49 UK People and Culture Leaders to Follow in 2026

The people and culture leaders worth paying attention to in 2026 have mostly stopped talking about culture in the abstract. They talk about process instead. How a grievance is actually handled, how parental leave is written, what a manager is quietly rewarded for when nobody is watching.

That shift is the reason this list exists. Culture is decided in those places, not in the values statement, and the forty nine people below are all working somewhere in that gap between what an organisation says about itself and what it feels like to work there on a Tuesday afternoon.

They come from very different places. Some run people functions at banks, retailers and broadcasters employing tens of thousands. Some lead workforce and culture inside NHS trusts, universities, councils, police forces and government departments. Others are consultants, authors and academics who spend their time helping everyone else think more clearly.

This is a group worth knowing rather than a league table, and the order carries no meaning. If you lead a people team, a leadership team or an organisation, a handful of these voices in your feed will be more useful than another management book.

1. Perry Timms

Founder and Chief Energy Officer, PTHR

Perry Timms runs PTHR, a small UK consultancy with a B Corp certification and a four day week, which is a useful signal that he tests his ideas on his own business before recommending them to anyone else. He has been named on HR Magazine's HR Most Influential Thinkers list five times, took the number one spot in 2022, and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2023.

He is the author of The Energized Workplace, published by Kogan Page, which argues that most organisational design still assumes people have infinite capacity. If you are trying to make a case for redesigning work rather than adding another wellbeing benefit, his writing gives you the language for it.

2. Mairéad Nayager

Chief People Officer, Unilever

Mairéad Nayager leads the people function at Unilever from the company's London head office, across a workforce spread over more than a hundred countries. She signs the People and Organisation section of Unilever's annual report, which is a rarer level of public ownership than most people functions take on.

Her Play to Win people strategy is set out in the 2025 annual report and rests on three planks: a winning culture, being uncompromising on talent, and what Unilever calls a next wave organisation. It includes four new company behaviours and a talent accelerator. It is worth reading as a published example of a people strategy with its neck on the line.

3. Tiger de Souza MBE

Chief People and Culture Officer, Macmillan Cancer Support

Tiger de Souza joined Macmillan Cancer Support in July 2026 after people leadership roles at Samaritans and the National Trust, so his experience sits squarely in organisations that run on volunteers as much as employees. He was awarded an MBE in 2020 for services to volunteering.

He has appeared in HR Magazine's top ten most influential practitioners list for three consecutive years and was named one of the d&i Leaders Top 100 Inspirational Leaders in 2025. Follow him if you work anywhere that has to hold paid staff and volunteers inside one culture, which is harder than most organisations admit.

4. Charlotte Eaton

Chief People Officer, Arm

Charlotte Eaton oversees people, workplace and sustainability strategy at Arm, the Cambridge semiconductor company whose designs sit inside most of the world's phones. She came to it from the chief people officer role at OVO, the UK energy company, so she has run people work through two very different kinds of scale.

In May 2025 she created and launched Arm's 10x Mindset culture framework across more than nine thousand employees, and embedded it in hiring, onboarding and performance rather than leaving it as a poster. She was selected for the CIPD HR30 in 2026. Her work is a good case study in making a culture framework survive contact with process.

5. Sharon Doherty

Chief People and Places Officer, Lloyds Banking Group

Sharon Doherty holds a combined people and places brief at Lloyds Banking Group, covering more than sixty thousand colleagues. Putting people and property under one leader is a deliberate choice, and it means questions about how work happens and where it happens get answered by the same person.

She sits on the board of the Financial Services Skills Commission, the industry body working on skills shortages across UK financial services. That combination, a very large employer plus a sector skills body, makes her worth following if you are thinking about workforce planning beyond your own organisation's walls.

6. Lucy Adams

Chief Executive Officer, Disruptive HR

Lucy Adams was HR Director at the BBC before founding Disruptive HR, and that combination matters. She has had to run a people function through public scrutiny, and she now spends her time arguing that most of the standard HR toolkit was built for a workplace that no longer exists.

