I think like many people in the profession I accidentally went into HR. It wasn’t an informed choice, I got involved first of all in mentoring and tutoring police officers in our control room environment, so dealing with all the emergency calls and incident handling, and I started to get a real love for people development. So moving into HR was a little bit of an accident. I entered HR first of all through training, and at that stage of my career I thought I really needed to find a profession to specialise in.
I got early exposure to strategy and developed my leadership skills. In today's business partnering model, leadership is all about helping others do their job as well as possible. That gets to the heart of what HR is all about.
I’ve been really fortunate to have a really broad HR career. So I’ve worked in Learning and Development, I’ve had some experience of recruitment, really generalist HR. I’ve carried out a corporate role outside HR but worked both within in it as well. I also have employee relations experience, strategic planning, and I’ve spent some time in IT and finance as well.
HR has given me a great grounding for my current position. I got early exposure to strategy and developed my leadership skills. In today's business partnering model, leadership is all about helping others do their job as well as possible. That gets to the heart of what HR is all about. The very fact that I've found my way to the top civilian post here demonstrates that HR is seen as a credible profession, certainly in public sector organisations.
In the police service the link between the way we manage and treat our own people and our impact in our community is well understood. Policing has been transformed in my time here. We now have an extremely tolerant and vibrant culture. HR has played its part in encouraging that. In essence, HR for me is about delivering performance though people. It's not a soft option, it's actually a really tough profession.
Any advice for anyone thinking about a career in HR?
To succeed in HR you’ve got to be a really good communicator. You’ve got to really like getting performance out of people. You’ve got to be pretty resilient as well. It’s a tough place to be, people are very very different, so you’ve got to be able to have the inner strength to deal with that as well as be quite, as I said, business-focused, a bit commercial in your approach and really good I think about planning and seeing some of the long-term future of your organisation.
The most difficult decisions are the ones that affect people's lives. We never forget that we're dealing with individuals, but my top priority has to be the lifeblood of the organisation. There will be more hard choices when the next round of spending cuts hits home. In Surrey we've always been innovative about delivering value for money and I'm confident we'll find a way through.