John Herring

John has over 20 years of experience working as a leader across public services. After his degree he worked as a care worker in social care whilst training as a psychological therapist. After qualifying he went on to set up a night time drop-in and therapy centre for homeless people in Liverpool in 2000. In 2005 John joined the NHS working in a mental health trust and for eight years worked in a number of roles leading on the delivery of mental health services whilst maintaining a clinical caseload. He briefly worked for NHS England before joining the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership at the start of the devolution deal for Greater Manchester. His first job in OD came in 2017 when as part of the devolution of health and care he took up a role focussed on addressing the leadership and cultural challenges of implementing the GM Mayor’s vision for a One Workforce approach to public services across the Greater Manchester devolved region. John also led on the commitment across Greater Manchester public services in addressing race equality across the workforce and commissioned the work to create change in experience and outcome for racially diverse groups in public services – this was the first project of its kind in the UK.

He is now the director for organisational development and culture in the NHS Greater Manchester and works on programmes across the Greater Manchester Health and Care System focussed on a wide range of issues from culture to governance, good employment and wellbeing, and employers as anchors and equality and diversity.

John sits on the Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter Board and the Employer Integration Board (led by Greater Manchester's Mayor) representing Health and Care. The aim of these boards is to spread good employment by a range of key characteristics including real living wage and EDI and improving technical education pathways into health and care respectively.

Outside of his public service roles he is the Chair of Abandon Normal Devices – an arts charity based in the North of England who use experimental art in unusual places to enable communities to have conversations about difficult issues. John is also a singer songwriter with two albums to his name and has worked in partnership with Unconvention raising awareness of the unique mental health challenges artists experience.