Increasingly, charity leaders particularly are under a really high degree of scrutiny. I think the media’s attitude towards charities has changed quite a lot and we often now see quite negative headlines and quite a lot of attacks on charities.

And partly it’s because the relationship that the public and charities have is really important and people care deeply about the work of many charities.

Lawrie Philpott: So today is a very happy day for me because I’m going to cast my mind back 25 years when I was chairman of the Susie Lamplugh Trust and we needed our first chief executive, and I’ve taken myself back to the paperwork that existed at the time and it said we were looking for a charismatic individual with drive initiative and sensitivity to take over the leadership from the founders who had lost their daughter, body never found, and the founders were Paul and Diana Lamplugh. Having looked at the paperwork, I then found that we had over 150 applicants, one of whom was Julie Bentley, who is here with Leadership Listening this morning.

We made a great appointment on that day, and Julie was very happily with us for four years, but the trajectory was always, I think, going to be onwards and upwards.

So in due course. Julie became Chief Executive of the Family Planning Association, Vice Chair of Shelter UK, Chief Executive of Girl Guiding, Chief Executive of Action for Children and since 2020, Julie has been the Chief Executive of Samaritans. So as you might imagine. All of that has left me a bit breathless.

I think it would leave anybody breathless to be honest. So Julie, you are very welcome to the Leadership Listening Podcast this morning. Tell us a little bit, first of all, so that we get into the conversation, and you and I know each other extraordinarily well anyway, your early life, family, education, what happened in that era?

Julie Bentley: About me, I’m 57 now and I was born into a very, very working class family in Essex, what would now be described as very low socioeconomic family background, as in we were pretty poor, and we were pretty uneducated. My parents were manual laborers, my mom was a cleaner, and my dad was a manual laborer on a building site.

My dad died when I was 18, but for much of my childhood I’d been brought up just by my mom anyway because my parents were divorced and then remarried, which is another long story that we don’t have time for today. So I grew up as a very shy, very anxious, nervous child. I didn’t really like to leave my mom very much, and wasn’t very academically successful at school. I don’t quite know what happened, but I stayed on into the sixth form and I began there to find who Julie the adult was going to be. And by some strange quirk of events, I found myself as head girl when I was in the sixth form at school and in that role you do a huge amount of work for charity as one of the big parts of the role.

And I feel like that was when I really found my calling, really because I absolutely loved doing the work for charities. And I think that’s what set me on the path to wanting to dedicate my career to the charity sector. Which is what I did go on to do after a five year stint as a posty delivering letters around my hometown.

And a very short spell as a police photographic technician, which I only lasted three months in because frankly I couldn’t cope with the awful images that you had to see then. I was just 18 at the time. But I found my place in the charity sector and that’s where I have been ever since, where I decided to dedicate my career to.

And thanks to lots of fantastic mentors along the way. One of whom I would say is you Lawrie, I’ve been extraordinarily privileged to have been able to work in and with and lead some most amazing charities.

Lawrie Philpott: Well, that’s a marvelous, marvelous intro. You’ve, you’ve led several important charities and in that kind of leadership role what are the sort of changes that have had to take place for the different charities and what bits have actually remained consistent throughout that retinue of marvelous charities?

Julie Bentley: I think, in terms of the things that has changed, partly what needs to change is dependent upon the actual organisation. So the size of the organisation, the scale of the organisation. So I’ve led very small organisations with 20, 30 staff, and then huge organisations with thousands and thousands of staff.

And then of course, I’ve had the privilege of leading Girl Guiding and Samaritans where the large part of the workforce, to use that phrase, are volunteers at Girl Guiding 109,000 volunteers delivered the delivered the Girl Guiding service. So what’s changed? I think, in those different organisations is obviously how you communicate and engage and connect.

It does depend on the size, the proximity of people. It is different if you are working with a largely volunteer base or with a largely staff base. I think what’s also really changed in more recent years is what people want from in organisations, whether it be as a volunteer or as a staff member.

Attitudes to the workplace have really changed, particularly since COVID. You know, the next generation of workers and indeed not just the next generation, but those in my generation, I think have really re-thought what is work. And there’s now a much more of a keenness for a better work life balance, which I think is a good thing in terms of people’s wellbeing and mental health.

