Corporate report

UKHSA Advisory Board: leadership update

Updated 29 January 2024

Purpose of the paper

‘Leaders who excel’ is a core component of UKHSA’s people strategy and a key contributor to building a high performing agency through engaging and empowering our teams. The purpose of this paper is to update the Advisory Board on the approach UKHSA is taking to developing its leadership capability across the entire organisation. It updates on how we have used the UKHSA strategy and outcomes framework and the outputs of the Advisory Board session on leadership in 2023 to guide our work so far, and the progress we will make over 2024 as we develop and embed our plans.

Recommendations

The Advisory Board is asked to:

• note the data relating to Leadership and Line Management capability that show that additional investment in these skills is required in UKHSA
• comment on the current intervention of ‘Future Engage Deliver’, and the development of a leadership plan, leadership capability framework, and a leadership development framework
• endorse our approach, noting approval of detailed proposals and tracking of progress by People Board, assured by the People and Culture Committee, and that we return to Advisory Board in 12 months to update on the effectiveness of the interventions

Wider context

In autumn 2023, as part of an Extraordinary Advisory Board session we facilitated a discussion on leadership to help guide our approach. This session consisted of our emerging leadership strategy and ambition, an initial approach to standards and personas and the leadership journey work that had been created as part of developing our UKHSA people experience journey.

Some of the key elements of feedback coming out of the session was as follows:

• approach should be given to developing high-performing teams alongside high-performing individuals
• UKHSA currently has a high proportion of managers, and efforts should be focused on building leaders: the foundation of brilliant leaders is in the delivery of brilliant basics, for example, good line management, 1-2-1s, performance management and so on
• our leadership approach should consider the profile of our current leadership cohort and understand their current tenure, experience and skills, providing different tracks for existing and new leaders, and recognising our need for both generalists and specialists
• that we should ensure that this approach doesn’t feel top down and instead comes through strongly at all grades and across the professions
• our current challenge is exacerbated by a complicated organisational structure, with many line managers and inconsistent spans and layers, including one on one reporting, which will need to be addressed separately
• addressing this through standards and personas may work but significantly more work was required to ensure that these are relatable to the business
• emphasis should be placed on effective implementation over the designing of an overly comprehensive framework

UKHSA has recently commenced some targeted leadership development for the Executive Committee which has been focused on creating high performing teams, ways of working and leading through change and is a mixture of collective sessions and externally sourced 1-to-1 coaching. This will help us model leadership from the top and, cognisant of the wider planned work outlined below, we will be drawing the links between the 2 pieces of work to ensure that the leadership capability expectations are consistent throughout the whole organisation.

Leadership ‘bench strength’ is also an important area of focus for us as it will help us to ensure that we have the right calibre of leadership capability coming through the organisation in the future. We know that career paths are important to our people and ‘growing our own’ is something we can, and should, leverage given the specialist work we do in some areas. This, supplemented with fluid or dual careers as well as bringing in external leadership thinking will provide us with a leadership talent approach that provides us with the capability and performance we need in return for leadership opportunities and challenge for the individual.

The Board may also be interested to note that leadership features in the recently published  Civil Service People Plan 2024 to 2027 with priorities including leadership performance and reward, line manager standards, improving productivity and capability, and increasing visibility. We will link in with this work accordingly and are also actively engaged with DHSC and MHRA who are also putting in place a leadership development approach.

Leadership insights

The 2023 People Survey Results have now been released (please note these results will be discussed in greater detail with the Advisory Board at the April session). These give us some great insight into our leadership and line management within UKHSA. There are particular sections in the report on ‘Leadership and managing change’ and ‘My manager’ but it should be noted that the benefits of good leadership and line management will be felt across all themes of the survey, for example, ‘Inclusion and fair treatment’, ‘My team’, ‘Resources and workload’.

In the ‘My manager’ theme, there has been a 4% increase in UKHSA’s score from 72% to 76%, but this remains slightly behind the Civil Service average of 78%. With the greatest improvements within those scores being a 7% increase in employees receiving regular feedback on their performance, and managers helping employees understand how they contribute to UKHSA objectives, the latter is still one of our lowest scoring areas on 66%.

In the ‘Leadership and managing change’ theme, there has been a 7% increase in UKHSA’s score from 41% to 48%, but again, this is behind the Civil Service average of 52%. We have seen the greatest improvements in the questions on senior managers having clear vision for the future, undoubtedly helped by the publication of the UKHSA strategy, and the organisation keeping employees informed of changes that affect them, which have both increased by 12%. And whilst there has been a 7% improvement in our score on how change is managed in the organisation, it is still our lowest score on 28% and 6% behind the Civil Service average.

