Hello PPMA members and friends

Last week Karen Grave and our Joint Apprentice of The Year 2018 winner, Josh Pimm, were invited to join our good friends and supporters from The Guardian on a sailing event to Cowes. A brilliant day was had by all and back on dry land, we caught up with Josh to find out how life has changed for him since winning the competition and also what he got out of the trip and the impact this will have on his immediate professional development.

Josh what has life has been like since you became our joint Apprentice of the Year for 2018?

• Becoming joint apprentice of the year has been such a fantastic opportunity from the start, it has opened doors for me and allowed me to progress my career, it has given me confidence when working and tips that I use in everyday life. I went in not knowing what to expect, an open mind, but the experience has set me up and allowed me to progress faster than I ever thought I would.

What specifically did you learn from the Apprentice of the Year programme and how do you think that will help you in your current work?

• The primary lesson that I took away from the apprentice of the year programme is the subtilties of body language and how powerful it can be, to be able to effectively present it is not only what you say, but how you say it. But there are a host of other skills that have really been developed throughout the program, from leadership and team work to the importance of eye contact and most importantly having confidence. Whether that be with senior leaders in my council or working under pressure with my team towards a goal, remaining calm and confident is key to success.

What was your reaction when you were invited to spend a day with our Platinum Sponsor’s The Guardian?

• When I was first invited to attend The Guardian sponsors sailing day I was unsure whether it was a joke. The opportunity to go sailing in such a beautiful part of the county and the opportunity to meet many other hard working professionals was too good to be true. To my luck it was not a joke and an experience I will hold with me for a long time coming.

We hear you were a whizz at sailing?  What did you enjoy most about that experience in particular and the whole day?

• Having never been sailing before I was unsure what to expect, but I can say I now have a sailing bug and will definitely be getting back to the water and raising the sails. It can be so easy to get caught up in our hectic work lives that coming out on to the open water and the only sounds being the ruffling of the sails and the sea lapping at the boat can be quite a shock. The ability to sit down and chat with people was very refreshing, so much communication is done over email, but this never compares with a face to face talk. And finding out the projects that other professionals and teams are working on is truly exciting stuff.

What will you take back from the day in terms of your immediate development?

• I will need to go sailing more. But more importantly the value of networking, especially for young apprentices like myself networking can seem like a daunting and unnecessary affair. But that could not be further from the truth, it is the networks that are built that will allow you to better yourself, show off your skills to the world, further your career and most importantly create lasting relationships with other likeminded professionals. To bounce ideas in a safe environment and learn from the lessons of others, a helpful hand to guide you towards your goals.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to The Guardian for the fabulous invitation and it’s clear that both Karen and Josh had a valuable and enjoyable day!

Dear PPMA colleagues and friends,

You will remember from Caroline Nugent’s term as our President last year, how passionate she was about Women in Leadership and likewise the amazing President of SOLACE, Jo Miller has made Women in Leadership a key platform for her term. So this year, to further confirm our commitment to our partnership with The Guardian, we have decided to become a Sponsor of the Women In series. Caroline and I attended the launch of the series last year on behalf of PPMA and it’s really great to see how our involvement has developed since then.

What you’ll see as part of our sponsorship is the PPMA brand prominent in all the Women In content – online and printed. We will also have editorial content and targeted adverts across www.theguardian.com. I’m so thrilled with this as it further reinforces the work we have been doing on our own branding, whilst at the same time supporting the topic.

I was delighted to introduce a Women In event last Thursday in London. We had some incredible women working in healthcare come and join us from across the country. They were incredible as was the panel. The panel comprised:

• Chair: Alexandra Topping, Guardian news reporter
• Samantha Jones, former director of the new care models programme, NHS England. She now works independently supporting people to improve health and care services
• Dido Harding, Baroness Harding of Winscombe, chair, NHS Improvement
• Juliet Bauer, chief digital officer, NHS England
• Dr Aruna Stannard, specialty doctor in emergency medicine with an interest in frailty and geriatric emergency medicine
• Cecilia Anim, president, Royal College of Nursing

The panel question was: How can we make healthcare a better place for women to work?  And the discussion was fantastic. It was humbling, inspiring and supportive. Plenty of ideas were shared but I’m reflecting on the fact that many of the issues talked about are those that we as HR & OD professionals have been grappling with for a long time – much too long in fact. At the end the panel members spent some time in speed mentoring events with participants. For those of you who followed my live tweeting you will know that the event as measured in decibels – was a huge success.

Some of the questions have made me reflect again on something that has been on my mind since I attended the Green Park/MJ Summit on Diversity in mid-June. For those of you who aren’t aware, Green Park produce an annual Public Service Leadership 5,000 report looking at gender and ethnocultural diversity at top leadership roles in Local Government, Civil Service, UK Government fully or partly owned organisations, Healthcare and Russell Group Universities and Educational Regulator sectors.

The results obviously represent a subset of the protected characteristics set out in the Equalities Act 2010 – nevertheless it is a rigorous analysis of data that is available across those sectors. Over time, I hope we will see a much more comprehensive dataset and one that includes an analysis of talent pipelines.

Wherever you are on social media you can see that the volume around diversity is dialled up significantly – that is all to the good. BUT, we seem to be stalling on the progress that has been made in the last 10 years. I think there may be a number of reasons for this and it was a discussion that I had with a fantastic Doctor last Thursday that made me think yet again about our overall approach to diversity.

