The Compassionate Leadership Interview

Nate Regier PhD is Founder and CEO of Next Element, a global advisory firm specializing in leadership communication, and author of Beyond Drama: Transcending Energy Vampires, Conflict Without Casualties: A Field Guide For Leading With Compassionate Accountability and Seeing People Through.Nate was a guest on episode 17 of the Compassionate Leadership Interview in February 2020. Since then Nate has been reinventing, rebuilding and realising new opportunities for sharing compassionate accountability.Nate is launching a new book in July - Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. A year ago, he was planning a second edition of Conflict Without Casualties but his team changed plans in order to respond to the challenges faced by companies coming out of the pandemic.The book reflects the tension leaders experience between paying attention to relationships and getting things done. Nate's understanding of compassionate accountability was in its infancy when he wrote Conflict Without Casualties. Since then, his team has developed the three switches of the compassion mindset, a framework for activating the behaviours required within a culture of compassionate accountability.Nate's latest book complements the many excellent books on Compassionate Leadership, as the only one with ‘accountability' in its title. He contends that ‘accountability' is an essential component of compassion, reflected in the latin root of the word, which means ‘struggle with.' We live in community with one another and that involves affirming human capability and being accountable to one another.In the book Nate establishes the relationship between the interactions connecting people, organisational culture, and brand. Culture is fundamentally the sum of the interactions between your people and, as Nate's friend Bobby Herrera has observed “brand is a lagging indicator of the quality of your culture.” Part 3 of the book is about implementation. It recognises that you have to “address common systems and processes that reinforce behaviour.” It starts with identifying behavioural norms, and then identifies the functional areas where processes need to reflect those norms. There is a tool for assessing compassion within the culture of an organisation.Nate maintains that onboarding, performance reviews, promotions, and reward systems in particular need to be aligned with compassionate accountability. Regular in-house training and practice are required to keep the materials alive.He acknowledges that “everyone is different, everyone comes on board from a different place, and it's not easy.” Sometimes the assumptions we hold can create barriers for us. The notion that compassion is soft can be prominent among these.Nate believes compassion can change the world. For example, he believes compassionate accountability is the next evolution of inclusion.

Eleanor Rutter is Assistant Director of Public Health at Sheffield City Council, and Leader of Sheffield's Compassionate Sheffield programme.A talented mathematician as a child, Eleanor went to medical school out of a need to seek the approval of other people. Following a complicated pregnancy, she was away from work as a hospital doctor for 18 months, after which she went into public health. She had a further two children and time off through mental ill-health, and the training programme, nominally five years, took her 12 years to complete.She had a false start in an authority with what she feels was an ‘over-medicalised' model of public health, but has now found her feet in what she describes as her “dream job.”In her current role, Eleanor leads the Compassionate Sheffield programme. It is in fulfilment of the city's 2018 public health objective to ensure that everyone has a dignified death in a place of their choice. She soon found out that there were a lot of compassionate communities doing good work in this area.Eleanor's approach is informed by the academic work of Professor Allan Kellehear at the University of Bradford. It recognises dying as a social and spiritual process first and foremost, rather than a medical one. She says that communities and neighbourhoods are best placed to allow people to live the complete lives they choose to value.Eleanor's team comprises two community development workers, one of which is an end-of-life doula, a communications officer, a clinical lead, and a programme manager. They are funded by Public Health Sheffield City Council, the ICB (Integrated Care Board), and St Luke's Hospice. She says the team is an enabler, building capacity, confidence and connections within and between communities. The main strands of the team's work to date have been advance care planning, developing training to help people navigate the end of life, building ‘death literacy' through death cafes, and leading Sheffield's covid memorial project.Atul Gawande's book ‘Being Mortal' has also had a strong influence on Eleanor's thinking. She says that by not listening to people and over-medicalising their problems we are at risk of stripping away their humanity.The next stage for Compassionate Sheffield is to build on the work that people did in the pandemic as compassionate neighbours. In the longer term, Eleanor feels that compassion runs through everything we do and its potential is far greater than transforming the end of life. For example, in Sheffield's economic anchor organisations many people are in a conversation with Michael West concerning compassionate leadership. She says “I don't think it's just a silly pipe dream, this idea of Sheffield becoming a compassionate city in its entirety.”Sheffield has not intentionally diverged from the Frome Model, which is the basis of Compassionate Communities UK. Rather, Sheffield's Health and Wellbeing Board, aware of the compassion that was already manifest in Sheffield's communities, wanted to grow Compassionate Sheffield using an asset-based approach.As white and middle class, Eleanor is very conscious of her privilege. Therefore, she has a problem with the term ‘achievements' and feels that often she has just needed to “scoop up the opportunities that were given to me.” Only two or three times in her career has she been faced with making a genuinely tough choice, which on one occasion involved insisting on doing the right thing even though her position was unpopular with some very senior colleagues.Through therapy Eleanor has learnt to see life as a learning process. One of the things she has learnt is the power of saying sorry and actually meaning it. Eleanor credits therapy as being the experience that has changed her the most. She put herself “heart and soul” into it. It was gruelling, but she is “massively transformed” and no longer driven by self-loathing.Otherwise,...

Ben Allen is a GP at Birley Health Centre, and Sheffield Clinical Director for Primary Care, with a special interest in elderly medicine and service improvement.Birley has bucked the national trend in patient satisfaction. Over the past two years while patient satisfaction nationally has declined from 68% to 38%, at Birley it has increased. He compares his initial impressions of Birley to the experience of riding a bike where all the components are high quality but they haven't been assembled particularly well.He realised that his first efforts to intervene were merely addressing the symptoms and not the underlying culture, so he started a process of self-education reading books by Patrick Lencioni, Jim Collins, Brene Brown, Simon Sinek and Nancy Kline for example. This led him to develop three main principles: finding and nurturing potential, team dynamics, and being purpose and values driven.He observes that “everybody has so much more to them than their professional role and their professional training.” The organisation needs a clear plan for how it is going to bring out the best in staff, including providing a mentor for each person, who has an ongoing day-to-day relationship with the individual.Most of his thinking on team dynamics draws on the work of Patrick Lencioni. It's firstly about creating an environment of psychological safety which allows people to voice their best ideas, and confess their mistakes without fear of censure. Secondly its about the quality of debate. Finally, if the first two have been done well, then people should be more prepared to commit to a decision, even if it isn't the one that they would have made personally.Ben has done less work on crystallising the purpose of the organisation than he has done on the other two principles, but he thinks that is a question worth asking all stakeholder groups, including patients. He observes that “we can often go to work with our own purpose” and that purpose may conflict with the goals of others. And in the absence of a larger purpose, the aims of individuals can boil down to “getting through the day.” It's only when you have that overarching purpose that you can ask “How are we doing?”Ben thinks that the type of leadership that the NHS needs is evolving. At present the principles he has outlined are not as understood and valued as they need to be. The ‘top down' model is not fit for the complexities of modern healthcare.Meetings have changed fundamentally at Birley since the start of the improvement programme. They no longer have meetings that are about conveying information, for which an email or whatsapp would do. Instead, team meetings are about engaging people, obtaining ideas, debating issues, and building consensus.Ben says there's lots left to do at Birley, but that he really does feel that it's a self-improving place now. Things Ben would like to see happen going forward include a “blurring of the boundaries between the practice team and the public”, more work on purpose and values, and rotating the leadership of meetings so that younger staff are involved.Ben feels that with increasing workload and declining staff numbers there is a real risk of changing things “out of desperation to make something different.” In his view, the right question is how do you sustain the people who are currently in primary care, while you train up the next generation of GPs? He also thinks that the nation needs a wider debate about the purpose of the NHS.In his role as Clinical Director for Sheffield he sees himself helping general practice to thrive. He is still working on the best way to achieve that. One of his approaches has been to get people from general practice with energy and ideas together in order to build solutions. Recently Ben has read ‘Reinventing Organisations' by Frederic Laloux. This charts the cultural journey from top down to purpose driven with self-managing...

Emma Clarke is Chief Executive of Weston Park Cancer Charity.The charity has been in existence for 30 years and supports Weston Park Cancer Centre, which serves the population of South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw. The charity invests in research, facilities and equipment, and also provides care through finance, complementary therapies, and advice.Emma was born on the Manor estate in Sheffield. She went for a bar job on the same day that she interviewed for her first role in the voluntary sector. Her first job was for a disabled children and young people's charity in London. She has risen to Chief Executive through a non-conventional route in that she hasn't been to university.For Emma, leadership is about being real and about being human. She says “relationships are fundamental.” She aims to foster a culture of belonging, of connection, and of pride in the work of the organisation. She believes that part of compassionate leadership is to give people a sense of autonomy and agency.She is mindful of ‘the shadow of the leader' and recognises that her own actions need to be purposeful and sensitive. Part of her role is to make sense for her colleagues of the complex environment in which they operate.Since assuming the Chief Executive role Emma has steered the charity through Covid, the economic crisis and challenging times in the NHS. She says a crisis “cuts through the noise.” Covid compelled her to rely on her values, and through that she gained confidence in her leadership. Now in the middle of the NHS crisis, she is optimistic about the future: she sees a lot of compassion, and she is surrounded by good people. She is committed to amplifying the good.As the Chief Executive of a charity, Emma has to work constructively with her trustees. She says that she doesn't see them as a group of people to report to, but rather a group of peers who are experienced and keen to contribute to the success of the organisation. It's up to Emma to make the most of the opportunity that they represent, by asking for help, asking questions and encouraging constructive challenge.Last year Emma introduced Sarah Markham of Calm-in-a-Box, a wellbeing consultancy, to the charity. The team at Weston Park had just finished hybrid working for almost two years and a hard winter loomed. Sarah ran a series of four sessions designed to support the mental health of the team and help them thrive through difficult circumstances. CALM is an acronym that relates to connection, all of me, energy (let me rest), and motivation. Emma says that often in the voluntary sector people can be so invested in the aims of the organisation that they feel guilty about taking the rest. The CALM programme has given them a language to talk about rest in the context of the work they do.Navigating the charity through the Covid crisis is Emma's proudest work-related achievement. It led her to a renewed focus on the most disadvantaged and marginalised of the charity's clients, as they were affected disproportionately by the pandemic.Emma says she makes mistakes every day, but the important thing “is not to dwell on it.” She says “mistakes happen, they're part of everyday life.” Imposter syndrome held her back for a long time, and she has had to work hard to challenge her limiting beliefs.Emma says an experience that has changed her fundamentally is finding that her and her husband were unable to have children. It's shaped who she is, but also she feels it is something she needs to be open about, so that other women who aspire to senior roles don't assume that they have to choose between children and a career. Jodie Day's ‘Living the Life Unexpected' helped Emma to come to terms with the situation.Emma's self-care regime involves hot yoga, a podcast out on a walk or in the bath, and gardening. And she has joined the National Trust: self-care to her often means learning and putting her brain to use in a...

Melissa Swift is North American Transformation Leader at Mercer and author of Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace.Melissa says that most of her career has been occupied by work that no-one understands. That's been a consequence of a preference for working with diverse groups of people to solve complex problems. She currently works at Mercer which is a consultancy that helps with making work better, rewards systems, and wellness.Melissa believes that one of the aspects of work that is rarely considered is the everyday experience of the employee and how they feel about the work they are doing. In particular, often they can't relate what they are doing to the goals of the business. Sometimes this is because the relationship is tenuous at best.Over the years Melissa has tested and learnt what makes a job fun for her. Her current job at Mercer combines intellectual challenge, working in diverse teams, and solving real world problems.Performative work appears in her book as a major problem area. A lot of the time what we are doing at work is artistic performance - we're doing it just to show off. If we eliminated this we'd have fewer meetings, time for other things, and a better understanding of who was doing the work that contributes to the outcomes.She believes that companies could do better by addressing “immigration, migration and incarceration”: recruiting for technical skills and training for language skills rather than vice versa, moving to locations where the talent is, eliminating the biases that militate against hiring formerly incarcerated workers.She says “data tells us that HR is starving, misdirected, and overloaded.” It is understaffed compared to other functions such as finance, and that means that it is squeezed between ever-increasing demands of the centre and the grass roots. At the same time it is still undertaking a lot of transactional work manually.Melissa believes that there is a need for candour about the effectiveness of information technology in many businesses. There's a reluctance on the part of management to go there even though they suspect the truth.Melissa believes that in order to combat ‘the great resignation', corporate America needs to manage work populations more thoughtfully. Whilst organisations look to create a consistency of experience for their workers, doing so fails to take into account the differences in prior experience of individuals. In particular organisations are not forging a high quality relationship with under-represented groups.Melissa contends that most companies could vastly improve their performance by doing less, and performing the high priority tasks better: so much activity doesn't translate to the bottom line. Much of what we do is driven by what Melissa calls the ‘work anxiety monster.' This not an employee problem, or even a management problem, it is systemic.Melissa's proudest achievement is the impact she has had on other people's careers. Her biggest mistake was to chose certain roles where she was under-employed when her daughter was younger: she under-estimated the psychological impact of being neither challenged nor valued.She was inspired on her own journey by Mary Cianni at Korn Ferry, who combines an academically inflected perspective on transformation consultancy with practical wisdom born of experience. Melissa would recommend Bob Sutton's ‘The No Asshole Rule' to aspiring leaders. “No toxicity is non-negotiable” she says.Her self-care regime consists of getting up at 6:30 for a two-mile run. She has done this every day for over 800 consecutive days now.Her advice to her 20-year-old self is “Don't put so much weight on every decision… take the pressure off, you have underlying values and they're going to come through.”

Mark Berrios-Ayala, Lawyer, is a Board Director of the Gwen S Cherry Black Women Lawyers Association, Regional Vice President of District Three of the Puerto Rican Bar Association of Florida, and author of ‘Let's Get Sincere', a book on being an ally. Allyship is basically helping a resilient or disadvantaged community that is not your own. There is something of a history of allyship in the Puerto Rican community in the United States. Mark makes reference to The Young Lords, a group that supports neighbourhood empowerment for Puerto Rican and Latinos communities, but also women and LGBTQ. Mark's book covers the political, social and spiritual dimensions of allyship. He makes the distinction between de jure, that is officially sanctioned, discrimination and de facto discrimination, which though not officially sanctioned is still real. Social discrimination is about, for example, being the only person in your workplace that is from your community. In this situation differences can lead to a lack of promotion opportunities or unfair termination. The spiritual dimension concerns the complications that faith can bring to allyship, particularly if the ally or the resilient community are eager to convert others. Good reasons to be an ally are if you have connections with a particular resilient community, for example friends, a job within the community, an affinity for their culture. Above all, you should have sincere motives and not hidden ones. And you should recognise that an ally cannot fix every problem for a community; for example mentorship does not feed people, mend broken families, provide stability and structure, or provide access to health and education. Mark lists nine behaviours that are helpful in an ally: courage, compassion, honesty, loyalty, consistency, selflessness, sacrifice, perseverance, and sincerity. There is a degree of overlap between these. Mark has experienced allyship in his own life, though at the time he may not have recognised it as such: one ally was a teacher who gave him guidance and widened his horizons. His proudest achievements to date are writing the book, becoming an attorney (five years ago), and sitting on various volunteer bar associations. In most instances his biggest mistakes have been associated with letting the advice of others override his personal intuition. This is one of the reasons that his book is written as a guide to help people think through the issues and come to their own conclusions rather than a set of rules. Apart from his own book, Mark would recommend ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People' by Dale Carnegie, and ‘The Art of War' by Sun Tzu. The latter emphasises the importance of knowing yourself and also the obstacles you face, which is quite relevant to allyship. He would also recommend ‘The Art of Seduction' by Robert Greene, a book on how to manipulate and use people. If you are a member of a resilient community or an ally to one, it is helpful to understand the behaviour of predators. Mark says “if you want to learn you to defeat an manipulator you have to learn how they manipulate.” Mark's self-care regime includes the gym, healthy eating and meditation. Spending time with friends and watching sport are other self-care activities. In addition, being involved in various voluntary organisations provides him with social support, new places to go, and fun. His advice to his 20-year-old self is quite specific: take a different prep class for law school, be more ambitious in your applications for law school, relax and spend more time on physical exercise in your first year. And his advice to his 25-year-old self would be “you will find a job but it won't be exactly what you think it is, and that's OK.”

