In the third of our series of blogs by existing senior leaders, Martin Houghton-Brown, CEO of St John Ambulance, tells us about his path to leadership and advice to aspiring leaders.
1. To set the scene, can you give us an overview of your career to date?
When I was starting out working with young people and communities, which I did for the first twelve years of my career, I learned so much about the nuts and bolts of how things work. Literally, I set out the chairs, unblocked the toilets and opened up and closed down the community centre. I learned about buildings, people, finances, just how organisations work. I will never forget when the ceiling fell in on the women’s institute meeting, fortunately they had gone into the kitchen for cake when it came down! If nothing else I learned how often cake can save the day! I learned so much and I value every bit of that, all my leadership decisions now, are made with the people who live in the community in mind, how will it affect the people who live and breathe this decision every day.
I registered my first charity when I was 20, a club I set up to provide holiday clubs for kids in what we then called inner cities, and I have been leading smaller and larger charities ever since. Fundamentally I enjoy the excitement and challenge of leading others, it’s a real honour.
I have had the honour of leading in lots of contexts, currently as CEO of St John Ambulance and as the volunteer Trustee Chair of Centre for Youth Impact. But I so enjoyed all my assignments, chairing the National Board of YMCA, Chief Exec of Missing People and then Depaul UK with the incredible Nightstop programme. I learned so much about leadership at The Children’s Society and through the many other charities I have worked and volunteered in over the years.
2. Have you always wanted to be a senior leader?
Leading is hard work. Leading small organisations is hard work because there are fewer people to do the work and leading in large organisations is hard work because the many people who you have responsibility for magnify the demands and impact of every decision you make. I always enjoyed leading and so I realised quite early on, ‘If all leadership is hard work, why not work just as hard and make the biggest difference you can.’ I set out with an ambition to lead nationally and use my energy to make that national impact. Not everyone approved of my ambition, but I feel comfortable looking back and realising that I made a difference sometimes in a small way and sometimes in a bigger way at every stage of my leadership journey.
3. Did you encounter any barriers on your path to senior leadership and, if so, how did you overcome them?
I have faced two big barriers to succeeding as a leader. The first was that I started my career in the church at a time when the majority of churches were anti-gay. I found the whole idea of coming out and being gay very difficult. To be honest I wanted to be straight, and my first marriage and three amazing children made a really good go at it. But the truth is you can’t change who you are. I was always gay and would always have ended up having to live with the reality of that. Sadly, however I hadn’t come to terms with it when I was outed for ‘having homosexual thoughts’, dismissed from my church job and sent packing with so called friends and colleagues ‘sending me to Coventry’ (literally – I ended up camping in the spare room of a kind vicar friend of mine in Coventry). What happened to me was wrong and really broke me. My career and my community work were in ruins. I had lost my house, my job, my hopes and dreams. I had nothing except my wife and children and one good friend who stood by me.
I learned so much from this experience, and probably the most important lesson for my life and one that I would offer to any aspiring leader: You are never your career. Your career or vocation or whatever you want to call it does not define you. Your inner passion, your decisions about what next and your belief in yourself define you. I got started again at 32 with no CV to speak of and a job handing out baskets at Sainsburys. From there I rebuilt, little by little I became a better leader, not worrying about failure, because I had already failed and survived so I just kept on going. I made decision after decision to try something more, to have a go, to build. I didn’t look back, I just kept on looking forward and seeking the next opportunity. Until just four years later when I was appointed Deputy Director in a regional charity in Yorkshire.
There is one other barrier to leadership which most of us face and that is our own resilience or lack of it. The more senior you get the more muck people throw at you. People who don’t know you say horrid things about you and quite frankly it hurts. So I invest in my resilience, I have a therapist, a coach and a mentor and together they provide me with thinking space, a place to be emotional and a place to say what I really think! Leaders need to invest in their resilience if they are to lead others because it will not all be easy.
4. How would you describe a ‘leader’, and has this changed throughout your time in the sector?
This is easy. Imagine you go for a walk to somewhere special, and its special because when you get there you will have achieved something positive. If you get there and you arrive on your own, you are just an explorer, and nothing wrong with that. If you arrive and you have companions who have joined you on that trek and found the joys of the new destination with you, congratulations, you are a leader.
People join you on that journey for all kinds of reasons. It does seem though that being kind, caring, enthusiastic, energetic and thoughtful goes a long way to helping people enjoy the discovery with you. In the beginning a lot of people followed me because I had bags of energy and communicated with lots of passion. But now, I hope I still have some of that, but I find as I climb bigger mountains, go on bigger adventures I need more than charisma to get me there.
In fact now I would say the better I plan and resource the journey the more people come with me. I try and work out who is going to find the journey hard and why? I think about who will need help, who will get tired on the way and who will need encouragement.
I also try really hard to be clear about where I am going. Because it turns out that not everyone who is around you really wants to come with you and sometimes you have to confront that and have difficult conversations about the journey ahead and who is really up for it. That’s hard but it’s a critical leadership skill.
5. What advice would you give to aspiring and developing charity leaders today?
Leadership is like any skill. Practice for ten thousand hours and you will be good at it. Practice means you have to look at each leadership act you make and reflect, how was that, how could it have been better? None of us are born leaders, some are told they are and that boosts their confidence to make a grab for leadership but its not true. We are all formed and mainly formed by practice.
If you haven’t already, start looking at leaders you admire and work out what you could do to be more like them. I am a mix of my Mum and Dad, my absolute hero Maeve, an off the wall Aussie I once met and my old Finance Director who showed such wisdom about finance and resources. And then a jumble of the best bits of leaders I know now from leaders I once led to people I work with now like who lead their own organisations with such courage and hard work.
Finally, some people will offend you, hurt you, mess you around, overlook you, ignore you, tell someone else that your great idea was theirs, get promoted over you, turn their back on you and in general make life difficult for you. If you can, with dignity and grace, ignore their bad behaviour and still be magnificent, you will enjoy leadership. Because life is full of leaders who got stuck fighting battles that are not worth it. The lesson I learned from losing everything is simply this. If you don’t like me or want me for who I am, no problem, I will go and practice being the best I can be somewhere else. Thankfully St John still want me so I get to keep practicing being a leader, here, making a difference as best I can for at least today. Enjoy your leadership journey and keep on being the best version of you, you can be.