Welcome to Leadership Worth Sharing, a podcast in which ACEVO chief executive Vicky Browning talks to civil society CEOs about their careers, their experiences and what leadership means to them.
In this episode, Vicky speaks to Jim Minton, CEO of Toynbee Hall. They talk about the importance of constantly learning as a leader, getting the community you serve involved in creating solutions for the issues they face, and why every chief executive can sometimes feel like they are a radio presenter.
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I don’t know all the answers. In some ways, better to be kind of honest about that. (…) in a sense, as the chief executive, your job is to draw on the talents you’ve got around you and the experience, and particularly for us at Toynbee Hall to kind of try, to kind of really listen to the community, because that’s where the answers will come from. So as a leader, my role is to try and create an atmosphere of collaboration, of kind of partnership, of learning (…)
Jim Minton
Transcript
Vicky Browning 00:00
Welcome to Leadership Worth Sharing, brilliant to have you with us on this Zoom call. Where you were you talking to me from?
Jim Minton 00:06
I’m actually in Toynbee Hall. We’re not open open as it were. But we’ve got a small team in, we’ve got a rapid testing centre here. And we’ve got some advice provision, we’ve got also got some staff who, for various reasons just can’t work safely or effectively from home.
Vicky Browning 00:23
And Toynbee Hall is the name of the charity and also the name of the building. Encapsulates, for me how much more Toynbee Hall the charity is than the space. And can you just tell me a bit about about the organisation, what you do, and maybe something about how you got there?
Jim Minton 00:39
We’re the kind of organisation I think that quite a lot of people have probably heard of, because we’ve got a bit of an unusual name. And we’ve got a long history and lots of kind of people associated with us over that history. But essentially, at our heart, we’re a community organisation, we’re based in the East End of London, and we provide support for the communities around us. More importantly, I think we try and use that support as a platform for those communities to, to make change themselves and to shape a fairer and happier future. And if that sounds a little bit of a kind of everyone likes to do that, that the point about the fairer and happier future is important for us, because it links very strongly to our our history, it’s a fact it’s like written up on our wall with inside our building here. It was one of our founders principles back in the 19th century, because it was established then, 1884 as a kind of a different way of tackling some of the entrenched poverty and inequalities within the communities around East London at the time. Poor housing, people in insecure employment, people unemployed, not enough food to put on the table, no access to justice, you know, 130 odd years later, those problems are still there. And so we’re still trying to deal with them. But the point of the organisation at the time was to try and create a way of tackling those things with the community as opposed to kind of just coming in and giving a little bit of help, and then going away again. And then of course, the reality if you if you go into our reception area, there’s some lovely pictures of our founding people. And I was gonna say, founding fathers and pretty much they are all fathers, unfortunately, it’s a kind of, you know, in what, in today’s terms feels quite old fashioned. But nevertheless, they had some kind of vision, and they had a kind of different way of thinking of doing things. And it’s spawned an international movement of similar kinds of organisations trying to tackle social challenges within communities. And we’ve tried to keep that spirit alive albeit it with with fewer moustaches and hopefully, with a kind of, you know, top down approach. It’s a much more community led approach. In practice, that means that we still deliver a range of services for the community around debt, advice, access to justice, financial health and capability, youth programmes, older people’s programmes, whether it be family kind of classic community organisation type of things, but also we very much have that kind of approach to listening to people, trying to influence change, and trying to make sure that people have a voice in the things that affect them.
Vicky Browning 03:10
And what about you. You’re not from the East End of London, I sense. How did you end up running, or leading, Toynbee Hall?
Jim Minton 03:16
I had a career working with you know, and in, a number of different charities and civil society organisations, with some really fantastic leaders actually, over years, who I’ve really learned from and always thought, God, I, you know, I can kind of never do their job. I did that, I worked in government for a bit, which was really interesting, and kind of really shaped some of my thinking actually, and, and always, throughout what I’ve done, I’ve worked overseas as well, international development projects, and always, like more and more felt that the answers to the kind of challenges that communities face need to come from the communities themselves. And so when I saw that Toynbee Hall, which had that kind of history of that kind of, you know, narrative, and had sought to kind of engage the communities in East London in making change, I thought that that does sound a really, really incredible job. And so and so yeah, so I’ve been here three and a half years now. And it feels like we’ve made some progress. But you know, every day, every day you learn something else, don’t you? Yeah, it’s a nice, it’s a nice place that I’ve ended up and it feels like the culmination of quite a lot of different things across my career.
