The work in progress with NHS North West Leadership Academy
What if impact evaluation looked beyond the visible?
The context
The NHS North West Leadership Academy (NHS NWLA) and Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board (GM ICB) have a joint ambition to create the conditions for people, communities and leaders who experience racial inequality to progress in their careers. Yet, data suggests intervention is needed to shift system conditions to enable career progression. With commitment from organisations across Greater Manchester, the NHS NWLA and GM ICB commissioned a pilot programme to support Global Majority Heritage aspirant leaders and an evaluation to understand its impact.
The opportunity
To design a power, equity and complexity sensitive approach to impact evaluation in order to make more impact more visible ahead of future investment decisions.
The work
- identifying evaluator positionality to power and privilege
- designing power, equity and complexity aware approaches to evaluation
- emergent experience led question design
- creating spaces for connection and listening
- protecting space to listen deeply, hear lived experiences and layer data collection
- generating insights in rounds
- creating sensemaking spaces to check insights reflect lived experience
- analysis of ripple effects – from invisible inner shifts to visible system shifts
- reporting on deep impact data
- socialising insights with commissioners and senior system leaders across Greater Manchester
- transforming insights into levers for system level change
- creating the conditions for leaders to personally share their stories of change
The progress (so far)
- learning from the evaluation went on to inform national, regional and city-region leadership development offers in three key ways:
- diversity in describing leadership development enables diversity in access
- ‘development from the inside out’ enables people to work with lived experience of inequality
- centring care and healing creates the capacity for growth which has the potential to extend to the collective
- development of digital tools and resources enabling system scale action to remove barriers to progression.
One lesson for leadership
Counter to popular practice in striving for a consistent approach to leadership, this work tells us to describe leadership and leadership development differently to speak directly to different people.