People need and want much more flexibility in their roles, whether it be paid or voluntary roles. People’s lives are more complicated. And I also think that the current environment both across the UK and globally, which is really impacting people’s wellbeing and mental health also impacts how they show up at work and the sense of support that they need as well.

And I think all of that is quite new, I would say, in the last 10 to 15 years, and particularly since COVID as well. I think what hasn’t changed about my leadership style within that is that I basically… I was gonna say I always try and be myself, but it’s not even that I try and be myself. It’s just that I don’t how to be anything else. So I very much try to be honest and genuine in my communications as CEO. I try and continue to try to build teams that collaborate and where there’s a team approach over individual kind of dominance of any one member of a team. I think being available and being clear have always been important to me and that is unchanged.

That sense that just because I hold the title of chief executive doesn’t mean that I can’t be approached. And so trying to be accessible, what I hope is that folk in my organisations that I work with and lead, that when they think about me, they don’t think Chief Exec, they think Julie, that they know the person that’s kind of behind the title, if that makes sense.

And I think the other thing that is unchanged across the many years of leadership is that I try to do what I believe is right for our service users, even when I know that that’s going to be hard and unpopular. And I think that has been a consistent and trying to be authentic about that, but also not doing things alone.

I think the days of the heroic leader who’s out at the front leading the charge are long, long gone. And I think that I take a very collaborative approach. In my leadership team there are times when, if we aren’t reaching consensus, that I have to say, okay, I need to make a decision here. But my first port of call would always be, okay, let’s have the debate in this room. Let’s hear the different perspectives, and then let’s agree together. What are we going to take forward? And that continues to be important to me as well. So I’d say that’s a few of the kind of similarities and differences, if you like.

Lawrie Philpott: And some of the journey has taken you to, you know, the national media. Half paid spreads in national newspapers that I can remember.

I also remember you were on Desert Island discs. Now that takes leadership into a different dimension. You become a public figure. How did that strike you and how did you cope?

Julie Bentley: I think that increasingly charity leaders particularly, are under a really high degree of scrutiny. I think the media’s attitude towards charities has changed quite a lot and we often now see quite negative headlines and quite a lot of attacks on charities. And partly it’s because the relationship that the public and charities have is really important. And people care deeply about the work of many charities and have a real passion for the charitable cause.

And therefore that means they have a very real interest in what’s happening within that charity. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s right that we want the public to understand what we’re doing and to be interested in us. But of course, particularly since the onset of the online world and social media, that has particularly changed because now it isn’t just a classic traditional newspaper that you open with something, but it’s basically relentless, online 24/7.

So, you know, being trolled online is something that I have experienced. Often folk who you’ve never met, mostly folk who you’ve never met who think that they know you or just have decided that they don’t like you for some reason. And that can be really very, very hard. It can be very hard, particularly when people are saying things about you that are simply not true and very hard when people are questioning a moral compass that you know you have and that you hold very dearly.

So I have to accept that in the roles that I’m in, that has brought me into the public domain, that, you know, that’s a choice I made. But I have tried very hard to protect my family and those close around me.

So I very much limit anything I say about my very personal life, my partner and my family in social media spaces, because I don’t want them to find themselves exposed. They didn’t choose that. But the other really important thing is when you are being criticised very publicly, you have to recognise it, but not let it eat away at you. Keep it in context, because you still need to make the difficult decisions that are the right ones for your service users knowing often that they are also ones that will attract really negative reactions.

So you definitely need resilience, I think, to hold some of the leadership roles in the charity sector. And I would say often the attacks can be worse as a woman because misogyny continues to be rife and women often get much more of attacks than men, although not exclusively.

So I think it has been difficult. It continues to be difficult. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t affect me because it does. But very often I also just ignore it now because you could go down a really big wormhole if you paid attention to everything negative that is said about you in public spacesometimes. What’s important is to know who to listen to and where to listen to them as well, because hearing feedback is important. That’s a separate thing from when newspapers just wanna sell headlines and indeed when members of the public just want to become keyboard warriors.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah, and I’ve always said having fallen foul of the press once or twice, maybe a few more times, that their job is looking for headlines and in many senses, one of the things you’ve got to do is watch out for that and not be too susceptible to that, which leads you into, as you call it, a wormhole that is negative from your point of view or my point of view when that happens.

