From Boots the Chemist to Lewis Hamilton's Boardroom | Dr. Hayaatun Sillem

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0:39Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started. Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50 % less your first year. That's homeserve.com slash podcast. Savings compared to renewal price void in Florida. Welcome to this episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. with Dr Hayartan Sillam. She has a fascinating background having worked as the Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering but as we learned in this episode her career actually started out in Parliament on the Science and Technology Committee.

1:14I have known Hayartan for a long time but we have worked particularly closely over the last six months as we have been producing the What We Don't Know podcast which was originally with Matt Britton before we went off to go and be Director General of the BBC. But it has been a real pleasure getting to know Hiata and work with her as we've redesigned the show. It's a show all about leadership, how you have excellence without compromising on quality. It's had some fabulous guests on it like John Brown from the former CEO of BP, Mark Reid, former CEO of WPP, and Sharon White, the former chief executive of John Lewis.

1:57So it is a fantastic podcast and it was great to do this in collaboration. The Boxlight team are behind producing it. On to this special episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future with Dr. Hyatton Sillam. Well welcome to this special episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future and what we don't know, a collaboration. There is a lot I don't know about this episode Jimmy. I'm sort of looking forward to it and sort of terrified and we'll see which one of those emotions turns out to be the more appropriate it's all going to be fine it's all going to be good that's what they always say what was your first job my first or what was the first thing you did for money okay well I did babysitting for money and I always think it's really funny when I think of sort of 11 or 12 year old me being paid to look after a baby I'm like I would never pay a 12 year old to look after my baby um but my first kind of proper job was at Boots the Chemist So when I was 14, I had a Saturday job at Boots the Chemist.

2:54I can still remember I got paid£2.32 an hour. And I was quite terrified most of the time doing that job. I did go to sleep at night just dreaming of shampoos and other items you can find in Boots the Chemist. And the highlight was when I was allowed to sit on the tills. And again, you think, 14-year-old sitting at the tills? Obviously, I was very grown up, Jimmy, but you know. and what did you did that feel like your first experience of leadership then sitting on the oh no i don't think i didn't feel like i was just terrified everyone was older than me and so you're sort of trying to um trying to not draw attention to quite how ill qualified to be doing what you're doing you actually are i think my first what would be my first leadership experience um oh i was thinking of something when i was at primary school okay um it's kind of a funny one to say but my my best friend and i uh my best friend annie uh we went to we were at a just a community state school and there was a real range of ability in our class and so there were quite a lot of people who couldn't read by the time we got to um what's now year six um and And so the teachers basically said, look, you two are fine.

4:11You learn everything that we're supposed to teach you so you can entertain yourselves for a year. So we literally, we'd just go and sit in the library, make resources for younger children. We spent a long time drawing some sort of fantasy world on pieces of paper stuck together. But actually we were treated as sort of being responsible children amongst a peer group. So I think that's probably my first little glimpse of leadership. it's a slightly odd one free free free range learning now or something free range learning yes yes you could pay a lot to have that these days exactly um and what did your parents do for a living my dad was a teacher so um he uh through his career taught everything from um adult education um through to children at all stages um but for the latter part of his career he specialised first of all in families that had English as a second language or a foreign language and then special needs so by the end of his career he was for about the last decade he taught severely disabled children and I mean that is not a job that you do unless you really have a passion for it which he did and my mum started off as a ballerina then became a stay-at-home mum then trained as a secretary and then ended up working in civil service in a variety of roles.

5:36Oh, interesting. Yeah. And what did that sort of teach you about the sort of world of work? Like, what are your memories of it when you were sort of growing up? I mean, I had quite a few different facets, I guess, to thinking about the world of work. I mean, my parents didn't have, you know, high-flying careers at all. Work was something that had purpose and meaning attached to it. but also was just pragmatically what we needed to be able to function. It wasn't something that the way I feel about my career now was certainly not the way my parents felt about theirs. But I think my dad in particular had a real passion for what he did and I could see that positive reward loop when you do something that you are good at and know is meaningful and that makes you in turn feel motivated and fulfilled and I think that was an important learning.