Her book HR Disrupted sets out the EACH model, which asks organisations to treat employees as adults, consumers and human beings. It is a simple frame that turns out to be uncomfortably demanding when you apply it to a real performance review process. Read her if your people team keeps polishing processes nobody likes.

7. Crystal Akass

Chief People Officer, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust

Crystal Akass has been Chief People Officer at Guy's and St Thomas' since August 2024, one of the largest NHS foundation trusts in the country. Before the NHS she spent eighteen years in the Civil Service, reaching HR Director at the Cabinet Office and Director of People at the Department for Work and Pensions.

DWP employs around eighty thousand people, so she has run people work at genuinely national scale in two different public systems. That is a useful vantage point if you are wrestling with how to make a people strategy land across dozens of sites and professions at once.

8. Danielle Harmer

Chief People Officer, Aviva

Danielle Harmer is Chief People Officer at Aviva and one of the most consistently recognised practitioners in UK HR. She was recognised seven times on HR Magazine's most influential practitioners list between 2016 and 2024, and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2025.

She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, a founding Court Member of the Worshipful Company of Human Resource Professionals and a former Master of that company. She also holds an external appointment with the Wellcome Trust. Sustained recognition over nearly a decade is a different signal from a single good year.

9. Rob Baker

Founder and Chief Positive Deviant, Tailored Thinking

Rob Baker founded Tailored Thinking, a certified B Corporation based in the north east, and works on job crafting: the idea that people can reshape parts of their own role rather than waiting for a restructure to do it for them. The premise is that most people have more room to reshape their own work than they think, and that nobody ever tells them so.

His book Personalization at Work, published by Kogan Page, was shortlisted in the HR and management category at the 2021 Business Book Awards. He also runs an annual Job Crafting Challenge. If retention is your problem and you have already tried pay and perks, his work points at the part of the job people actually spend their day inside.

10. Hayley Tatum MBE

Chief People Officer, Marks and Spencer

Hayley Tatum is Chief People Officer at Marks and Spencer, with more than thirty years in UK retail behind her including senior people roles at Tesco and ASDA. Retail people leadership is a distinct discipline, built around large frontline workforces, shift patterns and very thin margins for error.

She is a trustee of GroceryAid and of the pregnancy and baby loss charity Tommy's, and was awarded an MBE for services to the charity sector. Follow her if your workforce is mostly people who are not sitting at a desk, which is the majority of the UK workforce and a minority of the HR conversation.

11. Damian McGuinness

Chief People Officer, King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Damian McGuinness took up the Chief People Officer role at King's College Hospital in September 2025, having previously held the same post at London Ambulance Service. Emergency services and acute hospitals are among the hardest environments in which to do people work well, because the pressure never lets up.

In 2024 he was named People Leader of the Year by the Healthcare People Management Association, and in the same year his London Ambulance people and culture team won Team of the Year. Individual and team recognition together is a better signal than either one on its own.

12. Katie Obi

Chief People Officer, OneAdvanced

Katie Obi is Chief People Officer at OneAdvanced, the British software company whose products sit behind NHS 111, parts of the UK legal sector and social housing. She was previously chief people officer at the recruitment technology scaleup Beamery, so she has built people functions at two very different stages of growth.

She was selected for the CIPD HR30 in 2026. Under her leadership OneAdvanced topped the Financial Times and Statista Europe's Best Employers 2025 list, and the company reports that an internal AI assistant she introduced cut the time colleagues spend searching for knowledge from around five hours to five minutes. That is a rare example of an AI people project attached to a number.

13. Neil Morrison

Director of Human Resources, Severn Trent

Neil Morrison is Director of Human Resources at Severn Trent and one of the more outspoken people leaders in UK industry. He announced the company's move to up to forty six weeks of fully paid maternity and adoption leave, believed to be a first for a UK water and waste company.

