Empowering Teams: Leadership and Transformation with Chris Bleakley

I think part of it as a leader is A showing that you believe in your team, B, that you believe in the work they're doing, and C, starting from a point of believing that everybody's going to do a good job. I think if you start from a position of suspicion and then everyone's going to prove to you that that good, that's the wrong way around. I think if you assume that people are going to do a good job and you give them the benefit of the doubt and you enable them to see that it's not a culture where you're trying to find out whether someone's done something wrong or it's not a blame cult. Giving people trust, letting them get stuff wrong right and then not coming down on people like a ton of bricks. It's really important to set that out in the first place.

Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And this week on the podcast we're speaking with Chris Bleakley from Spire Healthcare about leadership and transform. Chris, you're very welcome to the show. I wonder if you could tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

Thanks Johnny. Great to be here. So, as you say, my name is Chris Blinkley. I'm the director of Resourcing as Spire Healthcare. I've been here about 10 months now and previous to that I've probably got about 20 odd years of experience in resourcing. My last role was as the Director of Resourcing at Nationwide Building Society. A lot of my background is in financial services, so healthcare is something new to me and previous to that I worked in various RPO type organizations and outsourcing businesses. So I've probably been in house now for about 10 years or so.

I guess Spire Healthcare, Chris, for a lot of our audience outside the uk and I'll include myself before I got to know you and the team, they may not be familiar with the company. Can you give us some history as to who Spire Healthcare is, the scope of the organization and maybe some context as to when you come into the business? Why were you hired, what was happening in the business at the time?

Yeah, it's funny because I think Spire is not necessarily the best known brand. It wasn't a brand I know particularly well when I was, when I was approached for the role. So if you think of Spire as a hospital group, largely, although we've expanded now into a health care group, there are 38 spire hospitals. A lot of those used to be owned by bupa. So funnily enough, if you Talk about bupa, that's a, that's a brand that most people will know. So a big chunk of our hospitals are what were BUPA hospitals but we've added to that estate. So we're one of the biggest private healthcare, private hospital groups in the uk, mostly in England. We've also got sites in Cardiff and in Edinburgh. I joined 10 months ago to head up the resourcing function and interestingly resourcing had been through quite a change. We'd originally had an outsourced agreement so it had an RPO in place for three years I think. And the April before I joined in the November, we went through a process to insource the whole thing from being part of one organization to being part of SPIRE itself and part of the broader HR function. And that was done for a couple of reasons. One, because we weren't getting the delivery or the performance that we needed as an organization and I think one or two other issues in terms of how the whole model was operating and aligning with the business. So there was quite a difficult period, painful period to then bring that into part of the spire HR function. And then I joined a few months later, a few months down the line. The team broadly or my team now are responsible for all permanent hiring and that's clinical and non clinical, all what we call bank hiring in the healthcare industry. So that's people who are sort of on zero hour contracts but can decide when they'd like to work on kind of a temporary basis in either a clinical or a non clinical role. And then we've got agency workers, contractors and various other bits and pieces that are unique to the, to, to the industry. So it's a broad range of different skill sets as you can imagine. Everything from all the central functions that you would expect in any organization, it finance HR through to real, real clinical specialisms. But it's worth pointing out I don't think a lot of people realize this. The one thing that you don't employ in a hospital group or a private healthcare group is the actual consultants, the people that do the operations, the anaesthetists, those people are all self employed and provide a service back to the hospitals. So in many ways you can think of a hospital group as a hotel group with theatres. So if you're a consultant and you're coming in to do operations in that hospital, you've got everything you need, all of the nurses, all the pre op, all of the assessment, all of the radiography, all of the outpatients, all of the support, all the food all the bedding, but we don't employ the consultants, we just employ all the infrastructure that supports those consultants to do their work. So it's quite an interesting thing to learn when you're moving from an industry like FS for example, where you would be employing some of the key skilled people in your organization, you wouldn't be buying that in on a, on a consultancy basis.

And Chris, how big is the team and what kind of volumes of hiring are you doing across how many different locations?