Darshna Patel is Deputy Head of Workforce Planning for Health Education England, former Vaccine Programme Director for Kingsbury Mandir, and a GP Pharmacist. The role of Health Education England is to support the delivery of excellent healthcare and healthcare improvement. It does this by ensuring that the workforce of tomorrow is sufficient in number and has the right skills, values, and behaviours. Darshna qualified as a pharmacist before moving into NHS management. A talk by someone from GlaxoSmithKline inspired her to take up pharmacy. She found that she enjoyed the people and patients dimension of hospital pharmacy, and that in turn led her into general practice, and then a lead role in a Primary Care Network. More recently she has specialised in workforce planning. She describes her career to date as a “meandering river”, led by her values and interests. Darshna was named as one of the 50 Leading Lights in the 2021 Kindness and Leadership Awards, partly in recognition of her work in setting up the world's first vaccination centre in a Hindu temple, The Kingsbury Mandir. She sees kindness as crucial to effective leadership, particularly where collaboration is involved, which means virtually all situations in the ‘social age.' “It's about valuing what… everyone brings to the table” she says. Her outlook is strongly informed by her first-hand experience of positivity and kindness at work. In her first job as a hospital pharmacist, she found herself faced with a myriad of ethical dilemmas. A conversation with a ward matron helped to validate her experience, and uphold her values when she felt most vulnerable. For Darshna, the three pillars of leading with kindness are: making ripples – small acts that serve to change a culture over time; nurturing psychological safety – discussing the concept, co-creating a list of behaviours that make it real; being authentically kind – challenging your intent. In her Leading Lights interview, Darshna used Julian Stodd's expression ‘the Social Age'. He talks about the rise of the rise of “radically connected, and empowered, social communities.” Darshna rejects the idea that she and Julian are being irrationally positive. She has sat with the concept for some time and believes it explains a lot of her experiences in relation to the pace of change and communication. Darshna is writing a chapter in Amar Rughani and Joanna Bircher's latest book, “Leadership Hikers.” (Amar Rughani was our guest in episode 33 of this podcast.) The subject will be ‘leading with kindness.' It has helped her process and reflect on her experiences, particularly at the vaccination centre. Darshna believes that kindness has a key role to play in navigating the current crisis in the NHS, with particular regard to staff mental health, innovation, retention, and patient wellbeing. She offers the performance of the Kingsbury Mandir as an example of what is possible when one builds an organisation using kindness as a guiding principle. Darshna sees mistakes as opportunities for learning and growth. If there is one thing she could have done better in recent times, it is looking after herself in order to be able to look after others. Nowadays, Darshna is more intentional about self-care. She practices yoga, tries to eat well, , and goes for long walks. On her walks she practices gratitude, which she says is the precursor of joy. Darshna is a practicing Hindu. Her spiritual leader, who sadly departed in 2020, has been a significant inspiration on her journey. He was someone who led a worldwide faith, while maintaining the ability to connect closely with individuals, and he personally embodied kindness. Darshna recommends Brene Brown's podcasts ‘Dare to Lead' and ‘Unlocking Us.' She has recently read Brene's book ‘Atlas of the Heart.' At present she is reading ‘The Gifts of Imperfection.'

Donato Tramuto is a Compassionate Leadership Activist, Global Health Advocate, former CEO of Tivity Health, Founder of the Tramuto Porter Foundation, and author of a second book - ‘The Double Bottom Line: How Compassionate Leaders Captivate Hearts and Deliver Results.' Donato believes that employees, consumers, and stakeholders are demanding that employers take care of their people, their communities, and the world around them. There's a strong imperative for employers to focus on their people as well as on profit, and, Donato maintains, by focussing on their people they will actually strengthen their bottom line. Donato lost most of his hearing when he was eight years of age. And for nearly ten years he was to all intents and purposes deaf. In consequence he was bullied at school and at home. His sister-in-law died in childbirth and his brother and nephew died in a car accident. Two close friends and their child lost their lives on 9/11. The experience of these tragedies has given Donato a degree of insight into the sufferings of others. Donato believes compassion to be a driver of success: greater employee involvement leads to improved productivity, and better employer and manager wellbeing, and morale. His book is underpinned by interviews with 41 global leaders, and a survey of 1,500 US employees. Donato maintains that the idea that compassionate leadership is weak leadership is a myth. His model of compassionate leadership is based on the three ‘t's of tenderness, trust, and tenacity. In the absence of trust, tough decisions meet with resistance. Gaining trust involves listening to understand. Donato would propose to dispense with the word “feedback”, which he feels has negative connotations. He prefers “constructive insight” and moreover would always ask permission of the employee before providing it. Donato says vulnerability is “a significant quality associated with compassionate leadership.” He didn't embrace it fully until 2014, when he received a Robert F Kennedy “Ripple of Hope Award” and took the opportunity to acknowledge that he was gay and had been in a partnership for 25 years. He launched two not-for-profit foundations in response to the loss of his friends aboard United flight 175 on 9/11. The Tramuto-Porter Foundation helps disadvantaged children pursue a college education. In 2011 Donato initiated Healthy Villages, which provides medical devices to populations that have compromised access to healthcare. Donato's book has been well received in the US, which he believes reflects “a thirst for new leadership” and also the situation of many people as the US emerges from the pandemic, for example loneliness is “the new chronic condition of the 21st Century.” Donato is engaged in a dialogue with Boston University School of Public Health who are planning to base a curriculum on the book. Like Stephen Trzeciak, a former guest on the Compassionate Leadership Interview, he believes compassion can and should be taught. Two people who have inspired Donato on his journey are Pope John Paul II and Robert F Kennedy. He says they both demonstrated that life is not about doing great things, but about doing small things that have the capacity to generate great change. A book that Donato would recommend to aspiring leaders is ‘The Seven-Storey Mountain' by Thomas Merton. Donato considers self-care is first and foremost about a sense of fulfilment, which in turn arises from the love, joy, and peace one finds in serving others. His advice to his 20-year-old self would be “never ever forfeit the opportunity to build a relationship with someone” and “be yourself… it's a lot easier.”

Sophie Stephenson is a teacher, facilitator and faculty member of Time to Think. (Listeners will recall that I interviewed Nancy Kline, founder of The Thinking Environment®, in episode 39 of the Compassionate Leadership Interview.) Sophie's CV includes The Royal Navy, The Prince's Trust, the Australian wine industry, and a masters in teaching from Melbourne University. After 10 years in Australia, she returned to the UK to start her own business, The Thinking Project. She had spent a lot of time working in large teams, but says that in the Thinking Environment she found ‘her thing.' Nancy Kline says of Sophie “her delight in life permeates it all.” Sophie says that right from being a little girl she has had “a sense of the sheer wonder of being alive.” Her LinkedIn profile states “I help brilliant women develop unshakeable confidence so they can make the impact they want without burning themselves out.” For Sophie a big part of confidence is having a really good felt sense our own boundaries: she says boundaries are not what keep people out but what allow us to feel safe enough to let people in. Burnout often results from internalising assumptions that we are not doing enough or we are not enough. Sophie loves working with women: she believes women are key to helping us transform our ways of working and the world we are living in. “We need that embodiment of compassion, kindness, wisdom, and treating people like they matter.” Sophie offers a range of courses and retreats. She says it is the people that make them so special. Her courses attract people who are already interested in how they create the conditions for themselves and others around them to thrive. Then she tries to create a place and a space where people can open up to who they are. Sophie has always written (and read). She sees herself primarily as a teacher, and to her writing is just an alternative way of communicating. She doesn't see a tension between her courses and her writing. She loves them both. In Sophie's December 2021 newsletter she includes a link to the Rosa Guayaba film Sawalmem. It asks “What is one word from your ancestral language which changed your life and that you can offer to the next generation to heal our relationship with the [natural] world?” Her own answer question to that question borrows from the Zen Buddhism tradition: “you have enough (as you are, right now).” Sophie's proudest achievement is working for herself for 12 years. It would have been easy to revert to strategy and operations in an organisation, but instead she allowed herself the time to develop a business around what she loved. A lesson that Sophie has had to learn in her career is not to base her success criteria on the views of others. She now has the confidence to forge her own path, and is more discerning about whose opinion matters to her. So many people have inspired Sophie on her journey, including Thich Nhat Hanh, Nancy Kline, Brene Brown, Tara Sophia Mohr. The common denominator is that they are all teachers that are working on being vulnerable and authentic. Equally she is inspired by everyone she listens to. Sophie reads at least a book a week. She recommends that aspiring leaders don't read books that promise to make you a better leader, but books that might make you a better human. She loves “The Anatomy of Peace” by the Arbinger Institute, also “Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet” by Thich Nhat Hanh. “The Way Out is In” (Plum Village) and “On Being” (Krista Tippett) are two of her favourite podcasts. Sophie's tries to live her life as an act of self-care. She doesn't see self-care as a separate activity. In particular she doesn't let herself get too busy. Her advice to her 20-year-old self would be to stop looking outside herself for the things she will only find inside herself.

Dr Sonya Wallbank is People Director for an integrated care system, and part-time senior consultant to the King's Fund. Sonya started her career in banking. The birth of her children sparked an interest in psychology, which led on to an undergraduate degree and then a doctorate in psychology. Working alongside the NHS in Leicester she explored restorative approaches that allow you to undertake challenging work whilst looking after your own mental and physical health. She has spent the last few years in NHS England and improvement supporting staff in the pandemic. In 2013 Sonya's work on restorative clinical supervision for NHS Midlands was a finalist in the Nursing Times Awards. This recognised that staff needed an opportunity to think about burn out, and their stress responses, and to increase their compassion satisfaction, and therefore the pleasure theyfound in their job. Nowadays Sonya works most of her  week in organisational design and improvement for an Integrated Care System and one day for the Kings Fund. She says the ICS work brings a sense of truth and delivery into the King's Fund work. She says the work she did during the pandemic is the most significant thing that she has done during her working life. She says NHS England and Improvement “addressed the basic needs first”, namely a hot drink and food at work, and food shopping for home. With knowledge from other countries, they were able to help staff understand what they were facing and think through their response in advance. They looked at the experience of the person outside as well as in work, and considered what it would be like for health workers going home and having to explain the impact of the pandemic to their partner and children. 2020 brought a fresh understanding into the health service of the critical importance of health and wellbeing. Sonya says that the NHS needs to see money spent on health and wellbeing as an investment in its long-term future, reducing staff absence and turnover. The pandemic has shown that “you can't be expected to come in and do this work and not be touched by it.” In the 2021 NHS Staff Survey 33% of staff said that their trust takes positive action on health and wellbeing. That still leaves two thirds of staff in a situation where their trust is not taking positive action, or at least, if it is they aren't aware of it. Sonya acknowledges that Trusts are still very wary of being accused of wasting public money, but they need to appreciate that caring for staff is essential to the future of the NHS. Nonetheless Sonya would agree with Michael West when he says there has been a “sea change” in the leadership approach adopted by the NHS. She says we have reached a peak in the innovation-adoption curve. People can see that collaborative working across boundaries is the future. However, there is a need for an investment in the associated infrastructure. Sonya believes a compassionate leadership approach is the way forward, but she recognises that it splits people, that there are those who believe it is a softer and less effective option. Her biggest career mistake was to take on an executive role in an organisation that was ‘broken.' Ultimately, she could not find enough allies to make the differences she wanted to make. Dame Emily Lawson is someone who has inspired Sonya on her journey. She led the PPE and vaccination programmes during the pandemic. Sonya's favourite book is ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People' by Dale Carnegie. She would also recommend ‘Dare to Lead' by Brene Brown. Her self-care regime involves surrounding herself with people she loves, doing things that she enjoys, and maintaining a sense of humour. She also tries to keep enough energy in reserve for her home life. Finally, it is about objectively observing the transient nature of some of the challenges we face. Her advice to her 20-year-old self would be “keep going” and “trust your instincts.”

Elena Armijo is a Certified Coach, Dare to Lead Facilitator, and founder of the C-Suite Collective, an organisation that supports women in the workplace. Elena started out as an opera singer. Music was a major element of the culture in Las Cruces, Texas, where she grew up. A masters degree in vocal performance was followed by a career singing opera internationally in her 20s and early 30s. She switched careers after a period of 4 years during which she spent 10 months a year on the road, and was in danger of becoming burnt out.  Her relationships were suffering. She enlisted a coach to help her take stock. She came to question some of her motives for her choice of vocation up until that point. The experience of working with a coach was pivotal to her, and she resolved to qualify as a coach herself. Elena contends that we need more women in positions of power because they bring a sense of empathy and compassion. It's not that men don't have these qualities, but the tradition of male leadership, particularly in the US, is one of power dynamics and control. Men and women have things to teach one another. For example, from the men that have mentored Elena, she has learnt to find her voice and stand up for herself. Elena maintains that “high-achieving women are under-supported in the workplace at every level”: because they are one in a sea of many they don't often get their needs met. For example, they may need flexibility around parenting, maternity leave, or emotional bandwidth generally. They need supporting from a different perspective. The same HR package can't be expected to work for everyone. Initially the pandemic exacerbated the situation that women face. In dual-income families it was often the woman who gave up her position in order to home school. However, after two years of the pandemic, a more nuanced conversation is emerging in relation to needs and support. Elena believes excellence in supporting women is characterised by a culture in which women are free to say what is on their minds, where shame is surfaced, and where mental health issues, including incipient burnout, are addressed as they emerge. Coaching can play a key role in this. The first stage of putting such a culture in place is a diagnostic one, using 360 appraisals, and referring to exit interviews. Shifting the culture is a long-term endeavour, starting with the C-suite. Concerning job interviews, Elena says “now is a beautiful time to ask questions, and remember that when you are being interviewed you are also interviewing the other person.” Becoming a Dare to Lead Facilitator was “a really beautiful moment.” Elena says that Brene Brown has created a common language to discuss things openly [shame, guilt, vulnerability, authenticity] that were formerly rarely spoken of. Elena's proudest achievement in her career as a coach is in “serving marginalised people that get to see possibility for the first time.” (And as an opera singer, singing at Carnegie Hall.) Her biggest mistake as a rookie coach was to try to go too deep too soon with a senior executive. He wasn't feeling ready to be so vulnerable, and he fired her. They later apologised to one another. It taught Elena the difference between being with people and pushing people. On her journey, Elena was inspired by Michael Madden, her first boss after her opera career. He gave her the opportunity to build what was next for her, and encouragement. To aspiring leaders, Elena would recommend the Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us podcasts, both hosted by Brene Brown. Also anything by Simon Sinek, and ‘I Feel Awful: Chronicles of Leadership' by Christine Sachs. One of her favourite books on leadership is ‘The Culture Code' by Daniel Coyle. Elena adopts an in-the-moment approach to self-care, asking herself each morning what she needs that day. Sometimes that can be a cup of tea, or it may be a walk with her dogs, yoga, meditation or working out. For her it's part of “regrowing the muscle...

Nancy Kline is Founder and President of Time to Think, Author of Time to Think, More Time to Think, and The Promise That Changes Everything: I Won't Interrupt You. She is a coach and speaker, and a visiting lecturer at Henley Business School. Before ‘coach' became a common part of the business vocabulary, her job involved listening and helping people to listen to one another, and Nancy was already working on the question “How do we help people to think for themselves?” Nancy has always been a writer – she has written 11 books in all - but ‘Time to Think' was her breakthrough best seller. At present, and for a while now, she has had to manage the tension between writing, and running a leadership development and coaching business. Ultimately, she has recognised that the two are inextricable and that her writing and her thinking environment work serve each other. Nancy says she experienced her mother (and father) as what she would now call “an embodied thinking environment.” She reflects that her mother hardly ever interrupted her, and she seemed interested all of the time, so much so that her ‘way of being' became what Nancy understood listening to be. She says “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. And then the quality of our thinking depends on the way people are treating us while we are thinking.” Nancy's vision is that one day every human being will live in a thinking environment from birth to death. She says ‘Time to Think' the organisation is not really an organisation but a loose network of qualified professionals. The strategy of ‘Time to Think' is “to discover, teach, and qualify people” and to work with those qualified people and others to learn and discover more. Nancy's leadership philosophy is that “the core job of a leader is to generate the finest thinking from everybody whom they influence” which requires them to be able to create the conditions for good independent thinking wherever they are. She believes that there are differences in what the male and female cultures allow by way of instruction in how to lead. She believes that there are facets of female culture that allow them to create thinking environments more consistently than male culture. However, you can learn to superimpose on your own culture the other gender's cultural permission to create thinking environments. As a generalisation, you often find a better-quality thinking environment where a team has both men and women. Nancy feels deeply committed to the NHS. She came to the UK to live when she married Christopher Spence. She sees the NHS as “one expression of the finest in civilisation.” She believes that human beings are born with a right to healthcare and to education and “there's something about going to bed at night and knowing that everybody's going to get the care they need whether or not they can afford it. There's something dignifying of me in knowing that they're being dignified.” Nancy's new book ‘The Promise that Changes Everything' focuses on the one thing that Nancy considers to be the distinguishing characteristic of a thinking environment and that is the promise “I won't interrupt you.” The book delineates the four generic systems of interruption that we live in. Nancy says that “the nature of a thinking environment… is that it is ever emergent… we are noticing new things all the time.” So, has she now written all that there is to say on the thinking environment? Probably not! Nancy is proud that she has stayed true to the idea that the conditions for independent thinking are there to be discovered. Therefore, it was never to become a methodology, but it was always going to be a fluid concept. And from the beginning she has wanted there to be “less company and more practitioners.” “Small is beautiful” has remained her organising principle. She has made plenty of mistakes but sees them as positive – it means that we have had the courage to go out there and try – and...

