Category: Blog

Delving into the human and the humorous, from her wealth of experience in health and social care, Levette Lamb shares her insights on what makes great leadership.

Levette is the Regional Patient Safety Advisor with the NI HSC Safety Forum (Public Health Agency) which works collaboratively with stakeholders to drive improvement in safety and quality in health and social care using internationally recognised theory and practice. She is a registered nurse who has worked in a range of nursing and management posts including time spent at DHSSPS leading on a range of multi-professional improvement projects across the region.

Levette is also a founding member of the Health Foundations “Q” programme and also lead for Q in N Ireland, and a graduate of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) improvement advisor programme. She has facilitated a range of training on Human Factors, which is about understanding human behaviour and performance and using this to optimise the fit between people and systems to improve safety and performance.

Last year marked the 70th anniversary of the NHS. What stands out for you as the best examples of leadership you have seen in health and social care services?
The first thing that springs to my mind is that everyone should be a leader in healthcare. Sometimes when we put individuals up on a pedestal, it makes other people feel that they can’t reach it. Some of the best leaders that I have seen have been the porters in the hospital who see the way how we are organising our appointments structure and suggest a way that it could be improved. Or the domestic supervisor who is struggling to retain staff in a low-paid job and is able to motivate them to do more over and above what their job description says. And, also it goes right up to the CEO who has to stand up and take all the flack for all the rest of us when things go wrong.

​I think for me, the main thing about leadership is making people feel safe, allowing them to flex and have that ability within their role but knowing that there is that safety net for them there in the background. We never go through anything but periods of change in healthcare; it just feels unending that there is something new around the corner all the time. That can be very uncomfortable for people if you are just not comfortable with change. Leadership roles are just vital in holding the whole thing together.
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How then can a good leader bring stability and reassurance to people?
As I said to my daughter the other day who is nineteen and who was in a panic about something, I told her that the first thing you need to do is to shut up; you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. I think a really good leader in time of concern and flux listens, just sits and listens to people’s fears and concerns and is able to empathise with them that they have either been in that situation before or that they are going to get them through it. That ‘I have your back’ type role; the rock in the never-ending stream of things that is going past you gives that feeling of stability.

​Feeling safe is so important and we spend a lot of time in work to feel unsafe. That transfers into clinical leadership. Clinical leaders are vital and they maintain the morale of our system out there on the ground when things are really busy and chaotic in terms of low staffing numbers and agency staff. Having that really solid clinical leadership is vital. It permeates the whole system and from your chief executives to your frontline leaders whether that be your ward sisters or others. ​

One of my favourite lines from one of my staff nurses has always been ‘Levette, the mood you come in in is the mood we go home in.’ She was absolutely right! Knowing yourself – ‘know thyself’ – as how in how I affect other people in that leadership role is absolutely vital.

People look to you, whether you want it or not, people do look to you. If you’re in bad humour, if your head always down, if you look afraid, if you look like you might bend in the wind, then there is no psychological safety for your staff who are having all of their own issues at the same time as you. So, sometimes you just have to steel yourself at the bottom of the stairs, put your game face on and then you go!

You work with a wide range of people locally and regionally in networks and forums inspiring people to collaborate and innovate in networks and forums such as the Q Community. What for you makes for great collective leadership?
​A central purpose. I’ll take it from my clinical background to start. As a Ward Manager, we always set out at our team meetings with the first question, ‘What is our purpose?’ and that has not changed. People may laugh at you for that and think, well as a Ward Sister you should know what your purpose is but sometimes that purpose can change on a fluctuating basis depending on your client, the targets or the objectives of the organisation. So, having a clear purpose and then everyone setting out their stall in agreement that that’s what they have to do and being able to look outside their own boundaries is key.

I was a Hospital Co-ordinator for a while which meant that I had oversight of the whole hospital and it was a fascinating job. You saw everybody’s troubles. I wonder if we sat everyone down and asked if we know our collective purpose if we would have had the same answer? I once asked that question ‘What is your purpose?’ of senior ambulance crews and it was really interesting to hear the different responses to it. Some said that their purpose was public health, some said that it was transporting people from the scene of something to hospital, others said that they were the front face of the NHS. Very different responses! It’s an interesting exercise to do. If this is our purpose, what does that mean to me?

