From Boots the Chemist to Lewis Hamilton's Boardroom - Dr. Hayaatun Sillem & Jimmy McLoughlin OBE

0:00I was the 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. If you're a CEO, you have to earn your mandate all the time. I was entangled in the cord, stood up, did an absolutely kind of slapstick style face plant, but was so embarrassed that I just... You worked a lot with Lewis Hamilton. There came a point in his career where he said, 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?

0:35What is something you felt like you failed at?

0:41Well, 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... 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.

1:10I'm like, I will never pay a 12-year-old to look after my baby. But my first kind of proper job was at Boots of Chemist. So when I was 14, I had a Saturday job at Boots of Chemist. I 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 Roots the Chemist and the highlight was when I was allowed to sit on the tills. And I came to think, 14-year-olds sitting at the tills? Obviously, I was very grown-up, Jimmy, but you know. And did that feel like your first experience of leadership then, sitting on the tills?

1:47Oh, no. I didn't feel like a leader. I was just terrified. Everyone was older than me. And so you're sort of 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? Oh, I was thinking of something when I was at primary school. Okay. It's kind of a funny one to say, but my best friend and I, my best friend Annie, we were at 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 what's now year six.

2:28And so the teachers basically said, look, you two are fine. You've learned everything that we're supposed to teach you so you can entertain yourself 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 that's probably my first little glimpse of leadership probably free free range learning now or something free range learning yes yes you could pay a lot to have that exactly um and what did your parents do for a living my dad was a teacher so um he through his career taught everything from um adult education um through to children at all stages 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 that 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 civil service in a variety of roles.

3:47Oh interesting. 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 you know 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.

4:34And 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 like brilliant at one thing and terrible other things I was a kind of all-rounder didn't there wasn't a thing that stood out as being oh you know that's that's mine um so i was not really sure until quite late which way i'd go sort of arts or sciences um 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 kind of looking back I like the idea of that sort of sense of being in a lab 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 so there's perhaps some sort of origin story for that but it's quite creative because people don't always associate that with the sciences.

5:58Well, don't get me on my soapbox here, Jimmy. It's very early. Hands on hips. I mean, that's just absurd. Were you trying to pick a fight with me? Yeah, just straight off the bat. 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.

6:41I mean design bridges the two brilliantly. And 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 elder brother. He was the sort of scientific, technical one and I was the creative one. A lot of people had that, projected that onto us. So I was kind of a bit of, came up in the inside lane on that one. And what were you like as a teenager?

7:11I 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. I 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 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.

8:07Oh, well, I think I spent, I think we were burgled at the age of about 15. And I tell you, for about a decade before that, I used to lie awake at night waiting to be burgled. Finally came true. Yeah, 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 to primary school, 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.

8:39And I was absolutely astonished to be made head girl. Well, 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. But I didn't feel that at the time.

9:12I just thought, good grief. And so it was quite a validating thing to feel that, ooh, none 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. I think it's a pretty tough message to land someone with as a sort of welcome on board. But no, the sad reality was at that age in lots of girls schools, particularly girls schools with high performing girls coming from families with high expectations, eating disorders were very prevalent.

9:58And 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. But it was a slightly harsh awakening. Abhorning message. Yeah. And so then you decided 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 then sort of go on a very academic career. 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. You know, I came from a family where my dad was the first person in his entire family, youngest of nine children.

10:39He grew up in apartheid South Africa. So the youngest of nine children, the first one to be able to finish secondary school. Everyone 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.

11:16And, 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. But in his view, education was freedom. Education was the most important thing he could do for us. So I did well academically. I had an older brother who was immensely clever, 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 did well. I got good grades. But I went on to university, you're correct. And then you did post-degrees as well.

11:52I kept going. I mean, yeah. Almost never stopped. Well, so I did 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 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. And 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.

12:38In 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 look 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. and 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 a blissful ignorance that the state I was in and so this whole thing of what is policy?

13:37I 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? So 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.

