Outstanding Leadership

Sir Nicholas Young 1

Awards | Tania Mason

Tags: Leadership and strategy | Charity Awards

The chief executive of the British Red Cross is the judges’ choice for the 2011 Outstanding Leadership Award.  Tania Mason finds out why.

The first thing you notice when you walk into Sir Nicholas Young’s office at the British Red Cross headquarters in the City is the proliferation of knick-knacks and mementoes that adorn his desk and fill a large wall cabinet. These are gifts from people in countries the world over, presented to Sir Nicholas on his many visits to war zones, disaster areas and other places where the Red Cross carries out its vital work. He keeps these trinkets on permanent display for two reasons.  First, they are a constant reminder that while he is safely back in London, the people he met in Haiti or Darfur or Palestine are still rebuilding their lives or learning to cope with their losses or struggling to overcome really difficult problems. And second, he admits candidly, is that “if the people who have given me gifts come to see me in London, they generally expect to see I still have it!”

This combination of genuine empathy, disarming honesty and a practical, non-nonsense approach seems to characterise Sir Nicholas’s leadership style. Leading is something that has always come naturally to him – he was a prefect at school and captained the cricket team, and he admits he enjoys the responsibility and the challenge of leadership. “I’ve always been a bit noisy,” he grins.

Indeed, he was well on his way to a top-flight career in commercial law when he decided to switch direction completely, taking a pay cut of about two-thirds and joining the voluntary sector.  

“My partners thought I was completely bonkers. I think they imagined I was going to go off and knit my own open-toed sandals,” he laughs. “From their perspective it was a very odd decision – and also from the point of view of people in the voluntary sector.  At that time almost no-one left a good job in the private sector to go to a charity.”

But commercial law wasn’t fulfilling him – he was bored by the excruciating detail and frustrated by the fact that everything he did was at his clients’ bidding.  As time went by he realised that the community work he did in his spare time gave him much more opportunity to make a difference than the law did. So one day he telephoned his nearest charity, which happened to be the Sue Ryder Foundation in Suffolk, and the next day found himself ensconced in a five-hour meeting with Lady Ryder in her tiny office within the local care home. That was his ‘road to Damascus’ moment. He says: “I drove home that summer night through the Suffolk countryside with a big red sun in the sky, and I just had this feeling that I’d been picked up and put down in the right place.”

So he began giving the charity free legal advice and volunteering in other ways, and before long Lady Ryder was badgering him to join the charity as an employee – not as an in-house lawyer or even with any specific job title, just “as a general assistant to Lady Ryder, doing whatever turned up”. And after six more months of “fretting” he finally took the plunge, and spent the next five years turning dilapidated stately homes into Sue Ryder care homes.

Making a difference

The desire to make a difference is in the Young family DNA – his dad was heavily involved in his local church and his mum was a Brown Owl and a Girl Guide commissioner. “I have always had an urge to make things better,” says Young. “And I think that’s the huge privilege that we have in the voluntary sector, to be able to do that. So many people do jobs that are just jobs.”

After Sue Ryder came his first spell at the Red Cross, five years as UK operations director, and then in 1995 he was lured to Cancer Support (now Macmillan Cancer Support) as chief executive.  It’s a time he remembers fondly, partly because it was a nice change to be able to focus on one thing – cancer – instead of the myriad issues that the Red Cross tackles, and partly because it was such a “wonderfully happy organisation”.

Also it was something of a golden era for the charity, as Young recalls: “We pulled off a stroke early on in my time there.  It was 1997, coming up to the election that swept Tony Blair into power. About three or four months before the election we gathered six of the country’s top cancer specialists in a room with the shadow Labour health team and bombarded them with issues around cancer.  Cancer was in a mess then – it was a real postcode lottery. At that meeting we persuaded them to adopt cancer as their number one health priority - they really saw the importance of it, and it meant we were able, with the new government, to transform cancer services over the next few years.

“It was a great time, we were very popular with Alan Milburn and the Labour government, and we raised lots of money.” In 2000 Young was rewarded for this work with a knighthood for services to cancer care.

But while Macmillan had gone from strength to strength, during the same period the Red Cross had lurched into a financial and organisational crisis.  A major restructuring started three or four years earlier had run into difficulties, and a new management accounting system had failed, resulting in a deficit of something like £14m. Morale had collapsed and staff confidence in the management and trustees had hit rock-bottom.  In 2001 the board contacted Sir Nicholas and asked him to return as CEO to sort it out.