You know the NASA example when someone who is the domestic is asked that question and they reply ‘I’m here to put somebody on the moon.’ We used to say to our domestic teams on the wards that your job is infection control not cleaning the floors.

It’s where people see themselves fitting into that greater good and see their contribution I think is where you get collective leadership.

Where you don’t get collective leadership is where people feel isolated, that their contribution is not valued. This is where they don’t see where they fit or they feel like a maverick or a somebody who is not essential to the organisation and that they are treated in that way or they are also not given information.

That cohesion of a team, knowing what team you fit into, knowing that team has each other’s backs rather than ‘Here comes the physio today, they are bothering us,’ but rather that everyone is seen as part of the team. The respiratory nurse for example is not just coming in to see patients but that her contribution is there to help the ward. I think that then transcends into where we are now.

My greatest example at the minute is where we do our work with the maternity team. We have a maternity collaborative here in Northern Ireland who has been going there over eight years. If I said that when we started we didn’t like each other very much, that would have been an underestimation. At that point there was not a lot of trust, not a lot of sharing, not a lot of cohesion. It was very a much a lot of maternity units who talked about things but didn’t do much. It’s the usual story of a journey: we’ve been through the peaks and the troughs of a lot of stuff. However, at the end of it, we have a maternity collaborative who exemplify collective leadership.

With the maternity collaborative, if for example, there is a serious adverse event in one Trust, someone will ring to ask if we can put this on the agenda for the next meeting as there will be learning from it. If there is new NICE guidance, this is the first port of call so we can do it one way for Northern Ireland. This is true collective leadership where people are willing to share openly about things which have gone wrong and willing to stand up in front of their peers and do that knowing that they have the psychological safety to do it. So, for me, that is all a matter about building trust.

What for you was the turning point in the maternity collaborative for you which told you this is working and people do feel safe and have trust?
We had one learning session where one of the Trusts stood up and presented a serious adverse event. I felt the support from other people in the room coming forward for those individuals who were standing up there and sharing it. We didn’t do as a dry presentation; we did it point-by-point as in ‘It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon, this is what’s happened, what would you do now?’ It was like a lived experience for people in the room. The support for the individuals standing up and sharing a difficult case was palpable. I think there was a turning point there where people felt that that was a really worthwhile exercise and think maybe they could do that too.

In collective leadership, the trust has to be there and I don’t think that you can underestimate the time it takes to build trust. That’s not to say that there are still hurdles along the way with some ‘robust’ professional conversations!

There is also something about collective leadership about getting small wins that people see they can trust the model that you are selling. The worse thing that you can do is to shove in another buzzword, i.e. ‘We’re here to do collective leadership!’ and watch people running for the trenches thinking ‘If I hang on long enough, she’ll go away!’ whilst they wait for the next buzzword. There is also something about ownership in getting collective leadership and getting those small wins early and hanging on to people.
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What insights would you give to someone who is an emerging leader in health and social care which you think would be most useful for them?
I think probably the first useful insight is the one I shared earlier, the mood you come in in and the one others go home in. The thing that sets the tone and the culture within your unit, your ward, your organisation is your current and potential, future leaders. Knowing that that is your power base rather than the traditional power base; knowing how you can influence the morale in a unit, the production in a unit, the performance of staff is really vital. ​
If you are a new leader, getting to know yourself first of all is absolutely vital. Things like doing Myers Briggs was a revelation to me. I work with a colleague who is the polar opposite in her Myers Briggs from me but that’s really useful knowledge for me. Before I would have thought oh, come on because I am your typical big picture person, your connector, your linker and don’t bother me with detail, it just irritates me. In contrast, my colleague is a details person, they want all the details and that big picture stuff is too fussy. So now that we both know that, it’s a symbiotic relationship: whereas I might have the idea about something, my colleague is the grit on the ground and will make it happen. Transferring this into a work scenario of planning a conference or a learning session, I’m all about getting the speakers and the focus for the conference and my colleague is about things like how are we getting the speakers there, what do the numbers look like etc.

