Introduction
What transferable traits and lessons can Defence and Security leaders glean from the challenges faced within police accountability structures? Mavs, our senior editor for People and Leadership, discusses this with Sal Naseem, a former Director at the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) and author of True North: A Story of Racism, Resilience & Resisting Systems of Denial.
True North provides a refreshingly honest and necessarily cutting exploration of how personal values can drive challenge and meaningful change within poor organisational cultures. Sal’s life story, from experiencing racism as a young Asian boy in Kilmarnock to navigating the complexities of institutional resistance and denial during his time at IOPC, highlights the importance of steadfast integrity and professional duty. Sal found himself a leading voice in confronting systemic issues while remaining resolute in his principles, qualities sought by any organisation that wants all of its people to flourish.
For our inaugural ‘In Conversation with’, Sal shares insights so that we can draw parallels between policing and defence, the role of values in leadership and followership, and how we can understand and follow our own True North.
“People deserve good leadership; it shouldn’t be the exception.” ~ Sal Naseem
Q&A
Q) Your book True North begins with your experiences as a young boy in Kilmarnock and follows your journey through continued significant challenges, including confronting institutional racism while a Director at the IOPC. Can you share what motivated you to write this book and what ‘True North’ means to you personally?
A) I’m conscious to avoid cliché here, but I actually just wanted to tell my story because no one had previously written about what it was like to work inside the body that investigates the worst forms of police misconduct.
I started writing this book in 2023, and it was part of my process of healing from what had been a pretty brutal experience in my time within the system. In writing the book, I was confronted with my reality of what it had actually been like to have been one of the most senior people of colour to have ever worked in that system, and how the spectre of racism had materialised in ways I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time.
As for this notion of True North, for me, it’s not just the title of my book; it’s actually about how I try to live my life, both personally and professionally, in constant and consistent alignment with my values.
Q) The book explores staggering instances of misconduct and systemic issues within the Metropolitan Police. While the context differs, the MOD also faces challenges related to misconduct (often categorised as Bullying, Harassment, Discrimination, and Victimisation) and cultural issues. From your experience, what are some of the common underlying factors that allow these issues to persist?
A). Having dealt with these same issues at a systemic level in the Fire Service (as an independent panel member at the National Fire Chiefs Council), I would say there are certain common features why they exist or the dial just doesn’t move:
- Quality of leadership: It simply isn’t there to lead on the scale of cultural change needed here across the organisational structures, and if I were to be specific, I’d say lack of moral courage is a huge factor here.
- The separation of culture from leadership: Any issues concerning poor/toxic cultures are the consequence of poor/neglectful leadership. The great trick by these leaders has been to separate culture issues as adjacent to leadership challenges, but that’s dishonest. They are one and the same, but that line of accountability then becomes uncomfortable for incumbents…
- Just implement the recommendations: I used to hear this very legitimate challenge from communities in my role at the IOPC, when I was discussing what needed to change in policing. Like any system/organisation which has cultural issues centred on these toxic issues, inevitably, there will be a myriad of reports with a myriad of recommendations on what needs to change. From my experience, vanishingly few are implemented, and we all know what’s wrong. It’s a question of having the intention and moral courage to do what needs to be done.
Q) What similarities do you see between police and military personnel responsibilities, and how do these shape their leadership challenges?
A) In both cases they are incredibly difficult and often thankless professions which place incredible demands on the men and women who serve in them. In the case of policing I’ve seen the consequences of this up close. But also stitched into the DNA of both professions is a strong focus on ethics and professional standards, which in the case of policing are wrapped up in the Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Behaviour. So that expectation, which is very much a public expectation, then translates into the leadership challenge.
From my vantage point, where I had to deal with the worst failures in policing, this theoretical leadership challenge of standards and ethics would be met with the crushing reality of the actual cultures within teams and of the organisation itself. In this respect, I would have to mention the Metropolitan Police, whom I had oversight of in my former role and who had the most acute challenges of any police service around organisational culture in this country in recent years. Something I’ll come back to before we finish up here.
Q) How do you think the concept of integrity applies to both the armed forces and the police, especially in high-pressure environments?
