Pay attention to the “stretch”

Public sector organisations, including the NHS, are paying increasing attention to tackling the “ethnicity gradient” that means the more senior the post, the whiter the postholder is likely to be. Growing numbers are paying attention to fairer recruitment process but unless more attention is paid to the “stretch opportunities” which are crucial to staff development and career progression, such efforts may well flounder.

The NHS policy statement Developing People: Improving Care (2016) https://www.nwacademy.nhs.uk/sites/default/files/resource_files/Developing%20People%20-%20Improving%20Care.pdf ?states that: “According to research, senior executives report their sources of key development as learning from experience in role and on the job (70%), learning from others, especially mentors, coaches and learning sets (20%), and formal coursework and training (10%)”

“Stretch opportunities” such as acting up, secondments, and active involvement in significant projects that give new experience and challenges, are a very important way of developing individual careers.

Lombardo and Eichinger (1966) expressed the rationale behind their 70:20:10 model as follows: “Development generally begins with a realisation of current or future need and the motivation to do something about it. This might come from feedback, a mistake, watching other people’s reactions, failing or not being up to a task – in other words, from experience. The odds are that development will be about 70% from on-the-job experiences - working on tasks and problems; about 20% from feedback and working around good and bad examples of the need; and 10% from courses and reading.” (Lombardo, M, Eichinger, R (1996). The Career Architect Development Planner) In other words stretch opportunities are much more important than formal leadership or management training - and management training must be consolidated in the work environment.

NHS data is only just emerging but we can expect it to resemble that of an American study https://worklifelaw.org/publication/climate-control-gender-racial-bias-engineering/ ?which surveyed 3,000 engineers and found women were 29% more likely than white men to report doing more office housework than their colleagues but that female engineers of colour were 35% less likely than white men to report having equal access to desirable assignments whilst white women were 20% less likely. For lawyers, women of colour were almost 30% less likely than white men to say they had equal opportunity to high-quality assignments, and white women were 18% less likely.

Few NHS Trusts currently monitor or have formal processes for access to stretch opportunities. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been told by NHS staff how such crucial cornerstones of development have been filled by a “tap on the shoulder”. When access is done informally the few examples I have seen of monitoring results confirms the anecdotal data even whilst access to the more extended Leadership Academy courses has become more equitable. As one middle manager BME nurse put it to me “whilst I was on a leadership course, my colleague was acting up into a maternity leave vacancy. Guess who got the substantive post next time?”?

We know (both from data and anecdotally) that under-represented groups of staff have poorer access to stretch opportunities, support during them, and consolidation afterwards. Fernández-Aráoz (2017) asked 823 international executives to look back at their careers and say what had helped them unleash their potential, the most popular answer, cited by 71%, was stretch assignments. Job rotations and personal mentors, each mentioned by 49% of respondents, tied for second. https://hbr.org/2017/11/turning-potential-into-success-the-missing-link-in-leadership-development . The same might reasonably be asked about staff with other protected characteristics, notably staff with disabilities and BME staff.

Casciaro and Lobos (2005) https://hbr.org/2005/06/competent-jerks-lovable-fools-and-the-formation-of-social-networks found (surprise, surprise) that when looking for help with a task at work, work partners tend to be chosen not for their ability but for their likability.

Despite the evidence of its importance and the evidence of discrimination, and almost five years after access to stretch opportunities were identified as a priority in NHS leadership development strategy, many NHS organisations still do not:

■ Monitor access;

■ Ensure access is fair – many opportunities are filled “informally”, not monitored and not challenged;

■ Treat such stretch opportunities as positive action options, possibly accessed via a “talent pool”;

■ Have a clear policy on how such stretch opportunities should be advertised, appointed to, supported and consolidated;

■ Analyse and then apply a “explain or comply” approach to the resultant data.

Since stretch opportunities and their consolidation are so crucial to staff development, NHS organisations need to plan, create and fill them in a strategic way. Creating or filling such opportunities in a random informal manner, without a coherent means of supporting and consolidating staff, will almost certainly reproduce the current patterns of inequality. Many future leaders experience developmental assignments as they randomly come up (driven by crisis situations and changing business environments) rather than being purposefully matched to assignments. Covid19 provided many such examples – a Technicolor version of what has been happening more quietly for many years. Affinity bias can easily play a dominant role in the allocation of such roles.

The good news is that some employers are starting to improve their practice and are actively working towards

■ Planning ahead, developing talent pools of staff who should be considered for stretch developments;

■ Setting organisation-wide expectations that stretch opportunities will be created and filled in an open and transparent way including a policy on the advertising and filling of all significant stretch opportunities, especially acting up posts, secondments and substantial projects;

■ Seeing the creation and filling of potential stretch opportunities as a deliberate set of measures;

■ Seeing the creation, filling and support for stretch opportunities as part of the organisation’s positive action measures to improve the representation of underrepresented groups of staff;

It is essential that stretch opportunities are subject an “explain or comply” process; in other words, analysed to ensure that on average, over time, at the minimum, the likelihood of women and men, White and Black and Minority Ethnic staff access such opportunities is about the same.

Examples of stretch opportunity (and there are growing numbers) could include:

■ As talent management becomes better embedded it should then be able to cross reference to whether some groups of staff have much slower career progression than others – and then seek to understand why, and how to change that. One NHS organisation asked shortlisting panels to think twice about not shortlisting BME candidates where limited “stretch” experience can be demonstrated for the very good reason that BME staff are likely to have had had less access to such opportunities during their career;

■ Planned secondments across organisations – most obviously within Integrated Care Systems or between Arm’s Length Bodies;

■ Projects that give staff an opportunity to stretch their skills, raise their profile, gain new confidence – a quality improvement project, planning a new way of working, addressing a specific problem. Planning for this should be part of the cycle of talent review and appraisals for all staff Integrating them with opportunities for mentoring, coaching, shadowing and development courses.

Rotating management trainees through departments is another way to increase contact. Typically, this kind of cross-training allows people to try their hand at various jobs and deepen their understanding of the whole organization. But it also has a positive impact on diversity, because it exposes both department heads and trainees to a wider variety of people.

With the NHS, for example, some employers have developed local systems for giving staff career development “work samples”. One Trust uses a “temporary transfer” system that gives staff a short part-time “taster” of different and potentially higher graded roles, while another Trust developed a Grade 5.5 for some staff, which is intended as a stepping-stone to a Grade 6 post.

What is crystal clear is that unless access to stretch opportunities is part of a wider talent management approach in which under-represented groups are ensured fair access, talk of fairer career progression will be hot air,

Much of this blog is an extract from No More Tick Boxes: A review of the evidence on how to make recruitment and career progression fairer https://www.england.nhs.uk/east-of-england/nhs-east-of-england-equality-diversity-and-inclusion/publications-and-practical-resources/

Roger Kline is Research Fellow, Middlesex University Business School