The benefits of job-sharing their DG role at the Department for Business and Trade have surpassed all expectations for Gavin Lambert and Caleb Deeks
Caleb Deeks and Gavin Lambert are treating CSW to a rare phenomenon: they are in the same room at the same time, side by side at a boardroom table. “Normally you’d never see us together,” Deeks says. “We usually divide and conquer.”
Substantive proof, then, that they are not the same person. But they do possess a “superpower” of sorts: they are job-share partners, jointly directors general for competition, markets and regulatory reform at the Department for Business and Trade. Taking inspiration from other civil service job-sharers, they went into the arrangement because they wanted to advance their careers while protecting their time away from work. What they discovered was a way of working that brought advantages beyond their expectations.
They had been colleagues in the business department for around 10 years when Deeks raised the idea of job-sharing with Lambert. He’d been thinking about it and talking about it for quite some time, he says: “I slightly started to feel that I’d done a lot of talking about it and no doing of it.” So when it transpired that Lambert was about to take adoption leave, it seemed like an opening.
“We weren’t especially close colleagues, but I think we knew each other well enough to have a mutual respect for what we did and how we did it,” Deeks says. “So it was great that the opportunity presented itself.”
They went for a walk in St James’s Park one day in 2018, and Deeks asked Lambert what he thought of the idea. Lambert recalls: “Job-sharing wasn’t something that I had necessarily thought about. But I was about to head off adopting children, so my priorities had somewhat shifted.”
Following that conversation in the park, a plan was hatched. “We agreed we’d spend the time while I was off on adoption leave exploring what job-sharing could mean for us, and what we’d need to do to succeed, learning from others about what success requires and working that through,” Lambert says. “So we did that for about a year.”
They talked to several people across the civil service who were working as part of a job-share, or had done so, to learn how they did it. “What their tips were for job-split versus job-share, what insights they could share with us around how to make it work,” Lambert says. “And we did some work on our own leadership – whether we were aligned in terms of how we lead, and how we deal with people, which was super helpful.”
“We talked to Polly and Ruth, of course,” Deeks says, referring to the renowned civil service job-sharers Polly Payne and Ruth Hannant, who have shared five roles in five departments, with two joint promotions. Currently directors general for policy at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Payne and Hannant were the first job-sharers to break the DG ceiling, and are credited with forging a new way forward for people who might otherwise have compromised on their careers when children or caring responsibilities came along.
“People go, ‘Oh, it’s great to see some senior males doing a job-share,’” Deeks says. “It’s really obvious to us that the only reason we’re able to do this is because people like Polly, Ruth and others blazed that trail, showing that it could work and frankly showing us how to do it. So, you know – massive amounts of gratitude for that.”
During Lambert’s adoption leave, Deeks was working on the civil service reform brief in the Cabinet Office – a role that Lambert had held 10 years earlier, under then-Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude. They shared the role for a short time when Lambert returned to work in 2020. “We were considering what role to move into, and the timing meant it was best for me to join Caleb in that job,” Lambert says. “But then our current job [in DBT] arose as an opportunity too good to miss. So we put our hat in the ring, and we got the DG job.”
“We end the call with me saying, ‘Caleb, would you have done anything differently?' This level of really frank, direct feedback is a unique thing" – Gavin Lambert
Do they have any reflections on what makes a job-share successful – maybe a few tips they would like to pass on?
“Yes,” they say, simultaneously. “We love talking about this, by the way,” Lambert adds.
“It’s obvious that you need to communicate a lot and share stuff and work-share. And we do that,” Deeks says. “But I think there are two things that have really stuck with me about making a success of a job-share partnership. First of all, being completely aligned on what you’re trying to achieve in the role. And then secondly, having alignment on your values.”
They have different strengths and different networks, which they agree is positive – they complement one another in certain ways. “But I think we’ve got a similar commitment to doing a really good job, like really high standards, but also doing it in a way that takes care of people, is positive, is respectful and kind,” Deeks says. “And I think that alignment is really crucial not just for making it work but also for the experience of all the people that we work with.”
They want the job-share to feel seamless to other people, Deeks continues: “You want people to be able to have a conversation with one of you, forget who it was, and it doesn’t matter – you’re going to pick it up, whoever’s there. And the feedback we get tells us that we are managing to achieve that, which is brilliant.”
Lambert says that trust is very important. “When I’m at home with the kids on Monday and Tuesday, I can completely trust Caleb will be getting on and doing it and making it work, and whatever he decides, I completely trust his judgement. And I will defend and support that.”
How do they manage the handover process – the pooling of information which makes job-sharing so collaborative, but which can also take up a lot of time in its own right? On this, Deeks and Lambert learned from job-sharers such as directors general Katherine Green and Sophie Dean, who spoke to CSW last year about the “personal overhead” of the handover process, which they carry out on a Sunday night to avoid cutting into the week.
