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Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CWP) has selected Ryhurst as their preferred bidder to become an innovative strategic estates partner.
Over the next month the Trust will head towards award of contract, following which CWP will enter into a 15 year 50:50 joint venture partnership to deliver a comprehensive range of estate management services.
During this time the Trust will use Ryhurst’s STEP (Service Targeted Estates Partnership) model in the delivery of an intelligent estates strategy.
Sheena Cumiskey, CWP chief executive, says: “We are very excited about this partnership and are pleased to announce Ryhurst as our preferred bidder. This partnership will ensure CWP’s estate is maximised to support existing clinical services and Trust plans for service development as well as plans to continue to deliver excellent clinical services and provision of high quality care.”
Stephen Collinson, Managing Director of Ryhurst, said: “Working together with the NHS, this appointment cements Ryhurst’s place as the leading developer of this type of partnership, whose single guiding principle is to support clinical strategy through smart asset management. We’re very excited to bring our innovative model to CWP and look forward to working together in the delivery of progressive, cost effective estates management services that offer good value to the taxpayer.”
Ryhurst’s STEP model, developed to help the NHS better utilise its estate, improve the quality of buildings essential for clinical services and provides an equitable solution for the taxpayer to be used in the delivery of a whole estates partnership with the NHS.
The estates strategy will include reviewing the use of existing facilities to deliver estate and asset efficiency, providing expertise in surplus asset disposal as well as exploiting estates and commercial opportunities.
Following the preferred bidder appointment and award of contract, it is anticipated that the partnership will be fully established by the end of August 2013.
In 2010, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust also entered into a whole estates partnership with Ryhurst, to design, build, finance and operate new facilities and manage the Trust’s property portfolio across over 700 sites.
To read more about our unique model ‘STEP’, click here.
To read more about our work with Lancashire Care Foundation Trust, click here.
I had a brilliant morning yesterday with Lancashire Care’s Aspiring Leaders when they fed back on the work they’ve been doing over the last few months. Very, very impressed.
The Aspiring Leaders programme is something that Mark Hindle (Director of Service Delivery and Transformation), ably assisted by his Executive Assistant, Michelle Cox, launched a few months back for the bright eyed up-and-comings at the Trust. They work together in cohorts on a number of things, including projects, and the first three cohorts fed back yesterday, and it’s no exaggeration to say that they blew us away.
It was a great morning, very uplifting, reminding me once again why I get up in the morning and love being part of Lancashire Care.
I’m now looking forward to another Appreciative Leadership World Cafe this morning at the De Vere Hotel in Blackpool as another set of cohorts blow our socks off.
In times like these, where money is tight, investment in training and development is often the first item of discretionary expenditure to be cut. That’s a short sighted approach and I’m proud to say that Lancashire Care is investing heavily in its people right now and we’re reaping the rewards.
Long may it be so.
Gretchen Rubin
As an Upholder, I have a tough time being criticized, corrected, or accused – of even the smallest mistakes – and I react very angrily.
Yikes, how I struggle to keep my sense of humor and light-heartedness! Here are some of the strategies that I try to use to accept criticism.
1. Listen to what a critic is saying. Really listen, try to understand that point of view, don’t just nod while I formulate my retorts. Accept just criticism.
2. Don’t be defensive. This is the toughest step for me. With my writing, for example, I always have to take a deep breath before reading an edit letter or meeting with an editor, to remind myself, “I welcome criticism. This person is helping me. I’m eager to hear how to improve my book/article/post.” Along the same lines…
3. Don’t expose myself to criticism from people I don’t respect. I pay a lot of attention to criticism from people I respect, but I try to shield myself from criticism from people I don’t know or don’t respect, because I fear that I’ll react to it, even though it may be unfounded. So when I get trustworthy criticism about my writing, I act on it, but I try to avoid reading drive-by snarkiness. The means that bad affects us more strongly than good, and I fear that I’ll change my writing in response to some person’s thoughtless comment, in ways that won’t make my work stronger. I need to stay creative, open-hearted, adventuresome, and honest, and if I feel defensive and apologetic, I won’t maintain those elements.
4. Delay my reaction. Count to ten, take a deep breath, sleep on it, wait until the next day to send that email…any kind of delay is good. A friend told me her rule: when she’s upset about something that happened at her children’s school, she won’t let herself do anything about it for three days – and usually she decides that no action is better than action.