Vicky Browning 04:26
Looking in your LinkedIn profile and how you describe yourself one of the one of the sentences you had there really struck me in that, and you’ve just referred to that there. You said, “I am still learning every day”. That seems to me it feels like from what you’ve said that that’s a really central part of how you operate as a chief executive and a leader is to is to have that realisation that you don’t have all the answers that you’re constantly learning. Is that is that something that drives you?
Jim Minton 04:49
Yeah, and you know, again, I can play it as a great kind of credit to myself kind of thing but the reality is, I don’t know all the answers. In some ways, better to be kind of honest about that. And that’s the point is, you’ve got brilliant team at ACEVO, and you’ve got great trustees. And we’re the same, you know, in a sense, as the chief executive, your job is to draw on the talents you’ve got around you and the experience, and particularly for us at Toynbee hall to kind of try, to kind of really listen to the community, because that’s where the answers will, will come from. So as a leader, yeah, my my role is to try and try and create an atmosphere of collaboration, of kind of partnership, of learning and have a bit of humility, to be honest, but but it is genuinely about thinking, how can we do things better? If this is a problem, what’s the you know, I’m not necessarily going to be able to say that’s the solution to it. But if we ask people, and we kind of engage people in the right way, then hopefully the right things will come from. I think it’s probably a frustration sometimes for some of the people I work with people like a decisive leader sometimes and you know, you have to flex that stuff. But actually, more times than not, I think people prefer to be asked and prefer to feel that they’ve got a view. And you can work things out together, if time allows you to do that. So that’s how I try and lead.
Vicky Browning 06:10
I’m interested in the founding fathers, as you describe. The philosophy, as I understand it, behind the setup of the organisation was this sense that if you could get the leaders of the future to understand what causes the inequalities, the sort of structural inequality, and you can get them to shift, but it feels like in 140 years, our leaders haven’t (inaudible) to move forward in that understanding of the structure and policies that continue to keep people that Toynbee Hall has served all these years, in poverty. And what’s your sort of feeling about how the organisation has had to shift and what it might need to do to get that message across to today’s and tomorrow’s leaders particularly in terms of the government?
Jim Minton 06:56
That is the kind of pretty fundamental question for our sector, I think, or a lot of, you know, organisations that describe themselves as civil society and about social justice and things, that kind of thing. You think it’s about the kind of power shift, isn’t it? And I will talk a little bit in a second about what some specifics, but I think there’s a kind of political understanding that that stuff is important, actually. And certainly, and again, as usual, led led by the voluntary sector, Julia Unwin in her report was talking about that couple of years ago. And I think a lot of people were a little bit confused maybe at the time about exactly what that meant. But I think the reality is seeing the Danny Kruger report, saying, you know, lots of the things that we’ve tried have failed. And actually now we’ve got to go back to listening to communities, and you can kind of take or leave his report. I think it’s pretty good report, actually, this stuff is too easy to say and very hard to do. But you’re absolutely right. It’s the problem. And again, in our in our part of East London, we’ve had, you know, we’re on the edge of the city sandwiched between the city and Canary Wharf in an area where there’s been literally billions and billions of pounds of investment over recent years and incredible shiny buildings, multiple opportunities for people and yet at the same time, we sit amongst the highest pensioner poverty and amongst the highest child poverty in the country here. So something isn’t working and and some of those things need fixing structurally but all of those things need fixing, structurally, but the question is how you do that? And I think, I think, you know, there’s, there’s interesting stuff happening in Barking and Dagenham, with one every day and Birmingham Impact Hub. You know, we’re not the only people who are talking about this stuff. But I think, I suppose, there’s an example of housing. Like we’re not a housing charity or housing organisation, we know lots of people that we work with in our community have got housing need, and we we set out a year ago to do some work with with people in private rented accommodation, and with the knowledge that we can’t change the private rented sector ourselves, it’s not going to happen. But what we can do is make the experience of people living there better, you know, if we do it in the right way. And so we’ve pulled together a group of young people working in private rented accommodation, and spent quite a long time working with them to understand what their needs are and what their aspirations were, and then pull them together with some landlords and again, that amazingly, that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often. And actually, it turned out, not surprisingly, landlords have exactly the same frustrations as tenants do, you know, they just want to have a kind of quiet life have their place looked after. They want to, they don’t want to be bad people. And actually, by doing that piece of work, we came up not only with the kind of sense that people felt they had a stake, which they didn’t have before, but also some genuine, specific changes to how in our small part of the world, private rented could work that we can share with people and say, Okay, well how about trying this? And how about trying that and the reason I use that example is to slightly just contrast it to the kind of… there’s another thing going on around here, which not surprisingly, is about kind of planning of a big redevelopment that’s happening and it’s not fair to go into detail of that. But classically, there’s a developer wants to build something big. And there’s lots of organisations that are really worried and cross about that and people in the community, and the kind of existing structures are so adversarial that you just end up with everybody complaining and the poor planning officers getting stuck in the middle of it, and somebody is going to lose, ultimately, and probably not everyone’s going to win. And you just think Well, okay, if you are going to shift power, one example, why don’t you have a way of working out those kind of things is much more led by what the community needs, rather than different interests and align themselves up against each other. It all sounds really woolly, I know. But it’s kind of you know, there are ways of changing, I think, and I have some optimism that the kind of political winds if you like, are moving a little bit towards that.
