Comment / Going for gold

By Sue Jacques

In a big year for the NHS, finance professionals need to harness the available support and hone their performance

It’s less than 100 days before the start of London 2012. The country’s hopes and expectations will then rest with our finest athletes, who, after years of hard work and planning, are in the final stages of their preparation with their aims firmly fixed on gold.

Since the games’ origins, back in ancient Greece, sport has become more and more scientifically based with some of our more prestigious universities offering degrees in subjects such as sports medicine and sports psychology. Today’s sports men and women are surrounded by teams of highly qualified professionals honing every imaginable aspect of their performance in an attempt to guarantee success.

So what’s this got to do with NHS finance? The NHS is facing some of the most challenging years since its inception and we are the NHS equivalent of our Olympians, responsible for steering our organisations successfully through 2012 and ensuring that NHS services become both more efficient and effective.

And like our athletes, it is important that in optimising our own performance we secure the support of others. Often an aspect of this support will come in the form of mentoring or coaching. Feedback on and insight into our own performance is critical to our personal development and it is essential that we don’t allow this important activity to be crowded out by our busy day-to-day working lives.

Research by Professor Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe provides well-established confirmation that leadership attention needs to focus on being authentic, honest and open, showing genuine concern and encouraging high levels of social support in our teams.

It also reaffirms that for us to motivate and engage our people we must be clear about expectations and make progress together.

But whether we subscribe to this or some other management research, failing to seek independent feedback on our own performance will only limit our development and performance. There are many sources of feedback: we can ask trusted colleagues for their views via 360-degree assessments or take our team’s ‘temperature’ to understand the climate that we are creating, to name but two.

The HFMA also supports us in this field through its mentoring scheme. Whether you are wishing to become a mentor yourself or to benefit from the professional  mentoring the HFMA offers you can do so free of charge (see page 28 for details of the association’s ‘Making a difference’ programme).

Like our Olympic athletes, I am confident that in 2012, by committing to improve our own performance through the structured use of feedback, we can exceed expectations in all that we deliver. And in doing so, we too can be faster, higher and stronger.

To demonstrate our authenticity and encourage high levels of social support in our teams it is critical that we work well with our clinical colleagues. In fact, one of my earlier columns focused on the importance of clinical engagement. Saturday 12 May is Nurse’s Day and nurses are the largest single professional group in the NHS. So help them to celebrate and send those you work with a card, email or text on that day, acknowledging how great they are – I bet they’ll be delighted.