So the team's about 45, 50, fluctuates slightly. We're doing about five, five and a half thousand hires a year across that permanent and bank population and that's in at least 38 locations because you've got all of the hospitals themselves, but then we've got some admin centres and we've got head office in London as well. And there's also one or two other bits and pieces like a distribution center. So there are multiple locations that vary from more central, so Manchester for example, to slightly more difficult, say Norwich or the Filed coast. And that split is mainly between, as I say, clinical hiring. So in the main nurses would be the key category there and then bank, which would be the same sort of skill sets, but people who are working on a, on a sort of shift or part time basis. And as you can imagine, the shortages of certain skill sets are particularly acute. So nursing is one. So in addition to hiring nurses in the uk, we bring nurses over from, from abroad as well. In particular the Philippines, India, West Africa. And then there are other skill sets that again I'm still learning about this, that are particularly difficult to hire. Pharmacists. You know, back in the day in fs I used to talk about actuarial hiring being the hardest, I'd say probably within the industry. I mean now it's pharmacists and some nursing, some of the nursing skills that we need as well. So it's a really broad range. And then from that non clinical, could be chefs, could be drivers, porters, IT specialists, finance specialists, ATR specialists and then we've got a central clinical team. So there's a lot of importance on safety and patient safety. Lots of audit and patient safety work with traveling teams that move around the uk. So it's a really interesting mix of skill sets that we recruit for.

And like a lot of when you come into the business, how would you characterize the business's attitude to recruiting? Do they love and value the recruiting team? Do they feel these were partners who are supporting them in the Growth and development of the business or what was the kind of general attitude to the recruiting team and the recruiting function?

Yeah, I think this quite often happens from a recruitment perspective. The team were under the cosh to a degree and the reason for that was if the hospitals don't have the right permanent employees, then we are spending lots of money on agency, on agency resource and as a result of that they become less profitable. And clearly we have shareholders and there are sort of financial targets to hit in addition to of the patient care focus. And I think the original setup for the team, certainly from a supplier management perspective, bearing in mind this is an outsource, I'm not sure we were doing a particularly brilliant job at managing a supplier. I'm not sure the contract necessarily set those people up for success. And interestingly we then twoed the same people who were probably being beat up a little bit for the job they were doing. It's the same team that we two ped in and I'll go through the detail of this, but fast forward to now. They're heroes and they're doing a brilliant job. But in the first instance, the main issue for the organization, the main issue would be around lack of resource and need to hire more quickly and that we weren't hiring quickly enough. And interestingly enough, it's the first time in my life in the position I've been in where I've had to go to a meeting every week to update exco on permanent hires on a weekly basis. You know, that's something I'd be used to doing on a monthly basis or even a quarterly basis. But the focus was on recruitment so much that the kind of the cadence was to update the XK team on a weekly basis. So I found that really interesting, quite intense, but it showed that there was work to be done to make sure we were positioned in the right place.