Back to the crux of the question, knowing yourself is so important to be a leader. I could be irritating the bejesus out of my colleague and may not realise it then, but now I do and am very aware! So now I would say to my colleague ‘Listen, I’m going to annoy you now and be big picture because I haven’t thought through any of the detail yet…’ By putting that out there though it opens things up. ​

The other insight I would give is knowing that every interaction with a member of your team counts. We talk about every interaction with your patient counts but every interaction with your team member counts.

Looking beyond your current boundaries is another thing. We can sometimes be very insular in our thinking. Maybe it’s my big picture stuff but I always like to look beyond what we are doing now: what could we be doing in 6 or 10-years’ time? We need to set ourselves big picture goals because if we haven’t got something set out for that time, how are we going to know how we are going to get there and how do your staff know?
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You need to harness the energy of others to be a good leader and knowing up front that you can’t do it all. Look over your shoulder now and again because if there is nobody behind you, well, you know that you’re doing something wrong. A colleague of mine, Mary Hinds taught me that. She said to me one day as we were walking up the backstairs one day at the Mater Hospital ‘You know, every now and again I look over my back shoulder to make sure that you are all still there because if you’re not, I’m not a good leader because everyone needs people there with you, behind you.’ There’s none of this rocket science or there’s no mystique in this. We’re not all Bill Clintons or Barak Obamas who can stand on the big stage but those local leaders are the people who count most and make the difference.

Walking the walk is the other important thing. Do not take yourself too seriously, number one. Be able to put yourself out there with whichever team of staff you are working with, understand their context and their working environment. The worst thing you can do as a leader – regardless what level of the organisation you are working in – is to lock yourself in an office and see yourself as untouchable.

I think it happens because people can get sucked into ‘I have to be here in the office, I have to respond to every email that comes in within a 5-minute turnaround and that may not be the important thing. The important thing might be taking yourself out of your office and walking down to your staff team to have a conversation.
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The other thing about the mood you come in in is that it also can apply to emails. The mood I receive an email in is the tone I answer it back in. The whole reliance on electronic communication has removed the so much of interpersonal relationships with people. It can be very easy to interpret an email when it comes through in a negative way when it was not sent with that intention. It could have been just that somebody who was just short of time just dashed it off. However, if you read it in a bad mood, before you know it you’re then into tapping these responses back and forward instead of getting up of your ass and speaking to the person.

We talk about leadership development programmes and training programmes when sometimes it’s just the small, common sense things. Things such as at least once a week, walk down and just see your team, know yourself, check yourself, have you got a central purpose, give yourself a bit of breathing space and don’t take yourself too seriously. A laugh a day is essential as also is laughing at yourself once a day which is vital!

On a personal level, what is the most useful thing you have learned in to lead a fulfilling life?
Just getting a good balance between life and work but knowing that you should always put family first is it. We can all get sucked down the rabbit hole of ‘If I wasn’t here and this wasn’t be done etc.’ However, we are all replaceable. Sometimes it takes a little bit of wisdom and experience to get to you to that stage as it can be difficult to explain that to somebody for example new in a management position because you have to live it.

Again, it also goes back to having good role models as leaders. I once worked for someone who said ‘You know I don’t expect any of you to be on your emails after 6 o’clock at night’. Great, but then they would spend all evening sending you stuff on email after 6 o’clock at night. Then it’s a situation everyone getting sucked in as if one person then answers it then do I need to do the same to look efficient etc. So, walking the walk and having good leaders around you is key to getting good balance between life and work.
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Loving your work is another thing. If you don’t love it, leave it. If there’s no love for it, it just sucks the life clean out off you. I knew my time in one role was up when I was just seeing different faces but the same problems and I thought that I’m no good for this anymore because I’m burnt on it so it’s time for me to go rather than me stay and make everyone else miserable.

