Five thousand managers, one platform: How Guy's and St Thomas' is building future-ready leaders

Trusts must build this skill at the same time as they face major structural change, fast-moving technology, tight budgets, and ongoing staffing pressure.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation Trust is tackling this head-on. The trust is one of the UK’s largest and most complex healthcare organisations, with a workforce of around 24,000 staff. More than 4,000 of them are managers.

Stephen Melville, learning and development manager at the trust, and Matt Linaker, head of advocacy and insight at Totara, shared how they built a training programme to support these managers. They spoke at a recent HSJ webinar.

How the programme works

Three years ago, the trust launched its People Manager Programme. It is built around the NHS’s seven people promises, and each of the seven modules follows the same three steps:

• E-learning: Managers learn the theory online at their own pace.
• Workshop: Managers join a live session with 30 to 40 others to work through real scenarios.
• Public promise: Managers post one thing they will try differently in their own role.

The trust also uses three levels of certificate: bronze, silver, and gold. Bronze is required for every manager. Silver and gold are optional.

The results so far

The programme is already showing strong results:

• 68 per cent of managers have taken part
• Workshops are often full, even though they are optional
• More than 2,000 pieces of feedback have come in, with an average score of 4.6 out of five
• Managers say their confidence rose from 3.9 to 4.5 after finishing a module
• Every score linked to line managers has gone up each year in the staff survey since the programme began
• The trust won highly commended at the British Training Awards

What it took to build

Building the programme took about six months of planning and buy-in. This happened at the same time as a trust merger, which made the work harder in some ways and easier in others.

Since then, the main challenge has been keeping the programme steady while the trust keeps changing. Stephen described the approach as “large-scale product management”. That means the team focuses on consistency, easy self-service access, and clear reporting to the business. It is a trade-off, but one Stephen says fits a trust of this size.

The programme also shows that required training and optional training can work side by side. Every manager must finish the bronze e-learning. But the workshops that follow are booked out because managers choose to attend, not because they must. Matt pointed out that this kind of voluntary demand is hard for any organisation to build. It shows that managers find real value in the programme.