Severn Trent also names him as its lead for Derbyshire, and lists the Youth Futures Foundation among his external appointments. He is a good follow if you want to see a people leader argue publicly for a policy change and then have to live with the cost of it.

14. Dr Grace Lordan

Founding Director, The Inclusion Initiative, London School of Economics

Grace Lordan is an Associate Professor at LSE and the founding director of The Inclusion Initiative, a research centre that applies behavioural science to the problem of building genuinely inclusive workplaces. She is also the author of Think Big.

What makes her useful to practitioners is the discipline of the underlying method. The Inclusion Initiative treats inclusion as something you can measure and test rather than something you assert, which is exactly what most inclusion work in organisations is missing.

15. Ade Rawcliffe

Chief People and Inclusion Officer, ITV

Ade Rawcliffe sits on ITV's group executive committee with a brief covering people and inclusion. ITV credits her with the eighty million pound Diversity Commissioning Fund and the Amplify leadership programmes, which put money and career structure behind a commitment rather than a statement.

She is a trustee of BAFTA and chairs its Learning, Inclusion and Talent Committee. Broadcasting is an industry where who gets hired shapes what the country sees, so people work there has an unusually visible downstream effect.

16. Helen Pickles

Chief People Officer, HM Revenue and Customs

Helen Pickles became Chief People Officer at HMRC in January 2025, leading people work for one of the largest employers in the UK public sector. She is based in Leeds and is a visible advocate for Civil Service careers built outside London.

She is also one of HMRC's Commissioners, the Crown-appointed office holders established under the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005, and sits on the department's Nominations, Reform and Modernisation, and Closing the Tax Gap committees. That is a genuine governance seat rather than an advisory one.

17. Catarina Abrantes

Group Chief People Officer, Starling Bank

Catarina Abrantes leads the people function at Starling Bank, where the brief is described as embedding a high performance, values led culture. She joined from the UK payments company Dojo, so her experience is in businesses that grew quickly under regulatory scrutiny.

In January 2026 she was the billed headline speaker at a People Leaders Connect fireside session in London on leading people in high growth, highly regulated organisations. That combination of speed and regulation is one of the harder cultural problems, and there are not many people who have done it twice.

18. Helen Tupper

Chief Executive Officer, Amazing If

Helen Tupper co-founded Amazing If with Sarah Ellis, and the company exists to make what they call squiggly careers work better for everyone. The premise is that the career ladder stopped being the default a long time ago, but most organisations still design development as if it had not.

She and Sarah Ellis co-wrote The Squiggly Career, published by Portfolio Penguin, which the publisher describes as a number one Sunday Times business bestseller. Her work is practical rather than theoretical, and it is aimed at the person having the career conversation as much as the organisation running it.

19. Maria Kokkinou

Group Chief People Officer, NatWest Group

Maria Kokkinou joined NatWest Group as Group Chief People Officer in March 2025, taking on the people brief for one of the largest banks in the UK. She sits on the executive management team, which puts the function in the room where capital and strategy decisions are made.

She represents NatWest on the board of the Financial Services Skills Commission. Between that and her LSE background, she is a useful follow if you are interested in how a large regulated employer thinks about skills as an industry-level problem rather than a hiring problem.

20. Rachel Gidman

Executive Director of People and Culture, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board

Rachel Gidman has led people and culture at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board since March 2021, one of the largest NHS organisations in Wales. Her board record includes designing and delivering the workforce and organisational development plan for the Dragon's Heart Hospital, the emergency facility built inside the Principality Stadium.

She also leads culture initiatives including Amplify 2025 and the health board's Apprenticeship Academy. Standing up a workforce plan for a field hospital in weeks is the kind of experience that changes what someone thinks is possible in normal times.

