Secret Musings of a Change Agent - It's all about relationships
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 my new blog series to help us all understand how we build change capacity for the future. In this post, I talk to Vicky Charles from Greater Manchester.
Vicky Charles is as pragmatic as they come. Down to earth, modest, straight talking, funny and incredibly talented when it comes to making change happen. She’s a big thinker who sees the big picture and has an unusual talent of being able to navigate complexity to focus in on the things that are going to make a practical difference. She has a passion for coaching, plays the ukulele and practices Buddhist meditation.
Vicky has a hidden talent for playing the ukelele
I met Vicky through a colleague who’d met us separately and told us both, you two should meet. So we did, over a brew. And there began a beautiful relationship.
Vicky and I share a passion for coaching and have worked together to ensure colleagues could access a coaching offer through staff volunteers. We also designed and ran a pilot race equalities reverse mentoring programme and had the absolute joy of working together providing change management capacity across a system wide change programme to enable a strengths based approach. Neither of us are averse to a bit of good trouble and enjoy the challenge of connecting the front line experience of teams in delivering change into the system to affect the drivers that help or hinder change happening.
I relished the opportunity to delve deeper with Vicky. Her natural modesty means she doesn’t talk about herself too much so when she agreed to feature in my blog series, it felt like a great opportunity to have a good rummage!
Vicky’s journey to becoming an ordinary person who is really great at making change happen is a mix of intention and evolution. Her experience of working in public services enabled her to see that the system can let people down which created a desire to change things. Vicky talks of how she puts herself in situations where change is happening and where people are trying to improve stuff.
This desire to want to be where change is happening took her into the probation service before moving to work for the local council. The opportunity came up to work on Challenger, a multi agency programme tackling organised crime and modern slavery. It was here that the evolutionary part of Vicky’s journey really took hold. It was the first time in her career where she felt in a position to really make change happen because all the ducks were in a row from national through to ground level: the political will; a recognition that these are not just police issues; a shared desire across sectors to tackle the problem; the context of public sector reform, and; the right people with a problem solving approach and a coaching culture where there was freedom to innovate.
Vicky describes getting to work on Challenger as being in the right place at the right time but I rather suspect that the conversations she had with some colleagues already involved led them to see how Vicky’s talents would be a real addition to the team. I’ve seen Vicky in action many times and she’s great at connecting with the right people to get stuff moving. Her self-confessed intolerance for circular conversations makes me smile as I’ve witnessed it first hand. She gets a look on her face and you know she’s either going to dis-engage if it’s something that doesn’t matter that much or she’s going to swing into action and channel the inner Vicky that gets things moving if it’s something she cares about.
“When you’re in the presence of greatness, you should button your lip and listen.”
When I ask Vicky about failures she’s learned from, she’s quick to tell me that she doesn’t tend to label things as failures - rather as things that have gone wrong. And usually because there’s someone else she could have spoken to who could have given her another part of the picture. Vicky has a keen focus on engagement and a sharp self-awareness that enables her to tune into her intuition. She’s acutely aware that in any change, we all have blind spots and “when you’re in the presence of greatness, you should button your lip and listen”!
In her personal life, Vicky has experienced lots of change from a young age and has worked her way through some big tough personal challenges. The gift that she has given herself by facing her challenges is a sense of fearlessness - bring it on. She’s very comfortable with personal change and has a deep understanding of people that enables her to support and enable them to work through challenges and change too. One of the things that her practice in Buddhist meditation has given her is learning not to be too attached to herself so that she is able to take criticism as a positive - it’s all grist to the mill for Vicky.
Grist to the mill
Vicky’s practice in Buddhist meditation has taught her to take criticism as a positive
I asked Vicky who stands out in influencing her journey to becoming great at making change happen. As she describes her mum as a huge innovator who set up the first national step-family network, a counselling and psychotherapy service and a resettlement programme for prisoners, you feel the pride and respect that she has for her. Vicky talks about how she’s always been blessed with quality colleagues and picks out two individuals as notable influences: The first being a strong visionary leader who sees how things need to be, is solutions focused and cares about people, and; the second who she describes as having a huge ability to knit things together and a talent for spotting gaps.
Vicky’s change super power is her ability to get to the heart of the matter quickly. And actually, this comes back to her passion for coaching. She “seeks first to understand” and fundamentally that’s how Vicky approaches people and life.
“It’s all about relationships.”
Vicky’s advice to an aspiring change agent would be “it’s all about relationships”. Focus on your relationships and build consensus. And she adds, ”listen to your gut and have the inner confidence to act on what it’s telling you”.
I loved getting to have a rummage around the inner workings of Vicky’s brain to better understand what makes her great at making change happen. 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” About Kath's new blog series — Kath Smythe Collective