And sort it out he did.  The pride is evident in his voice when he talks about the Red Cross today: “It’s a totally different place - a bright, buzzy confident organisation,” he says.  The charity’s financial position is fully restored and Sir Nick has a rule about spending money. “If I’m doubtful about some proposed expenditure, I sit down and work out how many little old ladies and men with collecting tins it will take to collect that much money. And then I imagine them all in a lecture room and I’m on stage and I have to tell them how I’m going to spend that money.  It’s an incredibly good test that I have used often to good effect over the years.”

Relentless optimist

Young describes himself as a “relentless optimist” and tries hard to spread a sense of optimism throughout the organisation. “I do think it’s a very important part of my job to inspire and to unlock the passion in other people. That’s really key, to make people feel as excited about the job as I am.”  

One manifestation of this is his insistence on travelling extensively to see the work of staff and volunteers first-hand.  He explains: “We’re often sending people into pretty dangerous, horrible situations where they are doing really difficult work. I think it’s very important that I should experience those conditions for myself.  Also, you can read two dozen reports and not really get the understanding of a situation that comes in two days in the field.

“Another really important part of my job is to bring back that understanding and those stories here, to the media and the giving public and the other people within the organisation.

“And, entirely selfishly, it keeps my motivation up. When you’re working with people who are going through a really bad time, they give you much more than you give them. People’s resilience and bravery, their capacity to care for each other, is astonishing.”

He employs other tactics too, to ensure he is seen as approachable: “I make a point of making a fool of myself as often as possible, I do spots of line dancing and sing at karaoke and dress up in ridiculous costumes at fundraising events. Last Red Cross Week we set up a village fete in the square outside, and I was challenged to sing.  In the end we had 300 people singing along to ‘Hey Jude’, it was wonderful.”

Unique vantage point

As leader of the world’s most recognisable relief agency, Sir Nicholas has a unique vantage point of the world’s most tragic and sorrowful situations.  Yet he literally brims with enthusiasm and energy and optimism – does he ever get frustrated or depressed by the situations he encounters?

“It does get frustrating that you can never do enough. Whatever we do it always feels like a drop in the ocean, but that just seems to motivate me to get up and do more.  You do sometimes feel overwhelmed.  The 2004 tsunami was scary, that was so big and overwhelming you felt you couldn’t do anything like enough.  But I don’t get disheartened by it – at least we can do something about it. How much more depressing it would be just to hear about it on the news and be able to do nothing -because you’re tied up doing boring takeovers and mergers!

“I do suffer from self-doubt but I keep those to myself. I worry about stuff a lot, but I don’t find that helps me deal with problems. Sleeping on it helps much more, I’m definitely a morning person.”

He also admits to some frustration at the impotence of governments, their apparent inability to implement policies that can genuinely improve things for ordinary people in bad situations. But he is not tempted by politics himself. “It doesn’t seem a terribly honest world. Also I sense politicians are continually obstructed by the constraints and compromises in terms of what can be achieved.  I would much rather be on the ground really making a difference there.”

Responsibilities to the wider sector

Working up to 80 hours a week in the day job doesn’t leave much room for extra-curricular activities, but Sir Nick is mindful of his responsibilities to the wider sector. During his career he has sat on various sector bodies and government advisory panels; he chairs a small charity that provides bursaries to the children and grandchildren of poor Italian farming families to come to England to earn English – a result of his father’s experiences in the Second World War – and he mentors others in the sector. He also makes time to advise people from other sectors who want to pursue careers in civil society.

Still, he doesn’t regret having been a lawyer, because it taught him one great skill that he still uses every day: “The most important thing you are taught as a trainee lawyer is how to work out what the question is. Once you’ve worked out what the question is, usually the answer is fairly obvious and straightforward.”  

He admits that when he first joined the charity sector he found the decision-making processes frustrating, but now he welcomes the challenge of making decisions by consultation and consensus.
 
“In charities there is a tremendous sense of shared ownership and passion, and that’s a pearl beyond price really. And if you are going to respect that and carry people with you through your journey of developing an organisation or solving a problem, it’s great if you can take people with you because it means you’re so much stronger in what you do. I think it’s a great discipline for a leader to make sure everybody’s on the train before it leaves the platform.”

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Directory: British Red Cross | Disasters Emergency Committee | GuideStar | Macmillan | National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) | Office of the Third Sector | Sue Ryder
Who's Who: Sir Nicholas Young