21. David Liddle

Chief Executive Officer, The TCM Group

David Liddle founded The TCM Group in 2001 to change how organisations handle conflict, grievance and culture, and he still leads it. He is the creator of the Resolution Framework, an alternative to traditional disciplinary and grievance procedures, and the author of three Kogan Page books: Managing Conflict, Transformational Culture and People and Culture.

In 2026 he was inducted into HR Magazine's HR Most Influential Hall of Fame, having topped its thinkers list in 2025. If your organisation runs formal processes that reliably generate more damage than resolution, his work is the most direct challenge to that model in the UK.

22. Jo Butler

Chief People Officer, Heathrow

Jo Butler joined Heathrow as Chief People Officer in January 2025, arriving from chief people officer roles at ASOS and Mitie. An airport is an unusual people challenge because tens of thousands of workers on the site are employed by other companies entirely.

Heathrow records that she has been featured in the Financial Times list of one hundred most influential women in European engineering, and in The HR Director's most influential list. Follow her if your organisation's culture depends on people who do not appear on your payroll.

23. Bruce Daisley

Writer and keynote speaker on workplace culture

Bruce Daisley writes and speaks about workplace culture, and works with leadership teams on building and sustaining it. He was previously a vice president at Twitter for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which gives his scepticism about workplace fashions a certain weight.

He is the author of The Joy of Work, a Sunday Times bestseller translated into sixteen languages, and is an honorary visiting professor at Bayes Business School in London. He is one of the few commentators in this space who will publicly argue that a popular workplace idea has weak evidence behind it.

24. Kerry Smith

Chief People Officer, British Heart Foundation

Kerry Smith joined the British Heart Foundation in 2013 from the Royal Horticultural Society and leads a people and organisational development team the charity describes as multi award winning. Long tenure in a single people role is increasingly rare and worth paying attention to.

She is a Fellow of the CIPD and a trustee of the Charity HR Network. She was added to HR's Most Influential list in 2018 and shortlisted for HR Director of the Year at the HR Excellence Awards in 2019. Charity people work runs on tight budgets, which tends to produce inventive solutions.

25. Isabel Naidoo

Chief People Officer, Wise

Isabel Naidoo joined Wise as Chief People Officer in June 2022, leading people work at one of the UK's larger listed technology companies. Her earlier career was at Capco and Accenture, so she came into product-led technology from consulting.

Her Leadership Strengths programme is a named internal development route that supports more than a hundred senior leaders through personalised development journeys. Investing in a structured leadership programme at a company that grew fast is a deliberate correction to the usual scaleup pattern.

26. Lynn McManus

Group Chief People Officer, Nationwide Building Society

Lynn McManus is Group Chief People Officer at Nationwide, the largest building society in the world and a mutual rather than a bank. She came to it via people roles at Leeds Building Society and CYBG, so her career has been built inside the mutual and challenger end of UK finance.

She serves as a commissioner on the Living Wage Commission, the body that oversees the real Living Wage rates. Sitting on that commission while running the people function of a major employer means her decisions and her advocacy have to line up in public.

27. Professor Jonathan Passmore

Professor of Coaching and Behavioural Change, Henley Business School

Jonathan Passmore is Professor of Coaching and Behavioural Change at Henley Business School and a chartered psychologist with five degrees. He edits the Wiley-Blackwell Handbook Organisational Psychology series, which puts him at the centre of how the evidence base gets assembled.

His work has been recognised with the Association for Coaching Global Award, the British Psychological Society Coaching Research Award and the Association for Business Psychology Chairman's Award for Excellence. He is currently publishing on artificial intelligence coaching agents, which is the question every learning and development team is about to face.

28. Rachael Etebar

Director of People and Culture, British Transport Police

Rachael Etebar joined British Transport Police in August 2018 as Director of People and Culture and sits on the force's chief officer strategic command team. Her remit covers people, health, safety, wellbeing, diversity and inclusion for a national force policing the rail network.

