Background
A successful Project Manager entered coaching without any prior experience of it. Their motivation was practical and improvement-focused: to strengthen their quality improvement (QI) skills and improve the way processes were designed and delivered within a demanding mental health context, particularly around 1-hour mental health assessments in A&E.
At the outset, coaching was seen as a potential tool for learning and process improvement—rather than something connected to emotions, motivation, or professional identity.
The Challenge
Working in mental health means operating in high-pressure systems that often prioritise speed, targets, and throughput. Over time, this can risk turning meaningful clinical encounters into tick-box exercises, stripping out the relational and therapeutic elements that motivate professionals to do the work in the first place.
The key challenge was not simply improving efficiency, but ensuring that quality and clinical meaning were preserved within the constraints of the system.
The Coaching Approach
Coaching created a protected space to think, reflect, and slow down. With skilled guidance and access to effective QI tools, the practitioner was able to:
- Sit with the emotional connection inherent in mental health work
- Explore what motivates themselves and their colleagues to care
- Examine how that motivation interacts—sometimes uncomfortably—with the realities of the A&E system
- Focus on the quality of the clinical intervention, not just compliance with time-based targets
Rather than separating improvement work from emotions, coaching explicitly integrated emotional insight with system thinking.
Impact and Outcomes
Through coaching, the practitioner gained confidence to “double down” on what truly matters:
- Reframing the 1-hour A&E assessment as a meaningful clinical encounter
- Ensuring quality improvement efforts strengthened, rather than diluted, professional values
- Developing greater empathy for teammates and their experiences within the system
- Facilitating reflective conversations within the team about purpose, meaning, and role
Crucially, the improvement work shifted from optimising a process to reconnecting teams with the fundamental purpose of care. This helped move practice away from a purely transactional model and back toward one grounded in professional values and motivation.
Reflections on the Coaching
The practitioner described the coaching as highly emotionally intelligent and deeply relevant to their role. The coach’s ability to understand how people feel, and, crucially, how those feelings influence motivation, ownership, and service design, was seen as a key strength.