A) It’s this word ‘values’ that comes into play here for me. And that’s not actually about the organisational values but about understanding your own value-set, your own True North. Understanding these, and being able to articulate these, are the first steps, to then being in a position where you can walk in alignment with the clear direction they provide. In essence, that moral compass.
In high pressure professions like the military and policing, utilising your True North within the organisational context in which you operate is crucial. I’ve sadly seen the consequences when police officers don’t do this, and they can be devastating for both members of the public and for their colleagues as well. The loss of integrity here can be seen in the context of policing in the past few years where that loss of public trust and confidence (particularly with the Met) from large sections of different communities has actually jeopardised the efficacy of that police service. For instance, when one mother told me her son, although he’d been mugged, wouldn’t report it to the Met because he had so little faith in them. The fact that her son was Black was also relevant because of the countless times he had been stopped and searched.
Q) That highlights a deep erosion of public confidence. In your view, what are the key factors that contribute to this erosion of trust, and how can organisations improve it?
A). Honestly, it’s the pattern. Same old shit, different day. Nothing changes. People are tired and they see through performative leadership much better these days.
Organisations can make inroads here by rooting everything in action and avoiding rhetoric. Of course, that action has to be sufficiently disruptive to drive the needed change. If people can actually see an element of change themselves, this will start to make a difference in improving trust and confidence, and I say that from experience.
Q) Since you mention values, what role do they play in navigating challenging situations in hierarchical organisations like the police or military?
A) A huge part.
I worked in an organisation that investigated police misconduct and yet, in many ways, suffered from many of the same issues. Groupthink and risk aversion pervades, and I say that from the experience of being an outsider but ending up with a seat at the table and being involved in some of the most high profile cases of misconduct involving the Met in the last ten years. Along the way, doing the right thing and driving change became a constant fight because that comes with the risk of doing things differently – challenging the orthodoxy and that impermeable groupthink at the most senior levels.
If I hadn’t operated in a way that aligned with my values, then arguably, I wouldn’t have the body of work that I can look back on now. It centred on change, the change I tried to drive in policing on some of the most wicked issues. My True North gave me clarity in the oppressive fog of moral uncertainty within my organisation, and following it always took me to the right place.
But, that isn’t easy and requires a level of moral courage and conviction which builds over time.
Q) What advice would you give to young leaders in the military about standing up to injustice within their ranks?
A) I would probably repeat some of my previous answer. It requires moral courage to lead like this, and let’s be clear that’s exactly what it is – leadership.
But there are different ways you can do this, especially when you are young in service. Calling things out immediately can be incredibly difficult, but you can always follow up afterwards with the support of a colleague and raise it in private.
I won’t pretend that’s easy, but I guarantee that if we all learnt to never ignore that niggle (we all sometimes get when we see something that’s jarred us), can you imagine how much better things would be? Doing the right thing always is not an easy path, but it is a path once you learn to navigate, will lead you to a remarkable view of self empowerment. It will also lead to a style of leadership that cultivates followership.
Q) And what does quality followership mean to you?
A). Everything.
This archaic notion of leadership I see bandied about by people which actually relies on command and control – it will only take you/the organisation so far.
In my experience, people follow people, and embodying a genuine values-based leadership style and the intrinsic ethical framework that entails creates that followership. At the heart of leading in this way is putting your people first; the rest naturally follows.
I think as leaders that’s the place we all need to aspire to be in.
Q) How can leaders create environments where diverse backgrounds and perspectives are respected while maintaining team cohesion?
A) Psychological safety for me is really important here. I always build up from this, and creating this takes time and trust and you have to be genuine about allowing people to feel safe and unthreatened in expressing their views, and understanding how these will be listened to, ahead of the necessary decisions you have to make.
There is another big conversation about inclusion and ultimately belonging, and that can feel harder when you are the “only one in the room” who looks like you, but honestly, this is just about trying to be fair and reasonable. From my experience, the best leaders here aren’t perfect, but they are sincere in their intentions, and that goes an awful long way to team members from minoritised groups/communities feeling that sense of inclusion, which then engenders belonging.
I could go on and rail against the faux complexity that much of the work around equality, diversity, and inclusion can create here…but that would mean that this answer would become an essay.
