Jim Leng
Jim Leng began his business career in 1967 when he joined games company John Waddington; he subsequently managed a number of the firm’s subsidiaries, before moving to head packaging company Low & Bonar, then chemicals manufacturer Laporte. By 2001 he was chairman of the engineering group Doncasters, and in 2003 became chairman of the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus – the successor to British Steel.

Credited with restructuring and reviving the group, Leng subsequently fielded takeover bids and in 2008 negotiated Corus’s sale to Indian giant Tata Steel – whose owners have extensive UK holdings, including Land Rover and consultancy TCS. Following the sale Leng joined mining multinational Rio Tinto as chairman, but he left the firm less than a month into the job; the Telegraph reported that he had clashed with chief executive Tom Albanese over debt-reduction plans.

Leng is also a non-executive director with Alstom SA – the French engineering business recently in the headlines over bribery allegations – plus Russian energy company TNK-BP and US private equity firm AEA. Late last year, he added another non-executive directorship – at HSBC – to his portfolio.

Anne Bulford
Graduating from University College London in 1981 with a degree in English literature, Anne Bulford qualified as an accountant with KPMG and spent 12 years with the firm before joining the BBC as head of internal audit. A career in media corporate finance followed, including a stint as finance and business affairs director at the Royal Opera House before she became Channel 4’s group finance director in 2005. Last year she was promoted to chief operating officer, retaining her finance brief alongside new roles in corporate, strategic, commercial and technological development.

As well as her expertise in finance, Bulford has experience in government: she chaired Ofcom’s audit committee from 2002-5, and sat on the expert panel that advised the Independent Television Commission on its 2002 review of the market in programme-making. She joined the MoJ board as a non-exec in 2008.

David MacLeod
“Seek first to understand before being understood,” says David MacLeod of the non-exec’s role. “If you come in from a different world with all guns blazing you can very easily miss the mark, so put real effort into understanding the organisation – then maybe you’ve got some points to make that would be helpful.”

An associate of the Institute for Government, a fellow of the Sunningdale Institute and a visiting professor at Cass Business School, MacLeod began his career in business but knows government well: he worked for a wide range of ICI businesses for 25 years, before joining the Cabinet Office in 2001 as a senior adviser on change and performance. In 2003 he left for consultancy Towers Perrin, where he spent four years advising public and private organisations on managing change; and in 2008 he and Nita Clarke, director of the Involvement and Participation Association, were commissioned by the business department to produce a report on employee engagement in the UK.

Their report, Engaging for Success, sets out important lessons for today’s troubled public sector. If downsizing and redundancy programmes are badly handled, he warns, organisations can find that as soon as the job market recovers, their best staff – the people who managers thought they’d managed to hang on to through the bad times – abandon ship. In fact, he adds, even when people do stay on following redundancy programmes, “their level of commitment is significantly affected by how the process is handled”.

So how can employers maintain the confidence of their staff while reducing head counts? MacLeod found that successful organisations exhibit four characteristics: they ran an open and transparent process that explained clearly why redundancies were required; they set out what was expected of staff, and offered coaching, feedback and support to help both departing and remaining employees; they listened carefully to employees’ views and captured ideas for improvement; and their behaviours matched their stated values – “I could see their rhetoric reflected in their actions.”

Dame Sue Street
Unusually among our non-executives, Sue Street is a career civil servant: she joined the Home Office in 1974, has led its criminal policy group, and in the 1990s led the government’s anti-drugs strategy from the Cabinet Office. Add a five-year stretch as permanent secretary at the culture department, and a role in 2009-10 leading a study of the Youth Justice Board, and it’s clear that she has both formidable experience of government and a real expertise in the Ministry of Justice’s fields of work.

The reform of non-execs’ roles, Street believes, will bring “much greater rigour” to departmental governance; she particularly likes “the fact that ministers are members of the board responsible for ensuring that their policies are implemented”, and hopes that the introduction of non-execs from outside government will “lead to a leaner, more effective pipeline from policy to delivery.”

What’s more, she adds, private sector non-execs may help hasten the government’s work. “The civil service takes a lot of time and care in making decisions, but there’s not enough emphasis on doing things by a certain date,” she says. “If we can inject the pace of the private sector, we’ll have an even better public sector.”

Street warns, though, that permanent secretaries will still be “personally responsible to Parliament” for departmental spending: “It will be very important for non-executives to leave the decision-making on those areas to the permanent secretary. They can advise, scrutinise, oversee, challenge, but they shouldn’t decide matters that fall within the permanent secretary’s personal responsibility.” In government non-execs, she adds, are “well-informed top-level advisers” – a role somewhat different from that played in many parts of the private sector. “Ultimately,” she comments, “you can’t have a whole board of decision-makers.”

Street herself has been a non-exec on HMRC, and says that her particular interest lies in listening to and transmitting the views of frontline staff back into the heart of the department.
Asked for advice on how civil servants should present policies and strategies to private sector non-execs, Street warns that they’ll have to become “far more numerate, far quicker to attach the prices, the costs, the times to plans”. As a non-exec, she looks for “the personal drive that persuades me that people know what they’re talking about and that [the plan is] going to happen”, and reacts badly to “any prevarication, anything that makes me feel I’m being fobbed off”.

It seems that senior civil servants will have to change their approach if they’re to get strategies and business plans approved by the new-model departmental boards. The reformed system, says Street, “demands quite a lot of ‘thought discipline’, which will be good for the public sector.” Ultimately, she concludes, non-execs will be looking “not for a learned treatise, but for leadership”.

Written by CSW