Vicky Browning 10:45
It’s obvious again, for what you’ve been saying how much you your, the way you operate as an organisation is to employ people with lived experience and people directly affected by the issues that are in the local community. How is that reflected in our own internal organisation and the internal workings? I know you’ve been doing some, some work on developing your board recently. How is that reflecting your work in the community and with people’s lived experience?
Jim Minton 11:11
Yeah that’s, that’s good. Because, you know, when I talk about us being community-led, and then sometimes people say, Well, do you elect your board? Does the board come from the community? How does that work? And, and it’s a great challenge to us, to be honest. And it was one of one of the things that you know, my chair, who lived for many years in Tower Hamlets, but has now actually recently moved out. But he, he said to me, in a kind of moment of reflection last year, you know, where where does our authority come from, you know, if we’re a bunch of the trustees are a bunch of helpful experienced expert volunteers, and you’re a bunch of staff who, some of whom live in the local community and others don’t do, you know, what, what, what gives you the right to say that you’re this kind of galvanising kind of catalysts for the community, and we couldn’t really work out a good answer to this. So we had had the opportunity to recruit some new trustees, and we decided to grow with a board actually, partly because, you know, for various reasons as boards do, you know, we’d had a had a particular skill set in the board and a particular set of relationships and, and some of those people were coming to the end of their time, and some of the the needs of the organisation were changing, we were going through a big redevelopment, but since that was coming to an end, we thought, you know, we actually need to change things. So we do need to have more of a kind of a relevance and a credibility and a kind of accountability community. So we explicitly recruited trustees, and we asked for people who had direct experience of the communities around us in Tower Hamlets. The most important thing, because we’re an organisation that, in reality should be there for everyone in the community. So if you’re from the community, come on, we got an amazing response, actually, and we’re lucky, you know, other organisations in other parts of the country probably won’t have this. But if you’re in, you know, if you’re in inner London, and Tower Hamlets got 300,000 people in it’s got all kinds of diverse communities. It’s got people who are incredibly talented, entrepreneurial, work in all kinds of different fields. And so we were lucky, we got both a very diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, everything else set of applicants, but also people who had incredible skills as well. We’ve changed the gender balance, changed the age balance, we changed the diversity in terms of ethnicity, and it’s a much it’s not it’s not we’re not there yet, you know, we still got a white chief executive, white chair, and, you know, as (inaudible) doesn’t live in Tower Hamlets anymore. And, you know, we acknowledge that that’s, that’s an issue, but you know, it’s been a good journey for the organisation and, and the quality of the quality of kind of connection with our trustees has really improved, actually, as a result of that.
Vicky Browning 13:47
And has that changed the way you run trustee meetings or the feel of the trustee meetings or… because I think you have (inaudible) additionally, you will have a particular type of person who becomes a trustee and the board meetings are often, can often reflect that. So they’re very formal, and they’re very, very structured. Has that changed, have you become, operating in a different way as well?