5. Admit my mistakes. My father gave me an outstanding piece of advice when I got my first real job. He said, “If you take the blame when you deserve it, you’ll get the responsibility.” I’ve found that to be very true. Difficult, but true. In my experience, until someone in a group (or in a family) accepts blame, everyone stays very anxious and focused on fingering the person at fault. Once I raise my hand (if appropriate), then everyone else can relax. And then we can all focus on what needs to be done.
6. Enjoy the fun of failure. Fact is, trying new things and aiming high exposes me to criticism. I remind myself to Enjoy the fun of failure to try to re-frame failure and criticism as part of the fun. Otherwise, my dread of criticism can paralyze me. Once, when I told my husband that I was upset because I’d received a mean comment here on the blog, he said, “Remember, this is what you want. You want to put your ideas out there. Not everyone is going to be nice.” That made me feel better.
The discussion of criticism reminds me of a passage from Stephen Spender’s autobiography, World Within World:
To overhear conversations behind his back is more disconcerting than useful to the writer; though he can perhaps search for criticism which may really help him to remedy faults in style. But he should remember that the tendency of reviewers is to criticize work not for what it is but for what it fails to be, and it is not necessarily true that he should remedy this by trying to become other than he is. Thus, in my own experience, I have wasted time by paying heed to criticism that I had no skill in employing rhyme. This led me to try rhyme, whereas I should have seen that the moral for me was to avoid it.
This passage is a good reminder that criticism should help us do better what we want to do, and to be more wholly ourselves, and criticism that doesn’t serve those goals isn’t helpful.
What am I overlooking? Have you found any other strategies that work for you?
Are you reading Happier at Home or The Happiness Project in a book group? Email me if you’d like the one-page discussion guide. Or if you’re reading it in a spirituality book club, a Bible study group, or the like, email me for the spirituality one-page discussion guide.
I was there this afternoon, closing off another Appreciative Leadership workshop at Stanley House in Mellor, sitting there hearing all the wonderful stories from leaders from all across Lancashire Care, feeling every bit as privileged as I always do.
These guys get it in a very real, very substantial way, and will do wonderful things.
I’m always delighted to go down sharing their space with them for a little while, revelling as the pennies drop in their thinking.
You don’t need permission from the organisation… You and hundreds like you ARE the organisation, now go ahead and realise your potential…
Scott Keller – Harvard Business Review – June 14 2012
Most senior executives understand and generally buy into the famous aphorism, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Prompted by HR professionals or consultants, they often commit themselves to “being the change” by personally role-modeling the desired behaviors. And then, in practice, nothing significant changes.
In the research for our book, Beyond Performance, we found that the reason for this is that most executives don’t see themselves as “part of the problem.” Therefore, deep down, they do not believe that it is they who need to change, even though in principle they agree that leaders must model the desired changes. Take, for example, a team that reports that, as a group and as an organization, they are low in trust, not customer-focused and bureaucratic. How many executives when asked privately will say “no” to the questions “Do you consider yourself to be trustworthy?” and “Are you customer-focused?” and “yes” to the question “Are you a bureaucrat?” None, of course…….
I attended a Lancashire Care leadership engagement session the other day where the Chief Executive spoke about our plans for the future and our transformational change programme.
The theme for the session was all about people, just as Lancashire Care is all about people: the amazing people who work in the organisation and the fantastic people we work with and for. We sometimes forget that simple fact, but in these extraordinary times we must constantly remind ourselves of that simple fact.
People are more important than ever before and this is why involvement, empowerment and leadership are so important. We need to maintain and develop our obsession with customer focus and patient and staff experience. We should ask constantly how we are doing, listen to what we hear and respond positively.
After the Chief Executive had finished, one of the attendees, Sue, came over and talked to me about her leadership challenge and battle with the forces of bureaucracy. Like many people I’ve talked to over the years, she’s wearied by the fight.
BUT…
Sue knows the fight is right. Sue has the fire in her belly, the passion in her heart and the knowledge, the constant, shining certainty, that unless she and a hundred other Sues out there stick to their guns and do the right thing, kicking back against bureaucracy and the men in suits, then we will never change anything.
It might be quite a simple thing she’s doing, but real change, sustainable change, is built on doing a lot of very simple, symbolically important things and doing them with passion and with great commitment – if you’re true to your values who is going to say you’re wrong, and why would they?