We are also able to review the survey results by slicing the data by leadership (using SCS as an indicator) in order to gain insight into what drives engagement for them and where they see improvement needed. This shows us that:

• we have significant work to do in helping leaders understand the drivers for change and their role in it evidenced by the scores for ‘I feel change is managed well in my organisation’ and ‘When changes are made in my organisation they are usually for the better’ being 33% and 49% positive respectively
• there are some positive progressions since last year with the question of ‘I believe that my organisation’s senior leaders have a clear vision for the future of my organisation’ increasing by 24% on last year to 61%
• 71% feel that they have right access to learning and development opportunities when they need them
• behaviours such as bullying and harassment are lower in the leadership cadre at 8% compared to the organisational average of 12%

In relation to leadership bench strength our first priority needs to be completing the build of our permanent leadership structure following a period of stabilising the organisation and setting its strategic direction. We have already reduced the number of SCS or equivalent posts in line with our overall workforce reduction but we still have 35 posts (26%) that are filled on a temporary basis.

We also need to mature our performance and talent processes to ensure we are differentiating on performance and identifying future leadership talent. Leadership performance and reward outcomes are shared with the People and Culture Committee and this year we will be strengthening our talent review and succession planning approach.

Early intervention: Future Engage Deliver Course

UKHSA has recently set up and commenced delivery of a leadership development course called ‘Future Engage Deliver’ (FED), originally initiated by Health Protection Operations who wanted to deliver this across all of their grade 7s and above as part of their Health Protection Ops transformation plan. Following positive feedback on the programme from Health Protection Ops we agreed to broaden this out to all members of staff at Grade 7 or equivalent and above.

This course is a one day, externally facilitated, training session which focuses on discussion and shared experiences rather than lecture style training. More information about the course is available online.

Currently 9 of 35 events have been delivered successfully, with 223 delegates already been through it, with an additional 702 booked on to events between now and end of March 2024 (and capacity for 300 more attendees). The average cost per delegate for this course is in the region of £100, and therefore represents great value for money against our learning and development spend.

Feedback from the course so far has been positive (66% exceeded expectations), with attendees particularly noting the benefit of having it delivered to groups consisting of people from across the entire organisation as it builds greater connection and understanding. Senior Civil Service attendance is actively encouraged to demonstrate senior leadership commitment to their own development.

We fully expect FED to be a core component of our leadership development offer moving forwards, as it enables us to have a consistent baseline language on leadership

Our leadership work in 2024

UKHSA has recently engaged with Ernst and Young Lane 4 to develop 3 key outputs to continue UKHSA’s leadership journey, ensuring we combine external best practice and thought leadership with our internal leadership requirements:

• an UKHSA leadership plan – as part of the People Strategy, defining the vision for Leadership in UKHSA over the next 3 years, what we hope to achieve and key components of our approach
• a leadership capability framework – a framework that sets out the core capabilities that we expect our leaders and managers to have alongside an understanding of how that applies to different cohorts of staff, for example, different grades, groups of staff like wider leadership team, technical and specialist roles and so on
• a leadership development framework – a tool that can be used by individuals and leaders to guide themselves or their teams through developmental stages, including but not limited to the formal development routes that UKHSA has specifically put in place for its staff; this will be tailored to specific audiences. This development plan will also set out the gold, silver, bronze options for delivering these interventions and an understanding of the optimum approach for delivery, for example, top-down sequence of immersion or by cohorts of potential and so on

This work will be building on the previous feedback received from the Advisory Board and as such rather than just focusing on capability from a skills sense will also be looking at building adaptability, mindset, and how this links to individuals’ leadership identity, sense of purpose and world view.

The intended outcomes of this work are to support:

• alignment across our leaders on purpose, vision, values and leadership behaviours across UKHSA
• a common language of leadership acting as a golden thread
• future fit leaders who are able to adapt to a changing context
• world class leadership across all grades and professions
• the creation of a high performance, high engagement and purpose-driven environment and culture in UKHSA
• sustainable leadership learning culture
• growing the bench strength of our leadership cohort, enabling stronger identification of future leadership talent and succession planning

As part of the initial discovery work, we will engage with profession leads, our leadership networks and will invite the Executive Committee and Advisory Board members to contribute, in addition to undertaking an organisational assessment of current leadership capabilities. This phase will take circa 4 to 6 weeks with the development of the framework a further 2 months – the outputs will be available in April 24. Communication and delivery will be throughout financial year 2024 to 2025 and beyond.

Next steps

This work will be approved, and progress tracked through the People Board and will be shared with the People and Culture Committee from an assurance perspective.

As part of the People Strategy and Leadership Frameworks we will be looking at the metrics that we propose to determine the impact of the interventions, many of these will be measured annually through the Civil Service People Survey and through our talent management processes. It is proposed that we return to the Advisory Board in 12 months-time to review the latest results and our forward plan.

Adam Hardisty

Deputy Director, People Strategy

January 2024