Weeknotes w.c. 22nd January

So didn’t quite manage to post these by the end of working week again! Although I did scribble down key points in a notepad, so at least I was able to extract things from my head prior to the weekend 😊

What’s happened this week?

It’s been a busy week in more ways than one. Lots of travel and face to face stuff which was both energising as well as draining (I am an inner introvert at heart!) – plus jumping around between quite different pieces of work.

This I visited one of our clinics I’ve been doing a bit of work with at Farnham Road hospitals which was great – it was lovely to meet the clinical team and walk through the current processes. I have come home with a stack of paperwork (plain copies I’ll add!) which we’ve actually already built into our Electronic Patient Record. For whatever reason we haven’t however changed the process of how we complete that paperwork in real time digitally. This definitely highlights where the development of a product alone is insufficient without the right learning and adoption support – and willingness to change things from the way they were always done. Benefits realisation is one thing I want us to get a bit stronger at and this has made me reflect we also need to get better at building in check ins to find out how products are being used after launch (I’m sure a lot of our teams already do this, so I’ll be doing some digging to find out the history on this one! Although the team are really pleased with the work digital did to date…. So understanding this gap of changing practice is going to be interesting!).

Working with my education colleagues, we have planned a digital literacy workshop for next week which will allow us to both develop a questionnaire alongside a process (which will need joint ownership from education, HR, digital and others) to be a success. I have my post its and magic paper ready! What this will allow us to do is measure where people are at before they join us and start to then develop the offers they need to do their job. This is a good cohort to start with as it’s discreet and will provide some learning into the wider organisation. It’s important to remember we may need to iterate and try different things, but it will be a great starting point to get something in place.

Skills Development Network world has needed a bit of attention this week. Hopefully people have seen the comms now that our Co-Chair Kevin has made the tough decision to step down so we have had to fully throw ourselves into recruiting a new co-chair ready for some of the work the SDN will be tasked with over the next year or so. As part of this we have also got momentum on our steering group away day and it’ll be fab to bring together the different voices across the South East – representative of different ICS’s and professional groups – to develop the strategy for the next 3-5 years (exact timeframe to be confirmed).

Finally, as a Digital Leadership Team we had an away day focused on Clifton Strengths. It was the first time (in my memory) we have come together and done a focused piece of OD work which allowed us to explore each other as individuals and reflect on the team. We were hosted by Ian from Kingfisher coaching who has previously worked with many of the team. One of the activities we had to do was to share which of our strengths we like, which frustrated us, and then invite the rest of the team to share what ‘strength envy’ they had of us!

For my strengths I picked ideation as the one I love. For years I thought my brain was just noisy and messy – but actually I’ve realised I see the world in a different way and am able to connect things in a way which others cannot. I have learnt to move away from feeling like I am a nuisance to sharing helpful insight. The challenge of course is to not take on the responsibility of actioning all those connections, but I will keep learning! For frustration I went for my activator/restorative (which are my top two) and ultimately can sometimes make me my own worse enemy. I just get things done, I often take on too many things, I say yes to everything. It’s not sustainable and I know it’s something I have to work on! (the flip side is, it does get things done, and I know that’s really valued and important!). In terms of strength envy I then got some beautiful feedback from colleagues which in honesty made me very emotional and something I don’t think I’d realised is I do draw on strengths like command (which isn’t always perceived well for a woman!) – yet I do things in a way which is very sensitive with the person always at the heart of what I do / how I say things / how I enact. That’s something I will explore more and it cements that I need to trust my intuition. It was likewise great to feedback to colleagues things about them I had strength envy for – and reflecting we often see ourselves differently! It was a really emotional exercise – and likewise a great way at showing appreciation without it being really tacky and forced.

I also met up with the lovely Antonia Brown for dinner who is CNIO at a neighbouring community trust. It was the most fantastic session and just affirmed to me how important peer support is both within and outside of your own organisation. It’s a really tricky time to be doing stuff like this, as I’m fully aware that the optics do not work in our favour. But I would argue we cannot make it a race to the bottom and what this allows us to do as individuals and a digital leadership team is to better support each other as we navigate the choppy waters of an NHS in financial recovery! If anything I think we should be doing more of this kind of stuff to support anyone in a leadership role, department lead or managerial role – because we need to support our staff in the current environment.

What Excited me?

Probably three things?

1 – The connectedness we made as a digital leadership team by going through the exercises above. It felt really special and timely as we, like pretty much every NHS trust at the moment, tries to navigate the current financial pressures. I am feeling more hopeful about how we can pull together and use our individual and collective strengths much better.

2- When other people can see the value and difference that doing digital well can bring. In the clinic example above, the icing on the cake was when the [AD] for the service started talking about this piece of work and how the clinical lead was working with us [digital]. I think working in digital it is very easy to be quickly pointed at when things go wrong, but the recognition can be a bit harder. So this was a real win for me (and genuinely why I come to work every day).