For people who weren't used to healthcare recruiting, which I wasn't a whole lot used to. When I met your team, one example that struck me was one of your team was sharing the story of how she had to work on staffing a brand new hospital for its opening. Really, you know, it hit me this was a, the requirement was you had to fill 100% of roles to be ready to go on a particular day. Like the, the coordination of that, the importance of that was amazing. And then the story that really blew my mind was something changed with that particular hospital, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, yeah, that was actually a clinic. So we were opening a new clinic and we had to get the entire team in place in the clinic for a certain date and then actually the building wasn't ready. So we'd hired an entire team of people for a particular clinic for reasons outside of our control. It was down to the contractors that the building itself wasn't ready and we needed to try and keep as many of those candidates warm for as long as possible for an opening that was. And I'm not talking weeks, it's like a quarter later, like three months later. So that, in its own right, is particularly difficult when you've sold them in. And some of these, these were. Some of these were leadership roles. It wasn't. It wasn't kind of just sort of the more junior roles, it was the whole range of different roles that would be moving into that clinic. We did lose some along the way, but then we rehired those people before, before the clinic opened. But the thing about healthcare, which is interesting to me is a lot of it is retrospective. So hiring, in terms of strategic workforce planning, there's a long way to go, I think, for the industry, because what you've got is a hospital that needs to have 20 people in it, because that's the safe level of staffing to deliver the right level of care. If you lose five, you need to recruit other five. But that's retrospective. That doesn't give you a forward plan of what you're going to need over the next 3, 6, 9, 12 months, which is one of the things we're working on at the moment. And that ended saying right is a real challenge because the team, it's difficult to work out where you're going to put your team because you're not entirely sure of what those volumes might look like. And also, bearing in mind, in a hospital group, you've got 38 different, almost mini businesses with almost slightly different cultures, with slightly different views on the world, with slightly different approaches to things. Some of those might have great leadership in them, which means retention is really low and therefore you've got more control over that. Some might have less good leadership and which means retention is, you know, is worse, and therefore you've got to keep rehiring into that hospital. So there are lots of different nuances and differences across the estate, but we're effectively organized so that we deal with hospitals in the northern region, in a central region, in the southern region, we've got a campaign team that look after things like nurse apprenticeships and then we've got a central functions team that look after it, Finance, hr, head office type Stuff. But the big challenge for us at the moment is we're opening kind of patient support centres, so a place where it's focused specifically on booking patients in, making sure they've got the right treatment, making sure that they've got all the right information. And that's a change from the way we used to work. So we've got concentrated need now in certain new locations to set up what is effectively a kind of clinical contact center, for want of a better phrase. So that's our latest challenge. But I think we started out from a position where there was a view that, and I think this happens a lot from a resourcing perspective, that we needed to be doing a better job and that, as usual, the issues were about resourcing and not necessarily anything else. What you need to do, I think what's really important is you need to start getting hold of the data that shows you what kind of job you are doing. And if you looked at the team as they'd been insourced, they were already starting to perform and perform better because they had better management, better leadership, better direction. And they weren't kind of. They didn't feel detached from spire as an organization. People felt that they were part of the same team. The key thing then, I think, or the key thing that I think, I think I continued this rather than started it, is making sure that the culture was right for that team to do its best work. So supporting the team to do good work and then getting hold of the data, which isn't always easy, to prove that you are filling jobs, to prove that the total number of vacancies is coming down, to prove that the time to hire is coming down, because the number of myths that floated around in the hospitals about how slow or how long it took to recruit in one particular place versus another, a lot of these things are not true. They're just perceptions that people have because they're waiting for that resource to land. So.

I want to dig, if you don't mind, on that culture piece. Right. Because in this transformation, there has been a transformation and we can go into the data and the changes in a second. But the, you know, you mentioned culture and you mentioned the leadership there in the different businesses, but talk to me about the leadership within TA and talk to me about, you know, from your perspective, what does culture mean? What, what you set up or what you set out to set up culturally across that leadership team to then allow you to dig into data and dig into changes in performance?

I think, I think a lot of it is about what's the best way to put this. So there used to be. We used to use phrases like being authentic and so, which have become a little bit passe now. But I think part of it as a leader is A, showing that you believe in your team, B, that you believe in the work they're doing, and C, starting from a point of believing that everybody's going to do a good job, right? I think if you start from a position of suspicion and then everyone's going to prove to you that they're good, that's the wrong way around. I think if you assume that people are going to do a good job and you give them the benefit, the doubt, and you enable them to see that it's not. It's not a culture where you're trying to find out whether someone's done something wrong. It's not a blame culture, giving people trust, letting them get stuff wrong, and they're not coming down on people like a ton of bricks. It's really important to set that out in the first place to enable the team to have some freedom to do their job. I don't believe in micromanaging. You know, I'm not an expert recruiter anymore. The expert recruiters are in my team. They know better than I. And I think trusting their judgment and listening to what they've got to say is really important. So you can do all of that, but you've kind of got to communicate. You're doing that. So regular communication channels and not disappearing off the face of the earth, just because you're leading the function doesn't mean to say that you should be doing, sort of spending all of your time doing something which is massively strategic. Somewhere in a white tower, in a head office, you've got to get involved in the nitty gritty. You need to know what the hell is going on and you need to be speaking to people. You need to be having regular communication with everybody in the team as often as you can do. Now, in reality, I rather and probably do spend more of my team, more of my time talking to the team than I do anything else, either the team or our customer base. And largely speaking, I think that's kind of what my job is. Find out how the team are doing, set the agenda, get the data, and then tell the team or remind the team how well they're doing using that data. But also remind our customer base, remind exco, remind the hospitals how well we're doing by constantly reiterating the message using the data.

That's kind of you mentioned like 30 something locations. Is this, you know, a physical team in one office, one building that you just sit with and you talk to or give me some context, you know, you're talking about, you spend a lot of time with them. How does that work? Is that remote? Is it in person? What does it look like?

