Govconnect spoke to Lorraine Flower, Managing Director of azzur in advance of the conference, about the Health in All Policies initiative and how azzur hopes to help organisations develop an approach to HiAP.
Lorraine brings 20 years service industry experience to bear alongside 20 years as anorganisational consultant. Her senior leadership roles at BA and GNER are powerfulguide points for today's work: developing contemporary, spirited leadership capability,and organisations built on inspiring purpose, vision and values.
azzur works with leaders and with the organisation as a whole. Our focus is to help leaders explore how they and their organisation can become even more effective. Often this means we are supporting them through cultural, behavioural and organisational change.
Our core purpose as an organisation is to help ‘conscious leaders create the newera of work for the greater good and we do this because we believe that greatleaders and great organisations can and will change our world for good.
A key element of HiAP is creating structural or procedural changes that support the consideration of health and health equity in decision-making processes across policy areas. How can azzur assist organisations build the right structures and processes needed for long-term and sustainable impact?
We support workforce and cultural development helping organisations to embed new practices and mind-sets across the organisation. This could include amongst other things an audit of and plan for strategic and grass roots internal communication, a review of cultural norms and/or values audits (to understand what drives the current mind-set/behaviours andwhat needs to change to drive a new mind-set/behaviours), development of the organisational narrative that supports a focus on health/health equity in all aspects of organisational life, a review of enablers and blockers plus, if needed, a depth review of existing systems and processes.
The key here is to review and understand all of the organisational levers within constituencies and across multiple constituencies/the system that need adjusting to shift the mind-sets and behaviours of all colleagues – from the most junior to the mostsenior.
Embedding HiAP requires staff across the council to understand the relationship between policy making and health. Achieving this may include activities such as training Councillors, chief and senior officers as well as front line staff on the health impacts of various policies and on the use of health analysis techniques, seconding or permanently locating public health staff in different departments. What advice would you give when considering this?
Here we are effectively talking about change for staff at all levels and in many roles. Helping people to understand the change, its impact and what’s needed from them and how to interact with seconded colleagues, means that time needs to be given to facilitate that understanding as well as dealing with any concerns or sense of ‘fear’ that might arise from the change. Often this means facilitated dialogue between people in groups so psychological safety is established/maintained during and after the change process. Involving people in the change and providing them with the space and time to plan and manage as much as possible for themselves helps greatly with buy in and outcomes.
HiAP is about creating permanent change in local government decision-making processes so that over time accounting for health considerations becomes part of the normal way of doing business across the whole council. How could azzur help to power changes at a systems and corporate level?
Spending time considering the whole system is vital. Learning to develop ‘systems leadership’ capabilities and qualities is a key component in successfully navigating a more holistic approach to policy making, leadership and the generation of desired outcomes. Equally key is the participation by all stakeholders at all levels within an organisation. A willingness to be transparent and honest about how things currently work and what needs to be done differently to facilitate this scale of strategic change opens the door to the required changes. Often this will require some direct work with the most senior stakeholders to establish the most e ective leadership behaviours in this area of policy making.
Is there anything you would like to make delegates aware of ahead of the HiAP 2019 conference on 1st May?
We have been working across local councils and the NHS to support organisational change for many years now both with leaders and in some cases entire organisations. Translating the requirements of systems leadership, cultural change and unblocking mind-sets and attitudes is core to our work. We would be delighted to chat with you about your needs and opportunities.
If you would like to learn more about azzur please visit http://azzur.co.uk/
Comments