Leading with impact: Ravinder Sahota on tech challenges, empowering teams and building a future-ready NHS

Leadership in the NHS is both a privilege and a responsibility, and Ravinder Sahota, Interim Operational Chief Information Officer (CIO) at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, offers an insightful perspective on navigating this demanding and rewarding role.

In this Q&A, Ravinder delves into the core principles that drive her leadership style, offering a candid reflection on how her approach has evolved over the years. But her leadership isn’t just about making decisions; it's about empowering her team. 

She highlights the significant role mentorship and finding your people have played in her own career and stresses the importance of creating environments where growth and development are encouraged, particularly for women and underrepresented groups in leadership roles. 

Ravinder’s commitment to paving the way for others is a cornerstone of her approach, one that demonstrates how a leader’s success is tied not only to their own achievements but to the success of those they mentor and nurture.

• In your role as Interim Operational CIO, how do you view the responsibility that comes with leadership - particularly in the NHS where decisions can directly impact patient care?

 I'm very lucky because I think I bring my lived experiences into the role that I do. Growing up I was a translator for my mum, as English is not her first language, and actually that's one of the things that I'm really cognizant of is the fact that we don't want to force digital exclusion, and still allow patients to be involved in their care. 

In terms of responsibility, it is understanding the privilege that you hold, especially in senior roles, you hold a privileged position in some sense; there are options that are available to you that aren't available to your teams. 

So, part of that is taking responsibility for your team/s as well, and ensuring that you're doing the best that you can to get your teams and your department into a position where they're performing well and they're not reliant on you as an individual. I’ve never wanted the organisation to be reliant on me and say, ‘well, we need Ravi because she does this and she's the only one that can do this.’

You should bring some of that responsibility down into your team so that they understand that what they're doing is really important and how that impacts patient care. Whilst understanding that there is a part that digital can play in being able to bring more people to the forefront of what they're doing in terms of managing their care and being involved in their care. 

You also need to understand where your organisation wants to get to and how you help your organisation move forward with  that, using digital data and tech to do that so that it can realise its ambitions as an organisation. 

You are facilitating that and you are serving the community that you need to serve, and you're doing it responsibly, you’re  making good long-term decisions about what needs to happen. 

• How has your leadership approach evolved in the face of increasing pressure on NHS resources and digital transformation demands?

 I talk about this all the time, if you had met me when I was in my twenties, I was a very different person, I was incredibly fiery, and I just made snap decisions about things. 

What you understand as you go through leadership is that you need to have your tailored approach, to who you are dealing with and also what's happening. But also, you need to be able to learn how to control your emotions so that isn't impacting and bleeding down into the team and the people that you are managing.

You get really good pieces of advice that really stick with you as you go through your career, for me some of those have been about the impact that you have. As a senior leader, if you are being really negative about something, that holds so much more weight to the individual that you're saying it to, especially if it's a junior member of staff. 

You really have to think ‘Is this constructive?’. Similarly, if you're praising somebody, that probably makes them feel so much better because they are getting it from a senior individual.

I think my approach has shifted as well and now I'm very much cognizant that it is the we, it is us collectively moving through, and that actually you can have good ideas as an individual, but if your team are not coming along with you, if the organisation's not working with you and you can't bring those people with you, nothing's actually going to come to fruition. The idea will just stay that, it will stay a good idea and you won't ever actually achieve anything. 

You will always get pressures and demands; it is one thing that is constant about working in the NHS, it's a given. So that's always going to be happening and there's always going to be something that you need to be doing or something that you need to be concentrating on, or more bandwidth that you need to be expanding.

I think the best thing that people need to do sometimes, is just take a step back because you need a little bit of time, and you need to look at it objectively and just think a bit more, ‘Is this feasible? Does this feel like the right thing to do? Is there something that we could do better?’

That's why I always say that if you're going to do something digitally, what are you adding? Don't just digitise something. What are you adding? What's going to make it better than what somebody had before?

 I think you need good people around you who pull you up, and that doesn't have to be senior people. That can just be people in your team who are not afraid to tell you when they think that you're doing something wrong or you're going down the wrong route, or you don't have all the information. Or, actually, you made an awful decision.

Sometimes that happens, we are not infallible. We try our best, but sometimes we do make awful decisions about things. Often, all you need is someone to talk it through so that before you get to making that difficult decision, or before you get really ahead of yourself, you've had that sense check.  

• Your role as a female leader in the NHS; there aren't many female leaders, unfortunately, in your kind of situation. So, what kind of unique challenges have you faced and how have you overcome them and how have you got to where you are?