If we look at leadership generally then, and the responsibility that goes with it. What are the most difficult bits? What actually feels heaviest about it in today’s environment? Social media, you know, everybody’s got an opinion. The media more generally, sometimes I think the sort of unfairness of it in leadership roles that are just very, very difficult.

Julie Bentley: Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of things I would say that are heavy in leadership, but for me, I think for me, the things, the responsibilities that feel heaviest are about the people. So I feel a huge sense of responsibility and Samaritans to the people that use our service, our callers, our service users. And so it feels heavy thinking about how do I make sure that we do continue to deliver that service, that Samaritans is here for the people who need it, when they need it. And then I think the other thing that I’ve always found heaviest actually throughout my career is our people – our staff and our volunteers.

And some of the things I’ve always found most difficult has been when you’ve had to make decisions around, for example, restructuring or making redundancies. I have never stopped finding that extraordinarily difficult. The very difficult conversations around pay and rewards and what you can afford to pay for pay rises, et cetera, I’ve had to make some really difficult decisions about that in recent years because resources are so limited. But I’m always so aware that, you know, this is people’s livelihoods we’re talking about and particularly in recent years how very difficult it is out there for people. And so I think that has always been another thing that has felt really heaviest to me, thinking about being the employer of people and how you juggle, holding things so that you’re doing your best for your service users, but you’re also doing the best that you can through the lens of being an employer. And then of course, giving the best experience to volunteers and making sure they have the environment and support that they need.

The media stuff and negative stuff in the media, that’s all unpleasant. But that isn’t the things that I’ve found heaviest. The things I’ve found heaviest have been about the people in my organisation and the users of my organisation services.

Lawrie Philpott: How does the connection work with the volunteers?

So you’ve had them in various different charities. Most notable, arguably, I think Samaritans, The CEO with a Samaritan, somebody who is part of the 24/7 – 365 operation, dealing with stuff, arguably at the worst time in the middle of the night when to lots of people, things seem especially dark. How does the CEO kind of connect with all of that? Did you have to train to become a volunteer or what?

Julie Bentley: I think it can be really difficult as a chief exec to connect with a huge volunteer base of people. So as I said, at Girl Gardening, there was 109,000 volunteers. At Samaritans, we have 23,000 of volunteers.

So in terms of the issues that our volunteers at Samaritans deal with, our listening volunteers who are the folk who are at the end of the 24/7 – 365 crisis support service go through a very high degree of selection and training as you would expect, to be able to take those really important calls.

When I first joined the organisation I was clear that I wasn’t going to begin listening myself because I just felt that was too much for me to try and do as well as be the CEO. But I did want to do the training because I did want to experience and understand what is that journey of coming into the organisation and becoming trained and qualified and then going onto the phones and the web chat, et cetera. So I did go through the training program, incognito, because we decided that it wouldn’t be very fair on the other folk on my training cohort if they knew they’ve got the new chief exec with them. So I trained with my local branch, which is how the training happens across Samaritans and it was an extraordinary experience, I have to say, an excellent training, you know, that is delivered by volunteers at the branch.

Yeah, I learn a lot actually about listening. And then so when I’d finished the training, I then went and observed some shifts in my local branch alongside a really fabulous volunteer, again to get that sense of the nature of the calls that we get. And I do still sometimes do that when I visit branches of Samaritan Services.

It is very different, an organisation that is predominantly delivered by volunteers because the motivations are very different often, although not exclusively, I would say. So if you have a paid workforce and a volunteer workforce, the way that those folk need to be recognised and motivated is quite different. You know, our volunteers are there on their own time. Without being financially rewarded or recognised for what they contribute. And I think something that most people across the UK don’t recognise enough, is so many of the services that they call upon in their day-to-day life are delivered by people who are there because they choose to volunteer their time.

They’re not there because they’re paid. And at Samaritans, we know that that’s one of the things that our service users really, really value about the service. That it isn’t somebody who’s there because they’re paid to be, that when they reach out to us in their darkest times, they know it’s somebody who’s there because they wanted to be there, and they chose to be there to listen.

And that’s a really, really powerful thing. And the motivation of why people want to volunteer with us can be really different as well. You know, so people bring real passion for the cause. Many people have a very profound connection to our vision that fewer people die by suicide, either because they have lost somebody to suicide or because they have lived with suicidal feelings themselves.