3- The recruiting of our Digital Skills Development Network Co-Chair has given myself and the team an opportunity to reflect on roles, responsibilities and expectations going forwards which is really helpful (in fact, all teams should probably do this on occasion!). This will help to get the most of out the co-chairs time (again, recognising organisational pressures in our day jobs) as well as reflect a bit more on our governance and the work we take on. Reflecting on my current exploration of ‘actual versus perceived responsibility’ this is a really interesting one. I do feel personally responsible for the South East Digital SDN – and I need to unpick that because it’s not healthy for me to have that expectation on my shoulders. So I’m feeling really optimistic about the future and I feel lucky to work with such a fab SDN team on the network!

Then to a slightly different angle, it’s been a bit of a strange one personally as all the constant build up to Christmas and then birthdays was suddenly over. I felt quite lost last weekend! I need to be mindful to not either (a) suddenly drop off a cliff or (b) ramp straight up back up to 100mph! Linking back to some of the therapy I’m trying to also be quite mindful of letting myself be bored and not filling up all of that time with work or something because of the need to constantly feel like I’m doing something. I guess in a way it’s exciting that I’m learning so much about myself at the moment, some of this years overdue, and I think it’s going to be a huge benefit in both my professional and personal life.

Reflecting on Strengths

So the eagle-eyed of you may have noticed I have renamed this section which was previously what would I do differently? I’ve decided to refocus it to reflecting on my strengths as this enables me to think positively and reframe ‘do it differently’ from sounding like a negative to how do I lean into the strengths of both myself and others around me for whatever the task at hand is.

It’s quite an interesting week because I’ve actually drawn on my activator/restorative strengths loads, which I’ve said can frustrate me because I do too much! But actually a lot of the work I’ve focused on will make my life easier in the long run. I say easier, there will always be something else that comes up! But it will allow me to better focus on where I can add the most value.

I’m slowly realising as well, organisation isn’t my best strength. I actually hate it. I find it overwhelming, exhausting, probably over complicate things a lot of the time! But I then over-compensate for it (perhaps because of the anxiety I’m not sure?) and as a result appear on the surface to be incredibly organised!

What am I looking forward to?

I’m really excited about facilitating the practical digital literacy workshop outlined above and look forward to seeing how far we get with our outcomes on the day. In my personal life, I am seeing the Lion King musical in London which I am so excited about! I will be the one sobbing through about 50% of the performance again I suspect!

Over and out for today 😊

Weeknotes w.c. 8th Jan / 15th Jan

So another slightly jumbled edition of weeknotes but with good reason I hope! As I get back into the swing of a more normal routine I will revisit the format which was working for me previously 😊

My main reason for not doing my weeknotes last week is that the weekend just gone, we hosted a party for nearly 30 kids for my daughters 7^th birthday. It was lovely (she has such lovely friends both from her new school and old ones – which means my friends too!). But it’s just been non stop since Christmas as there was no gap between putting the Christmas decorations away to running around decorating cupcakes, filling party bags and chasing up RSVPs!

It’s safe to say headspace became a bit limited. The flipside is I should really be doing this as part of my working week because the reflections make me better at my job, it’s part of my professional and personal development, but it’s just been busy……

So a couple of updates?

Rest/Wellbeing

I don’t feel like I’ve had a break really. The lead up to Christmas was exhausting, and while I had 9 days (I think?) solid off and did switch off from work, it was all Christmas and then birthday! Then straight back into quite a lot of busy asks. I sat down last night and have tried to carve out some protected time in my diary so I can slow down a bit and have a bit of thinking time to work on the more strategic pieces I have on at the moment. I’ve also booked a couple of days just for myself (yay!) after the next half term. The flipside of all this is I can get grumpy, irritable, takes things more personally than usual, it’s not good for my anxiety. Taking breaks from work is so important – and feeling rested is necessary.

360 Feedback and Mentoring

I mentioned in my last blog (and probably several in 2023!) about coming to a bit of crossroads and not really knowing what I want to do next. Although actually in quite a lucky way because I think I have several paths. I feel like 2024 is going to be a bit bumpy so I’ve taken the approach what are the things I can control and work on about myself during that period and understand where I need and want to grow.

There are two things I am doing in particular to focus on ‘the self’ in a work sense – in addition to the therapy I have been undertaken. I met with Debbie Loke earlier this week as part of the new Digital Health mentors programme. Really excited to be a part of this programme and I know there is alongside it a bit focus on how we support the next generation of women coming into these roles. I look forward to working with Debbie and the rest of our group (in fact I was reflecting on my old grad-scheme buddy Erith the other day on the power of action learning and group work, actually we do so little of that if it’s not proactively led by someone or a programme – there’s so much more we could do in every day life. Of course the programme and discussions itself will be confidential but I’m sure I will share some of my personal learning and reflections as we proceed.

