Breaking the silence – one conversation at a time

By Kash Haroon, North West ADASS Associate

Ask leadership teams how race is experienced in their organisation and the answer is often the same: we don’t hear much about it. Or, as I heard ten years ago across the North West: race? It’s not a problem. Silence about race often means fear. Staff worry that speaking up will mark them out as troublemakers or targets for future cuts. People still have mortgages to pay and lives to live. Silence equals survival.

For over two years I have worked with the North West Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (North West ADASS) on a regional anti-racism programme. Most arrive expecting the usual stuff: big gestures and ambitious commitments. What they find is totally different: a structured conversation that helps people uncover their own biases and the barriers they create without realising it. It gives people an opportunity to exhale: a space for the things they have always wanted to say, and the questions they have always wanted to ask, but never had a space to have them in.

What we were able to discuss together was everything organisations usually step around. The daily levy paid by Black and Asian colleagues: the thick skin, the mispronounced names, the pressure to prove you’re good enough twice over. Staff handed work because they speak the language, then expected to interpret complex assessments with no recognition or support. Flags appearing overnight across our communities: “it’s the first time in my career in my life, really, that there’s ever been a question where I’m safe going into somebody’s house and that’s scary”. And threaded through it all: coproduction and allyship as things you do, not things you declare. Systems change in action.

The most powerful moments came when staff shared their experiences of racism. We take a trauma-informed approach; nobody relives what happened for an audience. Some spoke; others wrote their experiences down and senior leaders read them aloud, closing each with the same commitment: this happened on my watch, and here is what I am going to do about it. Where organisations reached for the performative, a dashboard here, a polished action plan there, the room did not accept it. Not with hostility. With honesty. Training is not the answer here. Leadership practice is.

One senior leader spoke about their own bias: a childhood in a mostly white town, race learned from seventies television, and the realisation they had never had to question any of it. Privilege often looks like that. Not hostility. Absence. We keep finding the same thing: when we bring new information into our awareness, and we are ready to accept it without defensiveness or justification, that is where things change. Often in small ways. But a few small changes, made together, become something significant. It is happening in Rochdale right now.

This is long-term organisational development work, and we have the skills and language to do it. Belonging and inclusion arrive as byproducts of workplaces where honest conversation and acceptance of difference are normal. Deliberate proximity changes how people experience one another. There is hope, and it is practical. Make the time. Create the proximity. Let leaders go first. Then listen, without defensiveness, to what the silence has been telling you all along. And don’t lose momentum when you see the movement.

If you have any questions or would like to find out more about this work please contact North West ADASS.

You can explore further articles on anti-racism and inclusive leadership practice in Leader Summer 2026 and access resources from the Driving Race Equity Conference 2026.