6:27and do you remember what the first job you wanted to do was when did you begin to get that idea so family folklore says that I used to say I wanted to be a mother with lots of children who traveled all the time go thicker um and then I think I found it quite hard to actually have a serious view of what I wanted to do because I wasn't a child that was brilliant at one thing and terrible at other things. I was a kind of all-rounder, there wasn't a thing that stood out as being, oh, that's mine. So I was not really sure until quite late which way I'd go, sort of arts or sciences. And when you were good at science, I went to a girls' school, secondary school, when you were good at science at a girls' school, in those days, everybody, 100 % of the teachers and other adults would say, oh you should go and do medicine and I think there's a little bit of me that's quite stubborn and on point of principle I was not going to do medicine so I was extremely radical inciting to do medical research instead but actually I think you know kind of looking back I like the idea of that sort of sense being in a lab you know you're mixing things potions I had a habit of mixing all the contents of various bottles in our bathroom which you can imagine went down very well but I think in my own way it was experimentation yeah yeah so there's there's perhaps some sort of origin story for that but it's quite quite creative like because people don't always associate that with the sciences well don't get me on my soapbox here Jimmy it's very early this is very hands on hips um I mean that's just absurd were you trying to pick a fight with me straight off the bat i i just i think it's one of the great tragedies of this country that we have this kind of expectation that there are two lanes in life and you have to choose by the age of about 11 whether you're a creative person or a technical person i mean does anybody think that the people who are responsible for nobel prize winning breakthroughs are not creative thinkers and if you look at people in what are considered creative industries there is such a close interplay between technology and engineering and people who've come up through arts and design route I mean design bridges the two brilliantly and I don't I've never identified as one or the other I think a lot of people were surprised when I went into a scientific subject because they would have said in our family I had an older brother he was the sort of scientific technical one and I was a creative one a lot of people had that um so projected that onto us so I was a kind of a bit a bit of came came from the inside lane on that one and what were you like as a teenager um I was a happy teenager in lots and lots of ways I had lovely friends I must say I've been very lucky in my life to have really fantastic people as friends.

9:34I was at a school where I was definitely an outlier so it was a very good school but I felt very conscious of the fact that we were from a low socioeconomic group you know dreaded non-uniform days the car was comically inadequate compared to most people's cars what we did on our holidays was super different what I ate for my lunch was super different lots of allergies in our family and I just I think there was a lot of internalized anxiety through those years so although I was undoubtedly happy and lots of things went brilliantly all the while there was this kind of deep well of anxiety and I used to worry about all sorts of things I was I mean I was creative in the things I would manage to worry about give us an example oh well I think I spent I think we were burgled at the age of about 15 and I tell for about a decade before that I used to lie awake at night waiting to be burgled finally came true yeah it's it's not quite what you mean when you say your dream has been fulfilled no and when else can you remember a kind of early leadership experience I mean that's a very early one you gave me primary school but but sort of growing up teenage years university oh well I should probably confess that I was a head girl at my school so I think that would be the most obvious concrete example of a leadership role.

10:57And I was absolutely astonished to be made head girl. I was going to say, was that surprising? I mean, you just described feeling like an outsider in lots of ways. I was genuinely amazed. I think, you know, part of me thought, well, I'm a relatively good student and I wasn't a cliquey person. I didn't, I suppose, had different friendship groups and things I interfaced with. And, you know, things like that make a difference. so that's how I explained it in my head. But, I mean, I guess it's maybe partly other people feeling confident in you to interpret the role. Yeah. But I didn't feel that at the time.

11:33I just thought, good grief. And so it was quite a validating thing to feel that, ooh, enough of these people thought I'd be a good head girl. Should I tell you what my first encounter was after I was told I was head girl? Do you want to know what happened next? I went to see the headmistress. this is a terrible thing to say I feel bad saying it but she said to me well I was hoping for a fathead girl but never mind what why was that I mean there was a really serious context behind that it was I think it's a pretty tough message to land someone with as a sort of welcome on board but um but no the sad reality was at that age in lots of girls schools sort of particularly girls schools with high performing girls coming from families with high expectations eating disorders were very prevalent and I think her simple point was she thought it would be great to have a role model who was you know physically just looked different yeah um but it was a slightly harsh awakening onboarding message yeah um and so then you decide to go to university and you embark on quite an academic career like for saying that you weren't particularly academic as it were at school you you then sort of go on a very academic career I think I think the people who knew me as a child probably would say it's dishonest of me to say I wasn't particularly academic so I did well academically um you know I came from a family where my dad was the first person in his entire family youngest of nine children he grew up in apartheid South Africa so the youngest of nine children, the first one to be able to finish secondary school.

