News / Development programme to target aspiring leaders (HFMA 2016)

NHS Improvement director of resources and deputy chief executive Bob Alexander said the pool was a response to work by HFMA and Future-Focused Finance examining some of the current obstacles preventing finance professionals seeking the most senior roles.

The pool, which was announced by NHS England’s Paul Baumann in his earlier speech to conference, will see candidates assessing themselves and being assessed on development needs. ‘This will lead to tailored packages of what they need to develop to move up,’ he said. In part this would look to address the need for managers to gain experience of the changing leadership skills required to work across organisations.

He added that up to an estimated 20% of finance director and chief finance officer roles were currently filled on an interim basis or shared. ‘We need to move through this,’ he said.

Rob Whiteman, chief executive of CIPFA, warned that director roles were already ‘tremendously hard’ and were getting harder with the ‘need to couple grip and analysis skills with influencing skills’. He said this would require finance practitioners getting more involved in these roles earlier in their careers.

Sue Jacques, chief executive of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust and a former HFMA president, said it was also important to talk up the positive side of the most senior roles. ‘It is hard and you need the right skill set,’ she said. ‘But it is a really exciting job.’ She added that an earlier regional support programme – similar to the proposed national scheme – had already seen about half the candidates move on to director roles. ‘It is a really fulfilling role and while it is difficult, we’ve got to keep talking about the rewards or we are in danger of doing the job down.’

Tom Jackson, chief financial officer at Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group, said that the most senior roles could feel quite lonely and agreed that the changing nature of the roles needed to be factored in. ‘It is getting further from finance,’ he said, with a lot of general management skills now required. ‘It feels as if deputies are pretty much the chief financial officers in terms of understanding the detail,’ he said. The CFO role was as much about commissioning, partnership, engagement and collaboration and this broader role needed to be recognized in preparing people for taking on the jobs.