Three main principles emerge, all centre on taking control: of your direction, your investments and your emotions. Things you would want to do in good times but are still more important to do in difficult ones.

Base your plan on a sound view of the future: you will need to speculate on all that is going to happen.

A strong business plan focuses the attention, actions and resources of businesses on their ultimate goal. With the first whiff of any change in the marketplace, their plans are revised to keep the company moving in the desired direction.

In recession, our first task is to revisit our career plan. As events unfold, adjust or write for the first time your ambitions and the benefits you seek to achieve. Reschedule or schedule time frames to ensure they are still realistic. Refresh or construct your action plan to keep on track.

Base your plan on a sound view of the future: you will need to speculate on all that is going to happen. How long do you expect the recession and public sector freeze to last? What impact is predicted for your sector, service and career? Watch news, listen to critics, surf the websites, network and debate with a range of people to identify the possible scenarios. Hope for the best but plan for the worst.

According to the New Statesman smart businesses are “leanbut not short sighted”. Being lean means managing your investments – inside and outside work. Mindful that it is easier to save than to earn, reducing expenditure also provides more flexibility and choice in your future career moves.

Scrutinise new purchases and recurrent spending: are they needed right now; could they be secured another way – made, mended, borrowed; and, if inevitable, be procured at the required quality but least cost?

As a minimum:

• Continue to increase and hone your competencies. Identify what in your sector – in recession – cannot be done without, and equip yourself to provide it.
• Prepare your marketing materials well in advance. Have your easy-read, results-based CV up to date. Prepare a 15 second summary of your unique contribution to the workplace. Use all available media to attract new work.
• Finally and most importantly, successful businesses understand the power of emotion on behaviour, decision making and action. They control their feelings to ensure their impact for the good. Being aware of the most likely reactions in periods of instability better places you to deal with them when they are evoked in yourself and in others.
• Where decisions about our future are taken out of our control, fear and anxiety predominate.
• Fear destroys confidence. A pre-prepared career plan for all scenarios shortcuts the paralysis and offers immediate direction to your activities.
• Steering our careers through recession and the ensuing reduction in NHS management costs is a challenge we all face.
• Setting out our pathway, harnessing our investments and managing emotions to support our career goals makes for a good start.

Originally published in the Health Service Journal in July 2010.

Many health service managers are anxious. Their challenge is to not only sustain but further improve service quality against growing demands with constrained resources and, for many, organisational disruption.

Concern over jobs, livelihoods and careers is emerging.

At the organisations I have been involved with during the past few weeks I have seen some good leadership from managers at all levels. They remain focused, calmly absorb news on the pressures ahead and are carefully pacing themselves and supporting their staff through the uncertainty towards their goals.

In all the turbulence they have not lost their bearings. Whether natural trait or deliberate strategy, they seem to use four points of reference from which they glean information and act.

For one, these managers face and anticipate the future. They are unafraid to read the signs ahead and keep track of what is emerging (and disappearing) on the near and distant horizon. They collect information on the significant changes most likely to impact on their situation – and on how they will impact.

Effective managers prepare to avoid, minimise or even make opportunities out of the impending issues. They put aside potentially paralysing anxiety and channel their energies into action. They make space to be innovative about the way around or through the issue, always looking for what they and their organisation can gain.

They are aware of, but not overly concerned or distracted by, factors that are unlikely to affect them.

Second, they reflect on the near and distant past experience, without seeking to blame, justify or be nostalgic. The learning provides insight into potential “how to” and, perhaps, what not to do. It can also highlight the behaviours that helped and hindered progress.

Understanding the value of collaboration, they look outward to make the utmost of their resources and redesign services accordingly. Working across professional, organisational and sector divides releases everything from ideas and innovation through to economies of scale, while also improving service and patient experience.

Finally, these managers keep their eyes on today. Whatever the future will bring, they remain determined to reach their overall goal – the focus of their job, the remit of their team, the purpose of their organisation, the benefits for service users. They use every practice to encourage their staff to see opportunity in place of threat.

Assessing their priorities, they employ resources to greatest effect and create versatile plans, building in key review dates – especially for significant events.

Keeping our bearings in this and any season of change is essential for continued delivery at the level and quality required. We need to keep our eyes open to the challenges, hunt out solutions, extend our competence and hold fast, confident that we can do it.