Michael West is Professor in organisational effectiveness and innovation, Lancaster University and Visiting Fellow to the King's Fund, the NHS Think Tank. He is a former Executive Dean of Aston Business School. This is Chris Whitehead's second interview with Michael. If you want some background, please listen to episode 13 of the Compassionate Leadership Interview. In this present episode we are going to focus on Michael's lockdown project, the book Compassionate Leadership: Sustaining Wisdom, Humanity and Presence in Health and Social Care. Michael's interest in compassion stems from his meditation practice, which has brought him into contact with world religions for which compassion is fundamental. At the same time, his research and consultancy work on leadership and culture, in industry and the NHS, highlighted the importance of positivity and relationships in teams and organisations to effectiveness, creativity, and innovation. The pandemic created a space for Michael in which he could bring together research evidence, case studies, and practical approaches to compassionate leadership. The book was supported by Health Education and Improvement Wales, which has a 10-year strategy to implement compassionate leadership. Organisational culture is a recurring theme in the book. Michael characterises a culture of compassion as one in which people are present with each other, there's a strong emphasis on relationships, and there is a strong ethic of caring and support for people who are experiencing challenge or difficulty. Michael believes there has been a “sea change” over the past two years in the leadership approach adopted by the NHS. And this applies to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in particular. In England compassionate leadership is part of the NHS People Plan, but practice is less consistent. Coaching and mentoring receive numerous mentions in Michael's book. Coaching and mentoring are about being present, attending to the other, listening with fascination, helping them to articulate their thoughts, explore challenges, and be comfortable with ambiguity. Therefore coaching and mentoring formalise some of the behaviours of compassionate leadership. In the book Michael says “experiencing compassion for others shapes individuals' appraisals about themselves.” He believes when we experience an interaction with another who is truly present with us, it enables us to be more present with ourselves. He says “it's a myth that performance cannot be managed with compassion.” Michael believes that compassionate leadership actually enables a stronger emphasis on performance, because out of compassion comes a motivation for delivering high quality continually improving care. And it gives us the skills we need to listen to people and understand what is at the root of unsatisfactory performance. Michael's previous book was entitled ‘Effective Teamwork' and this latest book is informed in part by that one. He uses the expression ‘real teams' to refer to teams that have a clear purpose, shared goals, and take time out to reflect on their effectiveness. Michael believes that compassionate leadership can help avoid scandals such as Mid Staffs, Bristol, and Alder Hey. The research he and colleagues conducted following Mid Staffs, revealed that in the Trusts that were less effective, senior leaders tended to be focused on managing upwards and ‘comfort eeking' in their discussions with staff. In the highest performing organisations, leaders were focused on their vision for the Trust, and intent on ‘problem sensing' in their staff interactions. Michael contends that compassionate leadership is one of the keys to innovation, because it creates a psychologically safe environment, and that in turn enables the risk taking associated with innovation. This year NHS Wales published their Compassionate Leadership Principles which they co-created with Michael. NHS Scotland has a programme called Project Lift...

Mike Kent is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Kitlocker, Sheffield sportswear manufacturer and distributor, and an Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. Kitlocker is an online retailer specialising in sportswear, and employing around 100 staff. Before Mike and his fellow MD Tom Ward ran Kitlocker they studied at Sheffield Hallam and played volleyball. After university Tom had the opportunity to play volleyball professionally, but opted to join Mike in implementing the business plan that Mike had produced in his second year. Mike wouldn't necessarily commend the approach Tom and Mike took to equip themselves for success. In the early years they were “incredibly insular.” Only after the first decade did they become more externally facing. Building out their sales and marketing function was a catalyst for this. Recently the business has started to look at its education and training needs, but that's more with an eye on the next generation of leaders in the business rather than on the founders. Mike sees his leadership role as being about “understanding where we are, where we are heading, and shaping the company to cater for the step changes that we encounter.” As the company has grown, making plans and communicating them has become more challenging. The aspects of thebusiness that enthuse Mike are problem-solving, particularly in relation to the e-commerce and manufacturing systems, and the people. Mike is intent onensuring that the company's strategy, systems, and people are congruent. Mike's approach to leadership has evolved with the business and experience, and is a blend of empathy for team members, support for the development of individuals, and quite an ”autocratic” style. A directive style is not natural to him, but has been a response to the young talent the company has recruited via University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) placement schemes. His favourite takeaway from SHU's ‘Leading through Health and Wellbeing' course (which Mike, Dave Hembrough and Chris Whitehead have all completed) is “ruthless on the issue, gentle on the person.” He concurs with Peter's Drucker's quote “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Kitlocker, however, does not have a single culture, indeed that would be challenging, because its teams are quite varied in character. The business is thinking about how it facilitates an effective culture in each department. The company's story helps it in the recruitment of talent. When it comes to retention, the aim is to equip leaders to be more supportive and empathetic in relation to their teams. This needs to be embedded into the appraisal and development systems for all staff. Mike is proud of what Kitlocker's teams have achieved, rather than what he has achieved (and there's still plenty more to do). The company hasn't made any “cataclysmic” mistakes, but it's made many smaller mistakes and has learnt from them. One of Mike's inspirations in starting the company was Jagged Globe, a company that lead climbing and mountaineering expeditions. They gave a two-hour talk to Mike's Business Studies course on what the business does and their experiences as an SME. When Tom Ward said “Let's do this” Mike cast his mind back to that presentation, which he felt was “a really cool journey.” Mike's book recommendations are “Creativity Inc” by Catmull and Wallace, which is about managing creativity at Pixar, and “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. Mike is a fan of “The High Performance Podcast.” A growing business and a young family tend to crowd out Mike's self-care regime, but he has become more aware of the importance of it as he has grown older. He has been working at his exercise regime, but also self-development, and “being mindful of being mindful.” His advice to his 20-year old self would be “Don't be so insular.” Paying more attention to other companies and the external environment generally would have helped Kitlocker to see the bigger picture. Working

Edmund Cross is a trainer and facilitator, and specialist in creating developmental spaces for individuals and teams. After a childhood in Northern Ireland, Edmund attended the University of Sussex where he studied French, and learnt to identify patterns and understand systems. He then trained as a nurse in Sheffield. He says “it taught me about the practicality of intervening in people's lives.” Partly as a result of a back injury he moved into workingwith primary care teams on sexual health. After several years with the local health authority he worked at the University of Sheffield. Since being made redundant in a reorganisation he has been working independently – this compelled him to learn how not to be part of an organisation and a hierarchy. Edmund has a reputation for being able to sit with people while they resolve conflict. He puts it down to several skills he has picked up on his journey: sticking with people when they tell you something important, an understanding of rank and power, working with issues as they arise in the moment, and leaning into matters rather than shying away. He says “power underlies everything and we need to talk about it.” All of our relationships have an element of power in them. We experience power very early on, but we don't talk about it: “it becomes invisible to us, and yet it shapes everything.” Once people have the tools and space to talk about, it becomes easier to surface the associated issues. Over the past five or six years Edmund has developed a way of working that involves introducing people to models, such as the Johari window and the window of tolerance, and then encouraging them to apply them to the business of the group as it arises in the moment. He seeks to help people to trust their own thoughts and emotions. Edmund is an enthusiast for ‘not knowing': when you approach a problem with an open mind, more possibilities emerge. He adopts an orientation of curiosity and exploration. He finds David Snowden's Cynefin framework helpful in this respect. Edmund has a daughter with a medical condition. Before her birth, Edmund envisaged a predictable future, afterwards he was dealing with uncertainty and crises as they came up. It taught him to live in the moment and give things his best shot as they arose. Edmund's proudest achievement in his career concerns when,as a nurse, he acted as an advocate for a seriously ill patient who hadn't made a will. One of his biggest mistakes was to speak for part of a group that he was facilitating without an invitation, taking on the mantle of leadership when it hadn't been conferred upon him. The most formative experience for Edmund was a residential at Findhorn (https://www.findhorn.org/ (https://www.findhorn.org/)) which involved teaching on conflict and change by Ben Fuchs and Andrew Murray. The three books that Edmund would recommend to aspiring leaders are: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Sitting in the Fire by Arnold Mindell, and Difficult Conversations by Sheila Heen, Douglas Stone and others. Edmund's self-care regime includes sailing, platform diving, and running. His advice to his 20-year old self would be “stick with it and let it unfold.”

This show is a departure from The CLI's one-to-one format. Chris is joined by three guests to discuss joining up sport and wellbeing in Sheffield. Anna Lowe is Programme Manager at the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine and Leader of Move More. Chris Dayson is Associate Professor in the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, and leader of the Healthy and Active 100 research theme at the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC). Nigel Harrison is Chief Executive of the Yorkshire Sport Foundation. Move More is the vision of Sheffield as a happier, healthier, and more connected city. It recognises the key role that being more active has to play in that vision. The first Move More strategy was launched in 2015, and the second was launched in June 2021. It's a whole systems approach to increasing physical activity in Sheffield. The six priority areas are communities, education, health and social care, environment, sport, and active travel. Anna observes that many of the things that support wellbeing are non-medical; such as relationships, nature, and moving more. The latest Move More strategy targets the areas of the city where the need is greatest, as characterised by geographical location (the most disadvantaged wards), and demographic groups such as age (older people), and sex (women and girls). The Yorkshire Sport Foundation (YSF) is one of 43 active partnerships across England, primarily funded by Sport England. Their role is one of “connecting, influencing, and, where needs be, providing opportunities to be active.” One of YSF's managers is part of Anna's Move More team. Active Burngreave is an example of a project involving close collaboration between Move More and YSF. The funding for this originated from Comic Relief. The physical activity and sport were designed around how the community operated. The project employed Safiya Saeed, now a local councillor. She is “the sticky person that everybody goes to in that particular area.” There are now several activity groups: Big Brothers, Reach Up, Sisters. The key, maintains Nigel, is that this is people in Burngreave organising things for themselves through local leadership. The role of Move More and YSF has been to support it in the background through funding, advice, and professional development. Chris Dayson explains that social prescribing is an opportunity for health practitioners to address a patient's social and emotional needs by referring them on to activities in their community. Such activities may be social, physical, or a combination of the two. At the heart of the process – and where NHS England are investing a significant amount of money over 10 years – is the link worker. The link worker keeps abreast of what is happening in the community, and potentially also plays a community development role. They take the referral from the health practitioner, develop an understanding of the patient, and then put in place appropriate support and activities. Thus, social prescribing is a pathway from the NHS to the community, and it provides just one mechanism through which the Move More strategy might be delivered. Activities that involve connecting to nature or take place outdoors are sometime referred to as ‘green social prescribing.' The government has seven test and learn sites for green social prescribing. South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw has one of these test and learn pilots. This is a cross-government initiative including NHS, Department of Health, Defra, along with sector partners such as Sport England and Natural England. At present we don't know what proportion of social prescribing involves sports clubs, and in general there is a lack of knowledge about what capacity exists in the community and what can be done to support that capacity. Directories exist, but more important is the link worker's understanding of the community and what is going on. Chris is heavily involved in the evaluation of social prescribing. He describes...

Dr Julian Abel is a recently retired consultant in palliative care, former Vice President of Public Health Palliative Care International, and co-author with Lindsay Clarke of The Compassion Project: A Case for Hope and Humankindness from the Town that Beat Loneliness. From childhood Julian has tried to seek out what he can do that is “meaningful and helpful.” Going into healthcare was a direct expression of that. When he first entered medicine he discovered that it had a pronounced hierarchy. “The patient was nowhere near the top.” After a spell studying Chinese medicine and cranial osteopathy, he became a palliative care consultant in Weston-super-Mare within a service that covered hospice, community and hospitals. He became particularly interested in the community dimension of this because he came to understand that “the thing that makes the biggest difference is not the professional support but the love, laughter and friendship.” He says that it is deeply embedded in our nervous system: “we have a prosocial nervous system.” Julian's book The Compassion Project is largely based on the Compassion Frome Model initiated by Dr Helen Kingston and Jenny Hartnoll, and which Julian helped to lead. It spun out of a paper initiated by Helen. Julian supported the paper with some statistics, which included that emergency admissions in Frome had decreased by 14% whilst in the rest of Somerset they had risen by 29%. It was clear that they were onto something. Up until this point no-one had come across an intervention that would reduce population emergency admissions. The team decided that they need to ‘go public' and explain the building blocks of what they were doing and the benefits. Julian co-authored an article in Resurgence magazine, that was reported in the Guardian. Someone read the publicity and approached the Frome team concerning the possibility of writing a book. The Compassionate Frome model provides a means of connecting lonely and isolated patients with the plethora of activities that are going on in the community. The friendships brokered by Compassionate Frome create mental wellbeing which, via the mind-body connection, is reflected in physical wellbeing. Community connectors and health connectors play a key role in the Frome model. There are around 700 of the former (in a population of 28,000). The role of the community connectors is, by reference to a web directory, to signpost people to activities in the community that might be of interest. Julian the conversations that each connector has as a “little explosion of compassion in the community.” The health connectors are fewer in number and help people gain clarity on what is important to them and what they need when they are not in touch with these things. They are trained in motivational interviewing. His son Bewick has taken compassionate thinking into his primary school, located in a hard-pressed community. The first thing he did was help children recognise and name their emotions. And then they talked about which ones were beneficial to school life and which ones were harmful. More recently they have introduced a morning check-in, where they ask one another how they are, and if there is anything they can do to make it better. In time the children became happier and more connected and educational attainment improved dramatically. Julian feels that one of the challenges of the UK education system is that many of the ministers and civil servants are emotionally inarticulate themselves. Julian has formed an organisation Compassionate Communities UK (you can find it on the web at compassionate-communities.co.uk). It is focused on sharing, developing expertise, and education. Some of its work is professional facing and some is public facing. Julian's podcast ‘Survival of the Kindest' is also part of it. Julian is looking to develop expertise around community sources of support for trauma. “If you just rely on professional services, it's never going to...

Dr Amar Rughani is a leadership mentor and former Sheffield GP, former Royal College of General Practitioners examiner and Blueprinting clinical lead, and co-author with Joanna Bircher of ‘The Leadership Hike: Shaping Primary Care Together.' General practice didn't become a specialty in its own right – in terms of having a compulsory licencing examination – until 2007. Amar was involved in defining what general practice involved. He believes good GPs engage first and foremost with people rather than with disease systems and lab tests. Understanding humanity is at the core of what GPs do. Similarly leadership was just an expectation of GP colleagues rather than being defined or taught until recently. Amar set out to define it so that it could be taught. He's no longer sure it can be defined or taught, but it has been an interesting journey. His interest in leadership also stemmed from his reflections on working with patients collaboratively to improve their lives. He believes a strong argument can be made that effective leadership is highly context dependent. He found that much of the business literature on leadership – promoting positional power, control, personal achievement, and reward as motivators – didn't really resonate with him. The values of primary care are more to do with compassion, community, engaging with complexity, openness, and honesty. And so he felt that he had to write the book, because he couldn't find anything out there that said what was needed in a GP context. The book itself is “totally an exercise in compassionate leadership.” Amar says that he wanted to convey that he and Joanna did not have all the answers, but that people really matter, and “what they can do for their community matters for the whole world.” They called the book a ‘hike' because they wanted people to feel that Amar and Joanna were accompanying them on their journey. In the book Amar says “maybe we should ask ourselves whether, if we rarely feel uncomfortable or need to use our courage, we are actually engaging in leadership at all.” If we are going to change things then first we will have to “stick our head above the parapet.” We've noticed that there is a problem and we care enough to actually say so. He also says “it is humbling to appreciate that so much of what differentiates people who are given higher or lower status by society is not determined, for example, by genetics or talent, but by resources, opportunity and support” and feels that the more we see ourselves as an elite, the more disconnected we are liable to become from the people we serve. Leaders generally operate along two dimensions – task and people – and the people dimension is normally harder. People need to be willing to connect with you, and to give their ‘discretionary effort.' They won't do that unless they feel their ideas are welcomed, they are going to be supported, given some resource perhaps, and receive some acknowledgement. But the start of it all is that they don't feel that you look down on them or talk down to them. Amar maintains “our greatest potential for developing our most useful contributions lies not in the areas where we are weak, but in the areas where we are already strong.” At a traditional GP appraisal, weaknesses are identified and the expectation is that over the coming year you will spend time remedying your deficits. He found the work of the Gallup organisation, which is summarised in the book Strengths Finder 2.0, revelatory. That research revealed that a great number of measures of personal effectiveness were positively correlated with the ability of people to connect with what they were singularly good at. Therefore, one of the arts of leadership is to support people to engage with those strengths and apply them. Amar observes that in primary care, ones work can be so reactive that there seems to be little time to do much other than firefighting. However, it is nonetheless essential to clarify vision and direction. In

Dr Richard Field OBE is a specialist in individual and organisation growth and development, Chairman of Highlander Computing Solutions, former Chairman and CEO of the Dyson Refractories Group, visiting professor at Sheffield Hallam University, and a former South Yorkshire Businessman of the Year. Dave Hembrough recommended Richard for the show – Richard made a big impression on him when Dave attended his 10-day Integral Leadership course. Richard was running a leadership course at Balliol College Oxford for the Industrial Society when he was approached by the Training and Enterprise Council to design “a world-class leadership programme.” Richard designed it with a team of collaborators over a period of two years. He describes the result as a “programme for life”, as relevant to a young student as to a board of directors. He and Rob Copeland of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) (episode 15, January 2020, of this podcast) have recently developed a further iteration of the programme called ‘Leading for Health and Wellbeing' (LHW), which will be rolled out at the AWRC from June. He believes it is difficult to lead with compassion unless you are compassionate towards yourself. The Dale Carnegie training organisation has the ‘3Cs' rule; “never criticism, condemn, or complain.” And Richard didn't, except that he came to realise that the one person he was beating up was himself. At 35 Richard became the Chairman and Chief Executive of a large organisation. He sought advice on how to lead from a well-known business leader of the time David Frith, who told him there are only two things were necessary; be there and listen. Richard says “everyone is wonderful, it's up to us to give them the space to be the best that they can be.” As a child Richard had encephalitis and was in a coma for a month. He was bullied at school, and had to wear irons because his bones were brittle. On a course, he heard a saying that changed his life: “By doing you become.” He started working hard and looking after other people. A life of achievement, recognised through his OBE, followed. One of the objectives of his leadership course is to help people avoid the pain that he went through. His leadership philosophy is that everyone is doing the best they can with the resources available to them, and that people are family. His style is to ask questions because then the answer comes from the individual and they are learning. If things don't go so well, he asks how might that have gone better, and believes that reflection is one of the keys to life. He is chairman of several companies and believes that the effectiveness of teams is critical to successful business. The stronger the relationships within a board, the greater its ability to deal with challenging issues. The role of the chairman is to build those relationships, and create a culture of psychological safety within which difficult matters can be discussed openly. Richard sees the two greatest challenges facing business as social and environmental sustainability, and professionalism: entrepreneurs frequently fail through lacking the basic tools they need. Everyone should be continuously learning. His too proudest achievements in business are “just seeing people be the very best they can be”, and his Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) at Sheffield Hallam University. His biggest mistake concerns a visit by Tony Robbins to Sheffield Arena. At the last minute it transpired that the hire of the arena would be another £70,000 on account of the lighting rig. Firstly, Richard hadn't written down the requirements of Tony's team, and secondly he hadn't monitored what was going on properly. The course that has had the greatest impact on Richard was the Industrial Society course where he learnt “In doing you become”, so much so that he returned as a volunteer on 15 occasions before eventually he was asked to run the programme. One of the people that has inspired Richard on his journey...

