Day 75: Working With Stakeholders

How do you work with stakeholders?  Do you consider which to invest time and energy into?

Good conversation today about our Stakeholder Strategy and the key relationships we have with outside bodies.

This will help us to properly identify how we direct scarce resources to support the most important relationships in terms of power, influence, and interest.  We can also ensure the connections we make/have with these individuals/organisations result in meaningful engagement for both us and them. 

We need to make those with the highest interest in what we do feel valued and those with the greatest power/influence feel heard.

Day 67: What Matters To You?

All too often targets and measures of outcomes are set centrally without any engagement, consultation nor anything resembling co-production with the people that the outcomes affect.

It is critical e ask, “what matters to you?” before we make any assumptions about what we think, as professionals, is important.

It’s also important to treat patient stories and qualitative information as ‘data’.  This should not be dismissed as unscientific but should be given the value it deserves and used to drive improvement.

Central support for consistency of measurement, but locally derived standards that are meaningful to the people they affect is essential.

Day 24: User Engagement

There has been a huge amount written over the years on Ladder of Engagement, which takes you from sharing information all the way up to genuine co-production.  There is great opportunity now for a shift-change in how we partner with people to develop services that help them to meet their outcomes through excellent experiences.

We must be purposeful in our approach to this, saying, meaning, and resourcing our approaches to co-production with the people who have the greatest knowledge of what excellence looks like and what it means to have bad experience – they are the people who use our services.

Day 16: It Takes A Village To Raise A Child

Recent experience of a missing child (not my own) showed me how quickly, and unquestioningly, communities will altruistically support each other.

Can you replicate this community feel in organisations or teams?  We don’t want our teams constantly in crisis; We’ve learnt through Covid that people will go above and beyond, but crises are exhausting and while some thrive on them, others don’t.

Know each other on a more personal level to feel belonging to the community of your team.  I loved our recent MS Teams Board Christmas ‘Gathering’; even just an hour of sharing our festive traditions was really engaging.