​When people are in that situation of disliking their work or job so much, they just suck the mood out of everything. You are never going to get anywhere with those people because they will never motivate or inspire anyone as they cannot motivate or inspire themselves. There is always a way of going and finding something different to work at so if someone is so unhappy in their job, they should plan to leave, don’t stick at it.

The other thing is being able to motivate people which keeps the fire in you. Being able to see things getting done, being productive in what you do, being able to light that fire within people and not underneath them.​

To keep that balance, you do need to find the funny in every day. I think that as a leader, you need to be seen to have a sense of humour so your staff feel that they can show one! With this, work is more enjoyable: you’re not fearing coming into work and it’s a pleasant work environment. When it gets busy, it gets really busy and we’re all there working hard with our heads down but you know tomorrow might not be as bad as that and we’ll have a laugh tomorrow, go for a coffee and take a break.

Who has inspired you most in life/work?
In a clinical role, patients can inspire you everyday as they are going through difficult times as are their families and they just put their heads down and get on with it. You see miraculous things happen on a regular basis. I noticed the other day on Twitter which made me smile, was a staff nurse from one our hospitals, or it might have been a Junior Sister, had written and recorded a song for dementia patients. I thought fabulous! People like that, people who go that little bit extra inspire me.

​From a work perspective, an inspiration would be a paediatrician Don Berwick who set up the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in the States based on his experience of something going very badly wrong. He always tells his own personal story of the night when something went badly wrong of him as a doctor working with a child. He’s a great motivator. When you hear him speak you want to leave the room wanting to do something and wanting to challenge yourself. He is absolutely superb.

If you were going down the celebrity stage route, it would be Ellen DeGeneres. I never used to watch her at all then I watched something on YouTube and wouldn’t that be just a wonderful job! She’s always giving things away to people and making a difference even in small way to people which I think is great. I think she’s fabulous! What she has done for the whole LGBT community is huge as such a well-known personality who can carry that whole message that we’re all the same; it’s just the labels that others give us which makes us different.
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How do you think coaching can help people in leading their lives and work?
I suppose it’s a summary above of all that we have talked about. Our greatest resource is ourselves and the people behind us. It’s about how we can keep ourselves on track and others on track. We’re very good at teaching the technical skills such as how to put in a line or a drain. I think that we have been less on the softer side of knowing yourself, knowing others and team interactions. We’re learning a lot more now from aviation about team and crew resource management.

Still underpinning it, we still have a lot of lone wolves out there but it’s just the way they’ve been trained and brought through the system.
Bringing in the coaching model, more of that, the coaching conversations helps to get back on track. It’s very easy to go down that rabbit hole and get shoehorned into something where you can’t see the wood for the trees and you don’t where you are going. It’s about being able to have those structured conversations if you like. It helps to have that space to be able to think through things, to unpack things and repack them in a way which makes sense to you or to others.

The things that I see people crying out for at the moment in the health and social care service are information on data, how to present data, how to get it through to people, how you can do it, work on human factors and the third one is coaching.​

Of those three things, the data one; it’s about how we can use data to change hearts and minds, so at the end of the day it’s all about people. It’s absolutely all about people. They’re not crying out for technical information on how to do XYZ. The greatest resource we have in healthcare is people. If we don’t know how to motivate them, how to keep them, how to retain them and how to challenge them to change things, we’re going to get no transformation. ​

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Brett Hannam, Chief Executive of the Strategic Investment Board shares his unique insights and experience on the big ticket facets of leadership – change, trust and collaboration – in uncertain times.

Brett has been Chief Executive of the Strategic Investment Board (SIB) since 2012, having joined the organisation as Chief Operating Officer in 2006. He holds honorary fellowships of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Prior to joining SIB, Brett had a variety of roles, including Russian Interpreter, Head of IT for a Whitehall Department and Chief Executive of Northern Ireland’s Forensic Science Agency. He holds degrees from Oxford, the Open University and Queen’s University Belfast. In his spare time he enjoys writing and has published two books on the history of County Armagh.