It's a really good, really good question I think Johnny, because as a hospital group we have a head office in London. The team is spread all over the uk. They visit the hospitals that they deliver into and they occasionally will go to the head office, but they're not sat together, they're completely disparate, they're all over the uk. So a lot of what we do is remote. I mean, funnily enough, the first time that everybody had got together was when we met you guys in Manchester, which was back in October, in July. That was the first time we'd got everybody together, physically spent the day together because there's a kind of conference suite in the Manchester hospital. Talked about the successes of the first half of the year, talked about what the second half of the year was going to look like. Yeah, all went out and played darts obviously and had a few beers as recruiters like to do. And I don't think you can put a price on how important that is culturally. Bringing people together and getting to spend two days, day and a half together really helped to sort of continue to bring the team together. Now we can't do that all the time because of the cost. So bringing 55 people to Manchester or London or wherever else and paying for hotels and so on, you can't do that on an ongoing basis. But we set out a pattern whereby we'll do that twice a year. We'll do it in the summer, Christmas, January and then we'll do kind of spring and autumn virtual town halls. But having constant drop in sessions. I send a note out every Friday to the team to say what I've been up to. We've got a channel that people engage in, we've got a well being channel, lots of things that keep communication open constantly because you know what it's like these days if you don't do that. The only time you speak to some people is if you've organized some sort of teams or zoom meeting about a particular topic. And the drop in sessions that I hold, that we hold are, you know, if you want to talk about your favorite biscuits, you can do that. You want to talk about the weather or your holiday, you can do that. It doesn't have to be about Work. It's just about engaging with people.

It did really strike me, you know, in the eight months, let's say, up to that point, you know, it was evident to me that you knew all of the team. You knew everybody. The different leaders and managers all contributed and spoke about their teams. It wasn't Chris, the leader, the director of resourcing, sitting down and speaking on high was very, very collaborative, very engaged. Everyone knew each other. Even though this was a completely remote team and in such a short period of time, to build that culture, to your point, it's extremely important, but also it's one of the main parts of the job. As a leader, in your opinion, that's. That's what you need to do.

It's. I. I think, Johnny, I think it's a. I think it's half the job. Half the job is. Is one of the things. Good example would be, you know, we've got, as everybody has, we've got certain customers, we've got certain sites, we've got certain locations which are a little bit edgier than others, and they become more critical of the team. And yeah, that's where, you know, 80% of your problems probably come from 20% of your vacancies or from your locations or your customers. The important thing is that the people who are working on those more difficult locations or those more difficult vacancies or with more difficult customers, those people need support. Right. And your job isn't to sort of go, all right, I can see we're doing something wrong as a resulting team. Don't worry, I'll go and sort it out. I'm pretty confident that I know my team are probably doing the right thing. Not blindly, but I'm pretty confident they're probably doing the right thing. And my job really is to defend that position in many ways or to explain well to what some of those blockers are. And our blockers are the same as all blockers. Right. You. You look at the issues in one place, and it's not that we're not finding the candidates. It's not that we're keeping the pace up. It's that the challenges are all sorts of other things. They are managers not being available, hospitals being too busy, you know, interviews are not being attended, people not doing a great job of selling the opportunity. In some cases, salaries, right salaries where we can offer the right amount of money, but we're not offering it because people are worried that actually, at the moment, the two other people are already at that hospital are not being paid that amount. Even Though the market rate's gone up, Right. That's not a resourcing issue, that's a reward issue that we need to solve, which I think we now have. When you dig into it, you find out there are so many other problems and often, I don't know about you, but I have always said to people who are joining my team, this is the team, that often everything is the fault of resourcing and you know that if you're not hearing anything, it's good news, right? When you don't get any thanks, often that's good news. So the important thing is that those people who are working in those parts, more difficult parts of the team, know that they've got the support of their managers and ultimately your support, and I back them, right, Because I know they're good, I know they're good and I know they're doing a good job and that that gives me. And then the other bit is the data, right? Because if you're going to go and explain how well your team is doing in various important meetings across the course of a month, you need to be able to stand on solid ground with the data. And I spend a lot of time looking at the data to make sure I think it makes sense and that there is a story I can tell out of it. So, for example, quite often the more you study the data, if you've got it, the more there are interesting and surprising stories in there. So, for example, I now know that we've got half the number of vacancies that we had this time last year. And actually there may be areas of the business that are still saying, well, we're short of people. Well, you might be, but overall we've got a 50% reduction in the number of vacancies across the hospitals. There might be a view that we've always got a persistent gap in terms of how many nursing vacancies we've got. And you look at the data and it tells you, well, yeah, there is a gap, but we've actually added the total population by about 300. Right. So where you're seeing that gap, I'm seeing an increased population. And that's an important story when you're trying to break down what the future strategy will look like. And that's why I think if a third of your time or half your time is spent on culture, quarter of my time is spent with data and looking at data and making sure that data is correct. Because the problem is, if you're telling the story in your monthly or your weekly meetings, and that data is wrong or out, you can have the rug pulled from under your feet.

