Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
CoCreate partnered with Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LYPFT) to strengthen and connect leadership at both executive and collective levels. Through two parallel programmes, we helped leaders build psychological safety, align around a shared vision, and develop the trust, self-awareness and confidence needed to tackle complex challenges and improve care.
Challenge
LYPFT provide mental health and learning disability services across Leeds and York.
They have built a community of around 80 committed leaders through work with internationally renowned Professor of Management Jody Hoffer Gittell and her Theory of Relational Coordination. Progress overall has been positive, although the scores for ‘shared problem solving’ continue to lag behind.
The context in which we operate is challenging, complex and uncertain and we wanted to better support and equip our leadership community to not only manage through the change but to ensure we thrive as an organisation and build on the progress we have made so far to improve our services year on year.
Dr Sara Munro, Chief Executive Officer, LYPFT
Programme
CoCreate partnered with the Trust to develop two parallel programmes – one for the Executive Team and one for the Collective Leadership Forum. While distinct, it was important to keep the two connected, ensuring that executive learning fed directly into the wider collective leadership development.
We began with a masterclass on building psychological safety, challenging the Executive Team to engage openly and model the behaviours they wanted to see across the system. From there, we introduced key frameworks such as the Three Horizons to help leaders align on a shared future vision, identify common challenges, and make progress on priority conversations.
The Executive Team played an active role in facilitating these discussions within the Forum, stepping into a more collaborative and enabling role. We also used the iEQ9 Enneagram with the Executive Team to accelerate self-awareness, deepen trust, and improve the quality and effectiveness of robust conversations on complex, ‘wicked’ issues.
Impact
Feedback has been incredibly positive and the application of the different models is already evident in the day-to-day business of the organisation, informing our short-term and long-term plans to deliver better care within our resources. People are feeling a greater sense of control and influence over the future and recognising the value of having different mindsets and how we should use them/each other in a more purposeful way.
Dr Sara Munro, Chief Executive Officer, LYPFT
- 100% of respondents rated the exploration of the Three Horizons ‘Voices’ or Mindsets as ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’
- 91% of respondents rated the Three Horizons Dilemmas process to be ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’
- 82% agreed these workshops provided a useful framework for tackling complex issues
- LYPFT have reported significant improvements in communication scores across the leadership community
Client experience
The expertise and experience offered by CoCreate matched what we needed – building on psychological safety – which is already well socialised in the Trust – helping shift our mindsets from only focusing on surviving today to seeing the longer-term opportunities and understanding what gets in the way that we can do something about. Recognising the space for innovation and how we support this is hard to keep hold of when under pressure with the demands of managing for today.
Dr Sara Munro, Chief Executive Officer, LYPFT
External facilitation has been invaluable to create a trusted space for senior leaders. The style and tone of the workshops has been positive, engaging and challenging too, which is what we need. The combination of using frameworks such as Three Horizons and dilemmas framework applied to the current areas of work people are dealing with is bringing a change in focus. This has been enhanced I believe by running alongside this wider programme a targeted development programme for the executive team – similarly shifting our mindset and enabling the executive team to interact differently with our senior leaders.
