Since 2023 APS have been working with a prominent healthcare organisation to unlock hidden leadership potential —driving engagement, performance and retention.

Background:

In many healthcare and professional services contexts, teams generally expect their leaders to have technical expertise - typically resulting from years of direct application experience - in order to be seen as credible. Such roles often call for sensitive communication with patients and an ability to cope with the pressure of high demand, limited resources, and tension. Morale levels and attrition are often effects of such situations, which adds further pressure - challenging clinical leaders to work on their teams in addition to the demands of their core professional calling.

An effective development programme typically starts with helping participants become aware of what their strengths are and why they should work on any development to help gain more effective results personally, for the teams and for the organisation.  As you would expect, PhD level leaders are smart and deal with complex issues day to day – they expect evidence-based diagnostic tools and approaches that are backed up with significant research and scientific grounding. 

Feedback following previous participant experiences indicated a disappointment with tools used, comments suggested they seemed shallow, generic and technically superficial.  As a result, participants saw little value and impact on their day to day work. Despite best intentions by HR, this didn’t help them to help their colleagues.

Our Approach

1. Assess and Reflect

Provide Hogan Assessment tools to help participants understand their reputation at work – what drives them, likely every-day behaviour in the workplace, how they react to pressure and how all this compares to other adults.

Help the HR team to acquire the knowledge of such tools to support deployment and build collective insight and buy-in regarding strengths, focus and skill development areas - both individually and collectively.

Rapid Deployment of Hogan Assessments: Delivered within four weeks of first contact. In-house certification workshops enabled HR to own and interpret the data—predicted to cut recurring assessment costs by over 50%.

2. Exposure and Experience

Ongoing expert support: APS advisors worked alongside the cohort to guide initial debriefs and continue to maximise the value they were getting from the tools. APS consulted with the organisation about the benefit of understanding collective characteristics for cohorts of leaders, and agreed with the client to provide a bespoke “Team Insights Masterclass©” synthesising individual profiles into collective leadership dynamics.

3. Skills Development & Performance Tracking

Hands-on group development: Interactive workshops to translate assessment insights into real-world peer-to-peer strategies. Key focus areas included on self-awareness, communication styles and the ripple effect of senior leaders’ behaviours.

This approach provided insights about some of the frequently identified strengths of leaders within the organisation and also emphasised the challenges arising as a result of some ‘over-played’ characteristics. This opened the door for collective discussions about how to drive change and have a positive impact on the culture of the organisation and placed more focus on self-development, people leadership and organisational influence.

The “Aha” Moment

During the Masterclass, leaders realised that understanding their own tendencies wasn’t just “nice to have”—it was the linchpin to building team morale and sustaining high performance. That shift from technical command to people-centred leadership sparked genuine curiosity: “What else could we achieve if we channelled this insight across the organisation?”

Potential Outcomes

• Psychometrics become indispensable: Hogan Assessments are becoming the go-to tool for leadership programmes in the teams we have worked with so far, anticipated to boost HR-led engagement.
• Leadership pipeline: Advanced Leaders, Future CEOs and Medical Directors receive Hogan Assessments, executive coaching and targeted masterclasses—a closed loop from assessment to measurable growth.
• Behavioural agility unlocked: Senior leaders are expected to develop heightened self-awareness, adapting their styles for diverse team needs and carving out time for strategic planning.
• Data-driven talent decisions: HR are predicted to identify emerging leaders with greater accuracy, accelerating promotions and slashing time-to-fill critical roles.