Q) If you will indulge our readers and elaborate a little, what is your view of the difference between inclusion and belonging, and why should organisations take note?
A). Oooh, you had to take me there!
Look at the heart of this work on culture is about treating people fairly, properly, humanly. We can dive into all that engineered complexity in this area, but what we are talking about are basic principles of natural justice.
People need to be treated in the right way, and if we aren’t that unfairness we all absolutely feel down to the marrow in our bones.
How we create those right cultures takes us back to that point on leadership, which culture is a consequence of. If organisations invest in proper values led leadership training, I believe it would be transformative here.
Q) What lessons from your experiences with confronting institutional racism could help military leaders address systemic issues within their organisations?
A) Two lessons here.
Firstly, be prepared to call out the issue for what it is – institutional racism. Any avoidance of that difficult conversation and admission will ultimately discredit any subsequent work you may try to perform here. A good example here is Sir Mark Rowley’s response in 2023 after the Casey Review.
Secondly, it’s all about intention. In policing, I saw bravery from some senior Chief Constables who clearly got this issue and what needed to happen, and then I also saw a lot of performative nonsense, which the officers from those forces could also see. If you don’t have a genuine intention to tackle the systemic issues here, don’t bother because that lack of sincerity will transmit in ways you don’t realise, and of course, positively, the converse is true as well.
Q) How do you stay motivated to follow your principles, even when faced with resistance from those in authority?
A) My True North is non-negotiable, and for the purposes of this conversation it’s probably helpful to spell this out because they are the three Fs:
My faith, family and fight.
All three I found and were created from a challenging childhood in Scotland in the 70s/80s where I had to deal with the visceral hatred, violence and racism that came with being the first family of colour to move into our town. It was these three Fs that gave me the ability to keep going, often bloodied and battered, these built an inner armour of resilience that ultimately leveraged that trauma into a tool for my own empowerment and advantage.
This resilience and these values are indivisible from who I am, and ultimately, this grounding and attitude prove useful time and time again: when I had to fight after fight with my own organisation and the Met Police in trying to perform my mandate and ultimately drive change in policing for those victims in communities and also officers inside the Met itself.
As I describe in the first chapter of my book, I risked my career by saying ‘no’ and doing what was right to expose what that toxic culture actually looked like inside the Met.
The strength and motivation to do that came from my 3 Fs.
A) One point I would advocate for passionately is for values based leadership to be taught more systematically across both policing and the military at more junior grades. Courage and integrity are intrinsic to this style of leadership, but it’s not a natural leadership setting for everyone and I think everyone can become better at it with the right type of reflective training.
Q) Can you describe a pivotal moment when you had to make a difficult decision to stay true to your values?
A) Yes, as I alluded to earlier, I decided to publish unredacted WhatsApp messages from our Operation Hotton investigations in a report alongside the systemic learning recommendations we had made to the Met Office.
Doesn’t seem like a remarkable thing, however it had never been done before. These messages demonstrated the culture inside the Met, every form of discrimination was laid bare, misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, antisemitism, abelism… And the victims in this investigation were all female officers and officers of colour.
I wanted to build better awareness for members of the public of what this toxic culture actually looked like, and also those serving officers whose life experience meant they would never understand what some of their colleagues had to suffer. However, through a combination of fear and questionable morality, I came under huge pressure not to publish these messages. In fact, I was asked not to. I refused, and fought to ensure I could bring this into the public domain. But, by the time I had won that fight, it was clear all the risk of this was on me. I was so convinced this was the right thing to do – it didn’t matter. So in Feb 2022 we published and this story ended up becoming a global news story, to the eventual resignation of the then Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick.
My refusal to compromise my values, had ultimately led to systemic change in the Met.
It was, and still is a surreal and proud experience.
Q) Changemakers and progressives are often under fire from within their own organisations and wider communities. And this can carry a heavy toll, as you explicitly highlight in True North. What strategies have you used to build and maintain resilience throughout your career, and how might these resonate with military leaders?
