Facilitating leaders to create workplaces where healthcare staff want to work: evaluating a leadership development program.

Introduction: In today's climate of increasing health and social care needs and a declining workforce, most organisations and leaders are not only looking for strategies to recruit new staff but also ways of retaining the staff already in service. Retention, with its multiple factors and no single solution, is a wicked problem. Of the multiple factors influencing staff intent to stay, leadership and culture are two major areas where a significant impact can be made. Front-line leaders are in an ideal position for cultivating workplaces where staff want to work. Methods: As part of a two-nation project exploring the impact of various interventions on staff retention, we developed and evaluated a leadership development programme for front-line leaders in health and social care. Two cohorts followed a 12 month programme inspired by the co-operative inquiry process and adult, person-centred and transformative learning. Participants were facilitated in moving through continuous cycles of: identifying individual or group action, executing and observing the impact of their actions, sharing their observations and reflecting on the meaning of the observations for leadership intended to encourage staff retention. They creatively expressed their development narrative at the end of the programme. Results: In this paper we share the participant faction (one fictive narrative based on fourteen participant narratives). The narrative reveals how participants started with feelings of fumbling around in darkness but then discovering one's own (and others') colour as conscious attentiveness to the ways they were leading grew. Alongside finding the authentic self, participants came to the realization that you don't have to travel alone and that using critical thinking and creativity they dared surf the dynamic waves of current health and social care oceans. Discussion: We conclude that leadership development programmes based on adult, transformative and person-centred learning theory creates a learning climate and culture that enables front-line leaders to start to consciously cultivate workplaces where staff want to stay.