Across the NHS, chief executives and senior leaders are facing a familiar set of pressures: falling staff morale, workforce shortages, and relentless operational demands. These challenges dominate today’s leadership conversations. Yet within them lies an opportunity to rethink how leadership itself is developed and practised.
One promising pathway focuses on emotional intelligence and leadership style as powerful levers for change in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. The Leadership Emotional Intelligence Performance Accelerator (LEIPA®) – offered through collaboration between Virginia Mason Institute and LeaderShape Global – provides organisations a practical way to strengthen not only individual leaders, but the leadership teams that guide their systems.
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Leaders are frequently promoted because of their clinical or operational expertise, often without formal preparation for leadership itself. As a result, there is a growing appetite for development approaches that go beyond traditional performance assessment.
“Across the NHS, we see extraordinary people stepping into leadership roles without always having the support or framework to grow into them,” says Brenda McLeod, associate executive director, Virginia Mason Institute. “LEIPA helps leaders understand how their leadership style and emotional intelligence affect their teams. When leaders make even small shifts in how they lead, we often see improvements in staff engagement, satisfaction, and discretionary effort.”
Unlike conventional leadership assessments, LEIPA is designed primarily as a development tool. At its core is the 360 survey, which gathers feedback from supervisors, peers, direct reports and external colleagues to help leaders reflect on their leadership style. The framework explores six leadership styles – visionary, coaching, democratic, affiliative, pace-setting and commanding – alongside key emotional intelligence competencies, including self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
The process highlights how leadership style influences team culture and performance. Pace-setting leadership can deliver rapid results, but overreliance on it can also lead to stress, exhaustion and talent loss. By contrast, coaching, democratic and affiliative styles tend to build trust, rapport and engagement.
Greg Young, CEO of LeaderShape Global, notes that many leaders themselves are calling for this shift. “We consistently hear from leaders who want to move away from a constant pace-setting approach towards more coaching and collaborative leadership,” he explains. “When leaders engage their teams in that way, it unlocks discretionary effort – the initiative, innovation and energy people bring when they feel trusted and supported rather than simply pushed to run faster on the hamster wheel.”
Importantly, LEIPA also helps organisations develop a common vocabulary of leadership, enabling teams to discuss how they lead and how they want to lead together. Rather than analysing leaders in isolation, the process helps transform a group of capable individuals into a cohesive leadership team aligned around shared leadership behaviours.
In a system as complex as the NHS, strengthening leadership capability is essential to sustaining transformation. By focusing on emotional intelligence and leadership style, tools like LEIPA provide a constructive response to today’s pressures – helping leaders not only deliver results but also build the trust, resilience and engagement their teams need to thrive.