13:14Everyone else had dropped out by 12, 13, 14 years old to go and work. And his sister paid for him to go and train as a teacher. And so he became a teacher. So I grew up in a house where the value of education was never in any doubt. And I grew up knowing that the opportunities I had were not things I could take for granted. I knew that there were people with way more talent and ambition who just never would get the chance to study in the places I was studying. And so I think that that awareness always meant I had a respect for the fact that I was at a great school. And, you know, my dad was teaching at that time in a really quite rough, comprehensive school, getting a really hard time from his fellow teachers for sending his kids to private schools.

13:58But in his view, education was freedom. Education was the most important thing he could do for us um and so i was i did well academically i i had an older brother who was immensely clever you know child prodigy level clever and so i didn't think of myself as being particularly smart i thought that he was the really academic one but in retrospect i i did well i got good grades but i went on to university you're correct um and then you did post degrees as well i kept never stopped well I so I did in eight years of biochemistry in total so I did undergraduate four years and then PhD four years and then you take a leap into not into politics but into parliament yeah so that the pivot was unplanned in the last year of my PhD I developed very severe chemical sensitivities so one day I walked out of the lab and I was never allowed back in which was a very alarming way to have to end my PhD and decide on a new career.

15:08And it's quite funny looking back because in eight years of biochemistry at great institutions, nobody had ever talked about what you did if you didn't do research. In those days, I think it was basically seen as the smartest people would automatically want to stay in research and really kind of academic or charitable research, going to work in industry was pretty much looked down on as selling your soul to the devil. I may exaggerate very slightly. So I found myself in a position where I had absolutely no idea what to do. I had plenty of data, so I wrote up my PhD, got the certificate and all that.

15:49And I just applied for three jobs immediately in science engineering, policy, communications and publishing. And I got the first one in policy. And I genuinely didn't know what policy was because I'd been in the rarefied air of a very generously funded research institute. We didn't have to worry about higher education policy and regulation. We were just completely protected from all of this. No understanding where the money came from. It was, you know, a blissful ignorance that the state I was in. and so this whole thing of what is policy? I couldn't even explain my job to anyone else and I ended up working in Parliament quite early on because I thought well that looks like the most fun place to do this thing that I've now discovered is called policy and I've managed to get a job as a committee specialist at the Science and Technology Select Committee And what years was this then?

16:44So I was there from 2004 to 2006 which was sufficiently exciting. Yeah, I was going to say quite a sort of momentous period. Yeah, it was, I mean it was an immense privilege. I completely think that anyone who goes to work in that extraordinary set of buildings at the heart of parliamentary process should feel very proud and honoured to be able to do that. I say that with no cynicism whatsoever. And the majority of parliamentarians I met, I thought were pretty well intentioned. I might not agree with their politics but I felt actually their motivations were pretty sound. They worked hard on average, not every single person but lots of people worked very hard.

17:27But at the same time it was a slightly depressing place to work from the perspective particularly of science and engineering and technology policy because the level of understanding or interest in those areas was unbelievably low. I'm going to slightly put you on the spot with this but how will you give me a rough percentage perhaps of the committee had backgrounds in science and technology because you I remember it but then because that's where I started work and so on and it was that that committee you know wasn't seen as one of the sort of premier committees whereas now actually it's like quite a big department in its own right and it's kind of emerged it's changed quite a lot just when you were working there how many people had a sort of interest or a background in it?

