Secret Musings of a Change Agent 7 - Shefali Kapoor
What makes ordinary people great at making change happen? What characteristics do they share? What path have they followed? What’s their attitude to failure? And what advice would they give to others? I’m on a mission to understand more. Join me as I delve deeper in the sixth in my blog series to help us all understand how we build change capacity for the future.
Shefali Kapoor is Head of Neighbourhoods and one of the most senior BAME officers within Manchester City Council. She’s grounded, a grafter, and when she makes up her mind she’s going to do something, she’s not afraid to put in the graft to make it happen. Daughter of first generation immigrants, her Dad has clearly been a big source of inspiration to Shefali. Her mum arrived from India when she was 9 with her family and dad came over in his early 20’s with his three brothers. Over the years they have had to change, adapt and grow to build a good life for their three children. Shefali talks of growing up seeing them strive for what they wanted and putting in the hard work to get it and how this has unconsciously ingrained itself in how she approaches life herself.
Shefali told me a story about how her Dad insists on going to Lidl most days and how she’d thought it was his obsession with going to the supermarket until she discovered that he’s going there to make a contribution to the food bank each time. He doesn’t tell anyone. He just quietly gets on with it. And this is absolutely a quality I’ve seen working with Shefali over the last 10 years or so. She doesn’t shout about her achievements, she’s not motivated by status or power, she has strong values and a solid focus on doing the right things for the people of Manchester. Like her dad, she quietly gets on with it. Maybe this is down to what her dad taught her “the only person you can rely on is yourself” and this fierce independence has ingrained itself in Shefali’s psyche.
“The only person you can rely on is yourself.”
With a lifelong passion for people and places, Shefali has always been interested in how they connect and interact. This passion led to her taking a degree in Urban Studies but a degree with little practical experience in the field meant getting a related job straight out of university was almost impossible. Shefali began her professional career at Railtrack in 1998 working in the performance team. She successfully progressed internally until a 2004 restructure gave her the opportunity to opt for redundancy which she saw as her chance to “do what I really wanted to do”. She soon got a new job as a Regeneration Assistant in a neighbouring council. A job she thought would give her what she was looking for but…… “I hated it” said Shefali “it was an example of how not to manage a team”. Shefali, along with other members of her team, experienced bullying and having started in her new role in July, she was already looking for her next job by September.
This personal experience of bullying and poor workplace culture taught Shefali the importance of good clear management, of looking out for your staff and investing time in them so they can be their best selves.
Invest in People
Early experiences of workplace bullying taught Shefali the importance of looking out for staff so they can be their best selves.
Shefali also spoke of her experiences of racism over the years. Of feeling ground down by constantly having to explain why something is racist. And of her journey from feeling like she needed to “keep her head down” if she wanted to progress to a growing confidence and self-assurance to speak out and challenge when she feels uncomfortable. Shefali talked about how sometimes, what comes across as racist can actually come from a place of good intention but how it’s carried through feeling clunky and clumsy and crucially for Shefali, not the way we bring communities together.
Shefali’s way out from the job she hated was an advert for a Regeneration Officer in Manchester. “If there was one place in the North West to work in regen in the mid 00s it was Manchester - the regeneration of Hulme and East Manchester, the re-imagining of the city centre after the 1996 IRA bomb and the Commonwealth Games”, said Shefali. Shefali got the job and as she says “the rest is history”. She’s been working in Manchester ever since, gradually and modestly working her way up through the ranks and notably, not afraid to step out of regeneration into the corporate centre en route to her current role to get more rounded and varied experience.
People and Places
Shefali is driven by her passion for people and places and how they connect.
The passion for people and places that brought Shefali into local government continues to burn brightly and underpins everything that she does. So what has she learned along the way? Well, first up, Shefali’s clear she doesn’t like to think of failures, rather lessons learned. She reflects that when things haven’t gone the way she’d intended it’s usually because of one of two things. Either, she’s not taken the time to really listen to other people, to understand their motivations and explore differences so that they can go forward together, or, she’s lacked the experience and confidence to challenge when someone has said she has to do something in a particular way and she doesn’t agree.
She goes on to reflect that while the confidence to challenge has come with experience, if she could take herself back, she would have done the same things at the time because she just didn’t have the confidence to speak up. This makes me think about how we support aspiring leaders to develop. How we support them to develop that confidence earlier in their careers and how we create the psychological safety for people like the younger version of Shefali to speak up and help us get things right for more of the time.
Shefali describes her change super power as having a strong vision and sticking to it. Of note however the adaptation and growth that Shefali started by talking about emerges as she goes on to talk about how that vision is realised - and in fact, this is the advice to aspiring change agents that she ends our conversation with. “You have to listen, you have to hear the people around you”, says Shefali, “it can’t be ‘this is the way it’s going to be’. It’s important to listen to your gut but you have to balance this by tuning into each situation and what people are telling you”.
It was great catching up with Shefali. Her mum and dad must be hugely proud of her and I’ve a feeling that if I ever met her Dad, I’d feel like I already knew him because the qualities that Shefali talks of admiring in him are the qualities that I see in Shefali. If you enjoyed this blog and would like to understand more about what makes a great change agent so we can learn together how to build capacity for the future, check out my blog series for more “Secret Musings of a Change Agent”.