And so that really is motivating for people. And folk want to put their time, energy, skills, they want to make a difference and they want to meet that need that there is for the service. So It’s a really interesting world to operate in when you work alongside so many volunteers.

But trust me, volunteers help to make our society go around.

Lawrie Philpott: And if I think about it, you know, people who are doing this marvelous but very demanding work, how do they keep up their own souls, you know, when they’re listening to stories that are just desperately difficult most of the time?

Julie Bentley: Yeah. We very high support process in place in Samaritans for our volunteers. So they’re always connected with other volunteers. When they deliver the service, they debrief at the end of every session that they deliver. So they talk to a leader about the calls that they took so that they can kind of offload them before going back to their day-to-day lives. It’s a very supportive environment between our volunteers. But I think the thing that really keeps people connected to it is that they really see the need for the service. You know, day in and day out, they are there listening to people share their, you know, their really innermost thoughts, feelings, concerns, challenges, upsets.

And I think one of the things that keeps our volunteers with us and committed is that, understanding the need, believing with a real passion in our vision, which is that we are here because we want fewer people to die by suicide. And that sense of really making a difference and contributing and that sense of connection with other human beings as being part of such an extraordinary service. And I do believe that the Samaritan service is an extraordinary service.

I often describe it as, it’s a really simple, complicated thing, because actually it is really simple because it’s about one human being, being there to listen to another human being.

Which is actually really quite simple, but It’s really quite profound because the complexity of what people bring when they contact us is huge, and we are not a counseling service, and we’re not an advice service. We’re a listening service. And there is huge power in that simple thing.

Lawrie Philpott: How does the whole subject of listening work in your mind? What has leading the Samaritans taught you about listening and what might you say to people, I suppose, you know, in more general life about this strange thing called listening? I was always taught that you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion.

Julie Bentley: Well, I think that listening, I think lots of us think that we’re really good at it and actually it’s much, much harder than most of us think. And I think many of us listen to respond rather than listen to hear. And what I mean by that is, you can see it yourself… You’re in a conversation or you’re in a team meeting and somebody’s speaking, and you can see, if you look around the room, you can see the people who are really listening to what’s being said. You know, their body language tells you they’re leaning in, they’re really quiet. You can really see them concentrating on what that other person is saying. And then you can see someone else who is listening to respond. So they’re already formulating in their own head, what’s the answer to what that person’s saying or what’s my response to what that person’s saying going to be?

They’re preparing their lines already, and in doing that, they’re not actually listening. They’ve switched off the listening bit, because they’re thinking about ‘what’s my response?’ bit. And that really being able to just stay with the person wherever they’re at and give them your full attention is actually much more difficult than most people think. But it’s the extraordinary, powerful thing. And when I did the Samaritans listening training, I went into that thinking. I thought I was a good listener, and I realised, oh, I’m not as good at this as I thought I was actually. And over the course of the training, which goes on for many weeks I really feel like I understood and learned what does good listening really mean. And I feel like I’m a better person for that now, and I definitely am a better listener. And that’s why we often actually try and teach listening skills to everybody and anybody because, you know, we believe that if all of us could develop our listening skills, really pay attention to someone else, you know, like you often say to people – Oh, how are you? And generally you say, yeah, I’m fine. Well, yeah, good. Or you almost say yes, good, before we even let them finish asking you how you are. And you know, one of the things we talk about in Samaritans is that ask again. How are you? Yeah, I’m great.

Uhhuh, are you, are you really?

Lawrie Philpott: Mm-hmm.

Julie Bentley: Leave the space.

We fill the space so much. We need to leave a bit more space because actually if it feels like there’s space for some of those more difficult thoughts then we might well welcome those in and then we can hold them. We can create that safe space where we can hold people’s most difficult thoughts of complete hopelessness and in the just expressing them, you know, it’s kind of like untangling a ball of wool. People come to us sometimes with it feeling like a complete ball of knots, and by the end of their call with one of our volunteers, they’ve still got the same ball, but it’s just less knotted. You know, they’ve been able to do a bit of that unraveling and working it through.

And found their own solution or gotten themselves to a place where they feel like that they can move on with a bit more hope. And that is extraordinary, I think.

Lawrie Philpott: And it’s often said, if you’re not listening, you’re not learning. And learning about people at the other end of the telephone and learning about them by listening seems to me to be pretty important in the Samaritans business.