14:17And 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 work very hard but 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, give me a rough percentage perhaps, of the committee had backgrounds in science and technology because I remember it then because that's when I started work and so on and it was, that committee 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 but just when you were working there how many people had a sort of interest or a background in it?

15:14I 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 wasn't treasury or foreign affairs was it? it had no political value is the reality there was 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 politicising of the topic but mostly it was of interest to absolutely nobody of 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 but 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 for 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.

16:28It'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. Well, it does feel like it's changed a lot in the 20 years. It's become very much, you know, sort of, it's not quite front and centre of government um thinking but it it really is now in terms of it being its own department you know rishi suna cankist armor and fairness have both done a lot and invested a lot around it right it's shifted a lot in those couple decades yeah i mean undoubtedly there is nobody now who'd 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 um but i i'm 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.

17:41I think there are some other challenges we have. I would say on the side of scientists, if I just generalise, actually, it's not enough respect for policymakers. I think there's a sort of bit of intellectual arrogance. You know, we're superior. And that does not encourage people to think about the role that they could play as a progression from their academic career, for example, if they were to go into policymaking. Because the wonderful thing about politics is it's something you can go in almost at any career stage. So I think that there's something around socialising the idea within the scientific community that it is our responsibility to engage with policymaking.

18:22If 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, you know, 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.

19:08I mean, I stayed involved with policymaking, 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 well my 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 sort of waves of history of the last 30 years is just how important kind of cultural issues have become and actually economic issues and like 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.

19:56But that is a... Yeah, and I think maybe I'm also 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. Yeah. And that's a little bit different from talking about politicians. So anyway, I think there's a... We need to build this bridge. Whatever, however we got here, why ever 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 i've worked in both worlds so it's um yeah it's it's not as linear as it looks i think so 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?

21:11I can't believe that there is anyone in this country who doesn't know what the Royal Academy does no it is a it's a very specific you know part of our institutional landscape isn't it the idea it's what we call a national academy so national academies are kind of you know national assets um and they're the big four right they are the national academies and the national academies are fellowship organizations 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.

21:46And 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 policymakers. So it's a wonderful way of ensuring that people who 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 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.

22:46And 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 national academies are very unusual in that you basically work with the leaders in their fields. And, you know, so you have the fellows, you have the staff, but the staff are also immensely high quality. And so, I mean, 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.

23:24But it was certainly not an environment in which we suffered from opinion deficit disorder. I think it's fair to say. 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 getting fascinating insights from people who might be coming at the topic from a completely different angle so that they might not be an expert in the thing that they're doing with you through the academy but in their world they're an expert so even if their contribution in your patch 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.

24:04And 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 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 and 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 um 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 But the reason this came about is actually, I think, a really impressive story.

25:26Lewis 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 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?

26:01And 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 it 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 was 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 When we published the report, he was across every detail.

26:48He did so much media. It got broadcast, print, 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 organisation to create something really meaningful, really impactful. And I'm very proud of the work that the amazing team there 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.

27:21And what were the main sort of outcomes of it that the commission looked at? Because I agree that there's a way that you can think, well, I'm Lewis Hamilton, what more can I do to kind of raise the profile of black people in Formula 1 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 favourites, 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.

28:00you 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 gcsc 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. You see a higher number of exclusions amongst people who are from certain ethnic groups that again decreases the chances that they will ever have the opportunity to progress into further education or higher education.

28:44And 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 engineering roles 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 with the royal academy of engineering it funded motorsport scholarship bursaries so that for people of color who had managed to get into sort 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 realize 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 those are people who wouldn't have got there otherwise probably um 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 I'm going to ask you both let's start with professionally from so from the CEO role I think the organisation that I sort of was inheriting, if you like, having been part of it, was an organisation that was still quite a long way short of its true potential.

30:25So you think about the opportunity to ensure that engineering and technology excellence is delivering public benefit. It feels quite an important thing for society. 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 maximize the contribution that you then make and so I think that was a communications challenge a perceptions challenge but also a confidence issue for the academy I think you know we had to sort of start to believe in a different version of ourselves.

31:07And 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 a 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.