Welcome and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend, the podcast that helps you to grow confidence, care and courage your leadership.
I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their inspirational leadership stories, weaving together the threads of their life.
Together we delve into what they really care about, their values and beliefs, their passion and purpose and how they live and weave these through their leadership every day, in all that they do.
They offer valuable insights and rich experience to help and inspire you on your own unique leadership journey. If you are not already please do subscribe to the podcast, review and share it. Thank you!
About This Episode
In this episode I am delighted to be in conversation with Justin Russell, Former Chief Inspector of Probation, a role that he finished in the Autumn of 2023 on the challenges and satisfactions of leading in the public sector.
Together we delve into:
Justin’s three key encouragements for leaders, whatever the sector they are working and leading in:
About Justin
Justin is the former Chief Inspector of Probation, a role that he finished in the Autumn of 2023. I had the privilege of partnering with him and his leadership team over a short period of time during 2023. Together we introduced the Future-Engage-Deliver approach to leadership, created by Steve Radcliffe to help the team get clear on their shared future, build bigger relationships with each other, and to deliver more now and later through others.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation’s mission is to deliver ‘High quality probation and youth justice services that change people’s lives for the better’, their focus is on how the probation does things and on how probation makes a real life diffe
To listen to other Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend go to my website, www.annitownend.com
A big thank you to my support team at the Conscious Marketing Group for helping me with all the marketing of the podcast, to Coco O’Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music, for the lovely design, and for the excellent editing and sound production.
To contact me Anni Townend do email me on anni@annitownend.com visit my website www.annitownend.com, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting with you, thank you for listening.
Welcome and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend, the podcast that helps you to grow confidence, care and courage your leadership.
I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their inspirational leadership stories, weaving together the threads of their life.
Together we delve into what they really care about, their values and beliefs, their passion and purpose and how they live and weave these through their leadership every day, in all that they do.
They offer valuable insights and rich experience to help and inspire you on your own unique leadership journey. If you are not already please do subscribe to the podcast, review and share it. Thank you!
About This Episode
In this episode I am delighted to be in conversation with Justin Russell, Former Chief Inspector of Probation, a role that he finished in the Autumn of 2023 on the challenges and satisfactions of leading in the public sector.
Together we delve into:
Justin’s three key encouragements for leaders, whatever the sector they are working and leading in:
About Justin
Justin is the former Chief Inspector of Probation, a role that he finished in the Autumn of 2023. I had the privilege of partnering with him and his leadership team over a short period of time during 2023. Together we introduced the Future-Engage-Deliver approach to leadership, created by Steve Radcliffe to help the team get clear on their shared future, build bigger relationships with each other, and to deliver more now and later through others.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation’s mission is to deliver ‘High quality probation and youth justice services that change people’s lives for the better’, their focus is on how the probation does things and on how probation makes a real life diffe
To listen to other Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend go to my website, www.annitownend.com
A big thank you to my support team at the Conscious Marketing Group for helping me with all the marketing of the podcast, to Coco O’Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music, for the lovely design, and for the excellent editing and sound production.
To contact me Anni Townend do email me on anni@annitownend.com visit my website www.annitownend.com, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting with you, thank you for listening.
Anni Townend
Hello and welcome and welcome back to leaders in conversation with me, Anni Townend the podcast that helps you to grow confidence, care and courage in your leadership.
I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their inspirational leadership stories, weaving together the threads of their life.
Together, we delve into what they really care about: their values and beliefs, their passions and their purpose, and how they live and weave these through their leadership every day.
They offer valuable insights and rich experience to help you and inspire you on your own unique leadership journey. If you haven't already subscribed, please do like, share and review the podcast. Thank you for listening.
In this episode, I'm delighted to be in conversation with Justin Russell, Chief Inspector of Probation on the challenges and satisfactions of leading in the public sector.
Together, we delve into his experience of senior leadership in the civil service, the challenges and satisfactions of sharing the vision setting space with politicians and other parts of government.
We delve into operational versus policy leadership in the public sector, and ask why do most top civil service jobs go to policy specialists? And why is intellectual leadership prioritised over emotional leadership in Whitehall?
We explore Justin's personal career challenges as someone who loves policy detail and evidence, of getting the balance right between being hands off and hands on of being on the balcony versus being on the dance floor.