Brett, as CEO of the Strategic Investment Board shaping and delivering major programmes and infrastructure projects for the public sector in Northern Ireland, what for you makes for great collaborative leadership?

There is a word which we don’t talk about a lot which is trust. Whatever we have done which is working across boundaries and organisational boundaries mainly, it has always boiled down to a question of trust. By trust, in this context, my definition is a willingness to open oneself up to the adverse consequences of someone else’s actions. A willingness to do that is both very difficult to do and is not part of a culture of the public sector at all until fairly recently.
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However, the whole point as you will know from understanding the theory and practice from organisations is that bureaucracy has very clear lines of accountability and responsibility and very clear definitions of spheres of action. What collaborative working requires is to put all that to one side and commit to working in a different way. We are not going to work to those clear boundaries and hierarchies, we are going to focus on the outcomes, what needs to be done and then go away and do it. What that may mean is that I am working in my sphere of influence and the impact of that is to make you over here succeed in your piece of work and look really good!

​A lot of what we do in SIB is to enable other people’s successes. We can’t achieve anything on our own: we are there to help other people achieve their objectives. In order to do that you need trust because you can’t proceed otherwise if you are constantly expecting other people to let you down or act in ways that they are going to stop you doing what you want to do then nothing will ever get done.

What makes great collaborative leadership for me is a willingness to start to build that trust.

You cannot command trust, you cannot just say ‘trust me.’ It just doesn’t work that way and because trust can be lost so easily, so often on the basis of misunderstandings. It starts to make you feel that what you actually need to build trust is a personal relationship between people.

Trust can also be one-way: I can trust you but you needn’t necessarily trust me. Building that trust involves personal contact, getting to know people as I’m not sure you can trust people you don’t know. I think the idea of one organisation ‘trusting’ another organisation is very difficult to support.

So, what do you need to do in order to encourage that relationship? Well clearly, communication is very important. You’ve got get to the point, the litmus test that when something goes wrong, what is your reaction? Someone has made a mistake, you’ve got to deal with the consequences, what is your reaction? Do you immediately think is there a conspiracy against me or someone trying to make me look bad? Do you suddenly think that you’ve lost all trust in this individual? Or is it ‘I know this person and I know they wouldn’t do that’ or ‘this must be a mistake therefore it’s something we can work on together.’ So, the communication and the avoidance of blame culture is so critical to maintaining that trust. In order to that, you need opportunities to build relationships.

One of the best things I saw in doing that was when the civil service set up a collaborative working group as one of their outputs for outcomes-based planning. They created a course for all their senior civil servants. Although the overt reason for doing this was to learn about what outcomes-based accountability was and the systems it requires etc, I think the other reason for that was to really get people together in a room talking to each other and getting to know each other who otherwise would not have met. If they would have communicated at all in the past, it would have been in writing, very formally and not talking together as they were there. They were then starting to build relationships in a supportive and non-threatening environment and they could then go away and build upon this, which I thought was a really, really good idea.

Finding those opportunities to work closely and effectively together to build trust is really important and it can’t happen overnight. When the OBA was brought in, perhaps even more time would have been necessary as there was a recognition that it wasn’t going to go from one state to another without a transition period. That has all sorts of implications for the way we organise ourselves. If you are constantly moving people on, you only have perhaps two people in a work relationship for a year as then they move every two years. The first six months is spent building up that relationship and then you’ve really only got another effective six months to work together before you start all over again. What does that tell us about the need to change the way in which we move people around? To have that sort of thinking is very practical.

A very interesting point you made Brett was the concept of whole organisations and systems trusting each other. What other things do organisations need to think of in addition to that building of personal relationships and trust to work collaboratively?

