Leadership Listens – Introduction to the Compassionate Leadership miniseries
Leadership Listens is a series of curated podcasts for leaders in health and care. This mini-series of podcasts, as part of the Leadership Listens series, is all about compassionate leadership and is a collection of conversations between Professor Michael West and leaders from across the health and care sector.
It’s based around Michael’s latest book – Compassionate Leadership: Sustaining Wisdom, Humanity and Presence in Health and Social Care published in 2021 by Swirling Leaf Press.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Leadership Listens, curated podcasts for leaders in health and care.
My name is Paul O’Neill, Head of Strategy, Research and Development at the NHS Leadership Academy, part of the people directorate of NHS England and Improvement.
This mini series of podcasts as part of Leadership Listens is a series all about compassionate leadership and is a collection of conversations between professor Michael West and leaders from across the health and care sector.
Michael is Senior Visiting Fellow at the King’s Fund, London, Professor of Organisational Psychology at Lancaster University, Visiting Professor at University College, Dublin, and the Emeritus Professor at Aston university.
His work has a strong focus on healthcare; looking at teamworking, innovation, culture and more recently, compassionate leadership. He has some 20 books and 200 scientific articles to his name and as a fellow, many international learned societies. He has a long history of advising on policy and practice in health and care services.
Michael led at the independent inquiry on behalf of the UK General Medical Council, into the mental health and wellbeing of doctors in 2019, (‘Caring for doctors, caring for patients’) and the 2020 review commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing Foundation into the mental health and wellbeing of nurses and midwives.
He was appointed a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honors list in 2020, for services to compassion and innovation in healthcare. His latest book on, which these podcasts are based, is ‘Compassionate leadership, sustaining wisdom, humanity and presence in health and social care’ published in 2021 by Swirling Leaf Press.
These conversations were recorded at the beginning of 2022, as the country and the NHS, were beginning to emerge from the worst aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and setting a path for recovery. There are conversations between Michael and a variety of clinicians, leaders and citizens who reflect on different aspects of the role of compassion in care and treatment, of self-compassion, of compassion in teams, organisations and systems and its criticality and providing high quality, continually improving, health and care services.
Other episodes cover compassion and inclusion, leadership development and education about compassion and some of the myths surrounding compassionate leadership being a ‘soft option’ and it’s true place in not only creating a culture of kindness and consideration but as the very best way of delivering high quality clinical treatments with good outcomes, strong financial performance and person centered care.
I hope you enjoy the miniseries. Listen to all seven episodes, if you can and look out for other podcasts in the Leadership Listens series for more content like this.