And finally, the challenge of engaging colleagues in an era of hybrid working and how does remote working make leadership more or less easy, more or less satisfying?
Welcome, Justin.
Justin Russell
Thanks, Anni. Great to be here.
Anni Townend
Lovely that you're here.
Justin, I would like to start with you, and ask you about you, your values and beliefs, your passions and purpose. And in particular, who are the people, the places and experiences that have shaped you and made you the fantastic leader that you are today?
Justin Russell
So I grew up in Bristol, in the West Country, where my family and many of my friends still are and it's a very special place to me still, and I still visit it on a regular basis. My father was an NHS psychiatrist who had a particular interest in learning disabilities and was very involved in closing down some of the big mental hospitals around Bristol and moving people into the community and creating an ordinary life for people that are learning disability. That was a big passion of his and my mother was an English teacher in various schools around Bristol.
So I grew up in a household where public service, service to others was a very strong theme and a house where books and intellectual challenge were a big thing. As well, we were always encouraged to, to read the house, still full of hundreds of books everywhere you go, as indeed as my own house these days.
And then, after university, I moved to London. And my first job was in the Home Office Research Unit. I had thought that I wanted to be an academic for a while. And a job in the home office research unit as a social researcher, felt like a sort of step towards that. And that was the start of what's been over 30 years really working in government, in a range of departments. I haven't strayed beyond more than half a mile from St. James's Park Station in terms of my workplaces for much of the last 35 years. But it's been a great career, I've ended up working in three different government departments in a wide range of policy related jobs. And I've also had a chance to work in Downing Street, I spent four years working for Tony Blair, when he was Prime Minister in the policy unit there. So my career has been very much in central government in Whitehall, looking at the big picture, nationally across England and Wales in a whole range of policy areas. And that's been my real passion I think. What gets me going, is the potential for government to make a difference is the potential of public service. Government sometimes doesn't do the right things doesn't make a difference. But I think I still believe it can make a positive difference that it can make a difference to the lives of many people. When I was working in DWP, for example, I led on pension policy and pensioner poverty. And the decisions that we were making affected 13 million people that were claiming a state pension. So you had a real ability to improve people's lives there. Similarly, in the home office, I led the violent crime unit there were our overwhelming focus was on trying to reduce knife crime, trying to reduce the number of teenagers that were being stabbed at that time. And that was a great driving passion. So I think if I have an overriding belief or passion, that it is a belief that government can make a difference for the better it can improve people's lives. It can save lives, actually, if it does the right things. And that's been what's motivated me, I think that the things I value in friends, as well as colleagues actually is generosity. It's humility, it's humour, and it's compassion. And I hope that I show you some of those values as well, myself.
Anni Townend
Well, as someone who's had the privilege, Justin of partnering with you, and your team, during 2023, I have experienced you as being very generous and caring, and also very inspiring of the values that you're talking about and the belief that government can make a difference. And I know you've spoken about some of the challenges and satisfactions of leading in the senior civil service. Well, in the civil service in general, can you say more about what some of those challenges are? And indeed, what the satisfactions are, of leading in the civil service.
Justin Russell
I mean, the Civil Service is a very intriguing organisation to work for. It’s the biggest employer in the UK, there's almost 500,000 civil servants doing a huge range of things. The great bulk of those are actually doing proper frontline operational jobs. So, they're running prisons or probation service they're working in, in Job centres, they're working in the court service, they're running the immigration system, they're doing operational jobs. But about 20,000 of them are in what's called the policy profession. So they are supporting ministers and operational colleagues to to develop strategies and plans and visions for the future and to make sure that those are properly resourced, that the plans are in place and delivered that Parliament, all the parliamentary processes have gone through.
