Leading Together for Health

Jul 29, 2019

Jacqueline Lim, our partnerships lead, on why we need to focus on collective impact for health and wellbeing.

Health and wellbeing have been dominating the headlines. Mental health in the workplace and across wider society, the crisis around air pollution in our cities, and the devastating effects of malnutrition in regions troubled by changing climates and intensive farming are just a few of the issues we face. 

“Good health and wellbeing” is the third of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and is ambitious in its goal to: “ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages”.

Achieving SDG 3 requires us to take a connected, systems approach as:

  • Health is both symptom and cause: Many factors – from the air we breathe, the food we eat, our work environments, loneliness, even stress induced by the climate emergency – affect our health. And health in turn affects all spheres of life – our ability to access education, our livelihoods, etc.
  • Health and wellbeing is mutually reinforced across nested systems: From individuals, families, communities, businesses, economies to our biosphere, positive (and negative) actions have a reinforcing ripple effect on other systems. 
  • The potential for connected impact across varied organisations is huge: Health and wellbeing is no longer just the domain of health organisations like the WHO, the NHS, or medical companies on the frontline. Diverse organisations across sectors too are all part of the wider health and wellbeing ecosystem. There is potential for connected impact at the level of employees and others across supply chains, customers and other service users, as well as citizens in both urban and rural settings.

It also requires a collective approach to creating impact. Leaders need to “look above the parapet” of their domain expertise, their department, their organisation – even their industry and sector.  They also need to make sense of complexity from others’ perspectives. They need to imagine new possibilities and co-create an emergent future with others.

As Nesta put it at Nesta Health 2019 – The Future of People Powered Health: Reimagining Leadership:

“… It’s time to reimagine leadership in health. With the growing complex challenges we now face in health and care, top-down approaches to leadership are not enough. In fact, they are holding us back. We must be bold and innovative to expand our approach to leadership. We need to champion approaches that empower people to lead during times of uncertainty and to create a shared purpose.We need to embrace leaders from different vantage points, and approaches that bridge organisational boundaries.”

Fundamentally, we need leaders who are able to bring their real, authentic, best selves – able to step up and take responsibility for the change they wish to see – and not be limited by self-imposed barriers. This is at the core of our Open Programme at She Leads Change. 

The Collective Impact Programme – being, doing, and connecting.

In November 2019, our Collective Impact Programme will launch with the goal of deepening impact in specific thematic areas – health and wellbeing being the first. We will expand the programme focus on the “ways of being” and include the exploration of new “ways of doing”. The programme aims to develop capacities for connected, system-focused and collective leadership.

Participants will be asked to bring on board the programme a personal challenge and a professional challenge – the latter related to the theme of health and wellbeing. Following the 6-month programme, they will leave with an action plan that they can take forward as well as a whole community of other changemakers working alongside them.

An invitation to partner with us

She Leads Change is looking for other partners to join the likes of Pearson and others whose employees will be part of the first cohort of the Collective Impact programme working together and modelling the collective leadership required to create deeper, more sustained impact, in health and wellbeing.

We are also looking for individuals and organisations who would like to support us in this journey. 

If you would like to get involved, in the programme, or have ideas for future impact themes we should work on, let’s have a conversation! Get in touch with Jacqueline Lim.

Details & Apply

 

 

 

She Leads Change at Pearson Business School

Jun 10, 2019

I was invited by Rhys Marc Photis, leader of the strategy module, to introduce Pearson MBM students to She Leads Change, and to work with them on a topic relating to the self: I chose resilience.

She Leads Change was created on the premise: to lead positive change we need to first find and be our most powerful, authentic selves. Self and resilience are two concepts at the heart of our programmes. We work alongside our Open Programme participants on self – helping them open up the narratives, misperceptions or limitations we carry, alongside the strengths and capabilities we hold back. Our session on resilience, co-created by participants and facilitators, encourages participants to have the courage to live fully through being able to handle failure and related emotions of shame, vulnerability, hope, compassion and grief.

” Having looked at “Graves Value system” as part of the current module and how personality types can affect the way a team and company operates, it was good to reflect on how resilient I am as a leader. Shalini helped me to realise that having the power and confidence to know when to stop and say no is vital in effective leadership and enables me to be resilient in my everyday work.” — Matthew Evans, Senior Standards Manager at Pearson

With the students from the MA in Business & Management, I ran a session on resilience working on personal stories through an exercise of deep listening in pairs. Having got students to think deeply about their own resilience – the situation, their actions, what they learnt about themselves – we moved on to consider how knowledge of resilience qualities can help better us understand drivers and motivations and build deeper awareness of organisational styles.

She Leads Change was given as an example of a group orientated leadership and organisational style where individuals are motivated by collaboration, sharing responsibility and putting the team first.  Quite different from some of the other leadership styles in evidence all around us.

“It was a very insightful session to have Shalini in the programme. It showed me and others how important it is to be true to ourselves. The more authentic we are, the more resilient will be in this slightly mad world.” — Rhys Marc Photis, Head of Contemporary Strategy, MBM at Pearson

It was a wonderful opportunity to share some of the She Leads Change approach with business students and to co-create the session with Rhys as part of the Strategy module he leads on.

Shalini Sequeira is a facilitator on the She Leads Change Open Programme, and also a coach for She Leads Change. Outside She Leads Change she is an executive coach, working with talented BAME professionals to support them into leadership.

Our next Open Programme starts on 30th September, more information and sign-up here.