​You have to recognise the reality of the politics. One of the few advantages we have at the moment by not having ministers is that ministers aren’t in competition.
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Competition is bad for trust. If you have for example a minister from one political party being asked to act collaboratively in a way which might put a shine on another minister who is their political opponent, it’s asking a lot for that to happen. The structures within which we work make that challenging.
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Part of SIB work is to champion reform. What are the key factors leaders need to be mindful of to achieve successful change initiatives? ​

​I think the first thing that everyone recognises who have been involved in major change programmes is that most of them fail. It’s just a fact of life. Understanding why change programmes fail is a very important competency. The expectation however is normally that change programmes will succeed. Everyone of course doesn’t start off something expecting it to fail but the fact is that they can and you do have to understand why.

There is often a failure to understand how much people dislike change, how much more they feel ‘lost’ than embrace the potential benefits. That psychological reality is sometimes discarded.

Change mangers often look at things in purely logical terms such that it makes perfect sense. There are arguments for this set of changes, the logic is inescapable, this is what we need to do and how we’re going to do it etc. It entirely sets aside the emotional quotient which is so important to success.

One of the critical success factors for change from my experience is gaining the discretionary support of people. Ones who might be the victims of change who are going to pay the cost of change. There are going to be winners and losers unless the change is transient or superficial. Somebody said it’s not really change unless people are crying which is cruel thing to say but it’s probably true. Then you have people who are leading change and getting them to understand all of that.

​There is still reluctance on the part of those change leaders to take risks. That stems from the same cycle of reasons why people dislike change in the first place. They are stepping into the unknown. They are putting their own personal capital at risk and people are often reluctant to do that.

​So how do you build confidence in change leaders? The traditional way is to do it in an incremental fashion. My experience is that that sort of approach leads to programmes that last forever. They have relatively low impact. They are more easily rolled back. They engender acquiescence rather than support. They don’t last for very long once the impetus for change has been removed; people revert back to the steady, safe operational mode that they had before.
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Change initiatives that I have seen that work have been relatively short, relatively sharp with very specific measurable outcomes. They make a shift between Status A and Status B and do little to enable a roll-back. Long change programmes are oxymoronic. You can’t have a long change programme. You can have a sequence of short, sharp change programmes which deliver something which is worth having. The idea that you have one big long change programme which goes on for two to three years, no, it will never work.
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In terms of that phrase ‘discretionary support, what would quantify Brett as discretionary support?

​In the command and control environment, your leader can go out there and say ‘You will do this’ and people will, by and large, go along with it. They will go along with it just as far and with as little as they can. They will comply with the instruction and often do it in such a way that follows the letter of the requirement but ignores its spirit. Suddenly then you will find yourself bogged down, finding resistance and difficulties.

​If on the other hand you have gained the discretionary support of the group, then they want to follow and make the change. They will want to embrace it and take the risk but it’s a staggeringly difficult thing to do and it is really, really hard work. Without that discretionary support however, I think you’re on a highway to nothing.

What is the biggest barrier you see to self-confidence for change leaders to take the risk?

​It goes back to that earlier idea of investing your own personal capital. If it goes wrong, you feel you will be blamed. There is so much of that in the work environments we live in or at the very least, it’s not going to be good for your career. People tend to take the easier option to go for the smaller, more incremental change or water it down.
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There has to be a culture within the organisation that is prepared to back people in those change circumstances. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be scrutinised – of course they should – the risks should be calculated. That means that a lot more planning and preparation has to go into it.

Lots of change programmes go off at half-cock as people want to see low hanging fruit taken first. It’s an unfortunate way to think of things like that.

The consequences of thinking in this way are that things need a lot more thought, a lot more piloting where pilots can be thrown away. It needs a lot more focus on explanation, communication and emotional engagement.

It’s not saying that this is going to be wonderful but saying that this is going to be hard work. You’re almost getting back to Churchill saying blood, sweat and tears. People were able to relate to that. I think the truth of that was that people understood what was at stake, what they needed to do and then gave Churchill their discretionary support.

​What have you personally learned about leadership to date which you feel would be most useful to share with others?

​I don’t pretend to be a leadership guru at all but hope that these thoughts will be practical! Firstly, what I have seen is that not all CEOs are leaders, not all leaders are CEOs. I have been fortunate enough to see leadership exerted at virtually every level I have ever worked at. There were leaders who were not necessarily in leadership positions of being top dog or top cat but people who within their own sphere of operations clearly were leaders. They all had similar characteristics I think which goes back to trust. They enjoyed the trust of people around them. They were able to influence their actions and behaviours through that.

