The NHS Leadership Academy was moved to NHS England/NHS Improvement in April 2019. This was to align it more directly in support of the leadership initiatives set out in the NHS Long Term Plan
Most leadership development has been postponed over the course of the COVID pandemic.
Prior to these recent changes, the NHS Leadership Academy developed the NHS Leadership Model and accompanying online self assessment test.
To be able to take the test, it is necessary to register. My Academy ID (AID) number is 1000278428
The test is taken online. There are nine dimensions in the leadership model. Each is assigned an identifying colour. For each dimension you need to rate yourself as one of five proficiency levels
- I – Insufficient
- E – Essential
- P – Proficient
- S – Strong
- X – Exemplary
A second strand is to rate how essential the leadership dimension is to your job role. The processed output is emailed in a 25 page Adobe pdf document
There is also an additional section which applies if you line manage any staff. This section applied to me. There are three statements for each dimension and you are asked to score on a six point agree-disagree scale. The focus is on how well you feel your team feels supported and enabled in each of the 27 aspects
The results are presented in a series of charts. The first is the following radar plot showing the self rating for each dimension:
The same data is also presented as a kind of hybrid table/bar chart. This time the 'how important is it' measure is paired with the self-rating
This summary suffers a little from having five graduations in one measure compared with four in the other. But it does allow some sense of prioritising
The same data is presented again in a kind .of heat map plot showing three types of 'heat':
This chart looks quite 'scientific' until you realise that it is really just a 5 x 4 grid. Most of my scores sit in the 'balanced zone'
The scores are then presented again as a table showing the scores you give for the two ratings for each of the nine dimensions
Next, in my report, is the summary of impact scores. I have limited the screenshot below to the first six statements (covering two of the nine dimensions). It is really just a simple table
The remainder of the pdf document is largely space for you to write on reflections and personal development plan actions.
So how useful is this tool?
Overall, it uses the nine-dimension NHS Leadership model (for which further material exits). So part of the answer to 'how useful is it' depends on the extent to which you buy into the model. Nine is quite a lot of dimensions. It introduces a question of how well balanced all the elements and statements are across both the model and the assessment. There is a bit of a control on this in that you are asked to rate the importance of each dimension to your job role. So there is a kind of self-weighting.
Unlike quite a lot of assessment tools with online renderings (Honey and Mumford, Enneagram, Myers-Briggs etc) there is no complex algorithm behind the scenes, The tool simply presents back to you your own ratings. It does this through a slightly repetitious set of neat, alternative renderings in tables and charts. But you could easily set up the same scores in Excel and produce similar, and better, summary tables and charts.
The whole thing is dependent on how you perceive and score yourself. So it exists largely within one side of the Johari window. It may be influenced by your mood and level of self-confidence at the time you take the test. I will be interested to see how it looks if I retake the test in a few weeks time
There is a logical progression into a '360 degree' feedback exercise in which you would ask people who work with you how they rate you along all the same strands of the same nine dimensions. This excursion into another part of the Johari window might produce some surprises. But to be honest, reflecting even for a short while on the incongruity between my own self-ratings gives plenty of areas to work on. Basically my somewhat strident starting point - yes, I'm quite good at that' would sit awkwardly with 'how would they see me'
Edgar Bolton.
31/03/2021
Any views expressed above are purely mine and should not be mistaken for those of any organisations or individuals I have been associated with
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