Leadership Exchanged: Why we need to move away from hierarchies towards collective leadership with Kirsty McNeill

University of Birmingham

Joining Christopher Pietroni for our sixth episode of the ‘Leadership Exchanged’ podcast is Kirsty McNeill, Executive Director of Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns at Save the Children.

Kirsty is Labour’s parliamentary candidate in the Scottish target seat of Midlothian. She is also Chair of Our Scottish Future, the Civic Power Fund, Larger Us and the Aid Alliance, and non-executive director for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.

Kirsty is well-known for being an innovative and effective local and national campaigner, with a particular focus on social and economic injustice. She has gained extensive experience in leadership during her career, but also throughout her education, including her time at the Rockwood Leadership Institute where she completed an intensive leadership programme on the Art of Leadership in 2018.

In this episode, Kirsty shares her personal experiences with democracy and equality, learnings from moving from single-issue advocacy into government, and her thoughts on what good leadership looks like. This shapes her views on collective leadership and her approach to her role at Save the Children today.

The Leadership Exchanged podcast asks if the world's biggest and most complex problems could be solved if the right leadership approach was applied? Do we need to exchange current approaches to leadership for something new? In each episode, Leadership expert Professor Christopher Pietroni discusses with guests what kind of leadership is needed if you want to make real, lasting change.

Find out more about the Leadership Exchanged podcast: birmingham.ac.uk/leadership-exchanged

Follow Kirsty on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/kirstyjmcneill

Follow Christopher on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/pietroni_c

Resources mentioned in the interview:

Save the Children – https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/

IPPR Report – Making change: What works? - https://www.ippr.org/research/publications/making-change-what-works

Report – Counter Culture: How to resist the culture wars and build 21st century solidarity, by Kirsty McNeill and Roger Harding – https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FABJ9000-Fabian-Ideas-pamphlet-210628-WEB.pdf

Steve Akehurst’s Substack - https://strongmessagehere.substack.com/

Doc Society - https://docsociety.org/