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Chyrel Brown joined Michelle Ansell in The Impact Room following a 20 year career across Social Housing, a Chief Operating Officer at One Housing, alongside senior Chief Customer Officer roles at Notting Hill Genesis and a breadth of transformational Housing Association leadership experience. Now an Executive Advisor and with an established NED and Board portfolio.
Their conversation explores the pressures facing Housing organisations, why purpose alone is not enough to solve increasingly complex operational challenges, and the leadership capability needed to combine regulations, customer understanding, data, technology and commercial judgement.
Chyrel also speaks candidly about moving from Executive leadership into Non Executive and portfolio work, representation in the Boardroom and the barriers people can sometimes place in their own way as they progress.
Today, Chyrel works across Executive Advisory, turnaround and interim C-suite leadership alongside her Non-Executive and Board responsibilities.
Prefer to Listen
Housing is facing a convergence of challenges
Chyrel describes a sector where many long standing pressures are now arriving at the same time.
Customer expectations have increased. Housing quality and building safety remain under scrutiny. Organisations face investment pressure, changing demographics, regulatory demands and an increasingly volatile economic environment.
At the same time, Boards and Executives are expected to respond faster and communicate more openly than ever before.
Her point is that these issues are not necessarily new individually.
What is different is their scale, speed and convergence.
Housing leaders therefore need to be strategic, operational and forward looking at the same time.
Purpose is powerful but it needs capability behind it
One of the strongest themes in the conversation is Chyrel’s affection for the Housing sector and the people working within it.
She talks about the enormous goodwill and commitment she sees amongst people who genuinely want to improve lives and communities.
But she also makes an important distinction:
Heart alone will not solve the sector’s problems.
Housing needs logic, challenge, diversity of thought and stronger capability around data, digital, analysis and problem-solving.
Chyrel puts it simply:
“If nothing changes, nothing changes.”
The next phase of Housing leadership therefore needs to combine purpose with the ability to challenge established approaches and develop new solutions.
Customer leadership is changing too
Customers and residents are no longer passive recipients of services.
They have greater access to information, higher expectations and more ways to challenge organisations and make their voices heard.
That changes the role of customer leadership.
For Housing organisations, listening cannot simply mean consultation after decisions have already been made. Chyrel argues for much more active engagement and a willingness to use technology, data and customer insight to shape services.
That is particularly relevant to the evolution of both the COO and Chief Customer Officer roles.
The strongest organisations increasingly need leaders capable of connecting operational performance, customer outcomes, digital capability, assets, communities and organisational culture rather than treating them as separate functions.
Moving from Executive leadership to the Boardroom
Chyrel also talks candidly about the transition from Executive leadership into a portfolio and Non-Executive career.
As an Executive, she was accustomed to solving problems, directing teams and getting into operational detail.
As a Non-Executive, the role is different.
It requires asking the right questions, seeking assurance and resisting the temptation to move immediately into solution mode.
She describes the importance of learning to step back from:
“I know how to do this.”
and instead asking:
What evidence do I have? What assurance do I need? What questions should I be asking?
Her cross sector Board experience also broadened her thinking. Working outside Housing exposed her to different approaches to technology, systems, governance and long-term planning that could be brought back into her own leadership perspective.
Representation matters but so does access
One of the most useful parts of the conversation concerns representation in senior leadership and Board environments.
Chyrel describes entering rooms where other people appeared to understand unwritten social conventions, networks and language that she had not previously encountered.
Her experience was not simply about getting people into senior positions.
It was about demystifying leadership.
That means allowing emerging leaders to observe Boards and Executive teams, explaining how governance really works and giving people access to mentors, coaches and networks that help them understand environments they may never previously have experienced. Pasted text
The danger of waiting until you feel ready
Chyrel is particularly open about her own experience of imposter syndrome.
During an early acting Non Executive opportunity, she spent much of the assignment barely speaking because she was worried about being “found out”.
Only towards the end did she begin contributing more freely. Her realisation was simple: once she started speaking, people listened and thhat experience shaped an important piece of advice for emerging leaders:
Lean into being uncomfortable.
People often imagine that everyone else in the Boardroom possesses certainty or knowledge that they themselves lack, usually, that isn’t true.
Sometimes the biggest barrier is the story we have constructed about what we think we should already know.
Making room for others
Representation is also about what established leaders do once they have reached positions of influence.
Chyrel talks about “making room” for others, sharing the experiences that went wrong as well as those that went well, allowing future leaders to understand that progress does not require perfection.
Her analogy is particularly memorable:
Collect one pebble every day and eventually you are sitting on your own beach.
Progress is often the accumulation of small actions rather than one defining career moment.
That applies both to individuals and to organisations trying to create more representative leadership teams.
What leaders should take away
- Housing’s greatest challenges increasingly require operational, customer, data and technology thinking to come together.
- Purpose and passion matter, but they need to be supported by analytical capability and willingness to challenge established approaches.
- COO and Chief Customer Officer leadership increasingly overlap around customer outcomes, operational performance and organisational transformation.
- Moving from Executive to NED requires a shift from solving problems to asking better questions and seeking assurance.
- Representation improves when organisations remove some of the mystery around Board and Executive leadership.
- Mentoring, observation and access to networks can be as important as formal development.
- Leaders do not need to be perfect before they contribute; confidence often develops through participation rather than before it.
About Chyrel Brown
Chyrel Brown is an experienced senior leader with a career spanning Social Housing, customer and operational leadership.
Her Executive career has included both Chief Operating Officer and Chief Customer Officer leadership, giving her a perspective across operational performance, customer outcomes, organisational culture and transformation.
At the time of this Impact Room conversation, Chyrel had recently completed her COO role with One Housing and was building her Non-Executive portfolio.
Today she works as an Executive Advisor, turnaround specialist, Interim senior C-suite leader and trusted adviser, alongside Non Executive and Board responsibilities.
Her work continues to combine purpose led leadership with practical organisational improvement.
Building leadership capability across Housing, Customer or Operations?
Douglas Jackson works with Housing organisations appointing senior leaders across Operations, Customer, Transformation, Strategy and wider Executive leadership.
We help organisations identify leaders able to combine purpose with the commercial, operational and people capability required to deliver lasting change.
Talk to us about your next senior Housing appointment →
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