And that's been very much the profession that I worked in, in government and that profession has such great satisfactions, but its challenges as well. So the satisfactions are the chance to work alongside ministers to be at their shoulder as policies develop, to be in Parliament as announcements are made and that’s very exciting. The frustrations are that government is very interconnected. One of the key attributes of leaders is often said to be that they need to be able to set a vision, a strategic direction for their organisation to be clear about what the future looks like. While in a parliamentary democracy like ours, I think it's properly seen as the role of politicians to set a future direction to set out what the future should be in in a political manifesto or in a Queen's speech. And it's the role of civil servants to support them in that. So you are effectively sharing that future vision, setting space with someone else with an elected politician. Quite often it's not your vision that you are engaging your team in, it's someone else's vision. And sometimes you agree with that, and you've helped them to develop that, sometimes you don't agree with that. And that's obviously a more difficult position and a more challenging position to be in. I think the other thing is that particularly Whitehall, there are a huge range of different actors and players that are involved in any sort of policy decision or taking forward any policy. So typically, you won't just be working with people in your own department, but you'll be having to deal with the Treasury, if you need money to pay for your policy idea, you'll need to be working with the prime minister's office with 10 Downing Street, because you'll need their support, as well.
A lot of the policy areas I was working in, things like violence against women, violent crime, health services for people in prison, you're having to work with other departments. So I've spent a lot of time working with the Department of Health and Social Security, I've had to work with Department for Education, or local government. So you're having to build a coalition of people that are willing to support your policy idea and get them on board as well. So there's a whole interconnected set of relationships that you need to negotiate and get right to, to get your policy ideas over the line. And that's when it works. It's very satisfying. What the most satisfying and find time for for senior policymakers is when you finally get to launch your white paper, your bit of legislation or your big delivery programme and your briefing for the press conference. And hopefully, you get some decent coverage. And that's a great feeling. And that's often the point where you celebrate with your team. But there's an awful lot of work, goes into getting to that point. And that's just the start point. I think that the key point for me is that that's just setting out on paper, the future direction. The actual action is around then delivering the commitments that might be in that white paper or that strategy. And that's a whole different ball game and involves a different set of skills as well.
Anni Townend
You've mentioned setting a shared future direction, and that not always, for leaders in the civil service, is it necessarily aligned to how they feel or what they think. And I've spoken with a number of people through my work in the public sector and in the civil service, in particular, about leadership dilemmas and the leadership dilemma of engaging people in a vision that you yourself may not believe in, but as a civil servant, that you are in service to the decision and the vision that has been set by the current government. And I've always been impressed how civil servants have to get out of their own way, in order to be able to lead and to engage and to deliver something which at first sight may not be something that is truly aligned to what they feel is right, or the right way of doing something. How have you sort of come to terms with that in your leadership, Justin, around the leadership dilemma of delivering something that you may or may not have felt was aligned to your values and beliefs and your vision?
Justin Russell
I think that's a nice phrase to say sometimes you have to get out of the way. I think the key thing is that whatever you're delivering is to make sure that your team is doing it in the most professional way possible, that they are still wherever possible, sticking to your values. A politician in a manifesto may set out a direction of travel, but there are always different ways that you can deliver that headline policy, some of them more harmful than others. So sometimes it's finding the least harmful way through on what might be a difficult decision. And obviously 2010, 2011, when austerity started and some very tough decisions were being made about spending and about benefits policy, there were some pretty tough things that policy teams were having to take through some tough decisions that were being made about things. But I think what we need to do is encourage our teams to keep their sense of values there to see where it was possible to protect the most vulnerable as you are going forward. But as I say, also to make sure that you were providing the best and most compassionate advice to ministers so that they were fully aware of the implications of choices that they were having to make. And every every policy decision, everything that goes before Parliament, there has to be something called an impact assessment, which is a very robust and independent assessment of the winners and losers from any policy. And that is a key policy document that makes it hopefully transparent what the implications for policy decision are. But, I've worked with many, many ministers, and in my experience, every minister, whatever their political party does want to do the right thing, they want to make a positive difference to society, they want to help the most vulnerable, they often feel equally constrained as the civil servants do. And in doing that forward, so you quite often, both ministers and civil servants are working to the same constraints as you take a policy forward.
Anni Townend
And the same shared vision as well of together, we can make a difference and make it better. And the work that we did with your team, we were using the framework developed by Steve Radcliffe, future engage deliver, a very simple framework, which some listeners will be familiar with, and others not. But a very simple framework for thinking about leadership and helping leaders have a language of leadership around having a shared future of being up to something together, and having that shared vision and shared strategy, which you are talking about ministers having and civil servants having of making things better for people of improving things. And then you also mentioned the importance that you've experienced of building relationships of engaging. And Steve always talks about future engage, engage, engage, deliver and the importance of those relationships and coalitions. And working together with people of collaborating with people again of being up to something together with each other and finally, delivering and delivering through and with each other. I know the approach very much resonates with you and your leadership.
