Vital Signs - Essential management skills for new managers

The programme gives a firm foundation for ongoing training and, just like the monitoring of a patient's vital signs, will provide evidence of healthy management practice. Each 1 day workshop will focus on an essential skill

• How to lead and develop their team
• How to handle staff appraisal and performance issues
• How to identify and manage service change and improvement
• How to run effective meetings, compile reports, and make presentations

Vital Signs 2 - The Craft of management

The programme is targeted at middle managers. It takes three critial areas and provides robust and practical models which can be used immediately.

The aims of the programme are to equip managers with a range of skills in order that they can

• Act with greater understanding and confidence as they influence people and projects
  
• Improve personal and organisational performance, manage their own work and development effectively, avoiding burnout or career plateaux
  

Vital Signs 3 - Servant Leadership

Vital Signs 3 is designed for managers at all levels who wish to 'lead' significant change and improvement in their own organisation through the medium of coaching and/or internal change facilitation.

It does this by equipping and supporting participants to act as a cardre of internal coaches and consultants to their organisations, so that they support other managers in improving service provision in key problem areas. it utilises action learning as a key development activity.

We believe that good people management should not be a bonus, to be celebrated for its rarity or envied from afar by everyone else. It is essential for the health of the organisation, the staff that work there and, in case of the NHS, the health of the patients it serves. It is a continuing concern that in any other profession, foundational training precedes practice. In management it is considered normal to start managing and then be trained if money and space permits. Vital Signs is our attempt to raise both the profile and performance of management and has the following hallmarks.

• It is explicitly aimed at challenging and changing practice
• It takes an unashamedly positive view of the contribution of management to patient care
• It sees good management as a matter of character and values as well as knowledge and skills