Case Study · Communitas Clinics · NHS community healthcare · Two years, four programmes, the whole organisation
Communitas Clinics deliver NHS specialist care through their people. Over two years and four programmes they developed their whole organisation, clinical and operational, and rated the experience 9.1 out of 10.
Communitas Clinics deliver NHS specialist care through their people. Over two years and four programmes they developed their whole organisation, clinical and operational, and rated the experience 9.1 out of 10.Average Performance Partner rating
0.0/10
across the first year's 30 rated sessions
87
people developed across two years, clinical and operational, from healthcare assistants to heads of function
4 programmes
a Managers cohort and an Employees cohort each year, 2025 and again in 2026
Year two, live
recommissioned and rebuilt around Communitas's own competency framework, running now through 2027
Executive Summary
- Sector
- Community healthcare, an NHS specialist-services partner
- Buyer
- Senior leadership team, Communitas Clinics
The Brief
Develop the people who run Communitas Clinics, the NHS community provider delivering specialist dermatology, ENT and GP education across London and the South East. Reach the whole organisation rather than the senior team alone, the healthcare assistants and clinical administrators a patient meets as much as the heads of function running the business. Ground the development in Communitas's own competency framework so it speaks the language the organisation already uses, and make it count: tie it to how Communitas identifies and grows the people who will lead it next.
The Outcome
Across two years and four programmes, 87 people were developed as one organisation, clinical and operational together, against Communitas's own competency framework. The clearest proof is what Communitas did after year one: they recommissioned, and they raised the bar, rebuilding the programme around a custom Manager Strength Index and hand-selecting the people they see leading the organisation next. A partnership that started by reaching everyone became a deliberate engine for growing Communitas's future leaders.
From the leadership
When we started with 10X, I wanted development that actually fit Communitas, not a generic management course dropped on top of a busy NHS organisation. What we got was a programme built around our own competency framework, with a diagnostic tailored to us, so from day one it spoke the language our people already use. Over two years we have developed people right across the organisation, from our healthcare assistants to our heads of department, clinical and operational together in the same rooms. The experience our patients get is made by these people, and the programme treated them that way. What told me it was working was our own decision to go again: we did not just renew, we deepened it, building the second year around the people we see leading Communitas next.
10X has felt less like a supplier and more like a genuine partner in how we grow our managers and our future leaders.”
John Davison
Chief Technology Officer, Communitas Clinics
01 / The trigger
At Communitas, the care a patient gets is made by the people in front of them.
Communitas Clinics was founded in 2007 by a group of South London GPs and now delivers NHS specialist care, dermatology, ENT and GP education, to a population of more than six million across London and the South East. It is care delivered in the community rather than the hospital, which means the experience a patient gets is made almost entirely by the people in front of them: the healthcare assistants, the clinical administrators, the service leads, and the heads of function who keep the organisation running behind them.
Communitas had grown quickly, and they recognised early that an organisation growing this fast needs its managers and its people to grow with it. They wanted development that reached the whole organisation, not just the senior team, and that was built around the standard of leadership Communitas itself wanted to set rather than a generic course bought off a shelf.
So they opened the first year of the partnership to everyone: a Managers cohort and an Employees cohort, running side by side through 2025. The aim was to put a shared language for leadership and accountability into the hands of as much of the organisation as possible, clinical and operational alike, and to learn from that first year what concentrated focus could add next.
The real problems they brought
From the first workshop, the managers were candid about what they were carrying, and it was the challenge most managers recognise: doing it themselves. One manager admitted holding onto work because they could just get on with it, then seeing too late that it told the team they were not trusted. Another described handing work over and then, with no time, quietly dropping the follow-up. The instinct was always protective, to spare the team the overwhelm, and always at a cost.
Underneath it sat something specific to a fast-growing NHS provider: a wave of brand-new roles. As one manager put it, you are the team, you are creating the structure, so there was often no established way of working to delegate into, and after a recent move to service-line clusters, who owned what was not always clear.