Do you know what you want to be doing in five years’ time? You should. A carefully crafted career plan can show you the way forward, especially if your job is stuck in the doldrums and you lack inspiration to change it. The most successful plans are based on honest self-analysis: take time out to appraise your ambitions, experience and skills, and then draft a dynamic new CV.

Career plans

1. Have a career plan – however simple – if only to judge whether you are on target. Most of us have some kind of a plan, even if it’s only in our heads. Try committing yours to paper to see what it looks like.
2. Goals don’t need to be job-specific – fine if your ambition is to “be an astronaut” but not everyone is so definite. Don’t be put off expressing less explicit goals, such as ‘quality: of life and work experience’, or ‘variety: a wide portfolio of managerial skills and experience’.
3. Review your career plan regularly and set yourself fresh objectives: pin point contacts, competencies and knowledge you need to acquire, and roles to investigate further.
4. Make your plan realistic and effective:
   • Indulge in introspective and retrospection to unearth your values, explore what ‘makes you tick’, the skills you have honed, the places and people you like to work with. All this will be useful material when writing your CV later.
   • Anticipate what will be happening two to five years from now – to your profession, your organisation, your home circumstances and the world around you. Changes in these areas can help fulfill your ambitions, or inhibit them.
   • Strike a healthy life-work balance – position your plan in the context of your life and wider ambitions: each can play off the other and help or hinder you.
5. Keep a generic CV up and running on your computer. Update it regularly and overhaul it every two or three jobs, it should show your growing competencies and echo your career plan. Use it to build networks and be ready for relevant jobs when they come up.
6. Think twice before posting off your application. If done well the selection process will take up a lot of your time and energy. Does this position further your ambition, even by an indirect route?
7. Find out if you’re suited to the role by gathering plenty of intelligence on your prospective employer (including the organisation, department and team). Use your networks, as well as the employers adverts, job specs, websites and publicity material. What do they really want? What are they really like? Check if the job suits your career plan – and say so in your application.
8. Exploit (and time) your call to ‘discuss the post further’. Show you are well informed, ask pre-prepared questions to gain more insight, and market yourself by putting across a strong personal profile.
9. Make it easy for the short-listing panel to select you: tailor your CV to their requirements. Using the job description and person specification:
   • shape and structure the content. Move your most significant achievements to the front of each section. Be ruthless: edit out all irrelevant information.
   • Top your CV with a dynamic personal profile (a four or five line summary about you, your areas of expertise and career direction) and make it pertinent to the position.
10. Persuade some critical friends or colleagues to appraise your CV. Remembering the likely competition or the job, put yourself in the employers shoes – what kind of CV would impress you?

CV style file

• Choose and appropriate format: show your career progression by adopting a traditional chronological style, or highlight your transferable skills by using a skills-based format (list, with examples, your key skills aligning them to the employer’s requirements: then briefly add your career summary).
• Take care with layout, spacing and headings – be consistent.
• Pitch the wording at the readership and ban jargon, especially technical terms and abbreviations which may not be understood.
• Quantify your achievement showing the results – size of budgets, number of staff, etc.
• Be succinct.
• Read your finished CV aloud to see if it makes sense.
• Finally, triple check grammar and spellings – don’t rely on spell-checks, and take special care with names.

Originally published in the Health Management Journal in 2002.

Using marketing terminology in relation to the health service is more acceptable now than it has ever been. Many use the term “marketing” synonymously with selling, advertising or promotion and public relations.

Apply this view of marketing to the NHS and a picture appears of providers engaging in any range of activities to communicate more clearly about their service – what’s delivered, to whom and why people should use it. They may just be highlighting the availability of their service or, indeed, they may want to sustain or improve their service’s image.

Conscious of the less attractive competitive behaviors and marketing practices sometimes found within the private sector, many NHS organisations are rightly keen not to have resources squandered on needless or improper promotion. The Code of Practice for Promotion of NHS Services provides a guide to public services in their promotional activities.

The concept of marketing has evolved over past decades. It has moved from one of “selling” to one in which the needs and wishes of the customer are captured and reflected in the service. And services also seek to have a distinctive marketing strategy, to differentiate them from other providers and support the development of their provision.

This is reflected in the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) definition of marketing as “a management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.” Public and voluntary sector managers prefer to substitute “efficiently” or “within the resources available” for the word “profitably” in agreeing their vision of effective marketing.

