Jacqui Holmes, Senior Physiotherapist, shares how her struggles with mental health issues during the covid pandemic have encouraged her to develop her knowledge of emotional resilience and to put mental health and wellbeing at the forefront of her leadership. Jacqui shares some great advice about how to maintain a positive mindset and culture within your team, how to keep staff morale high and how we, as leaders, can support continuous professional development.
3 Quotes to lead by...
1. BUILD EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE
‘I did a lot of training and webinars on how to build emotional resilience and focus on the mental health and wellbeing of yourself and of your colleagues. Opening up those conversations and making it okay to talk about things has been really positive within our team.’
Q. How do you support the mental health and wellbeing of your team? Are you creating an environment where staff can openly talk about their feelings?
2. CELEBRATE AND ACKNOWLEDGE ACHIEVEMENTS
‘Within the team, we have a letterbox of excellence where people can anonymously post evidence of really good work that they’ve witnessed or that they’ve come across throughout the week. We use that each week in our team meeting to celebrate and acknowledge some of those achievements.’
Q. How do you celebrate and acknowledge achievements within your team? Can you think of a strategy like Jacqui’s letterbox of excellence that shows your team the difference that they are making to our patients?
3. DEVOTE TIME TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
‘With the pressures that we have clinically, it is difficult to identify time and set time aside to do your supporting activities in terms of continuing professional development and your own independent learning and preceptorship work, so I really pushed for some time to be set aside for staff going through the preceptorship programme. It was really beneficial to them to have a couple of hours in the afternoon each week to be able to sit down and focus on that work… I’m hoping that it trickles through to other areas, that message of it’s okay to spend some time on yourself and your development.’
Q. When did you last do something that contributed to your professional development? Are you giving your team time to focus on their development?
External Resources
Resilient leadership: Navigating the pressures of modern working life
The Best Leaders Celebrate Success
The Importance of Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
