Wed 23 Sep 2026
Interview with Nurjahan Khatun, Former Senior Civil Servant, UK Government: now Leadership & Executive Coach, Speaker, and DEI Consultant
Winner of 2025 Women into Leadership Award: Mentor of The Year
Every leadership journey has a defining moment. Looking back, was there a particular experience, opportunity or challenge that gave you the confidence to step into leadership?
The moment that gave me the confidence to lead was not a single event. It was a pattern I could no longer explain away.
For years, I noticed I would raise an idea in a meeting and watch it fall flat, only to hear a colleague repeat it moments later and be praised for it as insight. It happened often enough to stop being coincidence and start being data. My presence disrupted the room, not because of what I said, but because I did not fit the image of who authority was supposed to belong to. My tone was monitored. My confidence was labelled intimidating. My expertise was reframed as overkill. I was trusted with the crisis and excluded from the credit.
Leading the government's £17 billion COVID-19 change portfolio, under intense scrutiny and often as the only visibly Muslim woman at the table, was the moment I decided that pattern would no longer set the terms of my leadership. I stopped waiting for the room to notice my value and started naming what was happening. This was not a confidence problem. It was structural, and the difference matters.
That decision, to name the dynamic instead of quietly absorbing it, is the exact moment my leadership became mine rather than something I was auditioning for.
What advice would you give to women who are aspiring to leadership roles in the Civil Service?
Stop waiting to be taught strategy and start claiming it. Talented women are routinely kept busy in delivery and operational roles, indispensable precisely because they absorb pressure so well. Being needed in that way feels like progress. It is usually the opposite. It is how you stay in the room without ever being asked to lead it. I spent years mistaking being relied upon for being valued.
So, learn to step back before anyone gives you permission to. Ask what the organisation actually needs, not just what is on fire today. That shift, from reactive to strategic, is what separates women who get promoted from women who get relied upon, and you can start making it in your current role, long before the title changes.
Second, retire the idea that exhaustion proves commitment. It is not. It is a design flaw the system will happily let you absorb for as long as you allow it. Protecting your health and your boundaries is not the opposite of ambition. It is what makes ambition sustainable.
And finally, find precise language for what you are experiencing. Bias is far easier to navigate once you can name it clearly, rather than quietly absorbing it as a personal failing. Your confidence has not disappeared. Rooms that trusted your competence but never your authority have worn it down. Reclaim it on purpose. Do not wait for someone else to notice you are ready.
One year on from winning the Inclusive Leader of the Year award, what opportunities, achievements or personal growth are you most proud of, and has the award played a part in that journey?
The award mattered less as recognition and more as evidence. It confirmed, at a moment I badly needed confirming, that walking away from a conventional senior career to mentor women through the exact barriers I had spent twenty years navigating was not a step backwards. It was the point.
In the year since, what I am proudest of is not a single achievement but a pattern I now see repeating: women arriving convinced they are not confident enough, and leaving with the far more accurate diagnosis that they were never taught strategy, only stamina. I think often of one woman who came to me certain she needed to be louder in meetings, and left having realised she needed a plan, not a personality change. Watching that shift happen, again and again, is the most meaningful work I have ever done, more meaningful than any programme I delivered in government.
The award gave a mentoring practice built on lived experience an external stamp of credibility, and that credibility has let the work grow further and faster than I expected. But it has not changed the mission. It has simply made it harder for me, and for anyone watching, to pretend the mission was ever optional
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