Ollie Hart is a GP at Sloan Medical Centre Sheffield, Director of Peak Health Coaching, Clinical Commissioning Lead, social media influencer, and innovation leader in healthcare and wellness. His vision for the future of health and wellness in the UK involves inviting the individual and their community to take a more prominent role, as opposed to the healthcare system. All the research suggests that the impact of the system, based on a ‘medicalised model' is far less than was imagined. The behaviour of the individual and the support provided to them by their community is the dominant factor in their health and wellbeing. He believes the pandemic has demonstrated that alternative ways of doing things can be better: video appointments and the vaccine delivery model, involving collaboration between clinicians, volunteers and the community, are two examples. Over time during his practice as a GP, Ollie discovered that the medical interventions he prescribed were often less effective than when he supported people in understanding their condition, and in adopting healthy behaviours. He learnt a lot of his health coaching skills in a pain clinic, where the drug treatment options were limited. He finds having good therapeutic relationships “recharging,” for him as well as his patients. He set up Peak Health Coaching to support clinicians in health coaching, patient activation measurement (PAM), and social prescribing. Patient activation is about understanding where a patient is on their journey to empowerment, and tailoring their coaching and treatment accordingly. Social prescribing in its simplest form helps connect people to organisations within their community that might help them to initiate or sustain good behaviours. In a wider context, it is about providing equitable access and support to all members of a community. General practice is “constantly redefining itself. We respond to need, and to changes in the evidence base.” He says “in our essence we are community-based organisations.” Link workers, health coaches, and care coordinators are all part of the current wave of change. Ollie believes GPs with health coaching knowledge are in a position to make a judgement call on the most beneficial use of their time with a particular patient, whether that is in understanding their context better, or whether it is in discussing a prescription for a new medication. Good health coaching can create time, by starting a patient on a path that he might then pursue outside of the consultation. Ollie believes that health coaching can reduce health inequalities, but only if it is done with skilful consideration of the individual. If executed clumsily it can overwhelm the patient. He contends that there are no cultural barriers to health coaching, but the socio-economic circumstances of any community, irrespective of ethnicity, need to be carefully considered in its deployment. Ollie was instrumental in setting up the Graves Park Park Run. He feels it is a great example of an initiative that once executed with skill and imagination takes on a life of its own. He says “what they tuned into in Park Run was that it was not just about the running and the exercise, it was about the connection and … the common purpose.” Ollie says that the NHS and the current experiment in personalised care – the NHS has a target of recruiting 1,000 new link workers by the end of the 2021 – is a great example of learning by doing, somewhat similar to Park Run. He maintains that to promote an environment of innovation there has to be a degree of tolerance of risk, and a preparedness to accept failure. And whilst there has to be some acknowledgement of the potential downsides, if the system doesn't innovate it misses the opportunity of improved approaches that may save lives. Through his appearances on radio and television, and also on social media, Ollie is influencing the direction of the NHS and government. He doesn't have a deliberate PR strategy,...

Dave Hembrough is Founder and Head Coach at Sports Club Hallam Barbell, Sports Personality of the Year 2020 Unsung Hero for the BBC Yorkshire Region, and Lead Strength and Conditioning Coach at Sheffield Hallam University. Hallam Barbell is a weightlifting and strength training club, affiliated to British Weightlifting. Dave set up Hallam Barbell just over 10 years ago. At the time, he confesses, he didn't know what he was getting into. He had to embark on a learning journey to equip himself for leadership. Dave has had roles in strength and conditioning at national level for volleyball, table tennis, and diving as well as weightlifting, but none of that prepared him to run a club and to manage people. What he did learn from his time in performance sport was that helping people to beat an opponent didn't motivate him as much as helping people to be better, and healthier, and enjoy life more. At an early stage in the development of the club, Dave had the opportunity of a place on a leadership course run by Richard Field (http://www.integralleadership.com/prof-richard-field-obe.php (http://www.integralleadership.com/prof-richard-field-obe.php)), based on the ‘Integral Leaders Programme' (http://www.integralleadership.com/ (http://www.integralleadership.com)). This was a formative experience for him. One outcome of the course was that he developed a purpose statement that grounds him and helps him steer in the right direction: “To find happiness and commitment, for me, and those around me as best as I can, through being positive and future focused, supportive, caring, and compassionate, and by making a difference through action.” Hallam Barbell is a small, relatively new, and growing organisation that relies heavily on its team of volunteers. He recognises the need to support that team and for them to be enjoying the journey, contributing, and active. Where you arrive is “not always where you set out to go but that's part of the fun of the adventure as well.” Developing people is a priority for Dave. Development is part of what the volunteers rightfully expect in return for participation in the club. He runs a strength and conditioning mentorship programme at Sheffield Hallam University. During Covid he has run a mentoring programme for coaches, involving a monthly meeting, a buddy system providing for regular one-to-ones (for which Dave provided a framework), and also a one-to-one with Dave every two to three weeks. One of Dave's proudest achievements is that when he stepped back from Hallam Barbell for a couple of months following the birth of his daughter, the programme he had developed ran in his absence. He thinks great leaders make themselves dispensable. Similarly, when the club is hosting a competition he organises it so that he is a “spare part” and everyone else is doing the doing. He sums it up by saying the thing he is proud of is the people who have taken and run with the opportunities the club has offered them. The biggest challenge for Dave has been managing individuals. He uses the term ‘coaching tightrope' to describe the balance that needs to be struck between support and challenge, which in turn requires listening, and understanding. He is still working at this. During Covid Hallam Barbell were unable to use their original gym, and a company called Kitlocker (https://www.kitlocker.com) stepped forward to provide space. Between Covid lockdowns the club has had more sessions, and more participants. “It just shows that we've got the right traction, the right momentum, the right people.” They're currently going through a rebranding process that will position them for what's next. The end goal is to coach more people throughout the city region and beyond and positively affect more lives. Previously Professor Rob Copeland of Sheffield's Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre has featured on the Compassionate Leadership Interview (episode 15). In 2021 the AWRC will launch a Leading Health and Wellbeing...

Dame Jackie Daniel is Chief Executive of Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Executive in Residence with Lancaster University Management School, and co-chair of the Shelford Group, being the ten largest teaching and research hospitals in the UK National Health Service. She started her career in the early 1980s as a nurse. After 10 years of clinical practice she moved into general management, and has now been a Chief Executive for almost 20 years. In addition to her Nursing degree and a Masters in Quality Assurance in Health and Social Care, Dame Jackie is a qualified business and personal coach: when she became a Trust board director she found that she was spending a lot of time in coaching conversations, and wanted to improve her skills in what she regards as a critical area. Studying coaching equipped her with a range of tools and techniques to support people to flourish in a tough environment. Healthcare is a “people-centric business” and over the last decade or so, Dame Jackie has developed a programme for supporting staff to liberate their full potential. She says it is important in healthcare that people have a “discovery mindset.” She encourages her staff (and there are 17,000 of them) to be authentic and the best possible version of themselves. In May 2019 the Care Quality Commission inspected the Royal Victoria Infirmary, the Freeman, and the Dental Hospital and returned an overall rating of ‘Outstanding.' In reaching that verdict it cited the quality of the Trust's leadership, an inclusive and supportive culture, and a commitment to innovation and learning. The Trust's ‘Flourish' programme provides a means of sustaining that success over the long term. The programme has three domains: leadership and people (noting that people at any level in the organisation can lead), governance and risk management (including prioritisation and performance management), and the “relational fabric” of the Trust (communities of interest/networks of activity). Dame Jackie and her team work in 12-weeks blocks, so are constantly looking ahead and back, reflecting and learning from what has gone well and what hasn't. Communication is central to her approach. The 12-week system owes its origins to Agile project management, and enables the Trust to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances. The challenges facing the NHS right now are well documented – an ageing population, budgetary constraints, increasing costs of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. Dame Jackie believes that in addressing these it is essential to acknowledge the relationship between health, wealth, and wellbeing. The city is taking a systems perspective by including within ‘Collaborative Newcastle' The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHSFT, the City Council, the universities, the mental health trust, social care providers, and GPs. On a wider scale the trust also plays an important role in a “provider collaborative” of eight NHS Foundation Trusts within the region. She says “we have stepped through every week of this pandemic together over the whole year.” Dame Jackie's proudest achievements include leading, as Nurse Director, a campaign called “Improving Working Lives” in the Trent Region. She is also pleased with the six years she spent at Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (where failings at Furness General Hospital led to the avoidable deaths of at least 11 babies and one mother), leading the trust out of special measures, rebuilding the management team, improving care, and restoring trust within the local community. In Newcastle she is proud of raising the Rainbow Flag to celebrate LGBTQ staff and patients, and also being the first healthcare organisation in the world to declare a Climate Emergency. Jackie's biggest mistake was to take on a Chief Executive role to turn around a financially challenged trust. Though she was successful in achieving her goal, the job did not resonate with her leadership style or values, and she reflects that...

Professor Stephen Trzeciak, Chief of Medicine, Cooper University Healthcare and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Camden, New Jersey is co-author with Dr Anthony Mazzarelli of the book Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference. His personal quest is “to make healthcare more compassionate through science.” A specialist in Intensive Care, Stephen's research over a 20-year period had focused on resuscitation science. The trajectory of his life's work changed when he reflected on a question that his 12-years old son had been set as a school assignment: “What is the most pressing problem of our time?” It seemed to him that the most pressing problem of our time, through the lens of his experience as a physician, is the “crisis in compassion.” In the US, for example, 50% of patients believe that neither the healthcare system nor healthcare providers are compassionate. Physicians miss 60-90% of opportunities to respond to patients with compassion. Data from the Mayo Clinic shows that the median time before interruption when a patient is trying to explain their reason for going to a doctor is just 11 seconds. More than a third of physicians suffer from depersonalisation, an inability to make a personal connection. In an era of electronic patient records, physicians typically spend more time looking at a computer screen than looking a patient in the eyes. In partnership with colleague Dr Anthony Mazzarelli, Stephen set himself the challenge of answering the question “So what? Does compassion really matter?” in quantitative terms. 1,000 papers later they had found overwhelming evidence that compassion matters in measurable ways for patients and for medical practitioners. He considers himself “a work in progress.” Contrary to the belief he once held that people were either wired for compassion or they were not, he says there is plentiful evidence that compassionate behaviours can be taught and learnt. Trzeciak and Mazzarelli found that there were 24 different mechanisms whereby compassion could benefit patients. By way of example, if you are compassionate towards your patients you are more likely to be meticulous and less prone to making major medical errors. Research shows that if you are compassionate towards your patients, they are more likely to adhere to the course of treatment. In the psychological domain it might be intuitively evident that compassion for others can modulate the psychological distress of others. Compassionomics references the clinical evidence for this. Stephen has an ongoing research programme at Cooper University Healthcare and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University around the quantification of the effects of compassion in healthcare. He maintains that it is not until you quantify the impact for patients and for those who care for them that compassion will be given appropriate priority. It belongs in the domain of evidence-based medicine. He says “there wouldn't be a compassion crisis in healthcare if we really understood the magnitude of the effect.” As a specialist in intensive care medicine, Stephen routinely meets people “on the worst day of their life” and was a prime candidate for burnout himself. Conventional wisdom might be that he should maintain a certain emotional detachment from his work. But the research reveals a strong inverse association between physician compassion and burnout – “compassion can be a powerful therapy for the giver too.” When you bear witness to pain and suffering you activate the pain centres of your brain, but moving on to compassionate action activates the reward pathways. “Compassion feels good” and caring for others is fulfilling.

Mark Harrison is Director of consultancy Social Action Solutions, and Senior Research Fellow in Social Action at the University of Suffolk. Mark became an academic “by accident”: he sees himself as a practitioner who took a detour into academia for 15 years. He was Director of the Centre for Social Action at the University of Nottingham, De Montfort University, Leicester and the University of East Anglia, Norwich before he was invited to become a Senior Research Fellow in social action at the University of Suffolk. He has worked internationally, for example developing and managing a three-year deinstitutionalisation of childcare in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus for UNICEF, and managing a global disability research project for the Department for International Development. This snowballed from when Nottingham University hosted a group of academics from Vilnius in Lithuania at the behest of the British Council. His most fulfilling assignments however date from the beginning of his career (late 70s, early 80s), working with disadvantaged young people. He found that many of them were becoming scapegoated and/or criminalised on account of their ethnicity, where they lived, or because of their class. At that time, the conventional approaches in social work and probation were to either change their behaviour or remove them temporarily (outdoor pursuits) or permanently (prison) from their environment. Mark's team decided to ask the young people what the problems were and why the problems existed. They then encouraged the young people to develop their own programmes and projects to effect change. They brought about changes in policing on their estate, and founded a youth club. “Co-production” is the fashionable term for a lot of what Mark is involved in. It emerged from a critique of conventional engagement approaches, which often amount to little more than tokenism. He gives an example of co-production from an estate in Bradford where the young people stormed a Council regeneration meeting in order to protest at the proposed demolition of one-bedroom flats. Co-production critically involves valuing lived experience and a sharing of power between a community and the relevant authorities. Mark  highlights a number of obstacles to co-production evident in the UK: the reluctance of funding agencies to give grants to charities led by black or by disabled people; the prevalence of white people on professional bodies (including social work).  Mark believes that there is a systemic problem with the education, training, and management of professionals. They are taught that they are the experts and they are rewarded according to the things that they have done to communities rather than with communities. Mark believes that practice needs to be aligned with intention. Mark believes that meaningful change doesn't come from the top but from the collective action of ordinary people, who are determined and prepared to take the consequences. Often this means a collision between those people and the state, for example the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and more recently climate change activism. Mark aims to help communities get in touch with the root causes of the issues they are facing, to acknowledge their own part in them, and ultimately to take responsibility. During his early career Mark was inspired by the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Friere, author of the book ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed.' He would also recommend Mike Oliver's  on  ‘The Individual and Social Models of Disability', which has a relevance to understanding change beyond disability. At the top of his Twitter feed, Mark has a quote from Angela Davis which says “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I am changing the things I cannot accept.” His advice to his 20-year old self would be “trust in your instincts and in your judgement, trust other people (but also know when not to trust other people, because there are bad people in...