So it, it leaders also need support, which is what you are giving to people by listening to them. What support do leaders need, but rarely admit they need in today’s world, which I see is extraordinarily pressurised, very, very challenging, and I have to say in the next one, two, or three years. It’s going to get more telling in that challenging sense.

So what support do leaders really need, but rarely admit to?

Julie Bentley: I think there’s a lot, but I think two things I would say are, I think it is really important for leaders to be able to say and acknowledge that we don’t always have the answers. We get things wrong or indeed just to say, I’m really stuck, I dunno what to do now. Actually, I really don’t know where to go from here with this. And I think often the pressure on you as a leader to know the answers, you know, there’s an interesting conundrum often in leadership, I think, where folks who are affected by decisions that leaders make, want to be engaged and included.

And of course that’s right, but equally, they often want someone to make a decision, someone else to be responsible for making the decision. So that that whole piece about accountability. But I think it’s really important as a leader for us to sometimes just be able to say, I really don’t know. You know, I’m all out of ideas here.

And I think that that’s quite a hard thing for folks to do, particularly because I think it can make everybody else feel a wobbly. You know, blimey, if they don’t know, then what does that mean? But I think that that is something that we need to admit to more. And I also think that another thing that leaders need, but rarely say we need and very rarely get, is to be told sometimes that we’re doing a good job.

Most feedback that you get in a leadership role is when things aren’t going so well and people want to tell you, you know, what they need to be better. And it’s not very often in leadership roles that you get praise. I think that is, you know, we’re only human. We all need sometimes to have someone say that you did that thing, then well. Well done.

And I think sometimes people are hesitant about praising somebody they see to be in a sort of position of leadership, either because they think, you know, well, it’s not my place to do that. Or because, and I think this is very often the case and someone once said this to me, they think you don’t need it.

And I’ll give you a little example. Last year when things were very difficult, we were leading through some really difficult transformation conversations in Samaritans and it was really relentless and really hard and full on and very difficult. And I had a, a staffing colleague who I came in one day and just found a little card on my desk. It was a card that just said, I just wanted you to know that I know that this is really difficult and really hard and you’re trying to lead through some real difficulty and there’s lots of difficult feelings for people. But I just wanted to say, you know, I can see you are working really hard and you’re doing really well. Thank you.

And I said to the person, blimey, thank you so much. That doesn’t happen very often. I said, it means a huge amount to me that you did that. And they said, I think the thing is, none of us think you need it, Julie. And because people assume that if you’re in a leadership role that you think you’re great all the time, when actually the reality is much of the time in a leadership role, you are worrying constantly about not being good enough and not doing it well enough.

Yeah, so I think that’s a couple of things that I think probably leaders need, but don’t we have to admit to needing.

Lawrie Philpott: I know, and it seems to me as I have wandered around organisations for most of my career, that I see circumstances where people, leaders don’t recognise that just praising somebody,is immensely important for them. And in a funny kind of way, it’s important for you as the leader as well. And if you can do that in front of other people, you get an immeasurably greater bang for buck. At the other end of the scale I’ve also got a client who says to me, Lawrie, what I don’t want is constructive criticism, what I want is praise. So it’s interesting just to listen to the different perspectives that come. I don’t want constructive criticism. What I want is praise. How do you lead then, when every decision is going to be judged publicly? Because a lot of your work is in the public arena and historically over the various charities has been in the public arena.

How do you lead when you know that everything or lots of the things that you do are gonna be judged publicly?

Julie Bentley: I think, for me, it’s about getting a balance between understanding that things will become part of the public domain, but not letting that lead you to the wrong decision, if that makes sense.

For me it’s about constantly anchoring how I am and what I do with my moral compass. Can I look myself in the face at the end of the day? And that’s got to be more important. And for me, how I anchor around that is always prioritising in decision making, what is the right thing and the best thing for the people that need our service.

And that doesn’t mean I’m always gonna get it right. But what is important is that that’s what drives and motivates me in my thinking and decision making is the golden thread, the people that need our service. Is it the best thing for them or is it what do they need? And as long as I can do that and know that that’s what I’m doing, then it makes it easier to tolerate negativity around that in any domain, whether it be within the organisation or in the public domain outside of the organisation.

