The Art of Brilliance Blog

I was running a session for newly promoted Band 7s at a Trust in the Midlands last year. Twenty people in the room. Mix of nurses, physios, OTs. All promoted in the previous eighteen months. I asked them a simple question: “What percentage of your role is clinical, and what percentage is people management?” (more…)

Sports day. Year 6 production. Transition days. Leavers’ assembly. Staff barbecue (weather permitting, obviously). The class parties. Another water leak in the Year 3 toilets. The parent who turns up unannounced to discuss something that really could have been an email. (more…)

I was in a meeting with an HR director last month, and she said something that made me want to give her a standing ovation. (more…)

By the time you reach 40, life has probably handed you enough bad experiences, disappointments, losses, bruises and mini traumas to ruin the rest of your days.

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Forty-five minutes is 2% of your working week. That’s one meeting. The time you spend scrolling LinkedIn on a slow afternoon. That little bit of time between arriving at your desk and actually starting work. It’s nothing right? (more…)

The ward manager had fought to protect the time. Forty-five minutes on a Tuesday afternoon, squeezed between the lunch break and the drug round on a medical ward. Half the team didn’t think it was worth the fight. (more…)

The teachers who leave are never the ones you’d expect. (more…)

The most effective wellbeing pitch I’ve ever seen in the NHS didn’t mention wellbeing once. (more…)

One of our trainers, Martin, told me a story that I haven’t been able to shake. (more…)

I want to tell you about a manager I met last year. We’ll call her Sarah, because that’s not her name and she’d be pretty grumpy with me if I used her real one. (more…)

What changes in the room when you walk out of it? (more…)

That’s the question Andy puts to Nikki Ayles and Kev House in Episode 2 – and it’s one of those questions that sounds simple until you actually sit with it.
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