Certainly, in my line of business where you have 120 experts, most of whom, if not all of whom, know more than I do about their specialist areas, you have to be able trust the skills and competency of the team. If they haven’t got that competency, you’ve failed because you’ve employed them, it’s as simple as that. Here at SIB we put in a lot of effort to ensure that we get the right person for the right job at the right time. A lot of work goes into ensuring that before anyone ever arrives because it’s the sine qua non.
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Secondly, integrity, it might sound like an old-fashioned word, but it’s crucial in our line of business. We have to be trusted by our partner organisations. If there’s the smallest question hanging over our integrity we would be out of a job. We are party to all sorts of sin and vice of which we are repositories which we do not talk about at all.
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We do not seek in any way to take credit for other people’s successes which is why for example you don’t see our logo on anything. We are simply there to enable others’ successes. It goes wider than that. I was speaking to people who have just joined us about this.

It’s the importance of speaking the truth unto power. It could be so easy to tell people just what they want to hear and we’ll get lauded for that, how excellent our judgement is and how helpful we have been. We wouldn’t however really be doing our job. You’ll get away with it once but you won’t get away with it twice.

People if they do come back to you will wonder if you are telling them truth or rather what they think that I want to hear?

Speaking truth unto power so important. To enable that, we have to create a culture where that is possible. If you have someone out and embedded in an organisation and their job depends on satisfying the needs of a person above them and that person isn’t at the same level of integrity, they are risking their jobs. We have to give them the ultimate back-up in that context to tell the truth to say actually that ‘I don’t think that you are doing the right thing here, this is what we believe is the right thing to do in these circumstances…’ For people who are exposed in that way – which many of our staff are – that’s a really difficult thing. We have to ensure that people who are in that difficult position that they have the support of myself, the Board and their colleagues when they do the right thing. They will have our support no matter how hard it is. It’s not easy for anyone but if you lose that component part of the trust then you might as well not be bothering.
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The third thing is what I would call attitude. It’s more of an approach to ensuring that things get done. It’s not coming in at 9 o’clock and going home at 5 o’clock just fulfilling your hours and thinking that the job is done. It is recognising at times that you just have to throw everything at it and then at other times realising when you don’t have to.

The type of culture we build here is encouraging people to work at home as much as possible. On the other hand, we also want people to think of the office here as home. We want them to achieve a work-life balance which suits them: have no start time and no finish time. If people want to go off and watch the school play, they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. If the car breaks down and they have to go the garage, they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, just do it. We trust them with so much else so why on earth wouldn’t we trust them with little things? That side of it is so important; we give our staff a huge amount of autonomy. They are very aware of what needs to be done in terms of outcomes and results. How they go about that, they have to be able to decide on that themselves.

Most people respond positively to these two things. Having a good job where they can see that their results are important and achieving social value in what they are doing are such motivating factors for everyone. We are saying to them to do this in the way that you think is best and when you think it’s best as you are in charge of your life. We hold people accountable for that. They have the delegated authority to go away and do that but if it goes wrong, they also hold responsibility. In my experience, I can’t think of single occasion when this type of approach has been abused. In our circumstances, it works so well.

In working alongside such a wide variety of stakeholders, organisations and interests, what keeps you focused in staying true to your own leadership values?
Just as I have shown how important it is to trust my colleagues, it is vital that they trust me. That requires there to be a really small gap between what you say and what you do. So, if I am saying to people, encouraging them to work from home as it’s good for you and good for the environment, I have to do this too. If I also say to someone that once they have finished their work they should go home as we don’t want presenteeism, then I go home at 4 if I have finished at 4. Sometimes I think I that can’t do that as it goes against everything which was so inculcated in me working for the civil service!

