Moving from the BBC to the Royal College of Nursing may seem an unusual step, but for Julie Carrington it was the perfect chance to build on her work in promoting learning
At first Royal seem apart the largest professional glance the BBC and the College of Nursing (RCN) to have little in common from size – one’s a broadcasting giant, the other union of nursing staff in the world. But look more closely and common traits appear. Both organisations dominate their particular sector, answer to stakeholders who are not shareholders, and have a general agenda closely tied to the government of the day – the BBC as a government-funded, publicly owned body, the RCN as a promoter of the interests of nurses and patients on national healthcare issues.
It is these similarities that persuaded Julie Carrington to switch over from the BBC. She joined the RCN in 2006 as organisational development manager, with the remit to establish and lead its learning and development plan and to introduce initiatives to enable the union to become a learning organisation.
“Both organisations are accountable – the BBC to licence fee-payers and the RCN to its membership and focus on people outside the organisation rather than simply on profit-making, and that was what drew me to the RCN position,” says Carrington of her decision to quit the BBC after a decade there in various HR and training positions.
“The challenges are more condensed here [at the RCN] and the BBC was more developed in some of its management approaches, but there is so much we can do here that will have an enormous impact,” she adds.
Carrington is already making her mark at the RCN. After only a year she has introduced management competencies, designed a management development programme, set up frameworks and programmes for RCN officers and a learning and development network, developed managers as coaches, established a biannual staff survey, redesigned the induction and appraisal system, and created a mentoring database. All with a team of two advisers and one administrator, who, with Carrington, comprise the RCN’s organisational development department. “We are a small group with a big agenda,” she says.
Unsurprisingly, many of the initiatives Carrington is introducing have their roots in techniques tried and tested during her time at the Beeb. As an assessment and development consultant there, she formed part of a team of occupational psychologists set up to work on assessment and development projects and BBC-wide initiatives, with a focus on developing leaders and managers through individual feedback and coaching.
Carrington cites her achievements here as being part of the BBC’s first coaching service and designing the assessment centre for potential management coaches, as well as being one of the 10 lead coaches in the organisation, with responsibility for supervising trainee and established coaches. “It was during my time with the occupational psychology group that I got more involved with one-to-one feedback and development work,” recalls Carrington. “The internal coaching service for the BBC was started by this group and because of the skills we were using in the work we were already doing, I became heavily involved in that.
“Coaching is a powerful tool and a powerful way of learning,” she says. “Its biggest impact is the confidence people gain from the process of coaching and recognising their own abilities. Coaching also provides a validated space to think, which is an important element of leadership and management.”
The experience Carrington gained as part of the internal coaching service stood her in good stead to take on the role of management development executive and training and development manager at the BBC World Service.
Here, she oversaw the delivery of the management development courses provided by the training department, an advisory/consultancy service to managers on the most effective and economic means of training, and helped managers to identify and buy consultancy services for managerial development. She also provided coaching on personal development and managerial issues and developed training plans that linked business priorities to training needs.
Carrington sees her achievements in this role as project-developing management capabilities as part of culture change for one of the language services, introducing two new courses and beginning the evaluation of the transfer of learning, and setting up a training and development model for editorial staff.
In her next role, as development executive for BBC Sport, she provided a strategic perspective on divisional training and development needs, and supported managers through organisational change. She also improved the internal attachment scheme and set up evaluation procedures for it, and encouraged managers to take ownership of the training and development of their staff in the future structure.
Taking the reins
On joining the RCN, Carrington had to hit the ground running. The position had sat vacant for almost six months, and one of her first challenges was to take the reins of an induction process and management development programme introduced by the previous incumbent. She found the programme provider had gone into liquidation, leaving several modules still to be delivered to the candidates, who also needed to get through accreditation. Carrington saw to it that candidates received their outstanding modules and gained accreditation, and then examined whether what had been provided was suited to the union’s aims.
“I took a clean sheet and redesigned the programme to suit our needs more,” she says. “It gave us the chance to reflect on how well the provision suited us, when our over-riding objective is to create an environment that encourages a learning mindset and the ownership of learning.”
A crucial factor in creating a coaching culture is to get buy-in from the top, she says. When Carrington joined the organisation Beverley Malone was general secretary, but in January her replacement, Peter Carter, started his tenure. Many aspects of the union’s work are now under review to ensure they fit in with his aims for the organisation, Carrington says. “He’s interested in the coaching process, though, and has his own views on the management style that he wants for the RCN,” she adds.
She believes that the biannual staff survey she is about to introduce will help to inform both her department and Carter’s senior management team of the success of moves to create the RCN’s coaching culture, as well as providing an insight into where staff are in terms of their personal development.
Joined-up thinking
Carrington’s mission to turn the RCN into a learning organisation means that almost everything she is working on is linked in some way. The development of competencies feeds into the management development programme, which is linked to the development of a 360-degree feedback process. The management development programme is in turn supported by coaching. She is keen to ensure that learning is translated into the day-to-day operational work undertaken by the RCN’s staff and shared across all departments and divisions.
“We are looking at work-based learning projects so the organisation can gain maximum benefit from the cross-networking that occurs between people from different departments within programmes, such as management development,” Carrington says.
The learning and development network she has set up will, she believes, help to spread good training and best practice across the organisation and move it away from the silo approach that has traditionally been followed. The RCN operates offices for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as nine regional offices, and what happens in one office has rarely been shared with the others. In addition, many of the RCN’s staff are out on the road, meeting, representing and advising members and other healthcare professionals. So the organisation faces both the logistical difficulties of delivering training and learning, and practical obstacles to sharing the learning and best practice. To overcome such problems, Carrington is looking to develop the organisation’s intranet usage.
Other practical problems stem from the dispersed nature of the workforce. “The geographical spread is a challenge, and there are costs associated with that. Plus, some of the regional offices are small, so it is important to ensure clients are not being coached by managers in the same office as them,” she says.
So far, Carrington’s efforts to push the coaching culture have been well received, she reports. She describes her experience as “pushing against an open door” and “people biting off her hand” to take advantage of the development opportunities she is implementing. She also hopes that the initiatives she is undertaking will establish the RCN as a model of best practice.
“Our members are our ultimate focus, and much of my work is about ensuring our own house is in order,” she says. “If we are to be advising the NHS and healthcare providers on their procedures and practices, then we need to make sure we are practising what we preach.”
COACHING PROFILE
Julie Carrington: CV
- 2006-present: organisational development manager, Royal College of Nursing
- 2005: development executive, BBC Sport
- 2004: management development executive and training and development manager, BBC World Service (maternity cover)
- 2000: sabbatical as HR consultant, HR Partners, Sydney, Australia
- 1996: assessment and development consultant, BBC Assessment and Development
- 1996: assessment adviser, BBC Recruitment Services
- 1995 – recruitment assistant, BBC Recruitment Services
Fact file: Royal College of Nursing
- Established in 1916
- The world’s largest union representing the nursing profession
- More than 390,000 registered nurses, healthcare support workers and nursing students are members
- Almost all those providing representation, support and advice, whether as RCN representatives or officers, are nurses
- No political alignment
- Key priorities:
– fighting for decent pay and conditions (achieving an above-inflation pay award that values nurses and recognises economic reality)
– safeguarding patients’ interests in the reconfiguration of the health service (influencing commissioning and the movement of care closer to patients’ homes)
– leading the development of best practice (campaigning to ensure patients are eating
and drinking properly; fighting hospital infections such as MRSA)