Justin Russell
It does. I really liked the future engage deliver model. I first came across it when I became a director in DWP in 2012.
Anni Townend
And for listeners Justin, who may not know DWP.
Justin Russell
It’s the Department for Work and Pensions, which is one of the biggest government departments it's responsible for pensions for paying benefits for running job centres, hugely important department. I really enjoyed my four years working there. But the Permanent Secretary the head of that department, who was called Robert Devereaux, had worked with Steve Radcliffe, and completely bought into the future engage deliver model and we all trained in it ourselves. And I thought Robert did a really clever thing he thought about setting a vision for the department himself, which he called One DWP, which was making sure that this huge department of 10s of 1000s of people did buy into a shared vision of what we were about as a department. And we went out the whole of the senior leadership of the department, it was about 50 senior civil servants, went out on the roads with a shared script to run workshops with middle managers right around the country on what was One DWP, what was our mission about, what were the major programmes about and it was a really powerful experience for me to do that. I went off to Edinburgh and Newcastle and Cardiff and send it all all around the country where we'd run two hour workshops with managers from right across the business who might be running job centres or benefit centres to engage them, to engage them in that vision of what One DWP was about and give them the chance to interact with us and it was a very, very powerful experience which I haven't really gone through in any other department, but I think a lot to learn from that.
Anni Townend
Very much so, and it's a way of engaging with people emotionally, I think sometimes simply being in their place of work and being with them and having a shared experience is a way of engaging people in what was then One DWP, one Department of Work and Pensions.
Moving on to something which you mentioned, you have noticed is that Whitehall tends to value intellectual leadership and prioritises it over emotional leadership. And that this is something in the public sector where policy over operational is given priority.
Justin Russell
It's a specifically Whitehall and central government thing rather than necessarily a public sector thing, there was a very interesting piece of research that the social mobility commission did, which was published as something called navigating the labyrinth was the name of this report, which looked at the social class makeup of senior civil servants. And a very clear social sort of gradient as you move up the grades. In the civil service, a smaller and smaller proportion are from a working class background.
So in the senior civil service, only 18% are from a working class background, which is far less than in the general population. And in some departments, some very policy heavy departments like the Treasury, or the Foreign Office, the proportions are even smaller. And what seems to have happened is that the way that you get to the top in the civil service is to become a permanent secretary or the civil service head of a department, it's very advantageous to have gone through a policy route like like I have that there are much more people from a policy background rather than from an operational background, in in those permanent secretary roles.
And I think the theory is that's because the Whitehall culture favours the behaviours that are associated with being from a policy background. There's a lovely phrase they use, which is a behavioural code of studied neutrality, which is people who are quite emotionally dispassionate, I guess, think about things in a very intellectual way. I've had a lot of contact with ministers and so are used to winning their status by showing their grip over policy areas and their knowledge of detail and their ability to engage in intellectual argument, rather than their ability to engage with their own teams of their own staff. And so those tend to be the people that end up getting promoted to the very top positions. In Whitehall, it's a very noticeable trait.
And I benefited from that myself, I display all the classic characteristics of someone who's at the top of the civil service, I'm London based, I've worked in policy for most of my career, I've spent time working in what's called the centre. So I've been in Downing Street, all of those things are typical of people who make it to the top of Whitehall departments. And I think that's a real shame. I think there should be much more opportunities for people from an operational background who aren't London based to be heading Whitehall departments. And it's, it should be a major priority, I think, for the civil service going forward. Going back to Steve Radcliffe, one of his really powerful insights from his book was this idea of the four energies that leaders need to have intellectual energy, emotional energy, physical energy, spirit energy. And I think the culture of Whitehall is very much about intellectual energy, when actually it needs to give equal emphasis to what he calls emotional and spiritual energy to being able to inspire and motivate people behind a cause.