“We spend an hour or so every Sunday night going through everything,” Lambert says. “We do a little agenda and run through what’s going on. It’s super helpful.” And like Green and Dean, they don’t resent the interruption of their weekend: “I really look forward to it. It’s the highlight of my Sunday night, which probably sounds quite sad,” Lambert says. “I’m more productive on a Friday, knowing I’m going to be marked by Caleb on a Sunday night. But also, I get an hour of feedback on how I’ve done things.
“We end the call with me saying, ‘Caleb, would you have done anything differently? Was there anything you thought didn’t look quite right?’ And it’s not every week, but occasionally there’s a couple of things – just a bit of course-correction or a different pair of eyes.” This level of “really frank, direct feedback” is a unique thing, Lambert says, and gives them a resilience as a duo that they didn’t have working alone.
Deeks feels the same about their Sunday night handovers: “It means that I really hit Monday morning running because I’m not thinking of them as I did when I worked for the previous 20 years on my own,” he says. “If I’d had a weekend that wasn’t interrupted by a work thing, I’d start on Monday thinking, ‘What? What am I doing?’ Whereas now, I’ve had that conversation on Sunday night so in the morning, I know exactly what my priorities are and what’s going on.”
On a Wednesday, which is their crossover day, they often have breakfast together, followed by a senior management team meeting. “But otherwise we’re activating the job-share superpower of being in two places at once,” Deeks says, “which is brilliantly useful on occasion.”
The benefits of the job-share have surpassed what Deeks expected – he says he went into it looking forward to an improved work-life balance and more time for his family. “I hadn’t anticipated how big the professional effectiveness benefits of working in a job-share would turn out to be,” he says. “For me, those are actually more profound than the personal benefits.”
Deeks also appreciates the recovery time that the job-share affords him. “When things have been really intense, really busy, trying to deliver a lot in a short space of time, it’s brilliant to be able to hit it really hard for a few days and then go off and have a bit more time to recover and do it again the next week.”
Lambert has a note of caution on this – he’s aware that he has a level of resilience that his team might not have. “Particularly towards the end of the week, when I’ve only done three days, I just check in with those in our team who’ve put five days in, and who are probably a bit knackered by Friday lunchtime,” he says.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to do a director general job at this stage in my life if it wasn’t in this arrangement” – Caleb Deeks
Their job is challenging, nonetheless. “We’ve got a big portfolio, we’ve got more stuff that we pick up,” Deeks says. The pair has around 1,000 policy, delivery and operations staff working for them, with a brief that includes the oversight of 15 arm’s-length bodies, and responsibility for the regulatory frameworks that support growth. “Our goal is to help the economy grow and make sure we’ve got decent salaries going into people’s pockets every month, and there’s the taxation available to support public services,” Lambert says. “We see ourselves being critical to that.”
They also oversee the setting of the national minimum wage, and the plan to make work pay. “It’s a really big transformation in employment rights, protecting those in more insecure work, including zero-hours contracts,” Lambert says. This is something he’s especially proud of: “I was chatting to a mum in the queue for school the other week. She was asking me about what we’re doing on zero-hours contracts because she’s on one. And she connected with it because it will give her more stable employment. She was asking how quickly it’s going to happen. Not as quickly as she would like, but we’re on it. And that’s hugely inspiring – that the work our teams are doing, it really matters to people.”
They have a team focused on product safety, which tackles problems such as the use of conversion kits to turn pedal bikes into e-bikes: “There’s a rather horrifying possibility that they can explode when they’re charging,” Lambert says. And they cover competition policy – from Oasis tickets being sold through re-sellers to regulating big tech firms like Google – alongside a raft of measures to reduce the burdens on business.
Have there been any difficult days? Any big decisions that weighed heavily? Deeks has to go back to the pre-job-share days to find an example. “I was working in the Treasury in 2007 or thereabouts on spending on prisons,” he says. “It was one of these prison crisis periods which we’ve had experience of again more recently. And you were busy but there were very hard decisions to make that were going to have effects on people’s lives out there. I remember feeling that quite acutely,” he says.
Lambert recalls a previous DG role in the business department that he did on an interim basis – he was involved in the collapse of “a high-profile industrial company who will remain nameless, but it’s probably fairly obvious”, he says. “And it was sort of all on me… And you think about the thousands of families that are directly affected as a result of that. Similar decisions, albeit different ones in this current mode, are less acute, I think, because I’ve got Caleb to bounce things off just as a sense check.”
The interim DG role lasted for around six months, and Lambert decided against applying for the permanent position. Why was that? “It wasn’t a fit for me with the kids,” he says. “And just in terms of my time of life, doing it full time – it wouldn’t have been the right fit.”
Deeks is equally clear on this: “I wouldn’t have wanted to do a director general job at this stage in my life if it wasn’t in this [job-sharing] arrangement,” he says. “I’m really confident that together, we do a better job than either of us would individually.”
Lambert clearly agrees. He values the transparency in their working relationship, which means neither one of them has to be defensive if something doesn’t go well, or take weighty decisions without a trusted sounding-board. “Because we succeed together and we also fail together,” he says. “It is super, super powerful.”