Staff from Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust are celebrating after completing the organisations engaging leaders development programme.

The leadership programme, mainly aimed at team leaders and above, has successfully run over a six month period and covered a number of areas including: self as an engaging leader; systems leadership; maintaining health, wellbeing and resilience in challenging times, and inspiring and engaging teams.

Course participants have credited the programme with helping them enhance and develop their leadership skills. Feedback includes “I have found the programme really helpful. It has helped me think about my own weaknesses in leadership and has made me change my behaviour towards people.”

Another participant added: “I have found the programme useful and have used this in my work already. It has made me aware of my tendencies to be goal orientated and made me think about how I engage people and think about them as a person before moving to objectives.”

The programme initially came out of research done by Bradford University and the Real World Group that looked at the impact of leadership and team working on staff morale, wellbeing and team performance. The aim of the engaging leaders is to build leadership capability and help leaders engage, lead and manage confidently in a complex environment.

Ruth Shaw, Leadership and Organisational Development Manager at Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We first launched the initiative in 2014 and this is our fourth successful programme. It’s great to have such a committed group of staff who want to make positive change and develop their leadership skills and behaviours further.”

Engaging leaders is one of a number of development programmes the Trust runs to develop and grow its staff to make sure that they’re supported and enabled to work at the highest standard, no matter what level or what their career aspirations are.

For further information on the Trust’s staff development programmes visit www.bdct.nhs.uk/working-for-us/working-for-us/staff-development-programmes/