The Kindness Leader
Bob Klaber is a consultant general paediatrician and director of strategy, research and innovation at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Along with an incredible group of friends from across the globe he leads the conversation for kindness. You can find more information here: https://kindnessinhealthcare.world/
Bob trained as an educationalist alongside his postgraduate paediatric training in London and has a strong interest in individual and systems learning, quality improvement, digital innovation, behavioural insights work, leadership development and kindness. He has completed a mixed methods MD researching leadership approaches in healthcare.
In 2015 Bob set up a team who continue to drive an ambitious project to create a culture of continuous quality improvement across Imperial, has worked as Deputy Medical Director and has led work on the development and implementation of the Trust’s new organisational strategy. In his current director role he is responsible for strategy, research, innovation and improvement across Imperial College Healthcare, and within this role works closely with the senior leadership team with the Faculty of Medicine and Imperial College.
Bob is also a strong advocate for child health and co-leads the Connecting Care for Children (CC4C) integrated child health programme in North West London, which is focused on developing whole population integrated care models of care and learning within paediatrics and child health.
“And I sat there thinking, I’ve got this wrong, I’ve been framing this as ‘this is a bit soft and fluffy, but it’s really important’. I’d definitely been proactive and brought it into teaching and leadership work but always framed with an apology and I just thought, what an idiot I’ve been. This is the most important thing.”
Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or link to the transcript in BMJ Leader
BMJ Careers. “Role Model” Bob speaks to Kathy Oxtoby about what makes paediatrics a wonderful specialty.
Kindness, emotions and human relationships: The blind spot in public policy.
Julia Unwin CBE 2018 ISBN: 978-1-909447-95-0. Carnegie UK Trust
Read the full conversation in BMJLeader. Here are some key quotations from the interview:
“… it’s about working with primary care networks and, in modern language, integrated neighbourhood teams, to support them as they think about improving the health and well-being of the population of children they serve… It is a totally wonderful experience. Anyone who ever experiences will feel much less inclined to set foot in outpatients ever again; patients and their families too.”
“… the clinical conversations, experiences, responsibilities I have make me considerably better at my executive job than I would be otherwise. “
“…my clinical work and learning gives me a real energy and brings out lots of complementarity between the two roles. There’s an awful lot, actually, where the skills are very similar. Any job like this is about people, it’s about how you listen, about how you communicate… Those skills are very generic and very usable across things.”
“…On ‘multi tasking’, you can have a lot of things on but I am pretty convinced that in any one moment you can only do something properly. So, if I’m having a conversation with a family I can’t be sitting worrying about whether we’re going to be awarded the latest research grant. You’ve got to be able to separate those things out. I think that’s key.”
“I’m angry about how it took a once in a century global pandemic for healthcare leaders across the world to realize that looking after your staff is key to looking after patients. This is a conversation about leadership, and that’s catastrophic leadership failure. All of us who were in leadership roles pre-pandemic, what were we doing?”
“The bit about teams is so compelling… if your team, your ward, your clinic, your organization, is not psychologically safe then performance goes down, outcomes go down. …And , I’ve yet to find a better tool to create psychological safety than deliberate intentional acts of kindness.”
“… I worry that our medical schools generally excel at producing students who are very good at passing their exams, but I worry that there’s a growing dissonance between this and the need for people to learn about the things that they’re going to be coming up against when they’re working in healthcare teams? “
“What on earth are we doing in the way that we train people, the way that we employ people, the way that we think about them? These are our most precious and wonderful commodity. The starting point is that we have way more applicants per place, people with great hope and aspiration, and yet, we’ve designed systems that beat that out of them.”
“One of the things is that we have to get young people involved in shaping the future. That requires people like me in senior leadership positions to cede some power, to go and listen, to go and engage, to co-produce things, and largely we don’t have the skills for that.”
“Being a doctor is an extraordinary privilege. It’s a great pressure and stress as well but, you know, it’s a wonderful choice to make…and I’m going to spend the rest of my career doing absolutely everything I can to do, is to make sure the conditions and the environment are more suited for people to come and thrive, to not get burnt out, to not get fed up, to not think I’ve got to go and move to the other side of the world…To change this we have to look very hard at ourselves, about the brutalization of the systems that we that we run, and that’s about leadership. “
“We’ve got to connect. So, spending time building trust, building relationships, listening to each other, are incredibly valuable activities.”
