Leadership and Leadership Development in Health Care: The Evidence Base
The King's Fund, Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management (FMLM) and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)
The key challenge facing all NHS organisations is to nurture cultures that ensure the delivery of continuously improving high quality, safe and compassionate healthcare. Leadership is the most influential factor in shaping organisational culture and so ensuring the necessary leadership behaviours, strategies and qualities are developed is fundamental. What do we really know about leadership of health services?
The Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management (FMLM), The King’s Fund and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) share a commitment to evidence-based approaches to developing leadership and collectively initiated a review of the evidence by a team including clinicians, managers, psychologists, practitioners and project managers. This document summarises the evidence emerging from that review.
The summary describes key messages from the review in relation to leadership at different levels of analysis: it includes a description of the leadership task and the most effective leadership behaviours at individual, team, board and national levels.