The other thing I did was go through my 360 assessment as part of the NHS Leadership dimensions. It was fascinating and actually very timely as it compliments some of the things I am exploring in my therapy at the moment. In a space where I don’t probably get as much feedback as I need it was reassuring to see on paper those views from others around me and it’s no secret that I struggle with feeling valued (although I know it is in the large, an irrational feeling). Likewise, the facilitation call afterwards was incredibly valuable and I got to unpick some really important areas. If it sounds like I’m just focusing on the negatives I’m not – it’s just I think they are the more interesting areas of growth to write about.

One of the biggest things I need to reflect on is the impact of the really high standards I hold myself against, and the impact that may have on others which I hadn’t really considered before. This naturally made me quite sad. I think in some cases people who know me quite well, and know I struggle with anxiety etc hopefully are used to me but for those who perhaps don’t know me as well, or we haven’t established some of those explicit working relationships with, it could be detrimental to.

The second key area is around delegation. I’m fairly happy delegating transactional and simple things but then the bigger more complicated things I do struggle with – and I think there are a number of reasons here which I am exploring……

• Finding the balance of getting involved enough to pass it on. I know this is partly experience and practice but it just is something I find difficult. Sometimes it’s because the bits of work I get involved with often involve numerous parts of digital so it’s not always straightforward. The more and more I work with teams and individuals this becomes easier of course and this will also help tremendously with my role in supporting the Digital, Data and Tech profession! Also a lot of the work I do is just generally quite messy because I am going to cut through the noise and find out what the problem is – so I will try to give myself a bit more credit. I also probably need to get more comfortable with the fact I won’t always see the result, and actually a lot of the time the end result will be quite different to the one I perhaps envisaged (which is a good thing, as it means it has evolved).

• An additional complication to the above is I don’t have direct hierarchical influence over many people – it’s all influence, team work and negotiation. Which actually I’m fairly good at, but sometimes the “easier” thing is to just try and do it yourself! I hope that by not spreading myself so thin in the future, I can focus more on the depth of those relationships especially the more regular ones and give myself time to breathe in between things so can consider whether I’m giving people enough support to get the best out of them to do the work. I’ve said people to quite a few people I just felt like an absolute pain in the arse to most people in digital for at least my first year! Building those relationships to navigate the asks is something really powerful – and not to be underestimated.

• I struggle to process things sometimes. This isn’t something we explicitly spoke about but I know I can sometimes get brain fog, or quite literally just NOT GET something someone else is telling me because I simply need space and time to process it on my own. This is probably infuriating to those on the other side as well! But I don’t think this helps and I probably need to unpick how I process the work other people have done in a way which is meaningful. If this sounds a bit vague it’s because it is 🙂

• One of the biggest, if not the biggest thing for me – as I don’t like to over burden people. It probably links a bit into the above but I worry about others workloads. Actually I need to take a step back sometimes and remember people are adults and they (hopefully!) know they can ask for support and help if they need it, rather than the other way round. I don’t want to change this part of me, I think being an empath is a massive part of my leadership style and strengths- but I cannot shoulder all of that responsibility for others.

A big big theme in the above is how I do enough, and it being enough, and having the faith that it is good enough! Also that step into leadership roles has to be – and I know this – doing less of the work myself and guiding and coaching others into doing the work and finding their own path. I find this really hard…. but hopefully acknowledging it and knowing it is something to work on is the first step! I also know I can do it – because sometimes I do! So perhaps I need to reflect on why I might be more comfortable in some situations over others. Finally – the thing I am currently exploring in therapy is actual versus perceived responsibility which again I think is a helpful cross cutting theme across all of this.

Why I do my job! Tangible change for our clinical services

So this blog has already become fairly long so I think I’ll go into the detail of this next time, but I’ve had two fantastic pieces of work with two different services this week about how we can make things better for them. Benefits include better data reporting and integrity, a reduction in paper and manual processes, and future proofing.

With both services, working with multiple experts accross digital, we were able to identify some quick wins now (quite simply training issues to use our EPR in different way) – alongside some longer term opportunities which I’m in the process of writing up with the relevant clinical leads and pitching to our programme teams to get into our development backlogs.

I quite literally ended a call by saying “I love this – this is why I do my job and this is why I come to work”. I hope that for both pieces we do some quite robust work around benefits because I think that is something we need to do a bit better, but ultimately everything we do working in digital should be to make that experience better for our staff and ultimately lead to better outcomes for the people who use our services. It’s been a good anchor in a tricky few months!