I'm a mum of two children and I don't think it is said enough, but being a mum and becoming a parent really does affect your career as a woman. There are things that we've tried to do to encourage more women into the workplace, and encourage the advancement of women.

For me personally, my advancement has really been based on the fact that I've had really good people throughout my career who have helped me and nurtured me, and not everybody is that lucky. I do think it really does matter that you find a space in a role where you feel you are growing and you've been given the opportunity, but you are also being nurtured through that and that you have individuals who genuinely care about your progression. 

Don't be afraid to move if that doesn't happen. One of my biggest career rules was that if I've been in a position for two years and I'm not learning anything new, then I should move. I should make sure that I stretch and that I continue to develop. You have to take some responsibility, nobody's going to do that completely for you.

• Do you think there’s been a shift in inclusivity and representation in NHS tech leaders? Do you feel it's more inclusive now?

Probably not as much as I would've liked to have seen considering everything that we thought was happening. There have been a lot of initiatives across the public sector around getting more women and getting more representation from BAME groups and those with disabilities into those kind of senior roles. And I don't think that we are seeing the shift fast enough really, in terms of that representation. I think that is a little bit disheartening. 

I think it is a lot more inclusive, but whether it's inclusive enough to the degree that we're getting the shift, I would probably say no. I think there's still more work to be done there.

I think sometimes that's probably a failing on the part of people like me who do get into senior roles, because part of that responsibility should be to make it easier for people to come into, pay it forward but down. How do you pave the way for people who are coming behind you and make it easier for them as well? 

• What advice would you give to women trying to reach a CIO role? 

I would say perseverance is a real keyword, and resilience. You need those and do not underestimate that. So make sure that you've got a really good support network because they are the ones that you are going to need. 

I think the other thing is don't be afraid to be who you are. I think there is almost a kind of given that if you are a woman in a leadership role, that you’re going to be more facilitative, more conciliatory. You are going to be a bit more apologetic. You're going to be a bit more nurturing. 

You need to be your authentic self at work and that doesn't mean that you need to try and be all things to all people. If someone else has a perception about what you should be at work, that is their perception, that is something that they need to work through. But that should not stop you from being who you need to be and doing what you need to do.

I think it is really easy sometimes to give in and try to mould yourself into what you think other people need you to be. Sometimes you will need to do that as part of development, but that doesn't mean that you have to give up being you. You need to mature, but you shouldn't necessarily give up being you.

Also don’t think you need a traditional career in IT to be able to progress – there are so many digital roles now and transferable skills are very important. The more senior you become the more you realise, you need expertise beyond your own subject matter to be effective within an organisation. 

• What's been your approach to building these high performing technology teams? How do you identify and nurture talent? 

I think a lot of it is common sense and probably not anything that's new. I think one thing you have to get comfortable with is the fact that you are not going to be an expert in everything.

You might hold a senior position, but you are not going to know everything and that's why you have your teams, because they are the experts in these things. You need to use the talent that you have, and you need to use it to its best ability.

Part of what we've done is understand where we sit. So, I didn't come in and want to make a whole raft of changes. A lot of what I did in the very early days here was observing what was happening and the way that the team works. Where do you think you have problems? Do you have things like single points of failure that you need to be able to close down, and do you have a plan for where you want the team to get to? How do you move them through that?

If you know where you want to be in 12 months’ time, where are you lacking? What are the areas that you really need to focus on, and how do you do that? Some of that might be that maybe people are not necessarily in the best roles for their skillset, so you need to think about how you manage that. 

A lot of it is development in terms of being able to upskill or give them the skills that you think they need to be able to close the gaps that you have identified. The other bit is giving your team enough head cover and enough bandwidth to be able to develop because whilst they're developing, they're going to have to take time out.

Set your expectations, if that's where you expect them to get, then have that conversation and set the expectation and then make sure that you are facilitating them. 

Sometimes, this can lead to an open and honest conversation, is it the fact that I [as the senior leader] need to do something else to facilitate you, or is it the fact that actually you cannot get there? This can lead to understanding their limitations and where they want to be.

I think what you will realise is when your team reflects - what they thought was good three years ago is now no longer good – in fact, it's not even acceptable. They've moved so far forward that what is normal now is something that they could never have envisaged three years ago.

Have your goal in mind and don’t be afraid to hold people accountable.

• What are the biggest technology opportunities and challenges, over the next three to five years? 

