Banishing the 'sticky floor': transforming organisations to support inclusive cultures for healthcare leadership

Banishing the ‘sticky floor’: transforming organisations to support inclusive cultures for healthcare leadership’, an HSMC Seminar with Dr Charlotte Croft from Warwick Business School who discussed how developing inclusive forms of leadership in healthcare has the potential to enhance patient care, workforce motivation, decision making and efficiency. 

Developing inclusive forms of leadership in healthcare has potential to enhance patient care, workforce motivation, decision making and efficiency. But while organisational leaders have ambition to create more inclusive leadership cultures there is little evidence base of how to achieve this. In healthcare, females from ethnic minority backgrounds are over-represented at entry level roles but under-represented in leadership positions. Previous attempts to improve inclusivity have relied on establishing new Leadership Development Programmes (LDPs) which target under-represented groups. But LDPs do little to address organisational cultures excluding progression of females from ethnic minority backgrounds into leadership positions and LDPs alone cannot redress organisational inequalities related to gender and ethnicity. This talk moves the focus away from LDPs that attempt to ‘fix the person’ and instead discusses solutions that ‘fix the organisation’.

Charlotte Croft is an Associate Professor in OHRM. Her work focuses on issues of identity, leadership and collaboration in professionalised contexts. The majority of her research is focused on healthcare organisations, with a particular interest in the interplay between different professional and managerial groups during processes of collaboration. 

Charlotte was previously an NIHR funded Research Fellow exploring the absorptive capacity of Clinical Commissioning Groups. She was awarded her PhD from Warwick Business School in 2012, and her doctoral thesis focused on the challenges of leadership for nurses in middle management positions.

Prior to moving into academia, Charlotte worked as an Intensive Care Staff Nurse.