Helen Buckingham

When I took the plunge into a freelance life five months ago, I was fairly sure I had a lot to offer people and organisations, but I was less sure what they would actually want from me. Finding out has been a fascinating learning experience.

I have been fortunate to have been commissioned to lead or support a great range of projects in the last few months, from the very high profile lessons learned report for the Royal College of Physicians, through supporting NHS and independent sector organisations to review their governance arrangements, to one-off sessions facilitating discussion in groups of senior leaders. Some policy work too, with the excellent team at PPL, where I have worked on better understanding neighbourhood working (watch out for that report next week), and supporting London ICSs in the development of integrated neighbourhood teams.

The common theme I’ve found across all these projects is the relationship betwen good governance, good leadership and good partnership working, especially when times are tough.

Good governance is essentially about ensuring that individuals and organisations are taking the best decisions they can, based on the best evidence available, and that there is clarity of accountability and responsibility for taking and acting on those decisions. It’s also about getting the right balance of assurance on the present and planning for the future.

Good leadership is about creating that future vision for an organisation, and creating the conditions to enable that vision to be achieved. That includes ensuring that people have the skills, support and space they need to deliver, that there’s a credible and appropriately resourced plan, and a sensible approach to managing risks along the way. The vision will encompass the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ – what measurable goal do we want to achieve, what steps will be needed to get there, and what culture do we want to create for our staff and the people who use our services?

Good partnership working is about developing mutual understanding between people and organisations on what’s important to each other and the context in which each is operating – vision and goals, governance requirements, external environments, freedoms and constraints. And then working together to establish what kind of partnership arrangement will best enable each organisation to achieve their goals.

When organisations have good governance, good leadership and good partnership working in place, then individuals working in those organisations are able to see a clear purpose in their work, they understand what is expected of them, and the boundaries and autonomy they have to work within, and they understand how to get the best from their relationships with peers in other organisations – and indeed with the people and communities they are serving – to achieve mutual success.

So much is self-evident, and who wouldn’t aspire to this? But so few organisations can really say they’ve cracked it. So what gets in the way? I can’t promise to have all the answers, but here are a few things I have learned over the last 5 months and indeed the last 30 years!

It’s easy for governance to become focused on the process and not the purpose – to ‘tick the box’ but miss the point. Something I used to say back when I was leading system working was that we needed to be clear, collectively, on the principles we were working to as a system, because there might come a time when we would need to bend one of those principles, and it would be important to understand (a) that we were doing that and (b) why, on this occasion, it was right that we should. There are times when slavish adherence to process can damage relationships and slow down decision-making, leading to poorer outcomes. That doesn’t mean throw caution to the winds! Accountability remains fundamental. But good governance people are often very good at finding safe and pragmatic solutions – and at being clear on where the red lines are.

Leaders need egos. But egos can get in the way. There was something of a fashion, a year or two ago, for job adverts for senior roles to say that they were looking for a person who could ‘suspend their ego’. That always worried me a bit. I want leaders to have an appropriate degree of self-confidence, to believe in themselves and their capabilities. But I also want them to respect the capabilities and perspectives of others. Good leadership is a team sport, and that applies not just to the leadership team within an organisation, but also to leadership across a system.

Partnership doesn’t require a common goal, though it may be enhanced by one. It does require an appreciation and respect for each other’s goals. The quality of a partnership can also be measured by what partners say about each other when they’re not in the room. Good partnership isn’t easy – ask any long-married couple – and as in our personal lives, some partnerships fail. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying. It does mean that we need to make an honest assessment of what went wrong, and what the learning is for ourselves – because without doubt there will be learning for both parties.

I could go on, and no doubt there will be future blogs with more reflections. But for now I will draw to a close here. It’s been a privilege for me to be invited in to work with the organisations and leaders I have over the last few months, and those I will be working with in the coming months. Although I come with an awful lot of experience, which gives me expertise in this space, I can’t promise to have a ready-made set of answers every time – and I shouldn’t, because the answers you need to find will depend on where you are. What I can promise to do is to help you find the answers you need.