Anni Townend
100% I work with the four energies of a leader a lot, and think all four are really important. I'm known for the walk and talks for paying attention to the physical energy, and that's really important, for example, in thinking about leadership and our leadership impact, I'm often saying to leaders, you cannot help but have an impact be that in the virtual hybrid world in which we work now by way of being on teams or zoom. We're having an impact, whether we're in the room or not, we cannot help but have an impact. And that is often a physical impact. And the intellectual energy that you were just talking about as someone who has been brought up to read, to think and as you say who loves policy, and evidence, how have you managed to balance what you describe as being on the balcony, hands off. And being on the dance floor, hands on in your leadership.
Justin Russell
It's been a challenge all the way through my career. If you went back over my 360 appraisals at the end of every year, they would nearly always say, he needs to back off a bit, he's too into the detail. We know he loves numbers and evidence, but he also needs to let us get on with it sometimes. And I think, the concept of being on the balcony or on the dance floor I think comes from the adaptive leadership model, which is making the judgement about when you need to be in there with your people being involved in the detail. But the other times when you can afford to be up on the balcony and letting your team get on with finding a solution to the challenges themselves. So that was a useful insight to realise actually, you really need to think about the balance between those two aspects of your leadership, sometimes it's about creating governance structures within your organisation that constrain the times in which you do get involved in the details. So having proper programme or portfolio boards or clear points in the policy development cycle, when you will be consulted on things, but then be willing to back off and let the team get on with the details. So I think that's quite often where I've ended up negotiating my involvement. The trade off for that is I have to persuade my teams that I am intellectually interested in policy and the arguments and the discussions that go on. So what I don't want to do is only be involved at the end, when you've worked up some highly detailed set of proposals. I'd much rather have a discussion at the beginning, be given the chance to feed in my input. Now as I move into a new role, I need to recognise that challenge as well. My new support team have been having discussions with my current support team about my ways of working and they're already saying yeah, we've heard you really love data and evidence. And that's true. I am endlessly fascinated by all sorts of data and evidence and it's not necessarily a bad thing, but you need to rein it in sometimes.
Anni Townend
How do you manage all four of your energies? How do you look after your energies knowing that your strong suit if you like, Justin is the intellectual energy How do you bring the others to life in your leadership?
Justin Russell
On the physical side, I am action orientated. I do love jobs with a clear delivery focus as well as the more classic policy jobs so in some ways, I find the most satisfying bits of the policy process, actually delivering stuff in practice, and those have been my most satisfying jobs. I do a lot of exercise, I cycle to work every day, I cycle at weekends, I go to the gym, I still play football, I get a lot out of that as a way of preserving my levels of energy. I stay in touch with friends from down the years. I always enjoy going back to Bristol and reconnecting with old school friends and they really helped keep me grounded, not least because they’re not interested in talking about work and that's a nice break from talking about work all the time. So that's an important way of I think keeping your feet on the ground. I think it could be quite easy to let it go to your head when you go into a senior leadership position and having people that have known you since you were a primary school young lad or young lads is a very healthy counterweight to that I think.
I found it quite difficult the lockdown period of being stuck in my daughter's bedroom on a laptop without other people around. I really didn't enjoy that at all. Other people welcome that. I very much enjoy getting back in the office having some people around. My favourite parts of my current job are being out and about with my teams of inspectors on on sites and being able to spend time with them and spend time with frontline probation staff or people working in Youth Offending services. That's what I really find energising actually is that human human interaction on the ground. In my previous job, I think I visited like 40 Different prisons, because that was the most interesting part with the staff and with prisoners as well. I really needed that to recharge my connection to what we were about as a policy group.
Anni Townend
What do you think are some of the challenges for leaders around hybrid working and enjoying human to human connection at the same time?
Justin Russell
Well, I think it is that human engagement, human connection, the people really getting to know a different side, because I think if you're working remotely, the only time people see you is in a formal meeting rather than a more informal walk in the floor, or having a cup of tea with people. So one of the things I used to do before lockdown was called tea with a DG where I'd literally have a tea pot and coffee pot and some biscuits, and my office would pick eight random people from the group and we'd have a cup of tea together. It was a way of signaling, this is an informal, it's not a formal meeting, I really just want to get to know you a bit better and give you a chance to get to know me and I've done a little bit of it remotely, but I didn't find it quite as satisfying.
