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Fruitful Conversations help Macmillan Professionals increase their influence

Imagine influencing change in cancer care. What would you need to succeed?

Fruitful Conversations has been helping Macmillan Professionals increase their ability to have more productive conversations with their NHS colleagues and commissioners.

Some 4,000 clinicians, nurses and information specialists in the UK work alongside Macmillan Cancer Support to seek new ways of dealing with cancer patients to improve their care. For new ideas and projects to take hold, Macmillan Professionals must lead change in a complex and busy environment – often managing upwards and across a number of disciplines and departments. They need a range of leadership skills to engage colleagues in the idea of change and then to implement it.

They have to gain their colleagues’ attention - listening, consulting, inspiring along the way - and often must play to a colleague’s strengths and interests or demonstrate that it is small changes that will make a big difference to patients i.e, that the effort of change is outstripped by the reward.

Building productive long term working relationships is essential to even initiate some of these conversations – and certainly for innovations and ideas to root and develop.

Conversations for high stakes

These are conversations with the potential to affect patient care – so furthering the skills that allow the conversation and the relationship to continue, and to take productive rather than dead-end turns, is crucial.

Macmillan Cancer Support wanted to help professionals develop these skills by sharing ideas with each other and by understanding best practice, so Fruitful Conversations drew on studies of top leaders to design an experiential learning programme of ‘Influencing with Integrity’. Essentially this looked at the component skills and beliefs in three areas: Intention, Inspiration and Exploration.

Current challenges as well as successes were also brought to the table to give relevant meaning to new tools and exercises covering rapport and relationship and listening and language skills for clarity and progress.

Macmillan professionals have now taken away ‘considerable food for thought’ and a number of specific actions. They rated the new approaches as ‘excellent’ and ‘good’ and appreciated the opportunity for such reflection and planning.

Influencing with integrity
Conversations for high stakes
Leading change

If you or your team would like to increase your influence or to develop your own best practices in these areas, we can offer coaching, introductory workshops or programmes of development. Please email talk@fruitfulconversations.co.uk or contact Deborah Goodall for further information.

New series of Fruitful Conversations on communication and leadership launched

I am delighted to introduce the first in an occasional series of Fruitful Conversations to uncover how top leaders and communicators are successful in achieving what they set out to do. The aim is to provide insights into what works when leading and inspiring others.

Some people can stand up in front of audiences and lead them with integrity and apparent ease. What do these individuals do that makes them so good? How do they manage themselves and their communication so that others will follow? I have asked a number of these successful leaders to share what makes a difference - what beliefs, practices and view of leadership help them to be effective with people in this way?

A Fruitful Conversation with Helen Toogood of Unilever

In this first Fruitful Conversation, Helen Toogood, Vice President - New Ways of Working at Unilever IT has kindly agreed to reveal her innermost thoughts on how she uses engaging leadership to create new ways of working at Unilever IT.

When I heard Helen Toogood speak at a conference, I sat up and took notice. She was talking about embedding change in business teams at Unilever and yet here she was showing me a picture of the Queen…….

This may sound like astute attention grabbing for a dry subject but in fact it is more than that – the Queen was included because Helen thinks carefully about her audience. With the picture of the Queen, she was giving us a visually appealing and easy way into the fundamentals of her own leadership style. Through the picture her message was – ensure people know you as a brand, flag change up, keep some things comfortable and, of course, retain what’s good – hang on to the organisation’s crown jewels.

READ FURTHER:
» Download and read the full conversation here