The Compassionate Leadership Interview

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), based on the ‘Integral Leaders Programme’ (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 Programme lead by Dave and aimed at enabling organisational leaders to prioritise the health and wellbeing of their colleagues and family.Dave’s self-care regime involves eating well, drinking in moderation, cycling, rowing, running, walking his greyhounds, and walking with his daughter. But he admits that he is not great at it because he is so driven to work on the programmes he leads. “I review and reflect, accept where I’m at, and then try to go again.”Richard Field has been significant in Dave’s journey for his wisdom, experience, and knowledge, and how he shares and presents it. He has supported and believed in Dave.Dave recommends the website Brain Pickings (https://www.brainpickings.org/) by Maria Popova. He says “It’s not on leadership particularly, but I think a good leader learns lessons from all over the place.” He also admires the School of Life founded by Alain de Botton, which features philosophy and life lessons (https://www.theschooloflife.com/). He is currently enjoying ‘Great Thinkers’, which is the canon of the School of Life and features the ideas of 60 of the great thinkers of our time.The advice Dave would give his 20-year-old self is “be quiet, listen, watch, and be consistent with your effort.” He says that there is something to be said for not always being the centre of attention. 

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 it was “probably really bad for my health and wellbeing.” She says life is too short not to be true to yourself.During her career she has found so many people inspirational, from the ward sisters when she was a student nurse to the families she worked with in Morecambe Bay. She remembers as a student nurse trying to get closer to people so that she could get a sense of what they were doing. Nowadays, she encourages people to ask for the help, support or advice that they need. “Most people are really pleased to help.”Dame Jackie’s answer to Tracy Allen’s question “what is your leadership for” is “to enable staff to flourish.” If people feel they can give of their best and be who they truly are, it translates directly into quality of care for patients. Exercise is important to her and she starts her day (at 5:30am) with a 40-minute spin on her exercise bike. In the early part of her career she used to “crash into Friday.” Now she is more cognisant of how she uses her energy during the day: as an introvert she builds short restorative niches into her rhythm of work. She also pays attention to sleep and what she eats, and she works with a coach to help her reflect.The books that Dame Jackie has read that she has found memorable include: Becoming by Michelle Obama, Rituals for Every Day by Katia Phillips and Nadia Narain, Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin, The Salt Path by Raynor Wynn.Dame Jackie doesn’t feel the NHS is doing enough right now to create compassionate leaders. The time when circumstances are most pressured and such leadership is needed tends to be when it is undervalued. “We need to do so much more to talk about this… and to make it clear that it is the root to all sorts of success.”Dame Jackie is writing a book and most of what we have talked about today will be in there, along with the operational aspects of how you run a major organisation.What advice would she give her 20-year old self? It’s a journey and not a destination. Slow down. Try to enjoy it. And be who you are – “I spent way too many hours early in my career trying to be who people wanted me to be, and it was uncomfortable… and it must have looked and sounded very odd.” Accept that you are good enough, and give yourself a break.

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 the world as well as good people), and give yourself a break.” 