It's not just imagine about selling the successes and the wins. Imagine the data reveals the challenges to your point, you know, because it wasn't just a case of you build a culture, walk in and show that we're doing great. You had to actually do better, you had to drive that performance. So how do you, tell me, tell me how the data helped solve some of those issues, helped highlight where the problems were.

I think if you almost, you know, with no data to start off with, there are things that a team needs, right? They need the right tools, they need the right LinkedIn licenses, they need the right job board approach, they need to be using the right way. We use things like Daxtra, which is obviously a, you know, a way of sort of building talent pools and searching different job sites, website searching different job sites and CV databases. So you need to give them the right tools. I think then you also need to organize them in the right way. So I was really lucky in that that organization had already started to happen to make sure that people were focusing on, say a hospital and not a type of vacancy. So if you imagine you're focusing on nursing vacancies, then 38 hospitals might see you for five minutes a day. If you're focusing on Liverpool, the people in Liverpool know who you are. You know, if you're focusing on Norwich in terms of doing everything from chefs to nursing, those people will get to know you and your personality and you get to sort of oversee, become the recruitment manager for one of a better phrase for that site. So some of those structural things need to be in place. You can't just magically, you can't just culturally magic your way into success. But I'd say some of those things are really good managerial, operational, common sense, reflecting the setup of the business. Don't have a recruiting team that's not set up to exactly reflect the way the business is structured. I mean, you might disagree with the structure of the business, but it's slightly foolish to have a recruitment team that's not set up to align to that. So that alignment and providing them with the right tools and then having good managers, kind of, those are some of the basics that you need anyway. But on top of that, especially if you arrive in the middle of what I think was, you know, the team that would be insourced could already see there's some stuff they were starting to improve. But the first thing you're going to think is, what's this BLOKE all about, what's he going to change, what's he going to do, how's this going to affect things? And I think if you can quite quickly lay down the fact that, look, it looks like guys, you're already doing a good job, right, we can just, we can just make this better. And let me talk about what I'm going to be doing over the next two, three, four months to help support the work you're already doing now. Then you start to look at the data obviously and that data hopefully is telling you a big story, but it also helps you to start weedling out where some of the, some of the individual issues are. So we'd have focus hospitals, you know, we know that in general we're doing well hiring nursing but in, in this particular location, say out in Cambridge or Norwich, much harder to get nurses because there's less people around there. So you might need to focus your international nursing into those locations because you've not got as many nurses that want to work in Cambridge as you would have that want to work in Manchester or, you know, or around London so that the detailed data then really helps. So wheedle out some of those, some of those individual challenges and then when you show that that data is working, you can, you can sell your success back.

But it's not just about selling it to the business though, is it? Chris, I know you've spoken about, you know, it's maybe more obvious to people that you need to sell it to stakeholders in the business to show what recruiting is doing. But one of the things that you shared with me was that, you know, your belief that it's really important to start by sharing it to your team to show them the success before you show the business success. So talk me through that.

