Karina Singh
Karina is the Director of Transformation at HM Land Registry, overseeing its ambitious agenda to transform into an end-to-end digital business, to speed up and simplify property transactions.
She is also the Senior Responsible Officer for the Local Land Charges Programme, a complex geospatial programme, transforming a fragmented tapestry of services currently provided by over 300 Local Authorities to a single digital national service.
Karina has been a civil servant for over 30 years, mainly in HM Revenue and Customs and HM Treasury, as well as sometime in the private sector. She has led and managed various aspects of change delivery over the last 17 years.
She is a Fellow of the Association of Project Management.
I started my career in the civil service, back in the 1990s. It was intended to be a summer job, while I worked out what I wanted to do with my life. 30 odd years later, I am still here. After doing a range of jobs, about 15 years ago I fell into project delivery and loved it. I enjoyed the focus of a team working on achieving a great outcome, the collective problem solving and innovation and being able to see and appreciate the impact of the team’s efforts when the change is delivered.
More by accident than by design, I have been involved with all aspects of delivery – from design and set up, to pure delivery, to landing change into the business, so that the benefits can be realised. Today, I lead multi-million pound programmes. My journey hasn’t been linear but has been enjoyable. On IWD, I reflect on some of the things I have learnt along the way.
Don’t self limit
As a woman, the system is stacked against you, especially in certain professions. It’s easy to compound the problem by self-limiting ourselves.
We can probably all fall into the trap sometimes of being very bad at judging risk and often assuming doom and gloom. I used to think “I can’t do that because all these things could go wrong” and not think about the rewards from doing something. Even if things don’t go to plan, you will have learnt from it and take better decisions in future.
Every opportunity that you put yourself up for, every experience you have, every different team you work with, will leave you a changed person. The more you do, the more you test your capabilities, the more confident you will be, and the more resilience and strength you will find within yourself.
So, I’d say don’t wait for other people to give you the opportunity: find the opportunity. Try lots of different things, find out what you are good at, remind yourself of that and build your confidence in that way.
Have a career strategy
It’s easy to be in the moment and get focused on getting through the day, the week, the month. It’s important to take time out and reflect on your own career - on where you have come from and where you want to go. COVID has shown us how easy it is for longer term plans to be overturned in an instant. Opportunities arise and get taken away overnight. The more we have thought about what we want, in advance, the easier it will be to take the right decisions at speed. It’s not about having a detailed plan, but having a strategy, so that we can take the right opportunities when we see them. It’s not all about promotion or a pay rise but may be about having fulfilling work or a better work/life balance – whatever choice that you want to make next.
Work to your strengths
Every job requires a different leadership style. For project turnarounds and start-ups you need a different sort of energy and thought pattern. To embed something, build capability and change culture you need a more adaptive approach.
That’s why we need people with different leadership styles and we need people to know what their leadership style is so they can work to their strengths and at pace in stressful situations. Part of building confidence and developing your leadership style is working out what your strengths are and working to them.
Over the course of your career, you will take on different challenges and roles. Being clear about your strengths, interests and skills will mean you can step into these with confidence and make an impact quickly.
On International Women’s Day, take a moment to reflect on your path, celebrate how far you have come and create a strategy for where you want to get to.