Jim Minton 14:11
I think so. I mean, you know, again, it’s hard really to think about the last year because for everyone, it would have been different, you know, for us to bring in six new trustees and then virtually at their first trustee meeting, having to be talking about closing all our operations and going through everything online. And you know, everyone went through the same thing, but for the for the new trustees. Actually, I think they really benefited from it. And we certainly did, because in a sense, we had to have a lot of trustee meetings for the start of the crisis, a lot more regular communication with them, a lot more discussion of options and things which in some places might have felt that’s a bit operational, why a trustee is getting involved with that, but but given you know, we’re all in this same boat of trying to sort out how to respond to it, a crisis that none of us could have ever imagined having to respond to, then it was really helpful. I think we’ve carried that on that kind of collaborative board. You know, I’ve just spent the last couple of weeks in quite, as I’m sure everyone else as well, in really detailed negotiations with our finance committee around what our budgets going to be for next year. And so so the the kind of essentials of trusteeship are still there, very strong, unfortunately, a lot of scrutiny and, you know, challenge and all of those kind of things, but I feel that we’ve been able to do that in a, in a way that they, they grasp, for what it’s worth, the vision of the organisation and how we want to be so they can, their challenges are more thoughtful and more kind of informed than they probably were before. I mean, part of that is, you know, I’ve never ran a trustee before, before I came here, I’ve seen them and I’ve sat on them, and, and whatever else. These are a bunch of people who are giving all their time, you recruit them, because they’re brilliant assets, theoretically, your might as well get the best out of them. And that’s what we’ve tried to do.
Vicky Browning 16:04
Your background, before you came into the charity sector: you spent three years in the Home Office, you worked in communications in immigration, and police and crime. How is that experience of working within the civil service informs the way that you think about how we should influence government? And is there anything the broader sector could learn from that?
Jim Minton 16:28
It was a fascinating time. I went into the civil service, after I’d already had a few years working in kind of charities and corporate social responsibility. So I’ve worked at Centerpoint and NCVO, and Shelter. And within the drinks industry, actually, before that, and I went into the Home Office to do you know, a relatively senior job, I kind of get a kind of surprise, surprise myself that I got this this job as a senior civil servant in one of the most important policy areas, immigration, and, sorry, it sounds like I’m talking myself up because that kind of punchline but to be honest, I didn’t really do very well. And I didn’t enjoy it at the time, I found it incredibly hard, I found the culture hadn’t grown up in the civil service, as it were. And so there was all these kind of rules and conventions and things like that, that I just had to learn. And it was tough. And it was a very, it was a very difficult period where it was at the end of the, Blair handing over to Brown and that last kind of two, three years of the Labour government which was kind of running out of steam and was incredibly kind of reactive to a very hostile media, particularly around immigration. I reflect on it now, it’s kind of I went in with this like, which has turned out to be naive, but I think it was very nice idea at the end, you know, I’m passionate about immigration, I really want to do something to solve the problem what what better place to be than the heart of government in this senior role. And I realised actually that I couldn’t do anything. Very, very little there, you know, certainly not as a civil servant, you were kind of very much at the whim of, of what the government, to the ministers wanted to do. And again, that really made me think about my career and my values and where change came from, you know, Where, where, you know, that actually I, on the inside looking out, I could see that organisations actually were more influential in some ways than civil servants were in terms of shaping the agenda. And there’s good reasons that you know, government doesn’t, it looks for allies, it needed people to be on side. It was particularly at that time and I suspect that’s absolutely the case still now in government that if government says something is one thing, but if government can say something that a bunch of organisations who’ve got some credibility also agree with that it’s a really good thing. So I guess my, one of the takeaways for us is you will have allies in government whether in ministerial or parliamentary terms or in civil service and I I found that civil servants were desperate for ideas, desperate for things that ministers would like, you know, ministers, I want to, you know, I want to do something positive and then within the civil service, you could come up with a certain number ideas, but why don’t you talk to a charity or two and find out what they could do and use that and that was… So I would say, and some organisations as we know it, play that very well. You know, lots of other charities kind of sit on the outside, oh this mysterious world in there. I’ll just say get in and offer help. And I think that is that is one of the challenges for us that obviously are understandably a lot of the time and kind of whatever shade of government it is, but particularly, a guess with with this government, there’s a kind of sense that there’s an adversarial again, to go back to that relationship and that that’s difficult then to manage. I mean, we’re getting we’re doing a bit of work with the treasury we’ve been doing for some years around, no interest loan schemes, and the Chancellor announced in the budget last week that there would be some money going towards that. What that looks like, who knows, but we were really pleased that you know, that is something that could come from the insights of people in the community with poor financial health and low access to credit, eventually had worked its way up into being a kind of Policy (inaudible), they’d worked its way up because of a lot of behind the scenes work and not from us from loads of people to, to try and make that happen. And so I would say that engage with government. Personal experience with the home office was was really tough. But I learned so much from it, longer it’s got a distance, I can kind of reflect and think, wow, what, what a great place actually to have worked. But I would say now that that, you know, I find that now we’re working with the Greater London Authority, or the local authority, who I tend to spend most of my kind of influencing, if that’s the word, my time with, you know, people are genuinely open to ideas, if you come to them with that openness yourself, if you come and kind of tell them we’ve got everything wrong, they’re probably not likely to listen to you, so.