And, and I think not feeling the needs to constantly respond to criticism, particularly in the external domain because, you know, you could waste a lot of time and energy engaging, and particularly in social channels and it’s relentless, but it’s also pointless because in many of those spaces, people have made the decision about you and that will never change.

But actually the thing that is important to me isn’t necessarily what people think about me. What’s important to me is are we doing the right things in Samaritans for our service users? That is the one thing. But again, it does go back to you do need some resilience because it can be exhausting just being criticised.

Lawrie Philpott: And you’ve mentioned moral compass a a few times and I’m with you on that entirely and I worry these days whether we’re in a sort of post moral compass world in some senses, or whether it’s going in that direction. What do you reckon?

Julie Bentley: I think I have more hope than that. I think there certainly are people that I would question their moral compass, and in global leadership roles, I would say. But I also know from working in the charity sector particularly that there are a huge number of people with a very, very strong moral compass that are wanting to do their bit to improve society and improve the wider world.

It can be hard sometimes, particularly at the moment, I think with the constant narrative around us, you know, and frankly all of the horror that we’re seeing happening around us and around the world. It can be hard to hang on to hope, I think. But I think part of our jobs, particularly in the charity sector, is that we respond in the charity sector to some of the most distressing, horrific, difficult social issues. You know, domestic violence, food banks, people going hungry, poverty, inequity, disadvantage. So there’s a lot of difficult space that we work in in the charity sector, but also we are providing solutions. We are looking those challenges and societal issues directly in the eye and doing what we can to try and improve that across the charity sector.

And so I hang on to that for, for hope

Lawrie Philpott: And a lot of the issues that you’ve got around you in your role are deeply, deeply sensitive and at the same time we’ve got this need for transparency and kind of telling it as it is. So how does that balance work, do you reckon?

Julie Bentley: It’s a really good question, actually, and I think that transparency can trip people up. I can remember something so clearly from quite early on in my career, years and years and years ago. And there was an organisational restructure being discussed. I wasn’t the chief executive of the organisation but it was in early stages of discussion and I suddenly heard that whole team had been told that they might be at risk of redundancy and we hadn’t talked about that team being at risk of redundancy at all in the in the discussions. And when I spoke to the manager of the team and said, what? Why does all of the team think that? She said, oh, well, you know, because we’ve been talking about restructure, I felt that I had to, you know, be honest with them and I had to say to them, well, there is, you know, there is potentially a restructure and therefore that doesn’t mean that you are potentially gonna be made redundant.  And I said, but what they’ve taken, that they’ve heard that and because they’re human they’re now thinking she wouldn’t have told us that if actually it wasn’t gonna happen.

And she said, well, I didn’t wanna be dishonest. And I said, well, the honest boundaried answer would be, we’re having to think about the whole organisational structure. We haven’t discussed this team personally or directly. Equally, there are no decisions that have been made. It’s in very early discussions. So I understand that you want certainty, but there literally isn’t yet any decisions to share with you. So I wanna acknowledge that that feels difficult for you and I want to commit to you when I’ll be able to talk to you some more about that. That’s that’s the truth.

So I think for me, transparency is important, but it’s also important to recognise necessary boundaries, both professional and business boundaries. And as a leader, you have to hold information that not everybody can have. And I actually think it’s not responsible to think everybody has the same information because frankly I get paid more money to hold a huge amount of the complexity and the difficult information. It isn’t the case that everybody should have it all of the time. Part of the key of being a good leader is knowing what information do people need, when, and also when should we be engaging people more widely in thinking through the solutions to some of these difficult problems. But I’ve always tried to take an approach of if there’s something that we are discussing, but we aren’t ready, you know, we can’t talk yet about that. It’s just acknowledge that, acknowledge, we are thinking about XY, there isn’t anything I can share with you about that yet, and I wanna recognise that that will be difficult and I want you to know that i’ll tell you as soon as we’re able to tell you. That will never be enough necessarily for some folk, but it is the most transparent and honest way of dealing with something.

Lawrie Philpott: My consulting career has always had charities in its background in the sense of providing services on a pro bono basis.

And I think everyone that I’ve been involved with, even the ones currently, have difficult financial decisions all the time and at worst, you know, hand to mouth. So how do you make hard financial decisions when in your case the need for this service keeps growing and is likely to want to grow more in the future?