18:11I would say not more than 20%. Of the committee itself? Yeah. And you know, most people didn't really end up there by choice, let's be honest. It was a sort of… It wasn't Treasury or Foreign Affairs, was it? It had no political value, is the reality. There was, you know, maybe occasionally got something like human embryology technologies where there was some interest around the regulation of that and then there'd be a little bit of a bit more politicizing of the topic but mostly it was of interest to absolutely nobody your political influence which is a sad state of affairs but in some ways from a staff point of view gave you more agency more influence and also stopped it feeling like politics, party politics was driving decisions and outcomes.

19:05But it was a lot of pressure. I was very new out of my PhD, kind of a couple of years after I finished. And you're there trying to advise politicians in a very public way on everything from use of forensic science in the UK justice system, not my specialist topic, through to carbon capture and storage passing by higher education on the way dabbling a bit in international development it's absolutely crazy and you know i wore the title specialist which was true relative to the people i was working with but in any other sense completely mislabeled um well it does feel like it's it's changed a lot in the 20 years like it's become very much um you know sort of it's not quite front and centre of government thinking, but it really is now in terms of it being its own department.

19:58You know, Rishi Sunak, Anki, Starmer, in fairness, have both done a lot and invested a lot around it, right? It's shifted a lot in those couple of decades. Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly, there is nobody now who would say, well, I don't think science and technology is at all relevant to our political priorities, which I think the majority of people would have thought previously. but I'm not as positive as maybe you sound about where that leaves us. We still have an immensely low number of parliamentarians well certainly in the commons with backgrounds in science technology engineering and I think that the lack of technological and digital capitals in other words how much knowledge and experience our political leaders have in technology engineering science is still so low that it is absolutely harming our ability to make effective policy I think there are some other challenges we have um I would say on the side of scientists if I just generalize actually it's not enough respect for policymakers I think there's a sort of bit of intellectual arrogance um you know we're we're superior and that does not encourage people to think about the role that they could play you know as a progression from their academic career for example if they were to go into policy making because the wonderful thing about politics is it's something you can go in almost at any career stage yes um so i think that there's something around socialising the idea within the scientific community that it is our responsibility to engage with policymaking.

21:38If we do not lean over the fence and go into this messier, less structured world where you have to factor in things other than data and evidence in the sort of conventional quantitative sense, that, you know, that's not sort of diluting our integrity. That's actually serving society. So I think there is something around cultural norms and science, which doesn't help us. But equally, I think that we do need to have a greater shared acknowledgement of the value of people with different disciplinary backgrounds. And I certainly didn't experience in the world of politics a particular appreciation for people who had that hinterland, that background, that deep training in engineering or science.

22:28I mean I've stayed involved with policy making just not in parliament particularly not with my core job in parliament for 20 years and I still think there is you know the dominant language of policy and of government is economics and we could I'm liking that reaction on audio I'm sort of shaking my head You're doing quite a good shimmy there Jimmy

22:55My reflection on this at the moment is just that economics is becoming less important I agree, actually up until the time you were talking about it was I mean what surprises me about politics when you look at it in terms of the grand waves of history of the last 30 years is just how important cultural issues have become and actually economic issues and how we actually get growth whilst everyone pays lip service to it no one wants to pay the political prices that go along with it. But that is a... Yeah, and I think maybe I'm sort of broadening out too much from your original question because actually I think I would suggest that in the civil service, economics has been the dominant language of policymaking.

23:32And that's a little bit different from talking about politicians. So anyway, I think we need to build this bridge. However we got here, however it's the way it is, it is not a healthy position to be in when engineering technology science shape almost every aspect of our world directly or indirectly and we still have too big a gulf between those communities for it to be healthy and also we should stop talking about science and engineering and technology as one homogenous community the idea that that's all linear would probably come as a surprise to many many people to me who have squiggly careers within i mean being an engineer in a construction company is very different from being a biomedical researcher working on cancer research you know and I've worked in both worlds so it's um yeah it's it's not as linear as it looks I think.

24:24So then you go to the Royal Academy of Engineering going through this kind of like chronologically now what does the Royal Academy of Engineering do and we should probably explain at this point you you were there basically for 20 years and rose all the way to become the chief executive of it. But what does the Royal Academy of Engineering do? I can't believe that there is anyone in this country who doesn't know what the Royal Academy of Engineering does. No, it's a very specific part of our institutional landscape, isn't it? The idea of, it's what we call a national academy. So national academies are kind of, you know, national assets.