Anni Townend
Every time I came to work with you and your team I felt very cared for by you. And care is something which you mentioned. And thinking about the impact that we have on others as leaders. In that always, you made a large pot of real coffee, and you served it and I really thought that was a lovely way of emphasising something about you taking care of me, of the team, but also a sharing something together a little bit like sharing a meal together, but actually sharing something together. In this case, a large pot of coffee, which went down very well. And it's often the small things that you're speaking about that we miss when we're in the remote world of working. We miss those moments of personal informal interaction of taking coffee together, having a sandwich together, a walk in St. James's Park.
Justin Russell
I spent a lot of time working very closely with ministers in the days when I was a special advisor. Politicians are forced to basically blur their home and their work and their parliamentary lives. So it'd be quite usual for them to invite you around to the house if they needed to have a meeting about something and couldn't get away. And I really liked that actually the way that a politician would welcome you into their home, their private office will come and meet them at home and one of the things I've done in previous teams was, you know, I’d invite people back to my flat for drinks, we'd have Christmas parties in my house. I've just had a leaving party for my current job and we had that back in my flat as well. And I think that that's just a really nice thing to be able to do to invite people into your home.
Anni Townend
I do think it's really important, that personal connection and how we keep that human to human connection outside of teams meetings. And sometimes that might be picking up the phone, having a chat with somebody informally, finding ways of reaching out and connecting with people that aren't in the meeting slot, the back to back meeting slots that many people have in their calendars.
Justin Russell
One of the groups I worry about is, is new graduates going into jobs in the civil service, policy jobs for the first time now, and what it must feel like compared to my experience, starting a civil service career. I mean, I was lucky, my first job in the civil service, in the home office. It was a group of us who had all moved to London very recently, had all recently graduated, were all up for socialising quite a lot. I made lifelong friends in that period from working in the office with a close group of people. And I don't know whether people would have that same experience now if they're just working remotely and not sharing a physical space with people on a daily basis. I appreciate there may not be a business need for people to be in the office, you can still do everything you need to over laptop screen, but I do still feel there’s a human need to be able to interact with people face to face.
Anni Townend
I think research would suggest that what we think of as intangibles matter more than ever, and that human to human contact that we get from being in person, and the importance of that in our leadership, we need to pay attention to it and create opportunities for that kind of connection. So people can participate in things together and contribute, get to know each other better.
Justin, as we come to the end of our conversation, is there anything from our conversation that you'd like to expand upon and or elaborate on before we get to your key three encouragement to leaders?
Justin Russell
So just a final reflection on the discussion we had about the different leadership energies and why the Whitehall culture tends to very much focus on intellectual energy. And on reflection, I think that's partly because ministers themselves are trapped in a world where their status, their credibility is dependent on their grip of the detail. So they are constantly being called to Parliament to answer questions of detail around their department or responsibilities, they are having to do media interviews, where they're being challenged on lots of detail and data. And that inevitably then cascades down through the departments. So the people who are seen in a positive light around them end up being those who are also seen as having a good grip of the detail. So grip is a word you'll hear a lot in Whitehall, somebody who has good grip is seen as a good thing. By which is meant they have a good grip of the detail. And that inevitably, I think then accentuates that focus on intellectual energy and intellectual capacity rather than necessarily spirit or emotional energies.
Anni Townend
And you mentioned earlier, something about studied neutrality, a phrase that I haven't come across before, and that Gus O'Donnell when he was in position, spoke about, and to that in a different way.
Justin Russell
So I can remember Gus, coming to talk to senior civil servants at the home office in probably 2009- 2010, at a time when he was being coached by Steve Radcliffe, and influenced by his ideas around the different energies. And Gus was the cabinet secretary. So he was the head of the entire civil service. So he obviously could set clear messages around culture and objectives. And he came up with this, what he said should be the four P's in terms of the Civil Service values, and they were obvious things like Professionalism and Pace. But the fourth P, and the one that I think attracted most discussion and debate was he said, Passion should be one of the four P's. And that felt like a real shift away from this perception that civil servants should always be neutral, and impassionate. And I think it was a good thing. It does inject that sense of emotional energy into what you're doing as a policymaker if you can really become passionate about the thing that you are trying to deliver. And I've been very lucky in my career that I've been able to be passionate about things. I've been able to be passionate about pensioner poverty and helping with that. I've been able to be passionate about stopping violence against women, or reducing the number of kids that have been killed on the streets. And those have been very motivating passions in my time, and I think it should, and it should remain an important value for all civil servants.