Julie Bentley: Well, it’s a constant struggle, Income generation. It is getting harder and harder. I mean, not just in the charity sector, it’s a struggle everywhere, but it is very difficult currently in the charity sector. Demand for our services is increasing. The Samaritan service is free at the point of contact.

Our funding comes almost exclusively from fundraising through, the general public, through corporate sponsorship, through legacies, people leaving gifts in their wills, through people making philanthropic donations through charitable trusts. So every year we have to work really, really hard to raise the 27 million circa that it costs to run the Samaritan service every year.

As you will know, costs are going up that are outside of our control all of the time. And it means that you are faced often with decisions that feel pretty impossible. You know, how do you prioritise where you invest the money when sometimes you can’t choose because they’re costs that you have no control over.

And so it is a constant difficulty and struggle, I think in the charity sector in the last year, we have seen  a lot of charities merging and charities even winding up and exiting because they just couldn’t continue financially. So it’s extraordinarily hard is what I would say. And a constant juggle of what the limited resources we’ve got, where do we put them? Where can’t we put them? And what do we need to really prioritise? And obviously, you know, in a service like Samaritans, we have to prioritise safety of the service and quality of the service at all times. But it means that sometimes you feel like you are facing impossible decisions and I think that’s just the reality of it. And for me, again, it’s about trying to be honest about that with the organisation and with our staff and our volunteers.

Lawrie Philpott: When it comes to feedback, Julie, what has most shaped how you lead? We all need feedback. Where do you get your best feedback?

Julie Bentley: Well, by asking people to give me feedback, within the organisation, you know, I ask people what do you think about this? Did I do that? How did I do that? Did I do that all right? Should I have done that a different way? What do you think? How do you think we should go about this?

And that’s not just my executive team colleagues, but it’s other colleagues in the organisation that I go to for support and advice. I have a really good network of peers in the sector that frankly, I don’t think I could do the job without, you know, people I respect and admire and who have different skills to me.

So, you know, check things out with them, get advice from them, lean on them. And as I mentioned earlier, I’ve had some great mentors over the years. And, you know, you were my first Lawrie, Chair of Trustees I’d ever had at the Susie Lamplugh Trust and I learned a lot from you. I’ve got a great Chair here at Samaritans, who again, is a brilliant sounding board.

And then I’ve also had coaches and other mentors over the years who have just kind of given me steers and bits of advice. And one piece of advice that I had some years ago, which in my earlier Chief Exec life was really helpful to me was about power, the power of chief executives hold.

And you know, I started out by talking about the fact that, you know, I come from a very working class, very uneducated family background and the notion that when I was a CEO early on, that that there was power. You held power as a CEO, I was extremely uncomfortable about that. I felt very uncomfortable about the notion of thinking I had power and held power and I kind of wanted to deny it when I was a younger CEO and kind of dismiss it. A coach, a mentor said to me, You do a disservice to everybody by seeking to deny that you have power. Actually, you have to just accept and know and acknowledge that you have it as a chief executive. And then what matters, Julie, is what you do with it.

That has really stayed with me and it has led me to being really clear that as a CEO you do hold a lot of power, and that therefore, with that comes enormous responsibility. And what you have to do with that responsibility is hold it very carefully and respectfully. In the best way that you can, but denying it serves nobody, including yourself.

Lawrie Philpott: Well, Julie, we always round off our conversations by asking what a person’s pet hate is and your secret passion, and I genuinely don’t know what the answer to those two questions are. So what’s the truth of those two things in your case?

Julie Bentley: I think my pet hate is self-interest and self-promotion in leadership. The folks that are in the leadership roles just for their own their own self-interest.

I don’t know if it’s a very secret passion. I’m not sure it is a secret, but my passion is our wonderful charity sector. I don’t think enough of the public understand how much charities are the glue in our society. Providing lifesaving services day in and day out and, and without the charity sector, our society would literally collapse. I know that to be true. And so I am passionate about our charity sector. Have always been and hazard to guess I will always be.

Lawrie Philpott: Great stuff. Julie. It’s been a marvelous conversation this morning and viewers and listeners may well want to say something or ask questions and they can do that through emailing us at podcast@leadershiplistening.com. But from those viewers and listeners, Julie, we’ve learned a lot and thank you very much indeed.

Intro: Thanks, Lawrie. Lovely to see you.