Vicky Browning 20:45
You talk a lot about collaboration and partnership and working with others, that feels like something that’s really, really important to you. You’re not going to go alone, you are only gonna go in partnership with others. Is that an important part of how you operate?
Jim Minton 21:00
Yeah it is and it’s got loads of benefits, but you know, it’s got some challenges as well. But you know, like, I got, partly because of the work we do at Toynbee Hall, partly because we run a really, really strong partnership of 20 organisations across London delivering debt advice, and as a result of that, I was asked to co-chair one of the mayor of London’s recovery missions for London, so again sorry, it sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet, but you know, it’s kind of right place, right time, right organisation. And that’s been great. I think that there hasn’t, there hasn’t been enough, like civil society representation, or certainly community voices in some of those, and one or two of that recovery missions are now trying to get better community representation involved, which is brilliant. But as a result of that, I, you know, having various conversations with people around our area in East London, so you know, this, this recovery agenda is great, you know, but it does feel a little bit top down, it does feel like a little bit kind of set by the mayor and the councils and, you know, to to a larger set, it needs to be people need to lead. But could we do something ourselves on a more community base, and everyone was like great, you know, we really, you know, that’s, we’re really up for that. So we convened a session in January. And it’s kind of bad timing in some ways, because we’ve just gone back into lockdown, and everyone was really dooey. But it was a really good session of a bunch of civil society organisations, universities, some funders, GLA, their local authority, etc. so brilliant, we also really want to do this. And it’s great. And I’ve got it to this point. And then I kind of thought, oh, what do we do next? You know, I’m not I’m not in charge of this, you know, it’s like, it’s not my thing. So this this, this is the crunch with the partnership working is like, great. It’s brilliant to get people in a room, it’s brilliant to agree an agenda. But it’s easy enough if it’s kind of the organisation I lead, and I in a sense, well I can make things happen. We’ve had as a result of it, I think some some really positive science, about some funding over community led recovery and some strategies locally around health and well being. So we’re going to share that the people who are leading those are going to come and share that with the group. And for me that will feel much more comfortable position where it’s not me having to kind of lead, saying, Well, what about this? What about this? Actually, it’s like bringing to the table others so that for me, that’s the value of partnership working. It’s like, you have to kind of judge when you get to lead things don’t you. You have to kind of… Yeah, I have to find a way of keeping momentum in partnerships. But again, I don’t always get it right at all. And you’re not sure you know. And then every chief exec, we’ll say, we’ll roll their eyes, sometimes it could go, we go to another one of those roundtable meetings that goes nowhere. It’s a complete waste of time. And so you have to be careful about it.
Vicky Browning 23:30
There’s some interesting parallels there as well, in terms of leadership styles. In a kind of crisis and emergency situation even the most collaborative of leaders have to kind of go “actually, do you know what we’re gonna do this, and we’re gonna do it now”. So I think there’s some really interesting parallels between that concept that you talked about the way that partnerships work, and the way that leaders have to kind of flex different styles of leadership. How do you find the way you lead has changed because of the crisis? And do you think it will change back again? Or do you kind of dial things up and down as needed?