25:01But they're the big four, right? They are the national academies. And the national academies are fellowship organisations. So they elect on a peer election basis. In other words, other people who work in your field have to think you're great. So through peer election, they elect fellows. And so fellows are fellows are the leaders in their particular disciplines. And in the case of the Royal Academy of Engineering, they're drawn half from business and industry and half from academia, roughly by design. and the really important thing about a national academy is it then draws on that expertise to provide independent expert advice to government and policy makers so it's a wonderful way of ensuring that people have to make difficult decisions in a policy context can access really expert but also independent expertise and so that's that's why they exist so it's partly to sort of recognize and celebrate um people who have you know reached great heights in their particular fields but it's most importantly there to deliver public benefit and they are all charities yeah you know if you're growing up in you know derbyshire as a teenager you don't know about these things right and they're in these great grand buildings as well like it's not too shabby yeah the offices are they're decent and you go in and it's sort of adorned with all these like amazing names and products that people will have used and so on and they won't necessarily quite understand where it sort of all comes from and what's it like leading a group of or what are the challenges with leading a group of incredibly clever people because everyone there i imagine or vast majority further educated etc yeah so so national academies are very unusual in that you basically work with the leaders in their fields and you know this so you have the fellows you have the staff the staff are also immensely high quality and so i mean it's a it's a privilege you're working with people who are immensely smart who have skills beyond intellect that have gotten to the positions they're in um but it was certainly not um an environment in which we suffered from opinion deficit disorder i think it's fair to say um so i guess the upside of that is you can learn every single day from the people you work with it doesn't matter whether you agree or not you can always learn you're you're getting fascinating insights from people who um might be coming the topic from a completely different angle um so that they they might not be an expert in the thing that they're doing with you through the academy but in their world they're experts so even if even if their contribution and your patch which isn't necessarily resonating with you at a sort of specific level, you're still learning from the fact that that's how they see the world.

27:54And I think you have to go into those roles with a desire to enjoy the ride and to try and make it respectful and exciting. I always said my job was to make the academy the most rewarding place for people to put their pro bono time. We used to get more than 20 ,000 hours of volunteer effort out of our fellows, And they were people who had run the biggest companies, who had created the world into the most significant technologies. And they gave all their time to us for free. They gave it for mentoring young entrepreneurs. They gave it for sitting on panels to select who would get a grant. They gave it to selecting other people who would then become fellows.

28:31And they gave it to providing advice for government. And so if you get it right, they love working with you because they get a great return on the pro bono effort that they put in. and they love the experience of working with other high quality people from different fields. And you talk about leaders in the field, you worked a lot with Lewis Hamilton, which is a pretty, must have been an extraordinary experience, but tell us about the project that you were working with him. Yes, so this was a plot twist I did not see coming in my career. So I ended up co-chairing Lewis Hamilton's commission on the representation of black people in UK motorsport, which is not a sentence I ever planned to be able to utter, and I will happily confess that I had to watch all available seasons of Drive to Survive on Netflix in order just to feel competent to go into my first meeting with him.