And out at the front, the people who meet patients first described being caught in the middle: absorbing frustration, reconciling what a GP had promised with what the service could deliver, holding the line on a hard call. These were the real, universal problems of managing in a busy, growing healthcare organisation, and the ones Communitas chose to get ahead of.
02 / The whole organisation
One programme that reached the whole of Communitas, clinical and operational, in the same rooms.
This was never a programme for the senior team to attend on the organisation's behalf. It ran the full breadth of Communitas, so a Healthcare Assistant and a Head of Finance were developing against the same model, each at the altitude that fit their role. And because the cohorts were mixed across the business, people who would rarely sit in a room together, a clinician manager and a recruitment manager, a clinical administrator and an IT manager, were working the same real problems side by side.
How it worked
The room was the point, not a lecture from the front.
10X's principle is that the answers a healthcare organisation needs are mostly already inside it, held across its people. Communitas's clinical and operational teams rarely get the chance to compare how they actually handle the same situations, so the rooms were built to do exactly that.
A clinical administrator worked through a real delegation problem next to a service lead from another part of the business. Colleagues who normally only meet over a referral or a rota compared approaches to accountability and standards, and in the transcripts you can watch a method move: one person's way of handling a difficult conversation picked up and named by a colleague in the next breakout. The Performance Partner's job was to draw that knowledge out of Communitas and connect it, powered by the context their people were already in, rather than hand down a generic answer from a slide.
Who was in the programme
Clinical & care
55 people
Operational & corporate
17 people
Heads of function
9 people
Across the wider business
6 people
87 people, one organisation.
Two things came out of that at once. Communitas gained a shared language for leadership across clinical and operational lines, with a healthcare assistant and a head of function now describing accountability in the same words. And the senior team developed alongside their own people rather than apart from them, which is rare, and which set the tone for everything the second year went on to do.
03 / Built on their framework
Not an off-the-shelf course. A programme built around the competency framework Communitas already uses.
10X did not arrive with a fixed course to install. The development was built around Communitas's own competency framework, the standard they had defined for how their people should lead, so it spoke the language the organisation already used rather than importing a new one. That mattered most in a healthcare setting, where the work is specific and a generic management course earns little patience.
The diagnostic
A Manager Strength Index, customised to Communitas.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic, and for Communitas that diagnostic was bespoke: a custom Manager Strength Index, mapped to their own competency framework, so it measured people against the standard Communitas actually cares about rather than a one-size-fits-all model. It ran at the start and again at the close, giving Communitas a clear read on where their people stood and where to aim the development next.
How the work worked
Equip in the room, apply in the job, then bring it back.
The programme ran on a deliberate rhythm. Each in-person workshop equipped managers with a model and a single thing to try, then sent them back to the real job to use it. A few weeks later the cohort returned for a troubleshooting session built entirely around the problems they had hit putting it into practice. Equip, apply, troubleshoot, and round again across the year.
It meant the development never stayed theoretical. Managers brought live situations, a delegation that had not landed, a standard slipping, a change being resisted, and worked them with the Performance Partner and each other. The models were named and concrete: a way to delegate clearly and hold it accountable, a way to drive standards without burning people out, a way to lead a change without losing the room. What managers learned, they had already had to use.
What the first year worked on
- 01Delegate clearly, hold accountable, deliver results
- 02Shape stronger cultures, build inclusive followership
- 03Drive high standards, develop high performers
- 04Lead change, prove impact, embed innovation
04 / Choosing who leads next
After a year of reaching everyone, Communitas chose to go deeper with the people who will lead next.
The first year did its job: it put development into the hands of the whole organisation and showed Communitas what was possible. So for year two, Communitas made a deliberate choice. Rather than run the same broad programme again, they concentrated it, building a high-performance programme around the people they had identified as Communitas's future leaders.