Jim Minton 24:02
God, I’d like to say the latter. But of course, that’s not the reality. And if people do criticise me, and luckily, I’ve kind of open enough it up to be a someone who encourages feedback. I wouldn’t say I like feedback. But as I say, it was easy. It was in some ways it was easier at the start of the crisis because nobody had a choice and you just had to get on and actually leading, being a decisive leader in that kind of environment is pretty straightforward, because everyone will just go with what you say. And and I think they responded well, we surveyed them in summer, and they felt they’ve been really well supported by Toynbee Hall, which was like a real we’ve got was a real credit to the leadership team. We have an all staff meeting, we’ve got about 100 staff now we get about 80 people generally, we have every two weeks on Teams. And again, they’re more top down than I might like them in a sense that I’ll always spend 10 minutes at the start kind of setting the context and saying what the challenges are and you know, reminding people to support each other and talking about some good things that we are doing, and then we’ll have a great you know, as many different voices as we can from from the rest of the organisation sharing what they’re doing. But nevertheless, it’s kind of projecting. And there’s a lot of chatter in the team and things like that, there is a q&a, and there is kind of breaking into groups and discussion. And we kind of, we’ve toyed with the idea of Do we need to change it?, but actually, the response has been good, the people haven’t dropped out of them, people have engaged well, and I think people like just the fact of coming together. So to kind of be of learning for me is like you can, you can have the confidence to be quite kind of top down, if you like, not the right word describing… less facilitative, I suppose than you might… I find myself being a bit of a kind of local radio presenter kind of segwaying between each of the segments of this session. But again, it’s it’s nice to see that the chat and the responses are really good in it. It works well. So there’s there’s that. I mean, I think like all of us do, you know, we’ve got the challenge of well, how do you then how do you safely open up? How do you balance your, especially in a group of like, 100 people, whether there are some people who literally never been to Toynbee Hall before, because they’re joined during the pandemic, there are some people who are very wary and are going to continue to be very wary or people who’ve lost people, there are people in now love working from home, and so probably they will not want to come back from the office again, whereas there are others who absolutely can’t wait, and balancing all that stuff is hard. But again, it goes back, I think, to what, what I’ve said earlier is I’ve got a good team, who are who were wanting to listen to people, we’ve got a good kind of culture of asking people that we’re going to, you know, again, serve everyone, find out what their needs are, find out what their expectations are. And in truth, if we need to take it slowly, we’ll take it slowly that that doesn’t mean that we can’t, you know, get some of the services up and running face to face more quickly. But just in terms of generally reopen the office, and I think we’ve we’ve managed to build up that that trust across the team that allows us the space to do that. And again, that’s that’s been that kind of mix of styles, I suppose, like trying to be directive and decisive when I need to be and trying to be kind of collaborative, when I don’t know,
Vicky Browning 27:03
I think there’s a local radio presenter in every chief exec, you have to somehow keep everything going. And there’s that sort of sense of jazz hands, that you sometimes look back and think that was actually slightly embarrassing!
Jim Minton 27:17
Often!
Vicky Browning 27:18
In Toynbee Hall, when it started. And the people with the vision and the foresight to get it going, they had a message for the leaders of tomorrow. And that’s what their work was based on. If you had a message for the leaders of tomorrow, perhaps the sector leaders of tomorrow, what might that be?
Jim Minton 27:36
I mean, I think, try and put yourself in other people’s shoes as often as you can. That’s that’s a clumsy way of saying it but try and see the world from other people’s perspectives. And we found that, you know, again, as all of our organisations had to (inaudible) before time and absolutely for Toynbee Hall to really challenge ourselves on diversity and specifically kind of race and racism over the last year. And it’s been a very important thing to go through for the organisation at the same time as going through the kind of overall crisis of responding to COVID. And yeah, we took the decision to work with a local charity that works with predominantly young black women and said, They’re called You Make It, fantastic. And they, you know, they designed a programme to help organisations think about anti racism, we just said, we, we need to do this, we need to do this now. And we need to all do it, and we need to be led. And, you know, my team said to me, Jim, you’ve got to sit there and listen, and lead in terms of saying you’re completely up for this, but lead in the other way, in terms of saying, and if you tell us we need to change, we need to change and if you tell us we do things differently, we’ll do things differently, and you need to commit to it and you set set out things. And and we did it and it’s been really powerful and there were things that came out of that in terms of behaviours, in terms of who gets selected to say things in terms of what face of the organisation you present in terms of what gets valued, that were a real wake up, you know, and you kind of realise Oh, yeah, however once you think you see things from a different point of view, you don’t actually and you need to be open enough to be told that and you need to be prepared to change and so I think for, been around a long time I haven’t been the leader is in terms of chief exec for that long so as I said, I feel I’m still learning but I do think that people coming through and this there’s a we’re lucky in our world, we’ve got amazing, talented people, my challenge is to develop them so they can they can go and be the leaders of tomorrow and I’ve got absolutely no doubt in their kind of talents and their ability and I would just encourage them to listen and then maybe not think they’ve got all the answers, not that they do but you know, think that okay, well, I can learn I can keep on learning and if I see things from somebody else’s point of view, we’ll probably be able to make change happen more quickly than if we just get into this kind of adversarial, Oh, I don’t agree with you, then. Nothing. I’ll move on. So yeah, probably. It’s got it’s it’s a very bland lesson, isn’t it? But it’s kind of it’s important I think.
Vicky Browning 30:16
Thank you very much for sharing it. It’s been great talking to you. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, good luck with it all. Thank you, Vicky. It’s been yeah, really, really, really enjoyed it. Thanks for the thoughtful questions and the chance to talk and I hope it was helpful and made a bit of sense, but thank you.