Our values, and how we live them, are critical. We must continue to devote time and energy to communicating and discussing them and embedding them into everything that we do. We need an absolutely unrelenting focus on compassion and accountability, integrity and respect, teamwork and excellence.
Like Sue, I sometimes have doubts and feel weary with the fight, but every time you meet someone like Sue and have the discussion with them and engage on a real person to person level, shorn of all the normal management gobbledygook it makes you remember why you got into all this in the first place…
KEEP THE FAITH!
Day 24 – The frustrating task of self-motivation « courtesy of betweenfearandlove
Thought you might find this interesting…
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.“ – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.” – Latin Proverb
I think one of the most important things I’ve learned as I have gotten older is the importance of understanding that we have to go through things alone. Now, I know I have talked about the importance of understanding that we have to have help if we are going to get to where we are going. And that still stands. But we have to do the work on our own. We are the sole decision makers in what we do each day. We are the ones who are affected by our actions, more so than anyone else. We are the ones who have picked the path we are on. And we are the ones with the ultimate responsibility of getting to where we want/need to go.
It can be frustrating at times when we can’t find anyone to help us in the way we would like to have help. We have ideas and projects that we believe in, but sometimes it feels as though no one else really cares. The people who we feel are supposed to help may not always do so. And that can be difficult when we are trying to accomplish something that we believe in. It’s the ultimate rule when it comes to accomplishing your dreams…. No one will believe in you as much as you do until you can show them why they should. And unfortunately, that usually takes a lot of work.
I find that with writing it takes even more work. You can’t force people to read something. You can’t force someone to pay attention. When you sing people can hear you even if they don’t want to. When you act people can see you, even if they don’t want to. When you paint your work is visible, what you have to say and share is visible, even if people don’t want it to be. But when you write, your ideas are hidden between under the covers. The book covers to be exact. You can’t force people to understand that what you have to say is worthwhile enough to give up a few hours of their lives to read it. That’s significant time. A song is three minutes, and can be turned off. A show is 30 minutes or an hour, and can be turned off. A piece of artwork is available to take in over the course of a few moments. But books, books require an investment. And you have to do work. You’re not just observing, you are actively engaging in reading. And as a writer, I think it’s very important not to waste anyone’s time.
So I made it a point to write something that I believe is worthwhile. And after writing it, it felt great. But now I have to get people to read it. Which is less great. Because even though I want to share it, and even though I believe in it, I have to convince other people that they should as well. And though that makes me uncomfortable, what I have found is that thing that I started learning when I started college – no one else is going to do it for me. I’m the one who has to do the work. The ultimate responsibility is mine.
We all have things we want to do. Things we need to do. And we all have to start somewhere. Is there somewhere you are planning to go or something you are wanting to do? Find the time, find a way, and make it a point to do it. And along the way:
- Understand that even though people may be supportive, they may not be supportive in the way we’d like.
- Understand that even though it’s going to get hard, it’s something worth doing.
- Remember the journey is yours to take, and some of the people will have to come and go.
- Remember there are plenty of people who have made it through, so there’s no reason that you can’t, too.
- Stay motivated. You have what it takes. YOU.
- Smile. This is just good sense. It has the natural ability to lift your spirit, even when things are hard.
This is getting to be a habit.
A couple of days I ago, I was closing off an Appreciative Leadership session and here I am again today, doing the same and being suitably impressed once more by the impact that AL has on people and the genuinely inspiring comments they give each and every time.
Constantly privileged, constantly delighted, constantly remembering exactly why I love my job so much…
I never, ever thought this would impact in the way it clearly has and is continuing to do.
Appreciative Leadership is a leadership programme like no other I’ve ever known… It’s not a course but a way of being and it’s really starting to have a major impact on Lancashire Care and the way we are and behave.
I’ve just come away from the close off of another AL session with a bunch of people from across the organisation and it never fails to astonish me how uplifting these things always are. I don’t know what the magic is, but there is definitely some there, and whether I like it or not I can’t resist.
I always talk about how privileged I feel to be in this space with these people and working in Lancashire Care and it was very much the same again today.
It’s great hearing people’s reactions and stories and how prepared they are to share their stories about the brilliant work they’re doing.
Very, very humbling…
What's Dave Tomlinson up to now? 