29:20But the reason this came about is actually, I think, a really impressive story. Lewis is somebody that has always tried to use his visibility for public good, but there came a point in his career where he said, I'm ready to start my philanthropy and I know the issue I want to make a difference on, but I don't know how to do it. so he said I understand why after say 20 years in Formula One I'm still the only black driver it's incredibly difficult to break through there are you know 20 seats or whatever it's it's a fraction of people who are going to ever get to that level but what I don't understand is when I look at the team photo at the end of the season and I see 2 ,000 faces why is there so little diversity there and so he wanted to understand what did the evidence and the data say about the best way for him to make a difference in that area which shows just the most extraordinary humility and integrity in terms of you know not assuming that you have all the answers and wanting to do it in a way that will be as effective as possible so I this was during the commission sorry during the pandemic in 2020 so it was an all-round very strange year and I remember my husband saying to me after one of the first calls it's very strange here Lewis Hamilton's voice coming out of that room that you're in I said imagine how it is for me sitting here but he was absolutely incredible he engaged despite the fact that he was racing all the time during the pandemic he got COVID at one point he would show up to planning calls and when we published the report he was across every detail he did so much media it got you know broadcast print um absolute saturation coverage and he did all of the interviews because he took real ownership of it so i co-chaired that with him and then after that or around the same time as it finished he set up his charity mission 44 charitable foundation and i became a founding trustee of that and i have really enjoyed working as part of that organization to create something really meaningful really impactful and i'm very proud of the work that the amazing team they're led by a brilliant person called Jason Arthur I'm really proud of what that team have already done and excited to see what they're going to do in the future and what were the main sort of outcomes of it that the the commission looked at because I agree that there's a way that you know you can think well I'm Lewis Hamilton yeah what more can I do to kind of raise the profile of black people in Formula One than be the world champion what were the actual steps that came out in terms of that out of the commission so we took a kind of systems approach we love a systems approach to engineering it's one of our favorites but for a good reason because it helps you identify the kind of the points of leverage i guess and the points of vulnerability and basically what that showed us is that there is no magic bullet that's going to solve this issue you see problems at every stage so for example the lack of black teachers in the classroom means that children from particular backgrounds aren't having role models in front of them particularly in stem that make these subjects feel relevant to them the fact that in some schools people are channeled very early into doing away from doing triple science at GCSE means that realistically they're cutting themselves out of pathways that would lead them to sort of higher level qualifications in engineering that would be necessary to go into motorsport.

32:49You see a higher number of exclusions amongst people who are from certain ethnic groups that again decreases as chances that they will ever have the opportunity to progress into further education or higher education. And then when you go further on you think okay well some people do manage to succeed in getting science and technology and engineering qualifications at university or further education college um the conversion rate the transition rate into entering roles is is much lower than their white counterparts so having done all that of course then you think well what what are the the actions that are going to help with those and those actions formed the basis for a lot of things that mission 44 went on to fund so it funded a brilliant program with teach first to try to improve the number of black teachers in schools.

33:34With the Royal Academy of Engineering, it funded motorsport scholarship bursaries so that for people of colour who had managed to get into sort of the engineering track, they could get the high level qualification that would make them really employable in motorsport. And also as part of that package of support, got loads of time with motorsport teams so that they could build their social capital and understand what it took to be successful and so that the teams could also realise how much talent there was there and I think of the 13 scholars that have so far graduated I think eight are in Formula One or motorsport teams which is pretty amazing there's people who wouldn't have got there otherwise probably so those are some examples what was the biggest challenge that you faced at the Royal Academy when it came to leadership do you mean personally or do you mean in terms of the CEO function at the Academy?

34:32I'm going to ask you both. Let's start with professionally. From the CEO role? I think the organisation that I sort of was inheriting, if you like, I've been part of it, was an organisation that was still quite a long way short of its true potential. so you think about the opportunity to ensure that engineering technology excellence is delivering public benefit it feels quite an important thing for society yeah but very few people knew about the royal academy of engineering as we sort of joked about earlier very few people really thought engineering was very important to society when i took on the ceo role and that was a barrier to us being able to actually contribute because if people don't know you're there they're not interested in what you can offer, it's really hard to maximise the contribution that you then make.

35:26And so I think that was a communications challenge, a perceptions challenge, but also a confidence issue for the academy. I think we had to sort of start to believe in a different version of ourselves. And so I think that was a big part of the journey we subsequently went on with amazing other people around me. And personally, as a leader? I mean it's the hardest transition I've had to make in my career I think. I was in the fairly unique position of being both the change candidate and the continuity candidate. So I was the deputy CEO and I'd been there a long time so continuity candidate. You know had a lot of relationships, was trusted to understand the organisation not break it but I was also the first woman, the first person from a minority ethnic group, significantly younger than my predecessors.