Nadine Smith is UK Director of the Centre for Public Impact (CPI), a not-for-profit company founded in 2015 by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to catalyse and inform the debate on the future of Government. CPI helps Governments think about policy decisions and the role of the public servant. Their current focus is on human government and its relationship with the citizen. Their first premise was that the answer lay in “technocratic tweaks and adaptations… action and delivery” but they went on to discover that there were more fundamental and complex issues at play. Recently the CPI produced a report in which Nadine wrote “Government must be more human or risk becoming irrelevant.” She says there are three key elements to effective Government: legitimacy, policy and action. Of these, she has found that the conversation about legitimacy has been the most challenging, touching on mistrust, anxiety, apathy, and antipathy. She found that young people are “drifting away from the idea that Government could be of any help to them whatsoever.” More than that, she observed that almost anyone who had been through a trauma – for example a broken relationship, issues at school, losing a business, environmental shocks – felt that there was a lack of kindness and care on the part of Government. In consequence many people are deciding that the only way to effect change is to “do it ourselves, in our own way” and with disregard to the law. Nadine would concur with Michael Gove when he said in his Ditchley annual lecture on 27th June 2020 that “there is a deep disenchantment on the part of many of our citizens with a political system that they feel has failed them.” However, she wonders if the Government fully understands what is required in order to become more human; it is not just about moving a few civil servants out of Westminster and improving the quality of data. She believes that the Government needs to think differently about what regions and localities can contribute. Each place in the UK has a different character and it is appropriate to provide them with more self-determination, enhancing their value and self-worth. Central Government can play a role in this by “coordinating, enabling and connecting.” One of the leaders that the CPI has highlighted is Donna Hall, Chief Executive of Wigan at the time of the Wigan Deal (who features in episode 21 of this podcast). Nadine featured Wigan in a recent TEDx speech. She wonders whether wider adoption of the Wigan model is possible at present because the public are “exhausted” and a lot of healing needs to happen. I put it to Nadine that the general public has a degree of cynicism about the Government ‘listening' when follow up action is not taken. For example, progress has been made on less than a quarter of the recommendations of the 2013 Social Mobility Commission, and the Government presses on with HS2 despite the opposition to it. She believes that the Government has been preoccupied by Brexit and Covid. She worked on the first social mobility paper with Alan Milburn and wonders if social mobility and exclusion are sometimes viewed in isolation from “the bigger picture.” When a small (or not so small) group of people fail to succeed repeatedly through no fault of their own, the economy as a whole suffers. The stability of the country is at risk, and it brings the legitimacy of the Government into question. Nadine believes that another reason for Government inaction in the wake of consultation is that the system is unprepared for the scale of change required. CPI is working to help leaders understand system leadership and life-long organisational learning. If you are going to deploy the same performance measures and request the same data then you will tend to get the same answers, she says.

Rayek Rizek is Author of the book The Anteater and the Jaguar, former mayor of Neve Shalom/Wahat Assalam, and owner of Café Ahlan in that community. Born in 1955 in Nazareth to a Palestinian Christian family, he has been living in the Jewish-Palestinian village of Wahat Assalam (Arabic)/Neve Shalom (Hebrew)/ Oasis of Peace (English) since 1984.   The community is unique because it is the only community in Israel where Palestinians and Jews chose to live together consciously. The founder Father Bruno Hussar (1911-1996), a Nobel Prize nominee, believed that Jews, Christians and Muslims could share the country in peaceful coexistence. He did not have a predetermined formula for how that might be achieved, but he founded the community to explore how it might happen. Father Bruno's original request to establish a community, in 1976, was not approved by the state, but by 1984 when Rayek and his wife Dyana came to the site, there were five couples and ten single people living there (It was eventually recognised by the state in 1988). Bruno encouraged people not to worry how the community was to be managed and how their children should be educated. He believed answers to those questions would arise in time, and so it has proved. There are mixed neighbourhoods in other Israeli towns, but in Neve Shalom/Wahat Assalam, members of the community chose to live together. And they choose to talk with one another in order to understand their differences and needs. That is not to say that agreement has been reached on every issue, and the regular influx of new arrivals means that the debate will always be ongoing. After finishing High School, Rayek went to the USA in 1975. He returned to Nazareth in 1981 and a year later met his wife Dyana. It was she who introduced him to Wahat Assalam/Neve Shalom. They joined the community in 1984 and have been there ever since. Rayek studied for a Masters Degree in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution at Bradford University 2000-2001 and subsequently made a start on a PhD at Coventry – he didn't complete it because of a shortage of funds. At Coventry, Professor Andrew Rigby (@CTPSR_Coventry) encouraged him to read about other intentional/alternative communities. It helped him put his own community in context. Rayek came to appreciate Father Bruno more during his studies. Bruno never took the role of guru, even though he was much older than the other community members, but chose instead to learn alongside them about living in peace. This meant that the community was self-sustaining when Bruno passed away in 1996 - many such communities fail after the death of the founder, when there are arguments about the intention of the founder. (At the time of Bruno's passing, the community had 32 families – half Jewish, half Palestinian, all Israeli citizens – a regional bilingual school, a School of Peace, a Spiritual Centre, and a guest house of 40 rooms.) In 2017 Rayek completed a book ‘The Anteater and the Jaguar' that tells the story of the Oasis of Peace and what he has learnt there that might contribute to the resolution of the conflict in the Holy Land. The title was inspired by a story that featured in an episode of the David Attenborough series ‘Life on Earth.' The story is told by a tribe in the Amazon and relates how a Jaguar and Anteater were found locked in a deadly embrace, with the jaguar's jaw around the anteater's neck and the anteater's claws embedded in the big cat's flanks. For Rayek it articulates the complexity of the situation in Israel/Palestine.  Rayek is trilingual, so can follow the evening news on Hebrew, Arabic and English speaking television. He finds it depressing but revealing how alleged ‘experts' from both sides are stuck with their own positions. In the book he presents possibilities for Jews and Palestinians to liberate themselves from “the deadly hug of the two animals.” He wanted the book to be positive and balanced, and not another addition to the...

Michael is Founder and Executive Director of the Youth Voices Center, New York, motivational speaker, and author of the book Be Encouraged! He was a social worker and counsellor for 22 year before starting his own business. Michael likens his personal journey to that of a donkey who falls into a well. Unable to lift him out, his owner decides to bury him right there, but as he is shovelling the last spadefuls of dirt into the well, he sees the donkey's ears appear over the rim of the well: the donkey has shaken off each shovelful of dirt and trodden on it. Eventually he makes his escape from the well. Michael's dad was an alcoholic, who died when Michael was 16. As a teenage Michael “never had a sense of balance.” During the day he was permanently anxious about what was going to greet him when he returned home. His mother raised four children on the income from her job as a housekeeper – his father's earning went on alcohol. His neighbourhood was dysfunction with drugs, gangs and violence commonplace. He found his passion for social work and youth coaching from surviving in such an environment. When Michael started out on his own he developed a youth development programme called “Power of Peace”, which he took to high schools and middle schools. The programme incorporated staff development as well as student engagement. This led to the creation of his not-for-profit Youth Voices Center. His mission is “to help these young people to live quality lives” by “using obstacles as opportunities” and thereby breaking out of “the cycles that they come from.” The programme is for 25 to 30 students. There are two levels of the programme, each of which runs for two full school days. The programme starts with an assembly run by Michael, with the aim of embedding the language of the programme in the entire school. The pupil cohort is typically a cross-section of race and levels of attainment. This is to develop the ability of the students to build community with people who are different from themselves. The programme is interactive and provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their lives to date and appreciate the impact of some of the difficulties they have experienced. Michael observes that if we don't recognise the damage that may have occurred during such difficulties, those experiences can begin to dictate the decisions and the direction that we take subsequently. Many of his students have described the programme as a “life changing experience.” Michael looks to broker a long-term relationship with the schools in which he works. In some instances he has been there 10 or 15 years. He says “I become a fixture in the building.” The students have to choose to progress to the second level of the programme, after which they become co-facilitators. Until his children were born, Michael worked on the “Alternatives to Violence” project at the maximum security Green Harbour Correction Facility. This provided an opportunity for the inmates to reflect on their lives. The pleasure of it was in watching people become successful when they left prison. He attributes the high incarceration rate in the United States – the highest in the world according to CNN – in part to the culture of the United States, which promotes “selfish lives… not worried about anybody but themselves.” He tells his young people the story of the crabs in a boiling pot: every time a crab tries to crawl out, one of the crabs on the inside pulls them back in. “Nobody is lifting each other up.” He wonders if Covid-19 will be an opportunity for people to reflect on what matters have come to, but in the meantime Michael will continue to seek to serve the young people that he has an opportunity to help. The basis for Michael's leadership is his relationship with his heavenly father. He says it's the “basis of all that I do in my life.” He tries to lead by example. His proudest moment was becoming a father. At the same time he felt fearful at the prospect...

Sunny Dhadley FRSA is a consultant, coach and motivational speaker. For 10 years he was programme lead for the Wolverhampton Service User Involvement Team, in connection with which he was shortlisted for Public Servant of the Year 2018. Sunny was initially brought up in a multicultural area until he was six or seven. Then he moved to a predominantly white council estate. Nonetheless he felt at home there. It wasn't until he won a scholarship to a local grammar school that he felt alienated and became involved in gangs, street violence and illicit drugs. This led to him using and then becoming addicted to heroin and crack cocaine. He came to a point where he realised that he had to change or end up in prison or dead. He carried out his own detox programme at his parent's house. Three days after he finished he got married and went to Bali for his honeymoon. When he came back he volunteered for the Wolverhampton Service User Involvement Team.  Wolvehampton Service User Involvement Team (SUIT) was established by the Council to vet and critique their services from a user standpoint. Sunny progressed from volunteer to project worker to leader within a five month period, and then went on to lead that organisation for over 10 years. By the time he left it had become a service in its own right, mentoring and supporting addicts and former addicts, and had been cited twice as a European Model of Best Practice.  One the ways Sunny coped with his meteoric rise to leadership was by staying curious. He was prepared to admit what he didn't know and keen to probe issue in depth. He left in the middle of the organisation's success to practice what he preached. He had always tried to promote a mindset of learning and growth among SUIT's clients and now he wanted to initiate a further phase of growth in his own life. He left his successor with seven years of funding to continue the work of SUIT. Since leaving SUIT, Sunny has been able to spend more time with his children and has started to grow a business around consultancy and speaking. He has given a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93d-LWVAhWY (TEDx talk) and has been an ambassador for a political party. He has supported the development of the Lived Experience Movement, providing a voice to people who have experienced social harms in their lives. His Wolverhampton TEDx talk touches on the deep-rooted societal factors behind drug addiction, and the main reason for the success of SUIT was a perspective that embraced the whole of the addict's experience, including healthcare, housing, justice, education, and social networks. Fundamentally the service was based on compassion. Sunny believes that current UK drug policy causes more harm than good. The “War on Drugs” turned into a war on people that used drugs, disproportionately affecting the poor and traumatized. Sunny believes that the Government should legalise, tax and regulate the drugs market. Additionally, any enlightened drugs policy needs to consider the livelihood of the people who currently deal in drugs as a way of making a living. Sunny has written about the ‘Lived Experience' of people suffering from hardships for both NHS Digital and the Conservative Drug Reform Group. He believes that the involvement of people with lived experience in the design of services and the development of policy is often tokenistic and that a deeper commitment to lived experience would greatly enhance the quality of the solutions that we devise to societal problems. He's recently qualified as an Agile Project Manager. He believes that Agile approaches could help bring more efficiency to the public sector. Sunny is an Independent Ambassador for the Labour Party. In 2018 he completed a parliamentary shadowing programme. He would “never say never” to a career in politics, but in the meantime he is dedicated to helping the world in whatever way he can. Sunny's leadership philosophy follows from his philosophy of life, in that he believes

Laura and Evan run The Center for Compassionate Leadership in New York (http://www.centerforcompassionateleadership.org/ (www.centerforcompassionateleadership.org)). The Center is the culmination of Laura's life's work. For 40 years, she worked for tech and media companies in both the commercial and non-profit world. For the first 20 years she had a traditional career path and chased the American Dream. It was a personal trauma in 2000 that caused her to “come off the overwhelm… and settle into an inner journey.” For the following one and a half decades her contemplative practices were separate from her business life, albeit in time she came to recognise that meditation and yoga were benefitting her business leadership, and her relationships with friends and family. It was in 2016 that she decided to integrate her contemplative life with her business career. Laura and Evan tested their work with PhD students at Cornell University and have since developed a number of routes to developing and sharing compassionate leadership around the globe. They look to integrate evidence-based practices (and there is a growing body of evidence) with contemplative wisdom. There are four elements to their work: building a community, research to develop the understanding of compassionate leadership, thought leadership, and education and training. Their main goal at present is to provide a global hub for what are often isolated pockets of leaders who want to connect with their peers and grow together. Laura and Evan see compassion as a process that is embedded into the everyday rather than something you keep in reserve to respond to specific events. Listening is a foundational skill for compassionate leaders. But awareness, connection, empathy, understanding, and a desire to take action are all essential and need to be practiced on a daily basis: research on the companies that responded to the Brisbane floods of 2011 showed that the most effective responses emanated from those that had engaged in compassion training in advance. The Center's model for compassionate leadership conceives of it as an “inside out” process. It starts with self-compassion, then compassion for others, and finally for the greater whole. The Center integrates a number of different practices into their training. Self-compassion practice examples include breath attention,posture and mindfulness. A practice called “Just Like Me”, designed to help individuals appreciate their common humanity, and address unconscious bias, is used in the work on compassion for others, while a practice called “Interconnectedness” is an example of a practice to help develop compassion for the greater whole. Laura and Evan are working hard on the question of how organisations become communities of compassionate practice. Compassionate leadership differs from our normal understanding of the ‘heroic leader', but Evan would argue that compassionate leaders are authentic heroes. Traditional ‘heroic leaders' tend to be rescuers or saviours, but the vulnerability, empathy, and willingness to relinquish control required to work compassionately demand heroic courage. Additionally, part of the bravery of a compassionate leader lies in her preparedness to surrender status and pride for humility.  Some businesses within the tech industry have bought into Compassionate Leadership, for example Google with Project Aristotle, and in the UK the NHS has a Compassionate Leadership initiative led by NHS Improvement and The Kings Fund. Many manufacturers have taken to it, however other industries have a long way to go. Laura's view is that there are pockets of beautiful work happening but maybe “0.1 percent” of US businesses practice compassionate leadership. Evan describes the first barrier to compassionate leadership as “our lizard brain”, our natural propensity for flight, fight or freeze when we are under duress. We have the ability to think differently courtesy of our mammalian brain but it's...

If you aspire to being part of the impending revolution in public services, don't miss out on this podcast. Professor Donna Hall CBE is Chair of Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, and also Integrated Care System Advisor to NHS England, Chair of the New Local Government Network (NLGN) think tank, Professor of Politics at Manchester University, and former Wigan Chief Executive. You can find her on Twitter @profdonnahall. Donna studied Politics and English at the University of Leeds, following which she started her career in Human Resources with Leeds City Council. Since then she has worked in various roles in local government (and briefly in the private, and community and voluntary sectors). Most recently she spent 8 years as Chief Executive of Wigan Council, where the Council developed ‘The Wigan Deal.' Prior to that she was at Chorley, where ‘The Chorley Smile' was a forerunner of The Deal. In 2009 Donna was awarded a CBE for innovation in public services in connection with the DWP ‘Tell Us Once' programme, which allows a person to report a death to all government departments with a single phone call, reducing stress for members of the public at a difficult time. The Wigan Deal started in earnest in 2011, with Wigan Council, the ninth largest metropolitan council in the UK, having to make £160m is savings over an 8-year period. The Institute of Fiscal Studies calculated that proportionately they were the third worst affected Council in the UK in terms of the impact of austerity. Lord Peter Smith, the members of the Council, and the officers realised that a conventional cost cutting approach was not viable. The Council brokered a new deal with its citizens, in which instead of trying to ‘fix' people, the Council sought to nurture their strengths. The Council invested some £13m in grass roots community projects. One of the outcomes was that healthy life expectancy has been improved by seven years in the most deprived parts of the borough, and satisfaction with the Council increased by 50% across the borough. Organisations such as the Kings Fund that have evaluated its success have credited “constancy of purpose” as playing a major role - see ‘The Kings Fund (2019), A Citizen-Led Approach to Health and Care: Lessons from the Wigan Deal', available at https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/files/2019-06/A_citizen-led_approach_to_health_and_care_lessons_from_the_Wigan_Deal_summary.pdf (https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/files/2019-06/A_citizen-led_approach_to_health_and_care_lessons_from_the_Wigan_Deal_summary.pdf). Last month Donna presented at the NHS England “Leading Change with People and Communities Conference”, which was a sell out in both Manchester and London. She believes that we are on the cusp of a public services revolution in the UK. It's not just The Wigan Deal and similar initiatives, but the coronavirus crisis has illustrated how communities can pull together and how public servants can work with those communities differently. In her own time she chairs The New Local Government Network think tank, which is working with 70 of the most progressive councils and will shortly be working with their first NHS Trust to drive through whole-place, whole-system transformation, and deliver ‘The Community Paradigm': the 1940s saw the emergence of the state paradigm, which was very transactional and top down; in the 1980s the market paradigm sought to address the deficits in the state paradigm; the new “community paradigm… shifts power back to communities.” The Councils engaging with the community paradigm are all political colours. The original thinking came from economist Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize winner in 2009. Whilst Donna says that she can't understand why everyone isn't doing it, she concedes that it takes a different type of political and managerial leadership. It involves giving staff on the front line and residents the permission to innovate. And staff need the skills and courage to engage in human...

