Healthy leadership - executive coaching at The Whittington
David Sloman is currently Chief Executive of The Whittington, an award-winning hospital located between Archway and Highgate in North London. The Whittington Hospital has 470 beds and employs over 2,000 staff. The hospital was included in The Times Top 50 places where women want to work. It was the only NHS institution and one of only six public sector businesses to make the list.
Choosing a coach
Six years ago, while working as Chief Executive of a Primary Care Trust, David was given four sessions with a coach. By the end of the sessions he realised that, in the demanding environment of senior NHS leadership, carving out a regular space for reflection could be invaluable and he decided to find his own coach.
Charles Brook is Managing Director of The Performance Coach, a boutique coaching firm that helps leaders and organisations reach states of high performance. David met with Charles following a high personal recommendation from a colleague whose judgment he respected. He was impressed by Charles’s performance-centred attitude to coaching, and engaged him as a coach on an ongoing basis.
The Coaching Relationship
Before the coaching began, David still hadn’t made up his mind. He likens the situation of starting to work with a new coach to speed dating, where you’ve spent “a great three minutes” with someone but aren’t sure how the relationship will unfold. In the end, he needn’t have worried. The coaching relationship developed so successfully that David and Charles have now been working together for a full six years. As a signal of the success of the coaching, David points out that no matter how large his workload, no matter how much pressure he is under, he always keeps his coaching appointments in his diary. This is despite the fact that 1:1 coaching appointments are “the easiest thing in the world to strike out of your diary when time is at a premium.”
Success factors
Over the six years, David has been through highs and lows in his job but has looked on the coaching as an anchor. What would he credit as the four factors which have made the coaching relationship with Charles so successful?
1. A high level of challenge
One of the biggest difficulties within any long-term coaching relationship is not to sink into comfortable complacency. Throughout their time together, David and Charles have kept the level of challenge high. Though there are times when the coaching has a relatively loose structure, allowing David to dump the issues running through his head, more often the coaching is structured. David and Charles will talk before the session, giving Charles a chance to plan rigorous sessions that are full of challenge. Knowing each other so well, Charles also quickly senses when David is not performing to his best and can ask him the tough questions such as “are these actions really aligned with your values?”
2. Taking a holistic approach
One of the things which David most appreciates is Charles’s holistic approach to performance. The Performance Coach knows that life outside the office can undermine performance just as much as work problems themselves. For David, a useful aspect of the coaching has been that Charles has taken care to question all the aspects of his life, for example “we might have had an in-depth conversation about some professional strategic complex issue and at the end he’ll say ‘how is the exercise going?’”
3. Finding creative solutions
Planning coaching sessions in advance allows The Performance Coach to keep the coaching creative. An example of this came when David knew that, as part of his job, he would have to work very closely with another Chief Executive. Charles stepped outside the box and undertook a joint piece of work that allowed the two leaders to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and what behaviours they tended to exhibit when under pressure. As their joint project progressed, operating with a deeper knowledge of their respective motivations allowed the Chief Executives to work as a far more effective unit.
4. Getting out what you put in
David believes in the power of coaching, saying “Being a CEO in the NHS is a privilege, but it can be tough and lonely at the top. And carving out a space to reflect and be challenged on your performance is something that everybody who does my type of job would benefit from.
However, he is adamant that coaching is not the easy option. For a start it costs time - one of any Chief Executive’s most precious commodities. Secondly, it can be difficult. Conversations are often challenging and can be intellectually and emotionally uncomfortable. However, it is clear that you get out what you put in - if coaching never hurts it’s simply not working! Indeed, David’s commitment to coaching is so high that he recently completed his own Diploma in Coaching as part of a drive to understand the coaching he uses with his direct reports and build upon his own toolbox of leadership techniques.
Next steps
It is perhaps a testament to the success of David’s commitment to improving his own performance that his career continues to rise – he has just accepted the offer to become Chief Executive of the Royal Free, a larger hospital in nearby Hampstead. This will be the third job transition that he has gone through during the course of his coaching. He and Charles have already spent three hours talking through the new leadership challenges he will face and putting in place strategies to meet them. Once in post he plans to continue working with Charles, saying coaching is invaluable to him because “I always leave my sessions in a better place and I firmly believe that it is essential that the Chief Executive of any organisation is always mentally strong and mentally fresh.”
“What I like about The Performance Coach is that they commit to you. I know that Charles is actively listening. I know that he cares about his clients. I know that he hasn’t lost his appetite, nor his motivation, nor his interest.” - David Sloman, Chief Executive, The Whittington Hospital.