36:20And for at least 25 years, I never went back and checked beyond that. I was the first person who wasn't a rear admiral or brigadier to do the job. There are many dimensions of diversity. And for me personally, you know, that meant that I was going to get a lot of attention going to that role. It was some people were just confused. I met a lot of people who genuinely thought that I'd made a mistake when I said I was a CEO. I would have a daily conversation. People would go, what is it you do here? I would say, I'm the CEO. And then they would hastily attempt to rearrange their facial expression to something more appropriate.

36:55Not always successfully. You know, that was literally a daily experience. So that's kind of that side of it. There's a side of it that is a lot of people are interested and curious. And it gives you a chance to kind of perhaps challenge perceptions around engineering and what it's about. who it's for. But personally, the hardest thing was my self-perception in my career had been rooted in the idea that I am the person that stands behind the leader, that makes the leader look amazing. I'm the person that leader relies on to feel that, you know, I will have their back. I'll give them the best briefing.

37:29I'll do an amazing job. They can totally rely on me. And the idea that I was the leader was a huge mental leap for me to make. What was the biggest thing you had to upskill in? Public speaking. I thought you were going to say that. Yeah, we've had this story, which I know. What else was that? Well, I say it was another way of asking this as you host the leadership podcast. What's the most underrated leadership skill? Empathy. I mean, I grew up with such a mixed cultural background, right? I mean, you think, there's literally me and my brother and then every other part of the family. I was trying to think about, oh, yeah, you know, this is how I need to behave.

38:13This is how I need to speak. This is what I need to wear. This is their set of expectations. So, I mean, my earliest memories are rooted in. What's this group I'm interacting with and how do I need to be towards them? And what that does is builds a capacity for empathy that is, I think, probably exaggerated compared to what most people just incidentally develop. Because I had to be thinking, you know, what is what's Jimmy expecting from me? How can I make Jimmy feel comfortable with me? How can I show him that, you know, we're really similar, though we might look quite different? And so I was a very kind of big part of my my hard wiring.

38:49I didn't notice it for years and years years it was literally my 30s before I noticed that I had become so adept to trying to tune the version of me to the person I was with that I was probably making some choices I didn't feel very proud about I was I used the phrase knocking the corners off myself I was trying to edit myself into the version that I felt would be most acceptable and comfortable for whoever I was with and the thing is there's a massive upside to that so you know I had to go on a bit of a journey to get comfortable in my own skin with all the corners being the wonky shape that I am and everyone is but on the other hand what I had as a result of that kind of half my life experience was a recognition that we don't all feel the same way and that we can build our capacity to understand someone else's perspective by just being more aware of it by really listening to what they're saying observing what they're doing and I think empathy is an amazingly powerful skill for for example building a culture where people feel welcome and safe and valued and able to contribute to the full because you're thinking about how different people are experiencing the culture around you you're thinking about how different people are experiencing your leadership it's fantastic from the point of view of negotiation so if you negotiate with somebody without really understanding their drivers and the incentives they're responding to you're much less likely to have a successful discussion if you're in policy making and you really understand what does a policy maker need from this technical expert you're much more likely to be able to get better quality policy inputs that are actually assimilated and utilized there's almost no part of leadership where empathy can't help in my humble opinion very good and if what what was the one thing that you wish you'd done more of when you were there?

40:44At the academy? Yeah. It's one thing you sort of look back and think, ah, I wish we could have pushed more on that. I think that there are times that I look back on where I think we probably preserved the day-to-day comfort of how we interacted in a way that wasn't necessarily confronting hard decisions for the organisation. So, for example, there came a point where we split our senior leadership team almost in half because we were so invested in the idea that we just wanted to create a harmonious and sort of nice group that we had stopped the challenge and the creative tension from being allowed to surface in a way that is necessary to make sure you're doing your best for the organisation.

41:36and I think sometimes things like that where you know you're going to have to do different things like you know tackling a personnel issue for example you want to do it the nice way you want to do it the harmonious way and as a result it takes you too long to do a thing that deep down you always knew you would have to do. Very interesting and talk me through taking the decision to to leave and how you came about that you've been there almost 20 years but not quite Was there a temptation to do a few extra months? Not at all. It was also the 50th anniversary of the Academy this year, and lots of people are, why do you stand for the British?