Health Department's Macho Culture "Not Cricket"
December 3rd 2008
A senior nurse who worked at the Department of Health says she had to fight a "macho" culture. This culture was evident in many ways at Whitehall, says Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, who was England’s chief nursing officer from 1999 to 2004.
She includes the widespread use of cricketing terms such as "close of play" as evidence.
Nursing Standard reports on her public lecture, "Leadership, status and money", at Canterbury Christ Church University on Tuesday November 25.
In the lecture she asked: "In seeking leadership and leadership skills, are we wrongly seeking positions of so-called power or great wealth or high status socially, rather than seeking to transform and move forward a task by meeting the needs of the group and the individual to achieve the desired outcome?"
Although she supported a leadership style of "enabling and engaging", some senior civil servants were reluctant to share power with other staff, she recalls.
For example, a learning disabilities panel was set up at the department. As the members were predominantly people with learning disabilities and their carers, civil servants had to give up power.
"The group let them [civil servants] know when the meetings were inaccessible to them. It was one of the hardest things to do, because it meant releasing power and control," she said.
Dame Sarah continued to challenge the male leadership culture until deciding to leave and join the Church of England as a team rector in Sutton, south London. She now calls on women to take up more leadership roles. "It is not necessary to adopt a macho culture to get on," she believes.
Nursing Standard contacted a spokesperson for the Department of Health who stated that the current NHS chief executive David Nicholson is "trying to change the department’s directive style".
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