If you're looking for inspiration about making a difference in today's society, look no further. Dame Julia Unwin was Chair of the Inquiry into Civil Society Futures, which published in 2018. In the same year she wrote a report on The Role of Kindness in Public Policy for the Carnegie Trust. For ten years she was chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, where she was the driving force behind the 2016 report “UK Poverty: Causes, costs and solutions.” Julia thinks that we need “a fundamental rethink and recognise that we're here to serve people in poverty, to serve people who are disadvantaged, to serve people who haven't been given a fair chance.” That is not just about asking people questions, but also listening very carefully. Julia started her working life as a Field Worker for the Liverpool Council for Voluntary Services. Other roles have included Community Liaison Officer, Director of the Homeless Network, Chair of the Refugee Council, and Charity Commissioner. Julia says that most of her working life is the result of “accident and opportunity mixed with a bit of curiosity.” She's always sought to work where she could affect social change, “but to pretend there was a plan would be to mislead you.” The report on Civil Society Futures contends that “Civil society risks becoming irrelevant if we do not change”: Julia believes that new ways of organising are emerging constantly in communities, for example the response to the recent flooding in the UK, and there is a risk to the established institutions if they don't recognise the new ways of operating. Civil Society Futures has provided “a roadmap for how we can behave differently and how institutions and organisations can adapt their practices, behaviours and attitudes.” Julia maintains that local government has always been dependent on the network of association that naturally arises within any community. It's a recognition of this that has made ‘The Wigan Deal' a success, yet it is perilous to imagine that such networks are inexhaustible. She is concerned that there is a tendency to use the same procurement approach for all local authority services, and that the approach that works for IT and cleaning may be ill-suited to civil society relationships, with the consequence that the authority risks being further distanced from the community. The Wigan Deal and similar initiatives in the NW have positioned local government as a resource for the community, and not the community as a resource for local government. The deal embodies a new relationship for those organisations which are (to use a 70s turn of phrase) ‘outside the state.' The Wigan Deal and similar initiatives have also ushered in a different style of leadership, one which requires courage and flexibility, and the ability to follow as well as lead. Julia would contend that the success of such arrangements depends on a network of leaders rather than a single leader. The deep connections that people make with one another are essential to those networks. However, there are developments that militate against the new way of leading is that leaders don't always have the permission and the space to lead on account of social media for example. Julia is “a huge optimist” – humans have always been at our very best in difficult times. “The Sheffield civil society that you can see outside of this office was created in the heat of the industrial revolution when people's lives were utterly miserable…” She says it is “important that we have the tools and the self-belief to think that we can do something about it.” Julia sees the declaration of a climate crisis by the Government is a tipping point in the realisation (though it may not be a tipping point in action yet) that there is an issue to be faced. She would contend that the last general election was a tipping point that reflected the deep despair and anger in some parts of England. Julia would agree with Kirsty McNeill of Save the Children that civil...

Mark Michaux Brown is a coach, and author of the book ‘Outward Bound Lessons to Live a Life of Leadership', former director of corporate potential at Grappone Automotive Group and before that course director at Voyageur Outward Bound School. His is a fascinating story, because he has used the transformative potential of Outward Bound to change his own life as well as that of others. Mark spent 22 years at Outward Bound, which is an international organisation with a presence in 30 countries around the world. It was founded by in Great Britain by a German born educator Kurt Hahn. It came to the USA in the early 1960s and involves taking people into the wilderness, not for the purpose of teaching them deep wilderness skills but to help them become more confident, to connect better with others, and to be more compassionate so as to be of service to others. On leaving college Mark worked in two start ups and found himself “burnt out at the ripe old age of 25.” He set out to find something with more meaning in the world. Outward Bound was his “running away to the circus experience.” He was so enamoured with it after initially taking a temporary job with the Voyageur School, he became an expeditionary leader for ten years and was course director for a further 12. After a business course at university he joined Grappone Automotive. He spent eight years there, during which he played a leading role in restructuring the company. They started by co-creating, with the existing management team, a clear purpose-driven mission for the business. They then redesigned the organisational structure around the new purpose, and aligned the reward structure correspondingly. The sales process was redesigned following feedback from an advisory board made up of current and former customers. Not everyone, particularly in the sales and finance departments, could subscribe to the new purpose and processes, and some left to be replaced over time by a new cohort of staff who had a closer affinity with the customer and with their colleagues, including former teachers, nurses and hairdressers! Part of the job of an expeditionary leader is to empower a group such that they no longer need you. After eight years, by which time Mark was also heading up sales, marketing, and communications as well as corporate potential, Mark felt that he had reached that point. “If you can create a group that does not need you any more then you've succeeded.” The book had been in gestation since Mark's Outward Bound days. It was given impetus when by chance he met the creative director of Berrett-Koehler Publishers at a Conscious Capitalism conference. The book became a co-publication with Outward Bound USA. Mark interviewed 15 people to find out how they had taken the Outward Bound lessons into their lives. They included Arthur Blank of Home Depot, a former US senator, and members of the Kohler family (of bathtub fame). He wrote the book while he was still working at Grappone, so at four until six in the morning. On Outward Bound a group who normally haven't met before assemble in an area of wilderness. The expeditionary leader facilitates a discussion around how the group wants to be with one another. The leader also teaches basic wilderness skills in the first few days. The expedition itself is a means, not an end. The focus of the leader is the process whereby the group achieves its goal. The leader is constantly watching for teachable moments, particularly with regard to interpersonal relationships and self-defined physical and mental limitations. The same model can be applied to stretch projects in the corporate world. Debriefing, both formal and informal, plays a large role in Outward Bound. Every day starts with a community meeting, and closes with a debriefing which reviews incidents, possibly conflicts, and lessons learnt. There are also event specific briefings. It's the stretch places, on occasion failures, which are critical for people to grow. One of...

This is Chris's second podcast with Sarah. In the first, which is episode seven of this series, you can hear her backstory, some of her work-related achievements, and her approach to learning and to self-care. They gave this podcast the somewhat ambitious title of “the leader as philosopher, learner and listener” and imagined that it might be more of a conversation than an interview. Sarah has said previously that our politicians are no longer philosophers. She believes this matters because we live in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) world and things are grey rather than black and white. Philosophers embrace the idea that changing our mind is a legitimate, in fact healthy, thing to do. And politics matters more than we might imagine: politicians enact the laws that govern our everyday lives. Chris thinks that there are parallels in business. His favourite quote is from Emmy van Deurzen, who is an existential psychotherapist, and she says “Passive living comes easily; one can always fall back on it. Actively living requires much practice and study, as does any art.” Sarah is a big fan of the stoics. Stoicism acknowledges that life is a struggle and rarely goes according to plan. It helps her to appreciate the highs but not get too attached to them and to weather the lows in the knowledge that they too will pass. We have a tendency to ‘gloss over' things when they aren't OK and to say that they'll be better in the future. In reality when one challenge goes away another will replace it. Chris would say that it helps in an organisation if the leader has a clear sense of purpose and can articulate what the current struggle is for. Without such meaning the organisation is in danger of becoming a product of the system in which it operates. Chris cites Tracy Allen (episode 12) as such a leader. For Sarah values and purpose help with prioritisation. However, she understands why some people don't have clarity around values and purpose; she says “it's scary.” Chris says it's what Jean Paul Sartre would have described as “existential angst”, the anxiety caused by a person's awareness of her unlimited freedom and the corresponding responsibility. In his book ‘Compassionate Leadership' Chris includes ‘a spiritual journey' under routes to development and asks Sarah where she is on that journey. Buddhism and the stoics have been reference points for her, along with Alain de Botton, Christian Tippett and David Whyte. Chris describes himself right now as a ‘Christian Existentialist.' He believes in God, but also believes we need to take personal responsibility. He has found the books of Richard Rohr helpful, along with a lot of one-to-one conversations. He has come to a point where he can be comfortable with uncertainty. Sarah says that “a lot of therapy” has helped her, as have podcasts, in that you hear people's thought processes out loud. When it comes to helping leaders clarify their values and purpose, Sarah sometimes uses the question “Which are those moments in your life when you have most thrived?” Beyond philosophy, there's a whole lot more for a leader to master. Chris makes the distinction between informational learning – lectures, training, what passes for learning in most universities and business schools – and transformational learning – learning that enhances our ability to handle complex thoughts and ideas, and to consider our thoughts themselves objectively. Sarah says that she thinks this idea is useful and that transformational learning helps us close the gap between the knowing and the doing. For each person, the nature of the transformational experience that is most effective will be different, but what is important is that we get out there and experiment. Sarah recommends the writing of Seth Godin, who writes so well about mustering the courage to experiment. Both Sarah and Chris agree that talking with friends can be transformational, and Chris cites a book group that he is in where...

Dr Nate Regier is a trained clinical psychologist who has built a business on a beautiful idea. Diversity is a fundamental characteristic of the human race and an inevitable consequence of that diversity is conflict. He discovered in the work of Michael Meade that compassion is the mechanism that transforms conflict from a destructive force into a creative force. Nate is Founder and CEO of Next Element, a global advisory firm specializing in leadership communication, and author of two books: Beyond Drama: Transcending Energy Vampires, and Conflict Without Casualties: A Field Guide for Leading With Compassionate Accountability. In the 11 years of his clinical practice, Nate never quite came to terms with “diagnosing, pathologizing and setting myself up as the expert.” He much preferred coaching methodologies, consultation, liaison and training. So in 2008 he set up Next Element with some colleagues, to bring what they had learnt in the clinical space to the corporate world. His interest in compassion stems from his upbringing in Africa with parents who belonged to a Christian denomination that focuses on pacifism and non-violence. He became interested in how we might bring compassion not just to war-torn areas but also into the corporate workplace. Next Element has 80 certified coaches and trains, coaches and certifies people in healthy conflict communication skills so that companies can build cultures of “Compassionate Accountability.” He maintains that compassion without accountability isn't sufficient for navigating complex differences, whilst accountability without compassion – focusing solely on results and the bottom line – fosters alienation. A culture of compassionate accountability has three features – it's safe, it's curious, and it's consistent. Whilst some of Nate's clients are on the journey from good to great, for the most part, the executives Nate works with come to Next Element “because they want the suffering to go away”: they're tired of dealing with conflict within the organisation, they wish their staff would become more autonomous and capable, they wish people could deal with their own problems. The backbone of Next Element's approach is ORPO – open, resourceful, persistent and open. For example, if someone has said something that you consider offensive in a meeting, you might approach them later and start by disclosing how you are feeling (open). Then you share what you heard, how you interpreted it, and ask them for their intention (resourceful). The ‘persistent' element might involve explaining why it is important that we support an environment of safety and open-mindedness in our meetings. Then you could close by asking them how they feel about what you have said (open). ORPO is based on the idea that we are each responsible for our behaviours and we are not trying to fix each other but struggle together towards a common outcome. So far Next Element has worked with the leaders of organisations, but they have plans for making their training more accessible and affordable. Their theme for 2020 is “compassion reimagined.” They have a 2-hour webinar “Conflict and You” and they have just launched “Compassion Mindset”, a virtual learning course in compassion. “Leading out of Drama” is their compassionate accountability model. The UK National Health Service (in Wolverhampton) is already working with Next Element. Next Element has developed measures for compassion - “the drama resilience assessment” – that measures the capacity of an individual to resist drama and, instead, to turn it into something constructive. Nate rejects the idea that there is a giving and receiving end to compassion. In his view it is co-created between parties. Next Element practices compassionate accountability within their own organisation. They are a firm based on people skills and cultures and from the beginning they decided that they would be a laboratory. They've developed specific applications of ORPO for meetings,

Marie Cooper is Chief Executive of engineering business CBE Plus Group. Right now she finds herself stalking Jenson Button on Twitter with a view to him participating in a Get up to Speed with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) event. CBE Plus Group was assembled in 2016 by Marie and Chris Brown, her chief operating officer, who provides the technical expertise behind the organisation. The four businesses within the group comprise CNC machining, electroless-nickel plating, laboratories, and gear cutting. Marie ascribes her rise to CEO to her willingness to take opportunities and ask “What is the worst that can happen?” She intended going to university but had a car accident that prevented her taking her A levels. When she had recovered she trained to be a bus driver. She left after six months to work in the accounts department at DC Cook, a car dealership. When they went into receivership in 2001 Marie found herself “overpaid and underqualified.” She took a job at David Brown Union Pumps, who paid for her to train as a management accountant and ultimately to become ACCA qualified. Subsequently she moved to Flow Group in Sheffield as Finance Manager. After five years, she took the opportunity to participate in a management buy-out. She built up the business between 2010 and 2015 when they were bought by Parker-Hannifin Corporation. In her new role as plant manager she missed the ability to operate entrepreneurially, so left after 12 months, along with Chris Brown, to form Cooper-Brown Enterprises. Marie's advice regarding creating a unified group culture is to “have a lot of patience and take things slowly.” You have to understand the (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross) change curve and expect resistance to change. It's also about making the most of the available talent within the business. “It's all about people; people in the business, customers, and suppliers.” Marie sees her leadership as being “to empower, inspire, and create a next generation bigger, better and stronger.” She seeks to “get the best out of people, enhance their strengths, and develop their weaknesses.” Her proudest achievements include winning the Young FD of the Year 2012, Manufacturer of the Year 2015, and Businessperson of the Year 2015. She is also enormously proud of being part of the CBE Plus team. She thinks it is important to learn from mistakes and says you need to “trust your instincts, do the right thing, and move forward.” She defines success as seeing CBE Plus face the future with a stronger management team than it has at present. Marie considers retirement to be “doing something different”, for example developing her work with schools and sharing her experience with others. Apprenticeships are close to Marie's heart: BG Engineering won its category in the North Midlands and South Yorkshire Apprenticeship Awards and CBE Plus were one of exhibitors at Get Up to Speed with STEM in 2019. Marie is a trustee at the Work-Wise Foundation and an Enterprise Advisor. Marie says there is not a particular business that she is trying to emulate. “There are a lot of great businesses out there, and a lot that have shared their experience with us.” “The more I networked the more I learnt.” She hasn't met a business yet that is not prepared to share their expertise and experience. Marie talks about “changing a person or changing a person” but doesn't do so lightly. You should have given them every opportunity to develop themselves, educate themselves and be mentored before you take a decision to replace them. But in the final analysis “we can't have one person jeopardising everybody else.” Marie has met a number of inspiring people during her career, but one that stands out is Gordon Bridge, the finance director of AES Seal. He was willing to share his experiences and allow people to visit his business, helping Marie and Chris to transform President Engineering. Now CBE Plus open their doors to other businesses to pass that expertise on....

Professor Rob Copeland is Director of The Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) in Sheffield and Professor of Physical Activity and Health at Sheffield Hallam University. Rob is a keen cyclist. He says “if it's going to be a good day, it'll start with a bike ride…” He arrived at the studio having just played host to Andy Anson, the new CEO of the British Olympic Association. That meeting focused on the work that Rob and colleagues across the city have been doing on the Olympic legacy, supporting the population to be more physically active. Rob graduated in Sport and Exercise Science from Newcastle University. He studied for a Masters at the University of Sheffield before working for two years as a Community Health and Fitness Officer in Mansfield, supporting people with chronic health conditions into physical activity. That laid the groundwork for an academic career that started at Sheffield Hallam University, where Rob took a PhD in ‘Psychology and Childhood Obesity.' Over the past 18 years Rob has worked on over 100 projects supporting people into a healthier lifestyle. The story of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre conventionally starts with the 2012 Olympic Games, but before then Professor Steve Hake had a project called ‘Sports Pulse', which was about how academia and elite sport, particularly sports engineering, could support local companies to advance their technologies. With London 2012, Sheffield was awarded foundation partner status in the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine and received £10m of investment from the then Department of Health. Sheffield established a city-wide partnership with representation from every aspect of civic life, led by Sir Andrew Cash and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. The money was used to collocate NHS clinics with leisure centres. Three leisure centres in Sheffield now host 80,000 clinical appointments per year. This in turn became part of a much bigger programme called ‘Move More', Sheffield's physical activity strategy. The ambition of that programme was to transform Sheffield into the most active city in the UK. Rob led that programme and Steve Hake became the Research Director. That programme morphed into the AWRC. At its heart is the vision of transforming lives through innovations that help people move. The AWRC is located in Darnall, a ward of 22,000 people, a neighbourhood of 90,000 people, where there is “huge health inequality”, so the centre has a contextual local vision, “it's not just a grand vision.” The £14m funding for the building came from an application to the Department of Health and Social Care. The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) provided just under £1m for the equipment. The research work of the AWRC is coordinated around three themes: Healthy and Active 100, which looks at how someone born in Darnall today could expect to live 100 years of healthy and active life; Living Well with Chronic Disease, which considers physical activity as a treatment for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke etc; Technological and Digital Innovations to promote independent lives, which talks to the NHS 10-year plan. The centre has a programme of engagement with the private sector, including new start-ups and SMEs. Deputy Director Dr Chris Lowe secured a grant of £850k from Research England to create a ‘Wellbeing Accelerator', which supports the private sector with academic expertise. To be remotely successful the AWRC will have to have tackle the 38% of the population who, according to the latest NHS report, average less than 15 minutes per day of vigorous activity. In relation to this, Rob is “wholly convinced by the power of people.” All communities have assets, talents, and drive, and the AWRC is concerned with creating the conditions within which they can thrive. But the social, economic, and environmental conditions are not the same across all communities. Therefore, this has to be a conversation about empowerment and not...