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 extensive library of books that support one side or the other. It’s a perspective that arises from knowing his Jewish neighbours personally. When the Arabs and Jews first met in Neve Shalom/Wahat Assalam, they came to realise that there was another history that wasn’t told by either side. The starting point for that understanding was making a connection with the common humanity of the Arabs and Jews. Without the experience of living in the community, Rayek would not have been able to write the book: when he arrived at the community he had the idea that “I am right and they are wrong.” Living in the community has caused Rayek to change his attitude and to learn to be more open. Community life in itself is a challenge, even before the additional complication of the external conflict. Living successfully there involves listening to others and trying to understand them without judgement and with self-control. It is an ongoing social and psychological challenge. It hasn’t been an easy experience for Rayek but he feels it has been beneficial.In his book he describes the 200-strong primary school as “the jewel in the crown” of the community. In it lessons are conducted in Arabic and Hebrew, and the children play together as equals. Thousands of children have passed through the school. He believes that the impact of learning to live together is much greater in the formative years than later on. Rayek doesn’t pretend that living in the community has been a walk in the park. For example, he resigned from the School of Peace in 1989 and boycotted the community from within for 7 years, though he still he engaged with it on the periphery and never left it completely. He returned to full engagement in 1997 when he became mayor. Becoming mayor compelled him to find forgiveness for past hurts and move on to a more fruitful period of his life.He has served the community as mayor on two occasions. Between 1997 and 2000 he was still learning and was also preoccupied by making peace and (successfully) settling a longstanding dispute with the Monastery of Latroun that had gifted the land for the community. In the second period between 2005 and 2007 he had matured, had spent time studying intentional communities, and was better equipped to handle conflict creatively. He had come to realise the importance of forgiveness and of taking responsibility for ones own part in a conflict. One of the most useful books of the many Rayek has read is ‘The Golden Key to Happiness’ by (peace activist) Masami Saionji.Despite an impressive visitor list that includes Richard Gere, Stephen Hawking, and Roger Waters (who played a concert for 75,000 people at Wahat Assalam/Neve Shalom), and visits from “hundreds of journalist over the years”, many people have not heard of the community. Rayek suspects that there is an intention in some quarters to ignore the community because it doesn’t fit the narrative that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unresolvable. Nonetheless there are Friends Associations in most western countries and people wanting to learn more about the community and potentially contribute financially to the school in particular can contact it through them.The community is not utopia, but it has demonstrated that with a constitution based on the idea that everyone is equal and with good intent from all participants it is possible to peacefully coexist.There are 500 people in the community now. It cannot grow much more because it doesn’t have enough land (it has only 50 acres) – there is room enough for another 25 families, which would make it 150 families all told. There is no shortage of people wanting to join it: it is not only the current residents of Neve Shalom/Wahat Assalam that want to live together in peace. Most of the people who want to join are motivated by the prospect of providing “a better reality for their children.” There is a perception in the press that people should be living together in perfect harmony in the community, but peace does not mean that, in Rayek’s view. It is about respect, tolerance, and common humanity. Rayek is inspired by the generation that has been through the school. For example, his two sons live in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and have a broad friendship group that includes Palestinians and Jews. They debate political issues but not to the point of severing the relationships between one another.Israel/Palestine is “living under a big lie” and Rayek feels that most people realise this. Whenever he sees the community celebrating birthdays and holy days together he becomes “quite emotional.” Ultimately he is optimistic about the future for Israel/Palestine. He believes that everyone who is engaged in trying to create a reality based on denying the existence of the other will fail. At some stage everyone will realise that there is no other way but to live together as equals. Many ordinary citizens have already come to this conclusion; what is needed is leadership.Rayek holds up the medical system in Israel as an example of where Jews and Palestinians are working together on a large scale towards a common goal, that of healing people.His advice to his 20-year old self would be “to be more open, not to believe all you are told by politicians, not to believe everything you are taught in textbooks in schools, dig for the truth, don’t judge…remain open, remain humble… and keep learning. Realise that the other is a human being like you… and if you have any criticism towards their behaviour… try to imagine yourself in their place. ‘Racist’ means that the other is not a human being.”(The website of the community is at wasns.org.Rayek Rizek’s book is available on Amazon, in both English and German editions. Here are two reviews:“Rayek Rizek’s masterful volume is a unique contribution to the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict like none I have ever read before. I have been studying, writing and working inside this conflict for 32 years. Never have I seen this combination of insights about the past, the present and the future, about the self in the context of conflict, about the central importance of story, the taking of personal responsibility, and the inescapable unity of the land and its peoples. If you seek a spell-binding story, an odyssey into the soul, and a beacon of hope beyond war, enter here.”Rabbi Dr Marc Gopin, Hames H Laue Professor George Mason University, Arlington VA“Rayek Rizek’s book is essential reading, not only for those wanting to find out about the unique Oasis of Peace voluntary experiment in Jewish/Palestinian cohabitation, where the author has lived for 33 years, but also about the wider conflict. The Anteater and The Jaguar is that rare thing – a book that offers the reader the fruits of a lifetime of action, study and commitment by a principled and highly impressive participator.”Oliver Ramsbotham, Emeritus Professor of Conflict Resolution, University of Bradford, UK President of the Conflict Research Society)