Those who adhere to this broader definition recognise that marketing has more in common with public and patient engagement than “selling”. They see it as an ongoing process of assessing and responding to your position within a dynamic marketing environment. For the NHS, this includes flexing provision to meet the needs and views of public and patients. It means being mindful of the existing or potential provision by “competitors” or alternative providers.

In this model, promotion is viewed as just one possible activity out of a range of optional “marketing mix” adjustments that might be used to keep your service viable or, to use another term, “contestable”.

Take the former view of marketing – that equates to selling, if not promotion – and the benefits are limited. They largely hinge around maintaining or improving your service’s image, and excelling over any competition.

Use the CIM’s broader definition of marketing, review marketing theory and apply the principles and practice to the NHS, and commissioners and providers alike will find there is a range of tools with which to assess and shape provision.

Some marketing techniques may be new, others may already be familiar. For instance, you can use environmental scanning frameworks, such as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to assess the future viability of a service.

Market analysis enables you to generate reliable information that can underpin and prioritise marketing efforts and the use of resources.

Mapping different types of customer is a good starting point. These might include commissioners, stakeholders and staff as well as patients, their families and carers, both within the local area and further afield.

In a tendering context, marketing positioning models can help to assess your service’s attractiveness to commissioners compared with those of competitors. Look at what percentage of the market competing providers have, and whether they focus on a niche group within the overall market.

Whatever tools you use, it helps to follow a clear market planning process. Start with marketing objectives, align these to market opportunities and resources, formulate a strategy, then develop and implement a detailed plan of specific marketing activities.

Originally published in the Health Management Journal Sept / Oct 2008

An article in Health Management earlier this year assessed some of the implications of becoming an independent consultant. But what does it mean in practice? What are some of the pitfalls you should be aware of? Here we outline some tips for those contemplating the move based on our own experiences.

No more the financial security of a regular monthly pay cheque. Overnight, income becomes contract-based and variable. Before starting out, review your personal lifestyle and budget. Focus on essentials, reduce personal overheads, pay off loans and decrease the mortgage. Any NHS ‘package’ should be put to good use. Consider part-time employment (without compromising your availability for contracts) while business builds. Keep six months’ living costs reserve as a buffer.

How easy it was to taker infrastructure for granted. Now you must develop and maintain your own business and office base. Organise travel routes to incorporate banking, buying stationery and equipment (resisting the seductive, glossy brochures) and visits to your accountant. Build in time for book-keeping, getting quotes for professional indemnity and office insurance and seeking out and writing proposals for new work. Techno-nightmares (your system corrupts tomorrow’s Powerpoint presentation, a fault cuts off the phone, email and fax) will cause you to revoke your criticism of the IM&T Help Desk.

Once an organisation animal, now you must tackle the isolation of independence and the challenge of being ‘home alone’, perhaps for several days. With whom do you bandy ideas, obtain sanity checks or find creativity for your proposals and projects? Where is the social chat that lifts your mood, provides interest or brings fresh perspective? Office interruptions give way to domestic distractions if based at home. A good network of business and NHS colleagues, a supportive partner and family, a well-planned and varied diary will help, but strong self-discipline and determination must underpin all.

No longer part of the NHS, your former colleagues’ perceptions of you will shift. Some will use the resource you offer, a few may be envious or suspicious – inevitably, all will become more distant. You find yourself on the outside, looking in. While disturbing at first, the time and self-assurance, you will adapt. Use your new objectivity and maintain your networks by doing most of the running. Exchange your external view-point learning and experience for new information and knowledge of the Service.

Your move to independence may reflect a wish for more control of work and increased quality of life. Yet, just as work never arrives in a steady stream, so customers and contracts ‘ebb and flow’. A single, large project offers security but limits flexibility in attracting new work. Smaller contracts provide less security, but a great deal of variety. Achieving a ‘mixed portfolio’ of work is ideal – but requires you to balance the demands of various clients’ deadlines. Planning for and allowing time to acquire new business is essential. Building in vacation and training time is a risk. Turn down a contract in haste – repent at leisure.