Anni Townend
It's great to hear you speak about that. Something that I'm constantly impressed by is the passion of the senior civil servants that I have the privilege of working with, their passion to make things better, to improve things. As we come to the very close of our conversation. Justin, what are your three encouragement to leaders, whatever the sector they are working in?
Justin Russell
I think my first one would be, never underestimate the shadow that you cast as a leader and it can be both a good shadow or a damaging shadow. If you are living the values that you believe in, that you are being approachable, that you are welcoming everyone in to your circle, people will notice that and that will set a tone for the rest of the organisation. So I think, be aware of that shadow and make positive use of it.
Anni Townend
I want to pick up on that because some people may not have heard about the shadow you cast. It's thinking about the impact that you have on others and being very conscious as a leader, that you cannot help but have an impact. And the shadow you cast on a bad day can go far and wide. Equally, the light you shine or the positive shadow that you cast goes far and wide and can set the tone indeed can very much shape the culture of the team, the department, the community in which you're working.
Justin Russell
I mean, the Civil Services is an extremely hierarchical structure with all these different grades, and it's a very deferential culture as well. So I think you need to fight hard to make yourself accessible. And I like to think that feedback on me is that I am approachable, that I treat all staff the same, that I'm not obsessed with what grade people are. So you need to get that balance right.
Anni Townend
The values you spoke about at the very beginning of our conversation that you very much got from your mom and your dad, and in particular the care and the personal connection I think do shine through in all that you do. What would be your second key encouragement?
Justin Russell
To help people to progress themselves. So, I think I've benefited hugely from people who've been willing to mentor and support me, throughout my career, ex bosses I've kept in touch with who've put up with all of my requests for references, or to do practice interviews. I owe a huge amount to them and I never forget that. You should give back what you've had yourself. So I always say yes, when people will ask for a careers chat. And lots people do, I probably do two or three of those a week. I think people see when you've got to senior position that, oh, maybe they've got useful lessons to, to pass on. So, I'm always happy to give people advice on their CVs, or about how to get into policy jobs, or to help people do practice interviews. So I think, give back when you can, and what goes around comes around in terms of the support that we give each other.
Anni Townend
Wonderful, and your third key encouragement?
Justin Russell
I think my third key lesson from a life in the civil service. And we touched on this earlier about having to share that space, in terms of setting the future vision and that sometimes civil servants have to do things that they may not necessarily agree with, that you should still maintain your core values about right and wrong. And still, when asked to solve a policy problem, or come up with a solution, your starting point should be what's the right thing to do, accepting, you may not be able to do that. And pragmatically, there may be an alternative way forward. But keep yourself anchored in ultimately, what would be the right thing to do.
Anni Townend
I think asking that question is great. What's the right thing to do in this situation?
Justin Russell
But don't beat yourself up if you can't do the right thing. Because ultimately, sometimes it's beyond your control.
Anni Townend
Thank you, Justin, thank you for sharing your wisdom and your encouragement. You mentioned that you are always up for giving career advice and mentoring and helping people with maybe their interview practice. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you, and or to follow you and make contact with you?
Justin Russell
Probably through LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn account. Always happy to respond to direct messages on LinkedIn.
Anni Townend
Thank you, Justin. Thank you so much for everything that you've shared, an insight into working and leading in the public sector, and in the public service in particular.
Justin Russell
Thanks, Anni, I've enjoyed it.
Anni Townend
And thank you to you, the listener for listening. And if you'd like to listen to other leaders in conversation with me Anni Townend do go to my website, annitownend.com.
A big thank you as well as to Justin to my support team, the Conscious Marketing Group for helping me with all the marketing of the podcast and to Coco O'Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music and for the lovely design, excellent editing and sound production.
To contact me, contact me on email anni@annitownend.com. Visit my website, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting with you. Thank you for listening.
And thank you again Justin.