I think some of the biggest challenges are going to be the fact that we know that people see digital and tech as maybe the panacea for everything, and they feel like it can plug the gap and I'm not sure that it can.

I think, if your processes are not correct and the way that you're working isn't aligned, then digital has no hope.

We always know that funding is a real issue for digital, but using what you have wisely and thinking long term is going to be the key here because that is within your gift, as a senior leader. If you think long term enough, you can make some good decisions about where you want to get to. It might not be the quick, easy wins that you're hoping for, but it will move you to a place where that's better. It will be the fact that they won’t necessarily be easy wins which will be challenging. 

Working in your teams, being more integrated, not seeing digital as something separate really, but something which is fundamental and integrated is going to help you move to that space. 

There needs to be a recognition that we are no longer single organisations and entities, but that we need to work together in partnership and that means a lot of give and take. Not only is this a new view for some, but it will be challenging. 

Individually you could have spent years getting your team or organisation into a position, and you now may potentially be undoing some of that work to move to a better position collectively. That’s hard. That’s letting go of pride and ego in favour of the longer-term strategic outlook for the collective betterment of all parties. 

• Strategic recruitment, what part's that going to play in driving long-term digital transformation? 

I think strategic recruitment's only going to work if we're thinking in a strategic way about what we need.

I think that is where people fall short a lot of the time, because your plan is sometimes predicated on the fact that you need to do this by this time period, and therefore you need X amount of resource, and actually what you're not thinking is that your plan could be fluid and what you need are a range of options to be able to achieve what you need to achieve. 

If you think about it over a longer-term period – one, two, three years – as long as you get there, that's okay. It doesn't all need to be done within this definitive timeframe which constrains your options. 

I know some of the funding challenges are real issues because we don't get multi-year funding plans, so sometimes you can't plan because you don't know what you are going to get. But even if you were just to plan based on what you have and how you could use it differently, I think that would move people further. It would move them and allow them to see what they need, and I think then that's where strategic recruitment comes in. 

I think the things that people really need to be concentrating on are things like interoperability. Rather than saying, we're going to spend all this money on this new system that's really going to help us move forward. There are probably lots of interoperable things that you could do, which would make it easier for information to flow. 

You probably need to be thinking at a much broader level now around how do you work with other organisations and do you have some of those real enterprise roles in your teams that are going to allow you to think about things like enterprise architecture and you know, how you do data warehousing and management and data management across organisations, and how do you do kind of big portfolio management across organisations and bring it together so that you're doing it once and scaling it up.

• What do you look for in a candidate when you’re recruiting? 

I think that really depends on the role, if you're looking at a technical role, you can't get away from the fact that they need to have technical expertise in that role.

I think if you're thinking more generically, what you really want is someone who comes in with the right attitude. You’re not looking for someone necessarily who can hit everything in the job description and the personal specification, but someone who's willing to learn, who comes in with that eagerness, that passion, and that you can work with this individual.

Across a year on average, we deliver consistently between 27 and 30 projects, and we only have a team of four Project Managers – we’re not talking a huge delivery team here. What we do have in the portfolio team is that mix of staff, so everyone is involved, and people know what they're doing. I think that helps you with your delivery because you have the whole of that team contributing and it's not just them. 

We’ve got data elements, in the wider department infrastructure and hardware elements, it's about pulling it all together and it works because they are all enthusiastic and want to deliver quality outcomes, whilst understanding the importance of working together.

It's about understanding where your resource sits effectively and where you can move them to get the best out of them, and how you can bring people together. But some of it is around the fact that they’ve done the hard work, the department have done the hard work themselves.

They've moved themselves so effectively from where they were into the position that they now are, I give kudos to them. You are only as good as the team that's sitting underneath you, and the fact that they can do this shows that they are a brilliant team and that’s what we look for. 

They've moved, they've learned, they've grown, and they've stretched themselves to get to where they need to get to. Now they're delivering and they're delivering well. 

Whilst I’ve got really high standards for the team and I know where I want to move them, I think the same of myself. I must be making a positive impact, and if I’m no longer making an impact then, as far as I’m concerned, the organisation doesn’t need me because I’m not being effective. 

Final thoughts 

Ravinder’s insights demonstrate the incredible potential for leadership and innovation in healthcare technology. As the NHS continues its journey of digital transformation, there are exciting opportunities for those looking to make a real impact. 

If you're interested in tech roles available through Sellick Partnership, you can take a look at our tech jobs. Alternatively, if you’re looking for tech talent in your teams, contact us today.