She is deputy chair of the Police Officer Pension Management Committee, a governor of Farnborough College of Technology where she chairs the Search Committee, and a member of the advisory board of the HR Partnering Partnership. Policing culture is under permanent public examination, which makes people leadership there unusually consequential.

29. Paula Coughlan

Chief People, Communications and Sustainability Officer, Currys

Paula Coughlan has held a combined people, communications and sustainability brief at Currys since 2019. Bundling those three together is a real structural statement, because it means internal culture, external voice and environmental commitments are answerable to one person.

She was named an Advocate for Change in the 2025 Role Models for Inclusion index covering hospitality, travel, leisure and retail, her second consecutive year on that list. She is a good follow if you are arguing internally that culture and communications should not sit in separate silos.

30. Deb Dutta

Head of Culture and Leadership, The TCM Group

Deb Dutta heads culture and leadership at The TCM Group. He is a Fellow of both the CIPD and the Chartered Management Institute, and a certified practitioner of the Learning Transfer Evaluation Model and of psychometric assessments, which pairs culture work with measurement discipline.

His track record includes designing eight flagship leadership development programmes for a high growth advanced technology manufacturer, and leading a global culture transformation for a major fintech. Follow him if you are trying to prove that a leadership programme actually changed something.

31. Mark Adam

Director General, People and Capability, Ministry of Justice

Mark Adam was appointed Director General for People and Capability at the Ministry of Justice in August 2025, having been the department's Chief People Officer from 2021. The department runs prisons, probation and the courts, so its workforce challenges are among the most difficult in government.

He was voted into the CIPD's list of the top thirty HR professionals, and leads people programmes including the recruitment drive to staff prisons and increase officer numbers. Recruiting into roles most people would not choose is a genuinely hard people problem, and it is his day job.

32. Amanda Cusdin

Chief People Officer, Sage

Amanda Cusdin is Chief People Officer at Sage, the Newcastle headquartered software company and one of the largest technology employers outside London. She is a reminder that serious technology people leadership in the UK is not confined to the capital.

Alongside the global people function she holds overall responsibility for Sage Foundation, the company's philanthropic arm. Giving the people leader the philanthropy brief tends to keep community work connected to what colleagues actually care about, rather than parked in marketing.

33. Gemma Dale

Senior Lecturer, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University

Gemma Dale teaches employment law, organisational behaviour, leadership and management, and wellbeing at Liverpool Business School, and co-founded The Work Consultancy. That mix of teaching and practice is unusual and it shows in how concretely she writes.

Her book Employee Relations Explained was published by Kogan Page in September 2025. Employee relations is the least glamorous corner of people work and the one where most cultural damage actually happens, so a clear current text on it is genuinely useful.

34. Karen Gooday

Chief People Officer, University of the Arts London

Karen Gooday is Chief People Officer at University of the Arts London and leads its People Strategy. She oversaw the department's repositioning from HR to People and Culture, which was more than a name change.

Health and safety was brought into her portfolio in direct response to staff wellbeing feedback, which is a concrete example of a structure being redrawn because of what colleagues said. She came to higher education from Haringey Council and the University of Surrey.

35. Kate Seljeflot

Chief People Officer, Kingfisher

Kate Seljeflot has been Chief People Officer at Kingfisher, the home improvement group behind B&Q and Screwfix, since February 2020. The group employs tens of thousands of people across a mix of store, trade counter and distribution roles.

She fronted a group-wide target for more than twenty thousand colleagues to complete an apprenticeship, traineeship or formal qualification by 2030/31. That target was set after the company beat an earlier five million hours of learning goal two years early, which is the right way round: set the next target once you have proved the first one.

36. Helen Pericleous

Senior Vice President of People and Talent, Zilch

Helen Pericleous leads people and talent at Zilch, the London fintech, and has more than a decade in people and talent roles behind her. She is a member of the CIPD.

She was selected for the CIPD HR30 in 2026 on the strength of lifting Zilch's employee net promoter score from plus two to plus twenty four in two years, and building a learning and development function that raised engagement substantially. Moving an eNPS that far in a fast growing company is a hard, measurable result.