​These may be small examples but the point is that we show these in action. We want to you to feel that when you are doing the right thing that we will always back you up as an organisation. If it becomes a question of having to focus on those values, then there is something wrong because they have to be so much a part of you that it’s just the way you are.

The way things are done is just so important, it’s a personal culture.

However, you don’t necessarily start off that way. I most certainly didn’t because I came from a very different command and control culture. The idea of letting go initially was very difficult for me. Would I feel much happier issuing orders 24 hours a day and constantly checking up on people and maybe sleep easier, no. When intellectually I realised that a different way was the only way to work, then I did and practiced and practiced it until it became something I identified with emotionally as well as intellectually. I then proceed on that basis because if you are only acting out values constantly and not being part of you, how long can you really keep that up? Eventually you will crack as no-one can maintain that façade forever.

When you join an organisation in a new role, you don’t know who to trust, how the organisation works, you have to understand that first and then how your colleagues operate. I was fortunate in that I had 4-5 years before I became CEO that I got to understand how things worked. Having seen previously where the organisation had positioned itself, I was very clear on where I wanted it to be. I had a very clear objective and I wasn’t just trying to replicate what went before so that makes things a lot easier.

I shudder for someone coming straight into a new organisation to lead it and then having to bed in and to really understand the existing culture before you try to change it. Having said this, if you come as an outsider, the government have these things called ‘Gateway Reviews’. They are very short and sharp assessments of the state of a particular project or programme. Very experienced individuals will come in who have no contact with the project before. They come in and for three days they have conversations with everyone involved in it. I did a lot of that before I took up this role and it was staggeringly useful. It was so surprising how you could pick up on the culture of a project such as the attitudes and the approaches and learn from that. It can be done quickly therefore if you approach it like that though it’s not the normal way of doing things. You could take that approach if you were joining an organisation to lead it. It did however take time for me to understand this organisation with its work and all the complexities.

What for you are the most important things for a fulfilling life?

​We can use Maslow’s model, self-actualisation, here I go with the experience of being in work 40 years now! It took me less than six months to realise that I would never reach that state of self-actualisation by work alone. I’m just not that sort of person. I’ve seen people who do and that’s wonderful: their work is their life and their life is their work, they are happy and that’s great.​

I really enjoy my work and am staggeringly lucky in the people I work with who are just universally brilliant and I am so proud of them; it makes me get up in the morning.

​However, if that was all I did in life, I would not be happy. I have a huge array of outside interest, clubs, societies and the like. I also love history as a real interest. Local history is so much more important than people give it credit for. I also took up exercise late in life so I’ve gone from being a slob to slightly less of a slob! It helps to get into and think about other things.

​How do you think coaching can help people in leading their lives and work?

​I am a relatively recent convert to this and I coached some years ago. I seemed to get more out of it than the person I was coaching which was really rather odd! I think however that the person I was asked to coach was doing it as part of a course and that they had to do it. They had a very clear idea about where their career was going and a very clear understanding about the steps they needed to take to reach to where they wanted to be. You then have to think what value am I adding here?

The process is really useful for working and thinking through things and I have been converted.

We are very lucky that we have two coaches here working internally in SIB trained at the Tavistock Institute. It’s a service we offer in our organisational development. We have now created coaching opportunities for all staff if they want it and it’s entirely confidential. It will be good to see how this goes.

Coaching is a space where you can articulate things out loud and when you do this, nine times out of ten you reach a solution yourself.

I think I’ve been coached without me even knowing it! I have been so fortunate to have had the input of people as CEO who are simply brilliant and very impressive. They did it in a way which advised me which was so close to coaching by creating a safe space in which I could discuss ideas.
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One of the problems of being CEO which it takes you a while to realise, is that people can tend to agree with you. It can just be a natural tendency in people to tell you what they think you want to hear. So, having someone talk with you whose career is not in any way invested in talking through something is good. This is someone who has experience and has perhaps been through the things that you are going through. With them you can have that ideas space. They can help you with the things that you might need to consider or think about in shaping up your ideas and you can come back to them when you have thought about this. That is just so invaluable. I have high hopes for our coaching.