Year one reached 74 people across the organisation. Year two concentrated on 34, with 21 carried forward from the first year, the people Communitas selected to lead it next.
Twenty-one of the people invited into the 2026 cohorts had been part of the first year, so the second year was not a fresh start. It was a deepening, building on managers who already knew the language and were ready to be stretched further. They were told plainly that they had been hand-selected as future organisational talent, and the programme was rebuilt around them: pitched higher, anchored to the competency framework, and aimed squarely at growing the next layer of leadership at Communitas.
That is the strongest signal in the whole story. A client does not recommission a partner, rebuild the programme and stake their succession plan on it unless the first year earned it.
05 / What two years built
The proof is not a score. It is a second year, built around the people who will lead Communitas next.
The most valuable thing this partnership produced does not fit in a single number. Communitas came into year two with managers across clinical and operational teams already describing leadership and accountability the same way, a custom diagnostic feeding their thinking on progression, and a cohort of hand-picked future leaders being developed deliberately rather than by chance.
And the clearest evidence that the work landed is what the people in the rooms say about it, across every level of the organisation.
What changed in the work
The troubleshooting sessions are where the change shows, because that is where managers come back and report what they actually did. Anonymised, because these are real people, here is a sample of what they described doing differently once they were back at work.
- 01One manager who admitted they held onto everything started matching each task to the person best placed to grow into it, then trusting them to deliver it their own way.
- 02Another stopped quietly redoing the team's work to their own standard, moving to do it your way, tell me how you did it, then we discuss, coaching rather than rescuing.
- 03On a patient call that was going in circles, one colleague learned to hand it to a different voice. The same message from a manager landed differently, and the call de-escalated.
- 04One leader began naming a missing piece of information back up the line rather than absorbing the blame for it, turning a silent frustration into a two-way conversation.
- 05A team started closing every meeting with a short note of who is accountable for what, so the people who quietly switch off during delegation could no longer slip the net.
- 06One manager described a senior clinician who was wholly against a change, until their specific concerns were heard and built in. They ended up, in the manager's words, the biggest advocate, the one shouting loudest about why it had to happen.
One shared language
A healthcare assistant and a head of function, describing good management in the same words.
By the end of the first year the same handful of phrases were turning up unprompted in separate rooms, used the same way by a healthcare assistant and a head of function. It is the clearest sign the work landed: not a score, but a whole organisation that had started to describe good management in one language.
In their own words, across the organisation
Hear it from the people in the rooms.
“It is always good to get the opportunity to discuss other people's perspectives from their area of the business. The facilitator ensures everyone gets the opportunity to input and actively encourages all to participate.”
“Great conversation starters and thought-provoking questions. “If everyone owns a task, no one owns it” sparked a massive rethink on ownership for me.”
“Interactive, informative, and relatable to real issues. “The standard you walk past is the standard you set” is a message I'll carry with me.”
“Good to get time to discuss as a team. We came up with some helpful real-life examples of how we could prioritise development time for our teams more effectively.”
“I learned the importance of delegation and trusting my team more. I always thought taking on more would take the stress off my team, but I didn't realise the negative effect that could have on morale.”
“I now feel equipped to have accountability conversations with my team. That's something I wouldn't have had the confidence to do before the programme.”
“What stood out was how the workshop made us explore what high standards really means across different teams. A practical and insightful experience that will benefit the entire organisation.”
“Lots of tools to take away and use day to day. I'm now focused on supporting my team, giving them space to take on more responsibility, and being transparent about tasks from the start.”
“Very insightful, and it really built my knowledge of the subject. I now approach accountability differently, both for myself and for others.”
06 / Start here
If you run a healthcare or NHS organisation where care is delivered by your people, want development built around your own competency framework rather than a generic course, or want to identify and grow the leaders who will run your organisation next, that is the work we do.
Every partnership between 10X and a client is entirely bespoke and unique. Book a no-obligation call with one of our Development Experts to scope how we could support you and your situation.