37. Sally Hopper

Director for People, London Fire Brigade

Sally Hopper is Director for People at London Fire Brigade, appointed in late 2024, and describes herself as a lifelong Londoner. The brigade has been through a sustained and very public period of cultural reform, which makes this one of the more demanding people roles in the country.

Outside work she is a trustee of the London Playing Fields Foundation. Follow her if you are interested in what it actually takes to change a culture that has been publicly named as needing to change, rather than what it sounds like in a strategy document.

38. Rachel Howarth

Chief People Officer, Whitbread

Rachel Howarth was appointed Chief People Officer at Whitbread in July 2021, leading people work for the company behind Premier Inn. Hospitality runs on shift workers, seasonal peaks and high turnover, so retention is not an abstract topic there.

She is a non-executive director and chair of the remuneration committee at Cranswick, and chairs the People Committee at King's College London where she is also an independent member of Council. Chairing a remuneration committee gives a people leader a very different view of how reward decisions actually get made.

39. David D'Souza

Director of Profession, CIPD

David D'Souza is Director of Profession at the CIPD, the professional body for people work in the UK, with a brief spanning organisational development and culture, learning and development, corporate ethics, employee engagement and the future of work. That is effectively a view across the whole profession at once.

He also serves on the trustee board of the Royal Society of Arts. He is worth following partly because he is willing to be publicly sceptical about ideas the profession has grown fond of, which is a useful counterweight when everyone is repeating the same thing.

40. Ema Ojiako

Chief People Officer, Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust

Ema Ojiako was appointed Chief People Officer at Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust in June 2026. Community healthcare is a dispersed workforce model, with staff working across homes and clinics rather than one large site, which makes culture harder to hold together.

She holds a judicial appointment as an Employment Tribunal non-legal member, is an experienced charity trustee and non-executive director, and is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD. Sitting on employment tribunals gives a people leader an unusually direct education in how workplace decisions look from the outside.

41. Laura Fink

People and Culture Director, HiBob

Laura Fink leads people and culture for HiBob's UK business, which means she is both practising HR and working inside an HR technology company. Her public work focuses on the gap between having people data and making better decisions with it.

At CIPD ACE in Manchester in November 2025 she delivered a session on breaking bad habits around data in organisations, and she spoke again at CIPD Festival of Work in June 2026. If your team has dashboards it never acts on, her framing of the problem is a good place to start.

42. Adrienne McFarland

People and Health and Safety Director, United Utilities

Adrienne McFarland holds a combined people, health and safety brief at United Utilities, the water company serving the north west of England. In an industry with genuine physical risk, putting people and safety under one director is a meaningful design choice rather than an administrative one.

She is a Chartered Fellow of the Institute of Personnel and Development and sits on the delivery board of the Energy and Utilities Skills Partnership. Utilities face a well documented skills cliff, and she is one of the people working on it at sector level.

43. Jen Kelly

People and Culture Lead, Nexer Digital

Jen Kelly leads people and culture at Nexer Digital, a Cheshire based agency known for its work on digital accessibility. She is included here because small organisations do culture work too, and they rarely get written about.

She led the company's accreditation as a Living Wage Employer, and has been running a company-wide culture survey examining power dynamics, representation, development, equality and opportunity. Choosing to measure power dynamics is braver than most engagement surveys and worth watching.

44. Fiona Hnatow

Chief People Officer, University of Portsmouth

Fiona Hnatow is Chief People Officer at the University of Portsmouth and sits on the university executive board. She arrived in higher education from a public sector career that included Transport for London, the City of London Corporation and Surrey County Council.

She leads delivery of the university's People Strategy 2030, built around a culture of excellence and the institution's principle of educating and transforming lives. A named ten year people strategy is a commitment you can be held to, which is rarer than it should be.