Lara Bundock is founder and chief executive of The Snowdrop Project, a charity that supports survivors of human trafficking. Her Twitter page describes her as a “speaker, adventurer, actress, human rights advocate – embracing a life of faith, expecting the unexpected.” So far ‘the unexpected' has included advising the government of Turmenistan on how they can support the NGOs in their country to address human trafficking, and interviews with displaced persons in Libya against a backdrop of gunfire. The Snowdrop Project supports adults who have been trafficked with long-term care in order for them to achieve a position from which they can live independently – they were the first charity in the UK to provide such long-term support. They have a casework team comprised mainly of social workers who assist with finding a job and/or claiming benefits, child protection, and legal matters. The therapy team is made up of counsellors who help the survivors work through anxiety, PTSD etc. Their volunteers help with a mother and toddlers group, sewing, dance, and lessons in English as a Second Language. The fourth team within Snowdrop deal with housing renovations. On a strategic level, Snowdrop works on national policy development and advocacy. Lara trained as a social worker at Sheffield University. After a period in statutory social work she worked in a government safe house for victims of human trafficking. She realised that the statutory 45 days was not an adequate period of time to stabilise survivors: when they tried to live independently after that period, they typically experienced mental health issues, tenancy breakdown, and drug and alcohol addiction. They often returned to abusive relationships. She says “I thought ‘I can't do nothing' because I'm not that type of person.” She started a training programme for volunteers and took it from there. The Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner set up pursuant to the The Modern Slavery Act 2015 says, on its website, that it “demands a consistent response across the UK to ensure that victims are properly supported…” but Lara says that the system is “pretty broken” and demand is growing exponentially: in 2011, 700 people were referred for support, last year (2018) the figure was 7000. An ongoing issue is the identification of victims of trafficking. Early intervention is in its infancy, and there is a need for the dissemination of best practice nationally. 30-40% of the 7000 referred never receive any support. Long-term reintegration support is a “post-code lottery.” Snowdrop and two other organisations provide it, but in most areas it doesn't exist. Laura's typical day includes a senior leadership meeting, one-to-ones with team members, meetings with stakeholders such as the NHS and housing associations. In London Snowdrop is a member of The Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group and Lara is an advisor to the Anti-Slavery Commissioner. She sees her role as looking after the health and growth of Snowdrop on the one hand, and informing best practice and national policy on the other. Her leadership philosophy embraces compassion and a willingness to listen, to be challenged and to take feedback and advice. Snowdrop endeavours to look after its staff and volunteers. They pay for their staff to see external counsellors once a month. Paid case workers receive case and individual supervision, and volunteer case workers are supervised by a senior case worker. Volunteer case workers and befrienders receive group supervision. Snowdrop equips its teams through extensive training before they meet survivors of trafficking. Snowdrop ran for the first three years without funding. Lara and her operations coordinator Rachel Medina didn't receive a salary for two years. Then they applied to the Big Lottery Women and Girls Fund for £130,000 per year and were successful. Over the next three years they worked hard to diversify their income stream. They have just reapplied successfully to the...

Michael West is professor of work and organisational psychology at Lancaster University and visiting fellow to the King's Fund, the NHS think tank. How did he come to those appointments? He observes that careers often unfold rather than are preplanned. After university he worked in a coalmine for a year. There safety and mutual support were prominent features of the culture. When he returned to university, the experience led him to take a particular interest in teamwork in organisations. His 35-year involvement with the NHS originated in a study contrasting the working conditions of student nurses and health visitors. He has just co-chaired (with Dame Denise Coia) an enquiry into the mental health and wellbeing of doctors. He contends that “chronic excessive workload” is the leading predictor of staff stress, but such a workload has become “the unseen pattern on the wallpaper.” Additionally, the complexity of the conditions that patients are presenting with is increasing, whilst resources are constrained – the UK has one of the least well-funded health services amongst the OECD countries. Michael says that it is tragic that we don't demonstrate care for a body of people – NHS staff - who have chosen to dedicate their lives to the care of others. Lately, Michael has turned his attention to compassionate leadership. He views compassion as a core value of the NHS and sees clinician compassion as the most powerful intervention available to the NHS. But if we are to create a culture within which staff can deliver compassionate care, then the leaders of the organisation have to model compassion. This involves attending/listening, understanding, empathising/feeling and helping. In 2015, Michael jointly wrote a King's Fund blog with Suzie Bailey entitled ‘The Five Myths of Compassionate Leadership.' He felt it necessary because compassion can conjure up an image of “soft cushions, scented candles, pilates…” whereas in reality compassionate leadership is tough, involving a strong focus on purpose and quality, being prepared to have tough performance management conversations in a compassionate way, and challenging ruthless power. Michael believes that people can be trained in compassionate leadership: we are already “hard wired” to be altruistic, to want to help, to be kind and to find giving to others rewarding. Mindfulness and reflective listening are two elements of his approach to engage these characteristics. And compassionate leaders take the view that their role is fundamentally about removing the obstacles to people doing their job well. Michael points out the crucial difference between empathy and compassion: in empathy the pain centres of the brain are activated, in compassion the reward centres are activated. In 2016 Michael addressed the leaders of all the national bodies of the NHS in England. Since then Compassionate Leadership, expressed in “Developing People, Improving Care,” has become part of the national strategy for the NHS. It has also become part of the strategy for the NHS in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. In 2017 Michael co-authored a report by the King's Fund entitled “Caring to Change: How Compassionate Leadership Can Stimulate Innovation in Healthcare.” (It's the most downloaded paper from the King's Fund website.) Purposeful focused compassionate leadership creates an environment of psychological safety in teams. This allows people to talk about errors, overload, and bullying as a starting point for dealing with these issues. Examples of innovation catalysed by compassionate leadership include substantial reductions in bureaucracy, the use of physiotherapists in primary healthcare to handle the 40% of consultations that involve musculo-skeletal conditions, and the use of community psychiatric nurses. His involvement with the theme of Compassionate Leadership and its embedment in national strategy is Michael's proudest career achievement. He is also pleased to have been involved in the...

Tracy Allen is Chief Executive of Derbyshire Community Health Services NHS Foundation Trust (DCHS), a primary care trust with 4,000 staff. Tracy was recruited to the NHS Management Scheme straight out of university and, apart from a brief spell in academia, has worked for the NHS throughout her career, close to 30 years. For the first 20 years she worked mainly for secondary (acute) trusts but for the past 10 years she has specialised in primary (community) healthcare. She established DCHS in 2011 as the Chief Executive and has been there ever since – that is quite a stint as an NHS Chief Executive. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has recently rated the Trust as Outstanding overall and Outstanding for well led. Tracy attributes this to “great people who want to do a great job, a really clear set of shared values and a common purpose… and a golden thread that connects the way we go about our jobs every day back to those common values and purpose.” And this was evident to the CQC. In the next episode of The Compassionate Leadership Interview, Chris is intending to interview Professor Michael West, author of the report ‘Caring to Change: How Compassionate Leadership Can Stimulate Innovation in Healthcare.' The Trust has given a lot of thought to providing people with the autonomy and space to innovate. This has meant, inter alia, thinking hard about how to handle assurance and governance in a less time-consuming way. An example of innovation at the Trust is the introduction of health coaching, an approach based on the notion that healthcare is co-created between patient and clinician, rather than dispensed by the clinician. Using this approach the Trust has significantly improved outcomes for leg ulcer patients, for example. Health coaching improves the patient experience, enhances overall community health and wellbeing, delivers best value and is more fulfilling for the professionals involved. Tracy views her leadership philosophy as closely related to her philosophy about being a good human being. “It's a people business … it's the interactions between each one of us every day that determine the quality of the services we are going to provide.” Kindness, respect, teamwork, and feeling comfortable to bring your whole self to work are critical. The body of evidence that the CQC has built up has established a strong correlation between quality of health outcomes and how people in the healthcare provider feel they are treated, especially minorities. “Looked after people look after people. Hurt people hurt people.” The Trust is trying to create a culture where everyone feels supported and engaged, they all understand what is expected of them, and they truly believe they are all there to care for one another as well as to care for their patients. Tracy acknowledges the “inexorable” pressures within the NHS – rising demand, resource constraints, workforce challenges. And innovating, working with ambiguity, and empowerment within the context of a system under pressure places ever increasing demands on leaders. One of the lessons in leadership that Tracy has learnt from experience is the imperative to have difficult conversations with colleagues at an early juncture. Conversations at the right time are kinder than having to work round an individual and postponing the point at which things come to a head. If matters are dealt with well, an individual can be supported to find the right role rather than leaving under a cloud, and everyone benefits. “The compassionate thing to do is to step up and have the conversation. It's about how you have it.” One of the people that has inspired Tracy is Professor Donna Hall, formerly Chief Executive of Wigan Council, now Chair of Bolton Foundation NHS Trust and also Chair of The Local Government Network. She introduced ‘The Wigan Deal', a multi-agency service delivery approach founded on the strengths of individual communities rather than their deficiencies. Tracy sees the role of...

Lisa Leighton is joint Managing Partner of BHP Accountants, who have 350 staff in five offices across Yorkshire. They are the only Sheffield business named in The Sunday Times Best 100 Middle-Sized Companies to Work For. They have tripled in size in the last ten years. They act primarily for SMEs, but also in the healthcare sector, and for charities and not-for-profit organisations. Their strap line is “Reassuringly Straight Laced”, a phrase that reflects the personality of a business which has a family culture and doesn't take itself too seriously. Initially a shy only child, Lisa had to dig deep when her dad died while she was in her second year at university. His heart attack at 46 has shaped Lisa's life ever since. “I was almost searching for a new family” and she made BHP that family. “Everyone looks out for each other” she says. It also awakened her to the fact that we have one life and “you need to live it. There is no point in not doing things on account of nerves or thinking that you can't. Just try.” She feels that Sheffield has given her “so much” and so she is committed to returning some of that: she is Executive in Residence at Sheffield Hallam University and was treasurer at Cavendish Cancer Care for a five year period. Lisa doesn't understand why people would say accounting is boring. It gives Lisa the privilege of “being nosey” and asking questions in a huge range of businesses, without being asked why! She loves the human contact and arriving at solutions in partnership with her clients. What is it that makes BHP a great place to work? Becoming one of the Sunday Times Top 100 Employers became a formal part of BHP's strategy in 2010. Some of the changes they have made are simple and straightforward but mean a lot to their staff. They have introduced an email curfew between 7pm and 7am (anyone who works in professional services will understand how radical that actually is), they have introduced a volunteering day, free fruit, and a wellbeing week with Katie Bell Physiotherapy. The ‘Why' of BHP, the outcome of an exercise prompted by Simon Sinek, is “to support, develop and inspire our people and our clients so that they are able to realise their true potential.” The firm is investing heavily in technology, as Lisa believes a lot of the services that BHP provides will disappear in the next five years and that technology skills, for example data analytics, will be essential to the employability of the next generation of accountants.   Technology and people skills in fact are the top priorities of the business, which recently won Audit Team of the Year. The organisation is on a journey from audit to advisory. Transforming young people into rounded advisors is challenging because some of the grass roots experience that was the foundation of Lisa's training is no longer available to the profession. In lieu of that, partners take younger staff to meetings in order for them to listen to what is going on. I asked Lisa if the auditors of Thomas Cook and Carillion had been doing their job. Lisa acknowledged that the profession had been coming under pressure in relation to audit quality. Her view is that training is key. But data analytics also helps. Lisa is Joint Managing Partner (with Hamish Morrison). It is working well. She personally had not appreciated how lonely it is at the top and being able to share on a daily basis with Hamish has helped a lot. They have complementary skill sets and work in complementary geographies. However, they work hard to ensure that they manage BHP as a single unified practice. Lisa has moved around in the business, at her own volition, from audit to small scale advisory to corporate finance. In between she has had two children. She picked up the role of staff partner on returning from maternity leave, assuming responsibility for the HR function and this proved significant for her development. In particular it enabled her to hone her coaching and mentoring...

Tony Stacey is Chief Executive of South Yorkshire Housing Association, who own over 6,000 homes in the Sheffield travel to work area. There are around 1,000 housing associations in the country. SYHA is a standout: the social housing regulator has made a case study of it on account of the scope and impact of the initiatives that it has taken in service of its tenants. They answer their ‘why' question by saying that “with SYHA, you can settle at home, live well, and realise your potential.” They maintain their focus on this purpose by deliberately limiting their activities to the Sheffield City Region. They are fiercely independent, resisting the popular trend for housing associations to merge and operate far from their original local roots. In recent times they have turned down invitations to take over other housing associations outside of their area. On the other hand, they are very open to working in collaboration and partnership with local organisations: Tony observes they would be more likely to merge with a health trust than with a housing association. In their “Housing First Programme”, SYHA first ask what strengths the tenant can bring to the tenancy and then what support they need to sustain their situation. SYHA is in the Sunday Times Best 100 Not-for-Profit Organisations to Work For. Tony puts this down to the time the organisation spends thinking about leadership and culture; “what is it that engages people at a human level and what is it that alienates people.” The organisation has taken Jim Collins' book ‘Good to Great' to heart and looks to develop the humility (as well as the steely determination to succeed) that is the hallmark of Level 5 leaders. A few days after he became Chief Executive, Tony was asked what he was going to do. He said he knew what he wasn't going to do and that was sack the top team. “People feel they have to make their mark by being disrespectful about what happened in the past … bringing in people that are like them, with their kind of values … we do things differently [at SYHA].” SYHA puts a great deal of emphasis on the recruitment process. What a person stands for, how they behave and what motivates them comes before their knowledge – they can always acquire the latter through training. Tony is competitive and likes to see SYHA leading the pack, but by nature he is a collaborator: “Most of what we do, our big successes, have been in partnership with other organisations.” He is shortly to meet Ed Milliband, one of the commissioners of the Shelter report that considered the future of social housing post the Grenfell tragedy. He will be with tenants of and people who work for other housing associations, local authorities and ALMOs (arm's length management organisations). Trust and accountability are key issues for SYHA, but Tony feels that they are far better off working through the associated issues with others than alone. I asked Tony whether the diversity of his tenants is reflected in the diversity of his management team. In the majority of his tenancies the head of the household is a woman. The director of development at SYHA is a woman, as is the manager of their new build programme and of their maintenance programme. Tony rates today's SYHA as his greatest work-related achievement. In terms of its scale of activities and its ambition it is a different organisation to the one he took over. The workforce has grown from 90 to 750. They have set up an estate agency, they have a joint venture company with other housing associations to develop housing for sale, and they are running a randomised control trial on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions. One of the managers in SYHA set up a session called “Oops, that's interesting, I've made a mistake.” Tony was first up and one of his disclosures...

Nancy Fielder is editor of The Star, Sheffield Telegraph and Doncaster Free Press. She is the first woman to edit a newspaper in Sheffield. If you check out her social media feeds, football, art and the built environment emerge as themes. Of these, it's the built environment she is most passionate about – “the city really needs to move forwards but has got a lot worth protecting.” She was nominated for the podcast by Dan Hayes, the Star's business reporter. Does she think of herself as a compassionate leader? She tries to bring the same attitudes and thoughts she has towards her friends and family into the workplace. She speculates that it's a sign of being compassionate that you acknowledge that you don't always succeed in being compassionate. The foundation of her practice as a leader is listening. She has strong ideas on what she wants, but equally recognises that the local journalism landscape is changing rapidly. Listening and openness help her and the paper to adapt. In February last year the BBC ran a piece on the demise of the local newspaper and in May this year the Guardian claimed that the decline of newspapers is “starving communities of news.” Is it fair to say that local newspapers are in decline? Nancy says that while print is in decline, online news is thriving – The Star's audience is as numerous now as it was when the print edition was at its peak. Staff numbers have declined but the remaining team is very tight knit and still manages to run some great stories. Bylines no longer have the kudos that they once have, but journalists can see the response of the public to a story in real time. Nancy doesn't single out one person who has inspired her on her leadership journey, but lots of different people have helped her and boosted her confidence “and they are not the sort of people who would recognise they have done that because it is everyday acts of kindness and words of encouragement.” Having children helps her keep a sense of perspective and has compelled her to compartmentalise her life. And the children wouldn't allow it any event. When Nancy last appeared on BBC Breakfast (21/9/19) one of the subjects raised was some of the comments John Humphreys has made since his retirement (about feeling frustrated as a journalist). Does Nancy have things that she wants to say but feels she can't right now? She has learnt to put across her point of view in a reasoned way and it generally receives a favourable reception. Nancy has her finger on the South Yorkshire pulse perhaps more so than anyone, even local politicians. What single change does she believe would achieve the greatest improvement in the lives of her readers? She would want to close the divides that exists within the region, while acknowledging that this is no easy task. She would want to spread the know-how behind the pockets of manufacturing and educational brilliance more widely. It would help for a start if people from all sides of the city would travel more widely. Nancy tries to use her position to reach out to younger women and encourage them. She organised a “Women in Sheffield” awards last year and is looking to organise a bigger event in the future. She observes “it doesn't take much from somebody else to make you question your lack of confidence.” Nancy works hard to listen to and understand diverse communities. She highlights that Facebook are funding local news reporters. The Star employs a Chinese and a Roma-Slovak reporter. They have helped the paper get stories across from a different angle. Nancy tries to promote independent thought among her readers. She sees the role of the press as informing people and encouraging them to vote, but not telling them how to vote.   She doesn't read much specifically on the subject of leadership. Her advice would be to listen and read as widely as you can. “Pick up things you normally wouldn't want to try and give...

