Senior Leaders
Characteristics of leaders at this stage: Leaders at this stage hold operational accountability across services or directorates, translating strategy into deliverable plans and driving high-quality, sustainable performance at scale. They lead through others and across systems—aligning resources, improving outcomes, and managing risk to ensure safe, responsive and efficient services.
They shape culture and capability by developing leaders, fostering collaboration, and embedding a strong focus on performance and continuous improvement.
Examples of roles sitting in this area include;
Head of Nursing – You provide professional and operational leadership across multiple services, setting clear clinical and cultural standards and championing excellent patient care. You lead and develop senior nursing leaders, ensuring safe staffing, high-quality practice and continuous improvement. You work across organisational and system boundaries to influence strategy, improve outcomes and build a compassionate, high-performing workforce.
Head of Function – You set the strategic direction for your function, ensuring it delivers high-quality, consistent support to services and enables organisational priorities. You lead and develop senior managers and specialists, driving performance, innovation and improvement. You collaborate across the organisation to influence decision-making and ensure your function adds measurable value to outcomes and experience.
Assistant Director – You lead large, complex areas of the organisation, translating strategic priorities into clear plans and outcomes. You provide direction and oversight to senior managers, holding accountability for performance, quality and people management. You work across directorates and with partners to drive improvement, build capability and deliver sustainable, system-wide impact.
Associate Director – You operate at a senior strategic level, shaping vision, direction and delivery across services or directorates. You lead through senior leaders, ensuring alignment to organisational priorities, strong governance and high performance. You work in partnership across the system to drive transformation, influence decision-making and model the leadership behaviours expected at scale.
The WeLead Senior Leaders Programme is Oxleas’ flagship leadership development offer for senior leaders, where leadership has the greatest strategic influence on organisational culture, system working, and service delivery across the Trust.
The programme is designed to support leaders who shape direction, lead services and directorates, and are responsible for delivering complex priorities across organisational and system boundaries. It strengthens both the strategic and human aspects of leadership, enabling participants to lead with clarity, influence and impact in highly complex environments.
WeLead Senior Leaders is aligned to Our Leadership Way and the NHS Management and Leadership Framework, ensuring leadership at Oxleas is compassionate, inclusive, values driven and performance focused at the most senior levels. It combines deep self-awareness, collective leadership and real-world strategic application to support leaders to lead transformational change and deliver sustainable improvement.
The programme is designed for senior leaders, typically in Band 8a and above roles, who:
WeLead Senior Leaders is open to both clinical and non-clinical leaders, recognising the critical role senior leaders play in shaping culture, inclusion and organisational performance across Oxleas and the wider system.
The programme is inclusive by design and brings together leaders from across services to strengthen collective leadership, develop a shared strategic mindset, and embed Our Leadership Way at the most senior levels of the organisation.
The WeLead Senior Leaders programme focuses on strategic leadership, culture and system impact, combining deep self-awareness with collective leadership capability. Key areas covered include:
Leading with purpose and strategic intent
Strengthening leaders’ ability to translate Trust strategy into clear direction, align teams and services, and deliver against organisational priorities.
Leading culture and inclusion at scale
Developing capability to shape inclusive, compassionate cultures, address inequality and embed psychological safety, aligned to Oxleas’ EDI ambitions and values.
System leadership and partnership working
Building skills in influencing, collaboration and leading across organisational boundaries within the wider health and care system.
Leading through complexity and change
Enhancing leaders’ ability to navigate ambiguity, leading large-scale transformation and supporting teams through uncertainty.
Performance, quality and accountability
Strengthening oversight of performance, governance, quality and improvement across services, ensuring delivery of safe, effective and high-quality care.
Leading people and developing others
Building capability in leading senior teams, developing future leaders and creating high-performing, values-driven leadership cultures.
Authentic leadership and self-insight
Using tools such as 360-degree feedback, coaching and reflective practice to deepen self-awareness, resilience and authenticity in leadership.
The programme uses a blended and experiential learning approach, including senior-level dialogue, action learning, peer challenge and applied projects, enabling leaders to work on real organisational priorities while strengthening collective leadership impact.
Coming Soon – Click the below button to access the leadership behaviours and competencies expected at this level. The competencies enable these established leaders to translate organisational strategy into action, lead larger or more complex areas, and influence across functions or systems.