A comprehensive guide for experienced women leaders navigating public sector challenges, workplace restructures, and career transitions while maintaining values-based leadership.
If you’re a midlife woman leading in the public sector right now, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The endless, never-ending restructures, the constant efficiency drives, the way people are shuffled around like chess pieces rather than treated as human beings with mortgages, caring responsibilities, and decades of dedicated service behind them.
The Midlife Leadership Challenge: Navigating Public Sector Upheaval
As women leaders in midlife, we face a particularly cruel irony. We’ve often reached positions of influence just as the sector we’ve devoted our careers to becomes increasingly hostile to the values that drew us to public service leadership in the first place. We can be expected to implement policies that strip dignity from our teams while maintaining our own composure and “inspiring” others to do more with less.
Many of us are sandwich-generation leaders, looking after ageing parents alongside raising the kids we waited to have, or looking after grandchildren, all while navigating our own career and health transitions. The last thing we need is workplace cultures that treat us as expendable.
The Toll of Constant Public Sector Change
It used to be all part of the rough and tumble of organisational life dealing with politics and change. As we get older though, we can find that we just don’t have the additional bandwidth to keep on navigating the ups, downs, around and arounds.
Understanding the UK Public Sector Experience
The British public sector has its own special brand of dehumanisation:
- The endless consultations that are really announcements
- The “voluntary” redundancy schemes that aren’t really voluntary
- The top-down restructures that ignore frontline reality
We’ve watched successive governments promise to value public servants while simultaneously cutting budgets and demonising us in the press. We’ve seen Brexit create additional chaos, COVID expose our sector’s fragility, and austerity measures gut the services we’re passionate about delivering. Meanwhile, many people are struggling with the cost of living and facing long waiting lists to access services.
Reclaiming Your Power: Strategies for Midlife Women in Public Service
As midlife women leaders, here’s what we must remember:
1. Your Experience Has Immense Value
Your decades of experience have value. Don’t let anyone convince you that your institutional knowledge, your relationship-building skills, or your hard-won wisdom are outdated. These are exactly what the public sector needs, even if current leadership structures don’t recognise it.
2. You’re Not Responsible for Broken Systems
Stop trying to personally compensate for structural underfunding or poor policy decisions from Westminster. You cannot work hard enough to make up for systemic public sector failures, and trying will only burn you out.
3. Embrace Your Caring Responsibilities
Whether you’re supporting older parents or relatives, helping teens navigate education, or being present for grandchildren, these responsibilities reflect your values, exactly the same values that brought you into public service and no doubt keep you there.
4. Lead the Change You Want to See
Remember every terrible manager you’ve endured, every redundancy process that lacked dignity, every reorganisation that ignored human impact. Now do the opposite as much as you are able.
Practical Leadership Strategies for Public Sector Women
Protecting Your Team’s Humanity
When implementing changes, ask the uncomfortable questions:
- “How will this affect people’s wellbeing?”
- “What support are we offering?”
- “How do we maintain dignity throughout this process?”
Building Support Networks
Connect with other midlife women leaders across the public sector. Share strategies, offer mutual support, and create informal mentorship relationships. Facebook groups, LinkedIn networks, and professional associations can be lifelines.
Understanding Your Employment Rights
After decades in public service, you likely have significant protections:
- Familiarise yourself with pension rights
- Understand redundancy entitlements
- Know your employment protections
- Consider joining or staying active in your union
Women can sometimes be too nice in difficult workplace situations, not wanting to make a fuss and finding it easier to exit quietly, usually at their own cost.
Planning Multiple Career Scenarios
Whether it’s early retirement, a career pivot, consulting, or moving to a different part of the public sector, having options gives you power. Don’t stay trapped in toxic situations just because you can’t imagine alternatives.
Maintaining Wellbeing During Public Sector Upheaval
Self-care isn’t selfish, it’s essential:
- Maintain exercise habits (gym, swimming)
- Stay well-hydrated and eat nutritiously dense food as much as possible
- Continue hobbies that provide mental respite
- Prioritise quality sleep
- Focus on your health now, don’t put it off until “later when you retire”
When to Seek Professional Support
Reach out when you need help:
- Union representatives who understand public sector employment law
- Occupational health services if stress affects your wellbeing
- Women’s leadership networks for peer support
- Career coaches specialising in midlife transitions
- Financial advisers for pension planning
- Employment lawyers if facing unfair treatment
A Message to Every Midlife Woman in Public Service
To every woman who has given decades to public service and feels battered by constant upheaval: your service matters. The communities you’ve helped, the policies you’ve shaped, the people you’ve developed, none of that disappears because current leadership may feel like it has lost its way.
You don’t have to stay somewhere that doesn’t value you. There are always other options. But if you choose to stay, stay on your terms. Lead with the humanity that drew you to public service in the first place.
Your Value Transcends Organisational Charts
The public sector needs experienced women leaders who are values-driven and unafraid to speak truth to power. Don’t let them convince you otherwise.
You are more than your job title, more than your band or grade, more than the latest restructure. You chose to dedicate your career to serving others, and that choice has made a difference, whether directly providing services, delivering programmes, developing policies, or leading others.
Your value stands, regardless of what any organisational chart says.
Share this with someone who might find it helpful. If you need support navigating your career transition in the public sector, get in touch.
