Spotlighting Health's Female Leaders: Roz Campion
Please introduce yourself, including your role within your organisation, and a short overview of your career path.
I’m Roz Campion, the Director of the Office for Life Sciences. The Office for Life Sciences is an organisation sponsored jointly by the Department for Health and Social Care and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy that works across the health system to ensure that life sciences thrive for the health and wealth of the country.
I started my career as a lawyer working in the City and I have also worked as an academic. But my civil service career has split between working on social policy issues and working on international economic and trade issues (including working for the Foreign Office in Tokyo and Washington).
What has been the biggest leadership lesson in your career?
Not to underestimate the importance of kindness. My first job was in a plastics factory. We made the punnets that supermarkets use for strawberries. My somewhat grim job was to make sure that all the punnets had round holes in the bottom of them, since the machine that was supposed to make them was not able to actually push them all the way through. After three hours working on my first shift – creating holes in the bottom of punnets - my hands were torn to shreds. At the break, a more senior person who worked the carpentry team came by and gave me a little wooden stick to use for the rest of the shift. This saved my hands from being completely destroyed that day and indeed on all my subsequent shifts. I kept that stick for years because it was a really great reminder to me about the importance of seeing what is needed and stepping in to help and that is something that I have consistently tried to do throughout my career.
"My own experience has been that it can feel easier to be different if you hear your colleagues talking about what makes them different."
How do you make sure your work is inclusive of others?
For me the starting point is about ensuring that your teams have diversity within them – and by that I mean diversity not just of the protected characteristics (although that is super important) but also diversity of background and perspective. I then prioritise making sure that we are making the most of that diversity and listening to a range of voices on any given issue. It is obviously critical that we are enabling people to bring their whole selves to work. So I also prioritise talking about the things that make me a bit different – that I was the only child of a single mum who was a cleaner, that I am a lesbian – because my own experience has been that it can feel easier to be different if you hear your colleagues talking about what makes them different.
What advice would you share with the female HealthTech leaders of tomorrow?
Be fussy over who you work for – working for someone who really wants to enable you to thrive makes the difference between a good job and a great one. Do not underestimate the shadow that you cast personally and think about how you want to use that to support those who will come after you.
What advice would you share with those who want to support the female HealthTech leaders of tomorrow?
Ask the female HealthTech aspiring leaders that you know, how you can help them thrive (and do not assume that you know the answer already). Recognise that it can be hard to ask someone to mentor or sponsor you and so make it easy for the female HealthTech leaders of tomorrow to do that.
Roz Campion, Director of the Office for Life Sciences