Hugh Facey OBE is Chairman of Gripple and of the Glide group. In 2014 Management Today ran an article on him entitled “Is Hugh Facey Britain's best boss?” and he has appeared on BBC's The One Show. His career started at Tinsley Wire. He set out on his own with Estate Wire in 1984 and then sold it five years later to fund Gripple, the wire connector that he invented. 30 years on, the Glide group that he chairs is now some 1,000 strong and Gripple is known throughout the UK manufacturing sector as a pacesetter. Gripple is a hugely successful exporter with offices in 14 countries. His first and foremost business principle is that you should treat everyone as you would like to be treated. Other principles include that culture should be a priority, everyone should have the opportunity to grow and develop and all staff should share in the profits of the business. Hugh first started sharing the profits of the business with his workforce when he gave the Estate Wire team 10% of the sale proceeds when the business was sold (to fund the development of the Gripple wire connector). The rest of Gripple's principles were developed bottom up – “from our staff saying this is what we believe in.” Humour is a big part of the business: “If you don't have humour, business can be very, very dry.” Gripple is an innovator. It has a target that 25% of sales should arise from products not available 5 years ago. It has invested heavily in its development engineering team, but the sales team, continually seeking to identify customer problems that the business can address, is the leading edge of its innovation effort. Since 2004 it has been mandatory for new employees to buy shares in Gripple. In 2011 Hugh set up a company limited by guarantee Glide (Growth Led Innovation Driven Employee) and he and his vice chairman are in the process of gifting their personal shares to Glide (50%) and to a charitable foundation (50%) so that by 2021 the group will be owned entirely by future generations of employees. The gifting is crucial, because it avoids burdening the business with debt, which is the consequence of many trust type employee ownership structures. Glide also provides an effective vehicle whereby senior management can be challenged by staff on the running of the business. The value of shares bought by an employee in 1994 has since increased by a factor of 200. Gripple's challenge to business orthodoxy doesn't stop with employee ownership; it famously has no buying department, no HR department (people and culture instead), no job descriptions, no R&D department (ideas and innovation instead) and Glide is structured so that it can never be run by an accountant. Hugh maintains that there is no need for a buying department when you trust your people. Equally, recruitment decisions should be made by the manager for whom the recruit is going to work. “Job descriptions … stop people doing things.” The first thing Hugh did when he founded the business was to surround himself with highly capable people. The original board comprised of Roger Hall (now vice chairman), John McGee (formerly MD of Presto Tools), and John Heselgrave, an expert in recruitment and training. Along the way, other businesses have joined Glide and have benefited from Hugh's investment approach: PMS Diecasting, supplier of the housings for the Gripple Connector, GoTools, and Laser Scanning. “So many businesses look at the bottom line, and not the top line and the investment.” Hugh doesn't talk about any achievements of the business as his personally, but believes the greatest collective achievement of Gripple is the Gripple spirit; the willingness of people to work together, to support each other and also their charitable efforts. After “making a bog of” his O and A level results, Hugh went to Sheffield Technical College, where he sat an Institute of Marketing course, and took a job at Tinsley Wire

Sarah is Managing Director of Thrive Consulting Collaborative. She has a side hustle, Love Work More, with friend Richard Ferguson. Thrive is based on the premise that we all have enough time to prosper and works with organisations and leaders to achieve this. Love Work More provides people with tactics and strategies to find a working life that they love. Sarah originally qualified as a lawyer then moved into legal recruitment. After an MBA she moved into senior roles in professional services management and also joined the board of the Children's Society. Subsequently she and her husband moved to Colorado where she became CEO of an autism school. “It was a job that was about meaning rather than making money” she says. 18 months later, her husband Jonathan died in a car crash leaving Sarah with two young boys. She moved back to the UK and set up her consulting business. Six years on she reflects that “friendships and reading” have kept her sane. She has found that while “not everything has a reason, you can give everything meaning.” Sarah is a team player. “I think it is that sharing.” Sarah runs Thrive as a social enterprise and gives between 10 and 20% of her time pro bono. She is currently doing this with a programme at The Pankhurst Trust. During her career she often found herself the only woman in the room. Her sporting knowledge and background helped her cope, but in her coaching she tries to provide women with other strategies to flourish in what are often male dominated professions. There are 50 coaches and 50 coachees on the programme at the moment. Her current coachee runs a social enterprise in Manchester. “There is so much potential in all of us…” Sarah is disappointed by the current quality of political debate. She observed that in times gone by our politicians were our philosophers. She became involved in politics because she felt that the world was moving both environmentally and socially in a negative direction. She joined the Women's Equality Party several years ago and has since enjoyed canvassing and discussing politics in the town centre on Saturday mornings. All the research shows that “more equal societies are happier.” One of her proudest achievements at work related to a major restructuring in 2009. “It was about courage and values.” The CEO wanted everyone to feel heard, listened to and supported, so he and Sarah met everyone in the organisation. Her advice to her 18-year old self would be to find a coach or mentor, and to learn about mindfulness, meditation and stoicism. Those things would have stood her in good stead for the events of the coming 30 years. She would have also told herself that “you're going to be OK.” Your relationships and friendships will see you through. Sarah's has to work hard at self-care. Running, hill-walking and pull-ups(!) feature prominently. She encourages everyone to take some physical exercise daily, if only 15 minutes. She is big on visual cues to make things happen and so has fixed up a pull-up bar in her hallway. The running developed as a response to grief. The death of her husband profoundly changed her life. It devastated yet also transformed her and “the results of it have been inspirational in some ways.” He was her soul mate. The feeling that “we don't know how much time we've got on our clock” informs the way that she works with people. She was deeply moved by the response of people after Jonathan's death. The community in Colorado brought them a meal three times a week for three months. Reading is one of Sarah's passions, but she encourages all aspiring leaders to find their natural way of learning. There is a reading room on her website thrive.co.com. She is an enthusiast for medium.com. Regarding podcasts she recommends ‘Hurry Slowly' by Jocelyn Glei – time and energy management is a common theme of her work with leaders – and also ‘How to Fail' by Elizabeth Day. ‘How to Own the Room' by Viv...

In this show, Chris Whitehead turns the tables on Chris Hill. Chris regularly interviews young people in a ‘Dragons' Den' environment in his role as CEO of Element Society. Element Society is a charity that “empowers young people to make a positive change in their communities.” Over 2,700 young people have participated in the programme since its inception six years ago. Element Society facilitates young people to tackle social issues that the young people believe are important. At the moment those issues include mental health, knife crime, and community cohesion. By way of example, the young people have designed a peer-to-peer support project on “how to be a friend to someone with mental health problems” that has been delivered to 2,000 teenagers across Sheffield. They assembled a hard-hitting video from mobile phone footage to counter child sexual exploitation that has been adopted by the NSPCC at a national level. The teenagers involved spoke at the NSPCSS ‘red carpet' event about how they researched and built the video. Making use of his business background Chris has secured funding for Element Society from the National Citizens' Service Trust, the English Football League, the People's Postcode Lottery, The National Lottery Fund and also Sheffield organisations such as Westfield Health. As CEO Chris does everything from strategy, through governance, to “hoovering and mopping.” He has 10 in his core team, 50 in his delivery team (working on a sessional basis), and 400-500 young people on the programme every year. By the end of summer 2019 Elements Society will have delivered 150,000 volunteer hours in Sheffield. Chris's key leadership principle is to act as a facilitator, recognising that his young volunteers are “closer to the issues than I ever will be.” The charity has a youth board that helps shape the strategy which is then shared with the volunteers, who in turn are empowered to design initiatives that fits with the strategy. Chris's involvement in the voluntary sector started in his undergraduate years at Newcastle University. His masters at Sheffield concerned the measurement of poverty in the UK. On leaving university he became a consultant in the youth and health sector, then a consultant to social enterprises. Element Society arose from a desire to fill the gaps he had observed during his early career. Chris has drawn his inspiration from local business coach Jill White, who assisted him initially as a business mentor, and local businesswoman Faye Smith. He advises leaders in a similar situation to “look locally” when it comes to advice and inspiration. One of the highlights of his career is putting a care plan in place for Jack Marshall, a sufferer from Moebius Syndrome, in order to enable him to participate in the Element Society programme. Jack went on to win the Stephen Sutton Award at the Radio One Teen Awards for his fundraising efforts. He was named Law Student of the Year at his sixth form college and has now made it onto a law degree course. For Chris, self-care is about maintaining relationships and spending time with friends and family. His goals for the future include providing more services for young people with special educational needs or disabilities, and creating a platform for youth voice in Sheffield, a vehicle that permits them to have a stronger influence on local decisions. His advice to up and coming third sector leaders is to learn to say no. You need to develop the ability to prioritise and delegate. His recommended Youtube video is Simon Sinek's “Start with Why.” At Element Society they have developed a Theory of Change, which explains why they do what they do, how they do it and what they aim to achieve through it. It's Chris's roadmap as Chief Executive. Julie McEver of Local Partnerships helped Elements Society develop this.

As a child growing up overseas, Danyal Sattar witnessed destitution at first hand. It was a profound experience that has coloured his life's work. Having worked for Joseph Rowntree and the Esme Fairbairn Foundation he now heads up Big Issue Invest, providing finance to small and medium sized social enterprises, all of which positively influence the lives of people across the UK. He is CEO of Big Issue Invest, the social investment arm of The Big Issue, the magazine for homeless and vulnerably housed people across the UK. In setting up The Big Issue Magazine, Lord John Bird realised the difficulties of obtaining investment as a social enterprise. From this experience came Big Issue Invest, originally conceived as a ‘social brokers network.' Loans under £150,000 to charities and social enterprises are the “bread and butter” of Big Issue Invest. It's a niche that is unattractive to the high street banks, but Big Issue Invest have made it work, with low bad debt. While deploying and growing their existing portfolio the business is also looking ahead at products that will meet the needs of their lenders in 18 months time. With more than one million people in a position of destitution in the UK, the need for the transformative services provided by their borrowers is acute. Examples include a Scottish organisation that is replicating a Dutch model for community care where technology permits reduction of the management overhead and consequently more money is available to pay the front line staff. On leaving education Danyal spent five years with the New Economics Foundation think tank. His application for this role was inspired by seeing the living conditions of the previous wave of Rohinga Refugees in Bangladesh and appreciating that their position at that time was partly due to the economic driver imperative to clear fell trees in support of the Burmese/Myanmar economy. Danyal explains the virtues of having the Big Issue brand behind Big Issue Invest: they are a social enterprise set up by a social enterprise. The third sector recognises them as “one of them.” And trust between lender and borrower is an important part of the equation. Before taking up the role, Danyal asked the advice of other CEOs in the sector. David Gold asked Danyal to tell him what Danyal admired in other chief executives. This included trust, and consistent clarity of direction. Campbell Robb, at that time his CEO at Joseph Rowntree Foundation, cited focus, and prioritisation and the continued question, why are we doing this? Other CEOs pointed to the importance of repetition in relation to key messages and priorities and also continued explaining of the thinking behind them. Danyal talks about the responsibility of following in the footsteps of inspiring entrepreneurial leaders and the responsibility for him and his staff to generate the next wave of ideas. The big challenge Big Issue Invest faces is growing into the autonomy and responsibility that has been delegated to the team. An innovation process has been put into place to ensure that everyone's ideas receive due consideration. Danyal practices Tai Chi for recreation, but it resonates with his leadership philosophy – the idea of dealing with violence without becoming violent yourself. Listening and self-awareness are at the heart of this. He particularly likes the 2008 commencement speech at Smith College by Margaret Edson. In addition to the humanitarian crisis that Danyal witnessed in Bangladesh, he also draws his inspiration from the letters of Martin Luther King. He observes that “institutions can make us behave worse than as individuals” and cites the Macpherson Report as a further example. He underlines the importance of self-awareness. Cycling is a big part of Danyal's self-care regime. He describes it as “a reflection of childhood.” Danyal reflects on climate change: “[It] didn't happen by accident; we have meticulously...

Jodie started her own law firm, Thrive Law, at 29 and 15 months later she has 10 staff. Thrive Law is a specialist law firm, based in Leeds. The company specialises in employment law, with a focus on HR and mental health in the workplace. She graduated from Leeds Beckett in law in 2009, trained as a barrister and a solicitor, became qualified while working for Milners and at the same time started lecturing in law part time. She has worked pro bono for Mind and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health for her contributions to mental health in the workplace. At the same time as setting up Thrive Law, she has set up two networking groups, Thriving Minds and Thrive Women. Her prolific output is partly the outcome of a prodigious amount of energy and partly motivated by her personal experience, specifically a breakdown in 2017. Jodie has started a campaign for mandatory mental health risk assessments for workplaces. Anyone can sign the petition, which can be accessed via the Thrive Law website under mental health. Thrive Law is going to be trialling a four-day week based on the condensed hours model in August. This is all part of Jodie's goals to empower women and to empower people with disabilities. Flexible working helps both of these categories (everyone has a disability at Thrive). If it is successful it will be introduced for all staff next year. Jodie manages people the way she would like to be managed. Authenticity is important to her – “I practice what I preach.” She is honest about her own struggles. The outcome is high productivity, high engagement, low sickness and great client feedback. Setting out on her own at 29 is quite an achievement, especially in the legal field, where the average age of qualification as a solicitor is 35 and the average of a partner 65. The greatest learning challenge has been recruiting the right people. This made her re-evaluate her processes. Now she has a two-phase process with a telephone interview followed by an interview that explores both technical capability and attitude. Getting the induction process right is important to her. Jodie's personal development plan combines learning within the business with the parallel development of her general wellbeing. She does a lot of reflection and journaling. She sets herself short term and long-term goals every year. At present she is learning Spanish. Prior to setting up Thrive she was “consumed” by the world of work. Now she has a life outside of work. Every member of staff has a personal development folder and Jodie has a 360-appraisal process where her staff give her feedback on her own performance. Then we talked about Thriving Minds and Thrive Women. Thriving Minds was born out Jodie's own experiences. She wanted to empower employers to deal with mental ill health in the workplace. It offers various bespoke training. There is an associated Facebook group, a series of breakfast and an annual conference. This year's conference on 19th September will feature over 150 employers, will take place at Leeds Civic Hall and be opened by the mayor. Thrive is a networking group that meets quarterly. The group is open to men, providing those men empower women. Once again there is a Facebook group. The group only started in March this year but already has 200 members. She has been inspired by Lady Hale, President of the Supreme Court and a fellow Yorkshirewoman, and Baroness Mone, founder of Ultimo: she “came from nothing” and sold Ultimo for £39m. Other aspects of Jodie's self-care regime includes daily exercise: netball, yoga, weightlifting, or walking her dog. She also meditates using Headspace. She eats well, sleeps well and drinks plenty of water. She says “I understand what my triggers are and what helps me and doesn't help me.” One key ambition for Jodie is to be able to change the law in relation to mental health.

Adrian Brown wrote the foreword to the book Compassionate Leadership. After running a series of design agencies, he joined his father's medical devices business. He deployed his design skills to reinvent the business, putting an emphasis on clinician education and training. He has also deployed his communication skills internally, creating a culture that is open and engaging. His leadership style involves trusting his team, empowering them and "a lot of listening." He maintains that the written word can be a barrier to communication and extols the virtues of visualising, drawing and facilitating. His advice to aspiring leaders is to live an entrepreneurial life and try new things. "There is no finishing line to your training and education." Stretch yourself and others: you can't settle for "it's good enough." Get good people around you and listen to them. Be passionate - it's contagious. He takes long walks with his dog, both for exercise and inspiration.

Laurie Cottam is director and owner of Race Cottam Architects (RCA). Before he was an architect he toured the world singing with Oxford a capella singing group 'Out of the Blue.' A comparatively young leader in terms of his profession he is learning his trade alongside running the practice. He worked in London for a number of years before moving north to work alongside his father, Dave, one of the two founders of the practice. He describes how the narrowing window of opportunity for him to work alongside his father was a catalyst in making the move. He talks of his pride in both building a significant new secondary school in Sheffield and also in co-creating a new office for RCA with his colleagues. They worked hard to deliver something to which everyone felt they had contributed. His model for business is his own family, a place of belonging and a place where everyone is looking out for each other. One of the highlights of his last year was cooking Christmas dinner for the entire office. Everyone went out to pub and then when they returned, the office had been transformed into a winter wonderland! Balance is the key to his self-care regime, and social networks and exercise play a key role. He plans them into his week intentionally. He wants to be remembered as someone who saw the best in people and brought out the best in people.

Auriel Majumdar is a coach, thinker, speaker, teacher and poet. She is a regular broadcaster, recently featuring on the BBC's Naked Podcast. Formerly a senior manager with a local authority she gave up a well-paid secure corporate job to follow her heart and pursue a more satisfying portfolio vocation. She describes the pivotal event that catalysed the change. It was liberating, fabulous and traumatic in equal measure. Several years on she has a newfound sense of creativity and playfulness. She describes her new role as "creating space for people to do great thinking and reflection and connect with their values." Teaching at Sheffield Hallam University is another thing she has fallen in love with. She says "My art is my living." She is currently completing a PhD on coaching creative businesses, with a particular emphasis on conceptual artists. In the process she has developed an empathy with the artistic experience. "That feeling of being rejected that artists know from day one." Part of the lasting difference she is trying to achieve has an "emancipatory" quality to it. "Leaders ... are demanding something different." She reflects on the contribution art can make to coaching. We discuss the challenge of maintaining the balance between working and motherhood. She compares the current stage of the climate crisis to the end of the phoney war. We close with some sage advice for aspiring leaders. "If you can give as you go ... for me it has come back in buckets ... don't be jealous and proud with your resources."