Well, I think it's important for two reasons. One, because you need to be open, right? There's no reason why. So the sort of stuff I would present to XCO or the leadership team, you know, I'll send out to the team and we've got a teams channel and that information is there and in drop in sessions I, you know, I want to answer questions about volumes and thoughts on what it's going to look like in the future. So I think it's good to share that information because people feel more comfortable that they've got the big picture in addition to knowing what's happening within their particular area. And you want them to be informed. Right. I don't want my team in one particular part of the UK to have no idea what's going on elsewhere. They need to have a kind of broader view of that because we, we're not just putting bums on seeds, you know, we're not, we're not just order takers. We should be more consultative than that. And you can't be more consultant consultative unless you know the data. You know, just tiny little things. The reason it's important that they know the data and I know the data is you'll get passing comments of someone saying, oh, we've got loads of vacancies in X hospital. You need to be able to say, actually, you haven't, you've got none, or you've got two. Because those things become the little myths that float around, that float around the business before you know it. And this happened when I first started, there was two or three sites that were constantly being mentioned to me as being these. We've got a bit of a problem this particular location. But you look at the data and there isn't a problem. It's something that was happening six months ago. There's been a hangover. So I think sharing the success with the team is important. I mean, clearly, if there are, if there are challenges, you need to share that with the team as well, right, and work out how you're going to fix it. But I think you use that data not to beat people up, you use that data to come up with a. Come up with a solution. But yeah, I mean, you know, there is always some data that's confidential, obviously. But my philosophy in general would be to share as much of the data as I've got that I share with the business, with my own team. And ideally to do that, to do that first so they know, so they know where we're up to. And look, the other thing is, I mean, you should know this, Johnny, of all people, you can gamify the thing, right? So we've got team managers and, and divisional resources managers who set all sorts of weekly challenges for their team because recruiters love a competition, right? We all want to win, so there's loads of. You can build in quite a lot of fun into that. We have, you know, loads of little competitions on a weekly basis, little newsletters going out each week for the different teams to see who's won those competitions and it might be, I don't know, who's filled the most aged wrecks, who's filled the most clinical wrecks, who's for the most chefs, all sorts of different things that you can. Then you've got the data that says, this is the challenge. And the challenge could be, we've got loads of pharmacy wrecks that have been open for too long. So you set the challenge that becomes the competition. So I think you can sort of use the data in a sort of way to plug it into. To plug it into the culture.

Speaking of that data, right, looking back 10 months now, what are some of the biggest improvements or changes you're most proud of? Team's most proud of that. The data is showing, Chris.

I'd say I would be most proud of the fact that we have reduced the cost of agency usage by probably a percentage. I can't say because it's probably commercially sensitive, but a big chunk, right? A big chunk. It's the amount of money that was being spent on agencies and agency workers in hospitals, hourly nurses and so on, are expensive. They are expensive and we've reduced that by a massive chunk. So I'd say we, we should be super proud. I'm super proud of that. Secondly, I sit in these meetings, the one I described to you that had to go to every flipping week, and the reasons for our trading and our performance, which is what that meeting is all around, don't focus on resourcing anymore. People are less interested. And that is a good thing because it means it's not a problem. The total number of vacancies in hospitals we've reduced by 50%. So we're down from probably at least 700 this time last year to more like 350, 320 now. So super proud of that. The nursing gap that I talked to you about earlier, the nursing gap has been a perennial gap. It's been the same number. Even though we've been increasing the total population for as long as. As long as we've insourced the business in before, it's now a third of what it was. So it's the lowest that it's ever been. So we've got more employed nurses than we've. We've ever had. So I say that was a. That was a big win. I think the other thing is it's kind of. And I said this to you, I've said this to you before, when you keep repeating the message that we're doing a good job when we are, by the way, I'm not saying. Just keep saying you're doing a good job when you're not in the face of all kind of evidence to the contrary, when you're using the data to repeat that you're doing a good job. What's interesting is that people reach for that all of the time. So we've constantly got, you know, exec. Exco members who will, just, apropos of nothing in a piece that they're doing, talk about the success of resourcing because it's a thing that. It's one of the things that they're proud of. Now that they mention the number of jobs we've filled in such a short period of time, we reduce the time to hire, half the time to hire. In fact, more than half the time to hire. And I think the other thing is we've got a number of hospitals that are now fully staffed, so they, so they don't need any more people. Now some of this, as you know, Johnny, is probably going to be a temporary thing and it'll, it'll skew back and we'll have to, we'll have to get our skates on again. But, but those are the sorts of things I'm proud of. And I think having got all of the team together, you know, I'm just, it's just a really sound group of people doing a great job and I hope enjoying what they're doing, you know, which is really important. We spend so much time especially it might be remote, the world we work in, but kind of, for me, I don't know about you, it means it's a longer working day. You know, you're up earlier, you're working longer. I run downstairs to treat myself to a piece of toast and Marmite, which is the highlight of my, my day. But, you know, it's important that you enjoy what you're doing and you feel supported. And I think that that cultural bit and the data that backs it up is what is. What does that for you. But yeah, there's, there's loads to be proud of. Another example, just a quick one. At the moment, our campaigns team are working on the, the support centers I mentioned earlier. We've got one opening in Cardiff. Lots of planning went into this. A new building, a big project team. I think we got, I don't know, maybe 10 days notice, went live, found the candidates set up assessment days running on or assessment centers running on Wednesdays and Saturdays with kind of, you know, month notice period for people to start. We needed about, we needed about 30 people in the first instance, did that in less than a week and a bit, and those people would be ready to start to open that center and then we'll move on to the next tranche of, say, 30, 40 people. So it's not ideal because I think the planning could be better if I'm honest. But the team's ability to react to that and not be phased has been, you know, I'm really proud of the way they've, they've dealt with that. So yeah, I've done it lots. Johnny, I guess is the answer, lots to be proud of.