A) My resilience has always been rooted in my faith, family and fight. I use these to fill my cup. Also, as my book describes, I have learned how to wear my inner armour and use that resilience to great effect when pushing for change, but also made how I made mistakes about mistaking when I needed to take myself out of the battle, to take that armour off, to walk away and recuperate so that there was enough of me left for that long-haul.
The casualty here has been, in the past, my mental health, and that’s been through a toxic combination of individuals and organisational culture. Truthfully, I worked in a system and in a way where the work and people tried to break me, and although I came out of that experience calcified and strengthened, I also learned the value of being kind to myself and being open and honest to myself about my mental health.
The roles we perform in these settings are incredibly demanding, but knowing when to shed old machismo mentalities is key. So is being honest in holding a mirror up to ourselves to ensure we remain whole for ourselves, our families, and our people.
All of them deserve this.
We deserve this.
Q) Thank you. If you were to share one takeaway from True North with our readers, what would it be?
A) To practice living leading in a way that sits in alignment with your own True North. You won’t regret it, it changed my life.
Q) As we wrap up, if you could address a room full of military leaders, what would you say to inspire them to lead with integrity and courage in the face of adversity?
A) That’s a tough question!
I would maybe say something along the lines of:
“Everyone in this room knows and understands courage in a way that I probably can’t comprehend. But do you all understand the possibility of articulating that very same courage in your style of leadership? That moral courage that each and every one of you has, rooted within your values in a way you might not understand, but if you listen and follow them, will lead you to the right place every single time. Your own True North, keeping you constant in reminding each and every one of you in the direction your integrity necessitates you travel in. You all have this, just trust yourselves to lead with it.”
I might say something like that.
In conclusion – our own True North
Consider your own True North. Perhaps it aligns with a framework of courage, integrity, and an unwavering commitment to doing the right thing as a foundation for leading and acting with purpose. For military leaders, the parallels are clear: an organisational and personal need to uphold principles, elevate inclusivity, meaningfully nurture genuine belonging, and build teams that are safe to challenge rooted in mutual trust and respect. As Sal puts it in his book, “Some of the best leaders I’ve met have no fancy title, they earn respect in the way they act, the way they treat people, and the way they make people feel.”
Sal’s insights powerfully remind us that leadership is more than authority. It’s also about integrity, resilience, and the courage to confront what’s wrong, including and especially when times are hard. His own experiences, from Kilmarnock to the IOPC and beyond, fervently highlight the challenges people can face in navigating systemic issues while staying true to their values.
Tomorrow offers an opportunity. How might you embody your own True North to create a ripple of positive impact in your workplace environment?
Feature photo by Guven Gunes on Unsplash
Sal Naseem
Sal Naseem is the best selling author of True North: A Story of Racism Resilience and Resisting Systems of Denial.
Sal is the former Regional Director for London at the Independent Office for Police Conduct, where he spent the best part of a decade working in the police accountability framework in England and Wales. He is currently Assistant Director of Insight, Policy & Strategy, a Senior Associate Fellow at The Police Foundation and an independent panel member at the National Fire Chiefs Council, supporting their work on culture and inclusion and a Trustee at the Centre for Justice Innovation.
Sal has been listed as one of the top 10 voices in the world on anti-discrimination on LinkedIn by Favikon in 2024. Honoured as one of the 50 most influential people driving change in the UK through inclusion in the Diversity Power List 2023/2024, and also recognised as one of the most inspirational leaders on inclusion by D&I Leaders 2024.
Sal has worked on some of the most high-profile misconduct cases featuring the Metropolitan Police Service in recent years. As the Strategic Lead on Discrimination his work focused on stop & search, racism, misogyny, and police culture. Sal sat on the NPCC Police Race Action Plan Board, and the NPCC National DEI Board as an independent member.
Sal is also a media commentator and uses his platform to talk about male allyship as a necessity in the fight against male violence against women and girls, and broader issues related to inclusion.
Sal holds a law degree from the University of Glasgow and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Society of Leadership Fellows.
Mavs
Mavs, our senior editor for People and Leadership, thinks about the lived experience of service personnel. Much of his focus is on ground-level leadership, followership, retention, and culture.
He holds a Masters degree in Education with a leadership and management specialisation and an Honours Degree in History.
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