Going solo, how will you obtain sufficient work on a regular basis? The NHS changes. Former colleagues move on. Contracts become hard to maintain. Over time, you will not be able to trade on your original reputation. Larger projects must be tendered for. Tendering, a skill in its own right, is time consuming and de-motivating if unsuccessful. Continually build your reputation through assignments and proactive networking. Explore options to become an associate with an established consultancy, they are experienced in tendering and more resilient. Create a network with other independent consultants with complimentary skills, in complementary sectors – or those in similar fields. Bouncing ideas off one another can lead to sub-contracting or joint-tendering. While the network can be as formal as you like, trust and some ground-rules will be needed. However, the reputation of established consultancies may still prove overwhelming.

Plan ahead. Allow extra time and resources for each job. Network to supplement your resources. Cope with the challenges and generate the work. As an independent, nothing is quite as high as the highs you will experience. Good luck!

Originally published in Health Management Journal Nov 2001

So you want to manage your time better? Well, there’s no time like the present. Make notes as you plan three key steps. Lasting results will come from working things out for yourself.

Step 1: Identify your top three time thieves

What drains your time? Be sure to think through all the angles – in the workplace and at home.

In the workplace, for example, the most likely access points for “break-ins” come from your boss, your team, people who work for you, other colleagues, the organisation itself (including the physical environment, facilities and equipment) and people outside your organisation.

Try to differentiate between “time thieves” and “time aids”, which are things that ultimately release time and you. Time thieves are typically:

• unnecessary or lengthy calls and conversations;
• unwanted phone or email messages;
• badly organised, pointless meetings;
• unhelpful callers, interruptions and distractions;
• unrealistic expectations, unclear direction or advice; and
• destructive discussions.

Time aids can become time thieves when they let us down, such as when:

• the photocopier jams;
• your personal organiser fails;
• you lose computer files;
• your mobile phone battery runs out;
• you’re delayed in traffic, a queue, waiting for someone or left “on hold”.

Once you’ve made your list, circle your top three time thieves so you can focus on “arresting” them.

Step 2: Arrest them

Think about what measures you can take to arrest your three culprits. In working out what to do, remember the following points.

Prevention is better than the cure

Secure your work and home time against these time thieves wherever you can.

• Do only what’s necessary – restrict and screen out what’s not. Pass on essential information or, if you think you’ll need it, save, scan or file it.
• Don’t duplicate or proliferate. Don’t just dump unwanted information on others – bin it instead.
• Block distractions, switch off noisy machines, move from busy areas, prune clutter and remove rubbish.

Pause before action

If it has to be done, prepare the most effective delivery route.

• Prioritise and plan ahead. Take control of meetings, reports, presentations and projects. Clarify their purpose, challenge their duration or deadlines, confirm your own role and check the resources available. Batch tasks, calls and emails and deal with them together. Learn to speed read.
• Choose the best way or people to get things sorted. Know your colleagues’ weaknesses and strengths, how best to influence and engage them and over what. Understand, be familiar with and maintain equipment and facilities.

Maximise the opportunity

If it has to be done, make it work for the best for you and others.

• Turn difficult tasks into development opportunities for yourself or simpler ones for delegation. Seek out a colleague’s insight or support – but be sure to reciprocate. Share reviews, swap notes, provide joint briefs on policies or procedures. Innovation can make dull jobs enjoyable.
• Multi-task while waiting. Do those little jobs, perhaps something mundane but important like catching up with your reading or carrying out a web search you planned. You could use the time to simply reflect and relax.
• And, above all, don’t be a time thief yourself. Make a habit of brevity and clarity. Don’t procrastinate – focus and deliver on agreed objectives.

Step 3: Jail them

Once you’ve come up with some ideas, think about your findings. How are you going to deal with your main time thieves?

Now elect your top three tips and, without wasting any more time, put them into action.

This article is based on a regional seminar for IHM members and other managers given by Accomplice, which provides organisational and management solutions, primarily in the NHS.

Originally published in the Health Management journal Sept / Oct 2008.

Read the latest article from Nicky Spencer at HSJ.com

Read Nicky’s latest article for the Health Service Journal at HSJ.com.

Nicky Spencer asks us, in her column in the Health Service Journal, to recognise the impact of home-life stresses creeping into the workplace – and do those things that make for better health – not just in work but at home too. Read the article at HSJ.co.uk

Considering your ‘out of work’ needs is something we include in career accomplice, when planning for a sound career.