed in the longer term is the person who listens who engages, who respects can put in their own strength of views and do that in a way which engages with people and takes people along with them on a journey and appreciate sometimes when you may need to compromise yourself, not on your standards, not in your values, but on the how a particular outcome might be achieved. Now, I haven't heard anyone or seen anyone gesticulating over my shoulder at the moment. But what I'd like to do is leave you with the thought that is a very old one. It's a Socratic thought, which is that the unexamined life is not worth living. And I say I'm still engaged in leadership roles, but I look back over the last 43 46 years. Sorry, my arithmetic. 40 46 years. What has served me well, is that ability to reflect? And sometimes you learn some hard lessons, but they're always worth learning. Thank you very much. I know.