Tony Stacey, Good to Great in action

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...