Background A successful shop floor leader must perform many tasks, often simultaneously, and hold an array of skills to complete those tasks. They must deliver clinical care, education and teaching and manage flow and performance. Individuals within an organisation will have differing expectations of the shop floor leader depending on how they are positioned within the organisation. The purpose of this study is to explore what team members within a single organisation, perceive to be good clinical shop floor leadership through semi structured interviews.

Method and results Purposive, convenience sampling was used to find 12 subjects willing to undergo a semi-structured interview. The intention was to interview a cross section of members of the Emergency Department team, regarding what they understand by good shop floor leadership and exploring what are the perceived challenges for shop floor leadership.

A crib of questions was used but this was not strictly adhered to, to allow exploration of themes not predefined by the primary researcher.

The interview audio was transcribed and an iterative thematic analysis was then undertaken, with no predefined coding framework. Each transcript was analysed for themes and emergent patterns of commonality.

Conclusions The theme of clinical leadership was explored, and the breadth of expectation placed on clinical leaders was evident. The importance of role modelling and credibility were highlighted. Clinical leaders described their strategy for shop floor leadership, and those who were led on the shop floor highlighted factors they valued, in particular education and teaching. The tensions between conflicting demands on the shop-floor leaders were demonstrated. The output from the interview enabled recommendations to be made regarding shop floor leadership for the organisation.