Appreciative-Leadership

Chapter 2
The Leadership Story: Thinking Differently about Leadership, Appreciative Organisation, Appreciative Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry
My Story: Appreciative Approach
Professor Heather Tierney-Moore, CEO of Lancashire Care
Foundation Trust
Adopting an Appreciative Leadership Approach to Whole System Change
My interest and awareness of Appreciative Leadership and Inquiry started when I was working in Scotland. I was
the Director of Nursing at NHS Lothian, recruited to provide strong professional leadership across nursing and
allied health professions, with the overall aim of strengthening the quality and governance of services. At this time,
Napier University was also exploring the landscape of nursing and the links to compassion, quality of care and
nurse engagement.
Our starting point wasn’t about “Nurses aren’t trained properly” or that “The clinical context could do more to get
the best out of nurses”. There was simply a sense of us struggling with the general issue of standards of care and
a strong desire to do something to make the system work better.
As a result of a series of conversations and negotiations, we established a joint Centre for Leadership in
Compassionate Care. The Centre was supported by a generous benefactor who donated a million pounds over
three years to fund the work. What we developed was a series of pieces of work, to review the undergraduate
curriculum and determine how compassion could be built into it all the way through as a theme. Our belief was that
you couldn’t teach individuals to become nurses and then state “Now have some more care and compassion” at
the end of their training.
We looked for areas within the Health Board, wards or teams where we could see and report on real instances
of nurses demonstrating compassion. These became our “Beacon Wards”. We wanted to study them in terms of
understanding what it was that they did that contributed to their ability to deliver compassionate care. We developed
some other work themes around supporting newly qualified practitioners to sustain their values and compassion
into practice, regardless of where they might be working. We were very concerned that we might instil all the right
values in an individual, but if this newly qualified person then started working in an area that didn’t share those
values, the individual may not have confidence to practice those values on his or her own.
Thirdly, we identified another theme of work, which focused on supporting staff nurses who wanted to undertake
improvement projects to improve the care in their teams.
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