She had asked me why there were no men in the room.  This was both an obvious but an important question – especially as I had made the case in my introduction that Women In leaderhship isn’t just an issue for Women, it is clearly one for men.

The desire to create mutually supportive networks for groups who are underrepresented is, I think, a perfectly natural response to feelings of being ‘different’ and ‘being treated differently’.  Women supporting women is as understandable as men supporting men, LGBTQ supporting LGBTQ and so on.

I think these groups retain huge value. But in an of themselves, I increasingly feel they are isolating and that we need to put more focus and energy on ‘inclusion’. There are a few reasons for this:

• Diversity as a term is now confused with other meanings, over and above the protected characteristics. Rightly so, we increasingly talk about diversity in the context of social mobility, cognitive diversity, multigenerational workforces etc.
• We are potentially conflating the purpose of EqA with targets. The point about EqA legislation was to level the playing field so that the best people could flourish and not be artificially constrained.
• We don’t yet have a sufficient body of evidence that tells us what interventions works best and why. We do though have a body of private sector evidence that demonstrates that diversity at Board level sees an organisation doing much better financially than those organisations who aren’t.
• We are living in political times where diversity is an increasingly politically charged issue and in my experience that is not helpful at all.
• Whislt mutually supportive networks are helpful – I saw that with my own eyes last week – the reality is that everyone needs to be invested in the issue.
• Under the banner of inclusion, it is perhaps easier to see diversity as an issue of representation of our communities. That seems to be more helpful, but it needs more thought and evidence.
• We also have to reflect on the fact that this will take time. I was especially struck by the recent storm of protests around the appointment of the latest Board member of the Bank of England.  The initial howls of outrage that a man was appointed from a shortlist of 5, 4 of whom were women, completely overlooked the fact that of the 3 interview panel members, 2 where women.

I hope we can have more conversations about this and it may be that we devote our next PPMA quarterly supplement to the issue.

I’d be very keen to hear whether you are interested in that idea.  So please get in touch with me via social media or president@ppma.org.uk.  If you are using my email please copy Grace in on admin@ppma.org.uk.

Best

Dear PPMA colleagues and friends.

I hope you are enjoying this wonderful weather.  Last week the team was at the first of the two Public Sector Show conferences this year.  And, we had help from our friends at JobsGoPublic and The Guardian.

I had the pleasure of opening this year’s Workforce and Leadership workstream and invited all the days delagtes to attend as many sessions as they could – the attendance for all of the workstream sessions throughout the day was great. And this workstream is proving to be incredibly popular for our PSS colleagues overall.

Our second sessions were on Recruitment and Retention challenges caused by Brexit and the other very much focusing on Multigenerational Workforces. We had a couple of special guests in that session. Matt Burrows, our One to Watch 2018 joined us and Liv Harris, from Jobsgopublic joined us to walk participants through the research we jointly did and published at Annual Conference. We had some really interesting questions from the audience, particularly around the research. We’ll be looking at scoping the next part of that research over the summer, so if you have any comments you would like to make please let us know.

In the afternoon, I attended a panel chaired by Peter Cheese, CEO of CIPD.  I was was joined by our good friend Graeme McDonald, MD of SOLACE, the wonderful Deb McKenzie, People Director at Public Health England and Jessica Studdert from NLGN who brought a fascinating dimension to the discussion. I have had the pleasure of speaking on PSS panels with Graeme and Deb before, and I always enjoy the discussion with them and talking about the changes that have happened since our previous sessions.

One of the aims of our 4 way MOU is to find ways to help HR & OD colleagues gain experience across public sector as a whole. We already have some fantastic role models who have already demonstrated their capacity to do this. Deb is one of them and we’ll be hearing more from her in an upcoming article in People Management.

Grace also joined us for the day and manned our stand. We were chuffed with the number of people who came to visit and over 30 people signed up for our newsletter and we hope to see some more new members. Matt chipped in during the day and we also had support from the wonderful Stuart McKeown from The Guardian. We’re very grateful for our sponsors and their help in events like this.

It’s on to Manchester now for our next PSS. It’s being held on 20^th November at Manchester Central so keep your diary free!  Leatham and I will be with the PSS team over the next couple of weeks to work on our contribution to the day. So more to come in the next months.

Dear PPMA colleagues and friends.

So it’s that time of the year again where we gather and announce our PPMA Annual Excellence in People Management Awards shortlists!  Sponsors, Judges, PPMA Policy Board members and entrants gathered at The Guardian Offices in London to hear who had been shortlisted.

It’s always an important time for reflection and acknowledgment for all the great work being done by HR & OD professionals.  Karen, our VP commented on how thrilled PPMA Policy Board was to see the range of entries this year and how inspiring it is to see entrants from Local and Central Government, Blue Light and Health.  Our members will learn so much from these organisations – sharing best practice is the quickest – and most cost effective way – for our organisations to learn.

You can see all of the shortlisted entrants in the slide presentation below from the day:

We are so looking forward to seeing all of our shortlisted entrants at our Annual Gala Dinner on Thursday April 19^th at Hilton Gateshead, when the winners will be announced. Please don’t forget to book your dinner places – our booking page is here.  We hope you will also join us for conference itself – we have a fantastic, packed agenda with great speakers.  Check out our conference pages