“A warm welcome to all our readers – we are now in month 8 of our Clinical Education Improvement Projects #SE_CEIF Blog

I will be reflecting on the fellowships shared progress, learning and challenges from our respective projects and provide insight into my individual project, ‘Enhancing Transition to Midwifery Leadership’- Band 6-7 Midwifery Leadership Development Framework.

This month, the sun was shining for our group supervision day kindly hosted at The Royal College of Nursing Headquarters and facilitated by Professor Christopher R. Burton and Rebecca Tyrrell (NHS SE Regional Head of Allied Health Professions). To kickstart the day we each provided feedback on our project milestones and potential feed forward themes, it is incredibly uplifting to hear the phenomenal progress my fellowship colleagues are making with their respective projects.

Rebecca Tyrrell facilitated a session on Systems Leadership, exploring how to navigate working within complex systems. The use of Metaphors in the context of systems leadership is something in particular that resonated with me. For example, the visualisation of a system working in partnership using the metaphor of a Musical Orchestra- A conductor’s purpose is to bring a Unified Vision to a piece of music, working with an orchestra to bring that vision alive. If the conductor were to strengthen one section of the orchestra, for example the string section, this would overpower an individual musician perhaps the pianist. If we relate this metaphor to systems, neighbourhoods, or organisations, those that have the ability to inspire a compelling shared purpose promote a shared sense of collaboration not competition. Fellows suggested the use of other Metaphors such as planting a tree, building a house or baking a cake.

We also discussed Marshall Ganz (2007) Public Narrative Model of leadership, using personal values to leadership practice to motivate others into action through storytelling.  Ganz’s approach to storytelling has three key elements; the story of self (sharing own values), the story of us (connecting personal values with those of stakeholders) and the story of now (the need to create a sense of urgency for change along with a sense of hope). We had the opportunity to discuss and reflect how this model can support our own project stories to build strong interprofessional connections to an audience.  

All fellows have made significant project progress and have reached the stage where we are starting to think about implementation and fellowship outputs. My project focus is ‘Enhancing Transition to Midwifery Leadership’ with the development of a specific Band 6-7 Midwifery Development Framework. Following a consultation exercise, stakeholder engagement and interview’s themes were identified to produce my framework, this is presented and designed as a SIX pillar framework, encompassing identified themes from National Drivers.