It's a phenomenal story, phenomenal turnaround for the team and yourself and for setting that, setting the team up for that success with the culture, with the data. If you were to summarize for leaders listening to this who are either starting a new role, coming into a new business, coming into a different role as a TA leader, or they're just facing transformation, whether it be through budget pressures, through changes in the organization, growth decline, whatever that might look like. What are your top tips? What are the kind of lessons you've learned that you think are transferable to any sort of, of TA organization, to any sort of situation around transformation?

I don't think a lot of these things are revolutionary. I think they're pretty much common sense, I'd say, I think upon arrival, have a look at what's there already. Right. Because there'll be some great people already. I was lucky enough to have loads of incredibly talented recruiters, some absolutely outstanding managers. And the thing is not to arrive and to smother those people. They're already doing a brilliant job probably, but give those people the benefit of the doubt. Look around in the first instance before you decide what you're going to do. And I think the second thing then is talk to people and tell them quite soon what you're thinking about doing and what you've noticed. Give them a long term view as to what you think that plan looks like. Make sure people feel comfortable because the first thing they think when they get a new leader in place is, well, you know, we're going to half the size of the team. Are we going to outsource again at what, what, what does it mean for me? So I think you've got to position that quite quickly. Be approachable, be visible, be. And it's so easy not to be visible in our current world. But I would be, I would spend as much time as possible being as visible as possible to your own team, by the way, not just floating around, meeting important people, that's key. But with your own team is really important. You know, identify those people who can help you get stuff done as quickly as possible. I did that. I've got some great people on that list. And then if you haven't got the data, find a way of getting it and if you're going to spend money on anything in the first instance with any additional resource or anything else, I would go and get somebody who can help you sort the data out as soon as possible because the data is what enables you to tell the story with credibility. You can tell as many stories as you want if it's anecdotal, if you haven't got the data to back it up, it's no good. So get the data and then go back and tell people that story. And whether it's your own team, when you're repeating what a great job they're doing or where we need to focus a bit more or you're going back out to your exco or whoever it is you report to and you can you repeat those messages now ironically, the fact that I had to go and do this weekly possibly helped because in the first X number of weeks I was able to use some of that data to start showing or selling that the success is ensuring the reduction in vacancies and increased, increased time to hire. So I think setting that cultural agenda and being kind of authentic and as honest as you can be, spending money on or getting hold of the data as quickly as you possibly can do and then getting your messaging back into your own team and more importantly about how well your team's doing into the business or about how much they're improving. Right. They might not necessarily be doing brilliantly from the off and there'll be people that move into an organization where it's a bit. It's a tricky situation, but I think you've got to be able to position improvements or incremental improvements often and clearly and in a way that makes sense. But as I say back to the data. You want to be able to stand on solid ground. That's why it's important to I'd invest weirdly from a. For a person who's most interested in kind of culture and behaviors and leadership, the thing that's been the biggest help to me is having the right data.

Chris, it's been a fantastic story. I appreciate you sharing with us, with us here today. If any leader wants to reach out with you to kind of follow up, get some more insights, ask you further questions, where's the best place to reach you?

Well, I'm at Chris dot bleakly@spyhealthcare.com probably easiest. I'm on LinkedIn as well, obviously.

That's great. Thanks Chris, and thank you for watching. We'll be back next week.