45. Charlie Grant

Head of People Experience, Samsung Electronics UK

Charlie Grant leads people experience for Samsung Electronics UK. She co-founded the employee resource groups at Samsung in the UK and in the European office, including Women@Samsung, which has now been running for five years.

What makes that worth following is what came out of it. Through that group the team evolved Samsung's parental leave policies and introduced a menopause policy. It is a clear example of an employee network being used as a route into policy rather than as a calendar of events.

46. Paul Da Gama

Chief People Officer, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust

Paul Da Gama joined Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust as Chief People Officer in January 2026. He arrived from NHS Employers, where he was Workforce Improvement Programme Director.

In that national role he led the design and delivery of major programmes to improve the working lives of resident doctors, one of the most contested workforce issues in the health service. Moving from designing national policy to living with it inside a single trust is an interesting vantage point.

47. Jackie Lanham

Founder and Director, Jaxla People

Jackie Lanham incorporated Jaxla People in January 2025 and moved to it full time after leaving Hilton Foods at the end of 2025, where she was Chief People and Culture Officer. Her career before that ran through retail, finance and manufacturing, including Tesco, The Co-op, Aviva and Rexam.

She is a good follow for anyone thinking about what the chief people officer role is turning into, particularly the shift from running a function to advising a board. Having just made the move from group people leadership into independent work, she talks about that transition from both sides.

48. Kirsty Lee

Director of HR, BBC News

Kirsty Lee is Director of HR for BBC News and sits on the BBC News Group Board. That puts the people function in the room where editorial and operational decisions are made, rather than downstream of them, which is a rarer arrangement than it should be.

News is a useful case study for anyone in a high pressure organisation: constant scrutiny, permanent deadline, and a workforce whose experience of the culture becomes very public when it goes wrong. Follow her if your people team is trying to earn its seat through the quality of decisions it improves.

49. Maria Chakraborty

Director of People and Culture, Devon County Council

Maria Chakraborty was appointed head of HR at Devon County Council in May 2022 and Director of People and Culture in May 2023. County councils cover social care, highways, schools support and libraries, so the workforce is unusually varied for a single employer.

She has worked as a link business partner and delivered change including the implementation of the council's human resources management system. Rural and coastal local government faces recruitment problems that look nothing like the ones written about in London, and she works in the middle of them.

Conclusion

Three things stand out across this group. The first is that the strongest people leaders have taken on brief that goes beyond human resources. Places, safety, sustainability, communications and philanthropy keep turning up in the same job description, because the experience of work is not created by the people function alone.

The second is measurement. The most convincing work here is attached to a number or a named programme somebody can be held to, whether that is an employee net promoter score, a learning target, a pay policy or a published people strategy. Vague ambition is quietly going out of fashion.

The third is that the public sector deserves more attention than it gets. Some of the hardest people work in the country is happening inside NHS trusts, councils, fire services and government departments, under financial pressure and public scrutiny that most corporate teams never face.

If you take one thing from this list, make it that. Pick three people whose context looks least like yours, read what they publish for a month, and notice which of your own assumptions stop looking inevitable.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, keynote speaker and Certified Working Genius Facilitator. He is the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold more than ten thousand copies, and hosts The Leadership Conversations Podcast. He is the founder of The 7 Questions Movement and works with corporates, nonprofits, schools and leadership teams around the world.

Next Read

If this list was useful, two other pieces on this site go deeper into the practical side of it. The Working Genius implementation guide sets out a team method you can run next week, and it pairs well with anything you take from the leaders above. For a wider view of the thinking on culture, 35 essential thought leaders on team culture covers a broader field, and the leadership team development guide is the natural next read if the problem sits with your executive group rather than your people team.

If your people team keeps doing good work that gets undone somewhere above it, that is usually a leadership team problem rather than a people problem. It is also the problem I most enjoy helping with, through a keynote, a workshop or a day in a room with one leadership team. Write to me at jonno@consultclarity.org and tell me what is not landing.