The customisable and user-friendly mye-coach system enables NHS Leadership Academy to assist clinicians to grow their leadership capacity
NHS Leadership Academy’s purpose is to work with its partners to deliver excellent leadership across the NHS giving a direct impact on patient care. Its philosophy states that ‘great leadership development improves leadership behaviours and skills’. Better leadership leads to better patient care, experience and outcomes. The Academy offers a range of tools, models, programmes and expertise to support individuals, organisations and local partners to develop its leaders, celebrating and sharing where outstanding leadership has made a real difference.
Mye-coach team supported the increase of engagement for NHS professionals undertaking coaching relationships.
John Hunter, currently the Career Development Support and Progression Manager at NHS Leadership Academy, explained that during his previous role as Development Manager at NHS Leadership Academy Northeast and Yorkshire, he faced the challenge of increasing engagement, mye-coach, the online coaching and mentoring management system developed by Coaching Focus was the tool at his disposal. Initially, over 3 years ago, the mye-coach system was not used to its full capacity. Thus, John’s challenge was to find a way to grow the numbers of coaches registered on the system and increase uptake across the local member organisations.
Free professional development to train and register new coaches onto mye-coach led to increased coaching relationships and time saved on administration.
Through offering free continued professional development (CPD) opportunities for coaches, John worked with local NHS organisations to help them develop the skills and experience of coaches. In exchange, he registered them in the mye-coach system and over time, these organisations converted to the mye-coach system rather than manually managing their coaching relationships. Through mye-coach, they were able to run reports; see how many coaching relationships they had at any one time; how many hours were being spent on coaching; log coaching interactions, as well as provide a forum for open discussion.
Through publicising the ability for coachees to connect straight away with coaches by simply registering on mye-coach, John was able to provide exactly what local NHS organisation staff were looking for; an easy way of matching coaches and coachees, enabling the user to have total control and choice over the process. This reduced the necessity for staff to dedicate time to administer these relationships.
“They can go onto mye-coach, run the report and find out how many of their coaches are busy and which have spare capacity. It saved their time, and many of them in some of the really big NHS organisations came across to using mye-coach.”
When John left NHS Leadership Academy Northeast and Yorkshire to join the national NHS Leadership Academy, there were between 250-350 coaches registered in the mye-coach system and 550 coachees, with approximately 30% in active relationships on the system. NHS Leadership Academy Northeast and Yorkshire continues to use the mye-coach system to manage its coaching relationships.
Positive experience with Coaching Focus at a regional level paving the way to a national expansion across the NHS
John’s current role as the Career Support and Progression Manager at the national NHS Leadership Academy exists as the result of an identified need for more clinicians to sit on boards in NHS organisations. “We’ve found there is a correlation between clinicians at board level, and overall performance of the organisation…if you’ve got more clinicians on the board, the organisation does better”. One of the key steps identified to achieve this was to offer coaching to clinicians who were thinking about leadership positions.
John is currently attempting to manage over 60 coaches and up to 100 coachees through an excel spreadsheet which is proving inefficient and cumbersome. Due to his successful experience with mye-coach at the NHS Leadership Academy Northeast and Yorkshire, he has decided Coaching Focus will play a key role in moving forward at the national level.
“mye-coach will become the coaching register for the career development work I’m doing. From early 2021 I’ll start to use mye-coach as the single coaching register for our national coaching function on career coaching”. He estimates over the next calendar year he will be growing the number of coachees on mye-coach up to 500, and the number of coaches to 180. This will free his time up to help coaches and coachees rather than doing administration.
“What I’m hoping to see particularly is shifts in how many clinicians make up NHS board level positions. I want to see the level of clinical personnel on NHS boards increase by 25% at least.”
Client: NHS Leadership Academy
Challenge: NHS professionals interested in seeking coaching relationships were unaware of the mye-coach system available to them
Solution: Free professional development to train and register new coaches onto mye-coach led to increased coaching relationships and time saved on administration
Result: Positive experience with Coaching Focus at a regional level paving the way to a national expansion across the NHS
About Coaching Focus Ltd.
Coaching Focus partners with organisations to create sustainable, performance-focused coaching cultures.
They offer ILM Coaching and Mentoring courses for senior managers or HR/LD professionals who want to develop their expertise, Manager as Coach skills programmes, and other courses, to UK companies like Tesco and BSI Group.