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 because he didn’t have a model for fatherhood. Fortunately Michael had a loving mother and he drew on his experience of her to help him.The people that have inspired him most in life are the students that he has worked with. When he takes a class he always sees himself as a student, ready to learn from those he works with.His book recommendation is ‘The Dream Giver’ by Bruce Wilkinson. It’s a book that encourages you to follow your dreams. It’s one of the reasons that Michael’s wife left a corporate career to become a writer.Michael’s advice to his 20-year old self would be to be patient. His advice to students and friends nowadays is to live in the moment.At present Michael is working on ‘The Shake the Dirt Experience,’ an online 11-week course which takes 20 adults at a time and follows a similar process to ‘The Power of Peace.’ The objective is for people to become “the driver of your car rather than just the passenger.”  

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 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 everyone is of equal worth. He approaches leadership with the attitude of a servant. The humility he brings to leadership stems from the fact that he started at the very bottom. And he believes that respect is earnt by the content of ones character, rather than demanded by status.He cites parenthood and the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service 2014 as his proudest achievements. People that have inspired him include Dr Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who have shown that change is possible, while bringing humility, love, and compassion to their leadership.His self-care regime includes daily exercise, a gratitude list, prayer, and good food. The spiritual side of live is “massively important” to him. He is currently reading “Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet (as also recommended by Adrian Brown in episode 3). In general Sunny would encourage people to “keep learning, and keep connecting with things that inspire you.”His advice to his 20-year old self would be “Don’t get caught up in having to have all the answers.” He would say “Don’t be too harsh on yourself. Things will work out … It’s important that you are in tune with the things that make you happy.”

Laura and Evan run The Center for Compassionate Leadership in New York (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 only through mindfulness practice that we can find the space to intercept and calm our more primitive instincts and respond rather than react. The same lizard brain is responsible for the alarm we feel when we encounter people who are “different from us.” Finally, leadership and power are problematic, as explained by Dacher Keltner in his book “The Power Paradox.” And this is as much about the behaviour of the followers as it is about the leader. It’s very dangerous to start believing our own hype!Laura has been inspired on her leadership journey by her grandparents, her father’s family having emigrated from Russia at the turn of 19th century and her mother’s family fleeing Europe during World War II. Both voyages demanded the ability to keep going in the face of considerable adversity.Evan’s inspiration has been Professor Richie Davidson from the University of Wisconsin, who, Evan says, has undertaken his research in an integrated and humane way.Both Laura and Evan exemplify the self-care that they encourage others to engage in. Both practice meditation and yoga, and Evan also runs. They both reflect and journal, and make self-care a priority.The books that Laura and Evan would commend to aspiring leaders are Sharon Salzberg’s Real Love and Jim Collins’ Good to Great. Jim Collins’ Level 5 leader (professional will in service of the organisation and personal humility) captures much of what it takes to lead with compassion.Laura’s advice to her 20-year old self would be “be awake, pay attention, be content with what is, and be present to the moment that you’re in.” Evan would tell himself to “question everything… most of what I thought I knew [at 20] has turned out not to be right.”Both Evan and Laura are optimistic about the future. Evan says the only way for us to survive as a species is “by recognising our interconnectedness, and dealing with each other compassionately. It is the only choice.” All of the existential threats that we now face “can be overcome by understanding consciously what our condition is, and then responding in a way that recognises that every choice I make affects everyone else, and every choice they make affects me.”

