Cross-functional Leadership – North West Leadership Academy

This eight-week programme will introduce participants to tools for integrated or interdisciplinary work.

This programme is designed to support anyone involved in collaborative, integrated working in Health and Social care. You might be leading a multi-disciplinary team, partnering with other providers, or working across services and sectors.

The programme features four sessions hosted once a fortnight over an eight-week cycle. The sessions will focus on ideas that you can implement quickly to help with breaking down complex problems, effective planning and communication across siloes, and making use of different kinds of evidence and expertise.

In the intervening weeks, you will work to apply what you have learned with support from a self-paced learning platform. Videos, recaps, and activities will help you to move from understanding a concept or tool to putting it into practice and getting feedback. The programme is designed for a time commitment of 2 hours per week.

Programme Overview

Session 1 – Talking with experts: Using what others know

Integrated working beings together people with a range of extensive knowledge, skills and experience: different forms of expertise.

This session will introduce tools to:

Diagnose the kinds of problems you are working on and how different kinds of expertise can help you

Understand the level of understanding you need to have about the expertise of others in your teams, organisations or systems

Communicate more effectively as a leader working with different kinds of experts and helping those experts work together.

Session 2 – Beyond what works: Using a range of evidence

There are well-established ways to integrate certain kinds of evidence, such as randomised controlled trials about tried-and-tested interventions. In the context of complex challenges, uncertainty, or crisis, however, we often do not have the luxury of this kind of evidence.

This session introduces ways to access other forms of evidence, going beyond the ideas of ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’, to more deeply understand different data sources and what they can tell us.

Session 3 – Seeing the wood and the trees: From insights to big picture

Leaders can integrate perspective by working to both ‘see the big picture’ and have an eye for the important details: being able to ‘zoom in and zoom out’ on what is happening and what is needed.

This sessions introduces tools for working with abstraction and complexity to help to connect a birds-eye vision or strategy to more concrete details and evidence of change.

Session 4 – More than words: Communicating effectively across health and social care

Working across teams, organisations or systems requires new ways to communicate about what we are doing that will make sense in different roles, contexts, and specialisms. The work we are trying to talk about and carry out can be very complex.

This session demonstrates how different kinds of maps, metaphors and models can be used to help in this work and explain some of the principles of what makes a good representation or analogy.

If you are interested in the programme and would like to find out when the next dates are available please register your interest with our team.