Weeknote: 3 to 7 February 2025

I received some anonymous feedback

A colleague is apparently quite cross with me for a number of reasons, but one of them I need to address here. My anonymous colleague writes on my feedback form:

What should Matt stop doing?
Self-glorifying. He doesnt seem to actually DELIVER much, just talks about what other people do (and would still deliver without him)

Guilty as charged. In these weeknotes I do spend a lot of time talking about what other people do, and I make no apologies for that. What our teams achieve every day, against the odds in the new NHS England, is amazing, and deserves to be talked about more, not less.

It also made me reflect that some of the leaders I have admired most in my career didn’t seem to be doing much either. My anonymous critic is right that I don’t personally deliver much, but I hope I do help in some small way to create the space and hold the boundaries for others to deliver in difficult circumstances.

I take great satisfaction from seeing others do their best work. If you read anything here that looks like me trying to take the credit for what others do, well that’s my clumsy phrasing, and I am sorry.

What else was hard?

In conversation with a senior colleague in another directorate, I was shocked at how little involvement she had in an important piece of work directly affecting her portfolio. At times like this a culture of internal secrecy seems incredibly counterproductive. I used to put this down to a lack of shared collaboration tools following our merger, but in fairness to my IT colleagues the tools are mostly fixed now. Maybe the default to developing ideas and advice in tiny silos remains a hangover from a time when collaboration was technically harder. Whatever the cause, the behaviour is not normal and it has to change.

What did I enjoy?

A hectic week, but one in which we made progress on a number of fronts, including collaborating at pace with operations colleagues on plans for the coming 12 months. There will be difficult choices to make, but I can see some options emerging more clearly now.

A catch-up with a colleague who has recently moved to an important new role in the NHS in Wales. The health service there is devolved, so we have a different relationship than with services in England, but there’s still lots we can collaborate on.

Seeing some sterling examples of leadership from middle and senior managers in dealing with impending organisation change. We cannot afford to slow down delivery, even though we’re all now carrying an extra overhead of uncertainty.

What do I need to take care of?

There’s a convergence of decisions about budgets and priorities as we barrel towards the new financial year starting in April. As I said in last week’s note, conversations about money are really conversations about people. What should we do differently for patients, families, and frontline staff? And what role should my NHS England colleagues play in that? I need to keep people’s priorities front of mind and make sure we use our limited resources accordingly.