This episode was recorded on 21 July 2020 with Paul Streets, CEO of Lloyds Bank Foundation. Paul has an enviable career spanning the public and voluntary sector, with previous roles in international development, health, human rights and education organisations. He has held CEO roles at Diabetes UK, Health Development Agency and the Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board.
We talk about:
- Paul’s leadership journey, starting early, working with his father in the family’s greengrocer’s business, and another formative experience as a social worker after graduation.
- Lloyds Bank Foundation’s response to the crisis, their new Covid Recovery Fund, and the decision making behind single versus multi-year funding right now.
- Infrastructure organisations, the new approach to (brilliant, collaborative) leadership of them and our collective ability as a sector to influence government.
Key highlights for me:
- Your leadership journey can start at any age. I resonate with much of what Paul says as both my parents were self-employed too and the 24/7 nature of it, relationship building and crisis management are certainly formative and character building.
- But early experience isn’t everything. Paul talks about the value of being curious and inquisitive as a CEO and I feel that’s an innate characteristic. If you’re aiming to be a leader (and I mean this in a non-hierarchical sense), the more you can be in situations where you are learning and adapting to different environments and people, the better.
- There is a real shift to more collaborative leadership across the sector. This approach is demonstrated particularly brilliantly by infrastructure body leaders and has been brought to the fore in recent months as key organisations have worked together and influenced Government during the crisis. I recommend following Karl Wilding at NCVO, Vicky Browning at ACEVO, Debra Allcock Tyler at Directory for Social Change, Jane Ide at NAVCA and Caron Bradshaw at Charity Finance Group, to name a few.
I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to share – you can find me on Twitter.
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Beth Crackles 