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.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 to human conversations and “not hide behind clipboards”: their role becomes supporting residents to live their best possible lives.One of the pillars of the Wigan Deal was “The Be Wigan Experience”, a low-cost high impact half-day programme for staff developed by the Council’s HR team. It was eventually deployed to all public servants working in Wigan, including police officers, GPs, hospital staff, housing associations, and the DWP. It aimed to changing the mindset of public servants from rescuer to partner, and was based on the values of being positive, accountable, courageous, and kind.Some of the national inspection frameworks don’t recognise whole system working and militate against the implementation of The Deal and similar initiatives. Donna mentions the article in Health Service Journal (2020) about applying Elinor Ostrom’s thinking to STPs (Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships, a new form of collaboration between the NHS and local authorities) and ICPs (Integrated Care Partnerships), available at https://www.hsj.co.uk/service-design/what-have-nobel-prize-winners-ever-done-for-us/7027119.articleThe Bolton NHS Foundation Trust job is Donna’s first chair role and she is really enjoying it. She loves her home town. She sees a high degree of commonality between the NHS and local authorities – both are delivering “fractured public services that don’t work together around the person and the family.” The culture in the NHS is different on account of the “command and control from NHS England.” Local government has more freedom and flexibility. “But we’re all public servants with the mindset that we’re here to help people.” Her sister is a midwife at the hospital.Despite needing capital investment in its facilities, Bolton aspires to be a smaller hospital, putting more resources into the local community. Their new strategy “For a Better Bolton” is about keeping people well and out of hospital, and also about the hospital’s role as the largest employer in Bolton.In her role as Integrated Care System Advisor, Donna has facilitated away day sessions for NHS England, helping them to think about the community paradigm and to broaden their thinking beyond the NHS. She thinks there is a lot of learning from The Wigan Deal about delayering and empowering front-line staff that could be applied in the NHS.Apart from the King’s Fund report, Donna would also recommend ‘Radical Help’ by Hilary Cottam, who supported the Council in Wigan. She identified that the Council was spending 80% of its time on assessing, referring, and processing families through a fractured system. They were only spending 20% of their time on face to face relationship building and understanding the strengths of the assets within families.Donna’s personal leadership philosophy starts with the notion that humility is an underrated quality: she believes it is important for a leader to acknowledge that they are not perfect and don’t have all the answers. She has always tried to create a relaxed but productive culture that focuses on people. Someone once told her that she has a very good bullshit detectors, being able to pick up on individuals whose behaviours don’t align with what they say. One of her favourite questions is “So what?” by which she means what difference will this strategy make to people and the way that they live their lives? She says “the human element of what we are doing is really important.”Donna enjoys talent spotting, especially finding new entrants into the system who are starting out with a fresh pair of eyes. She says “we’ve got a very limited window where we can seize that opportunity to help them help us shape a new transformed organisational system.” Her favourite work related achievements comprise The Wigan Deal, The Community Paradigm (published by the NLGN in 2019 and written by Dr Adam Lent and Jessica Studdert, available at http://www.nlgn.org.uk/public/wp-content/uploads/The-Community-Paradigm_FINAL.pdf), and Tell Us Once. Her biggest mistake concerns “Don’t Blame the Council” (ITV 2015), where she trusted the judgement of two of her staff in relation to a television programme subsequently watched by 14 million people. In the event it proved to be “awful.” She says “when you trust people occasionally people let you down, but in my experience they are very few and far between… most people if you trust them you get so much more back in return.”She cites her dad as a major inspiration on her leadership journey. She was adopted. Her dad was a strong trade unionist. When she asked him as a little girl “Daddy, will I ever be a princess?”, he replied “No and you should think yourself lucky – they’re a leech on society!” He gave her a belief in the power of community.Donna’s self-care regime comprises time with her dogs, family, and friends. Nature and countryside is how she reconnects with her soul.Besides Radical Help and the King’s Fund Work on The Wigan Deal, Donna would commend ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Harari to aspiring leaders. Among other things, Harari highlights the importance of our belief system. Donna says we need a narrative that everyone can get. People overcomplicate strategy. We need to keep it simple and compelling, and stick with it.Her advice to her 20-year old self would be have more confidence and self-belief, worry less about what people think of you, and worry less about having a strong northern accent. She would give herself a big hug.