Leadership program for healthcare managers

Participants are recruited broadly, so there is diversity in the group. A participant may have 20 years of experience in health care and be ready for a new step, a young direction nurse has ambition and potential to develop into a position as a manager in a nursing department, but medical and support disciplines were also represented in the group. Participants' perceptions of Noordwest from their own departments became broader, more colorful and their networks expanded, increasing their chances of developing or changing positions. But satisfaction with Noordwest as an employer also increased with a wider range of opportunities.

The training was provided by Tijm of Relevance. As development director, he facilitated that also in the training, participants had to take the lead. Internal facilitators Joyce Kruijff and Hanneke Derksen led the intervision and, as HR specialists, were the lubricant to link participants to departments or mentors. This led to expansion of their network and visibility of participants in the organization. Hanneke and Joyce were able to address bottlenecks that stagnated the development and movement of participants. Each participant was also assigned a mentor with leadership experience.

A unique feature of the program was that in addition to six training days, coach interviews, pairing with a mentor and four intervision days, 12 internship days were also linked to the program. During the first program, we noticed how difficult it was for participants to take time for internships with a supervisor outside their cluster in addition to their job and workload. Their own department misses their employees for 12 days in addition to the training days and intervision. This needed to be facilitated better and made clearer from the start. Therefore, the internship days are now included in leave hours in the financing of the development track. One's own department is compensated. This sends the message that Noordwest is happy to invest in development and that the participants are serious about learning and development and orientation to a next step in their careers.

Trainers from external organizations are regularly used to help develop a particular skill for an organization. It is not so common that the fulfillment of the course takes place in close co-creation with the internal consultants. By doing so, in recent years, it was found that the training return was much higher. And all three professionals also grew themselves in this trajectory, more than they could have grown without each other. Perhaps that is the best reason to look back on this development track with such satisfaction. And on to the next leadership track!