Executive Summary
- Vulnerability has a business case: Katherine Hernandez ran Home Group’s regional operations through 18 months of PTSD after open heart surgery. When she started talking about it, team performance improved and colleagues felt safer disclosing their own challenges.
- Housing saves the NHS £2 for every £1 spent: Home Group’s hospital discharge pilot cut average stays by 99 days and saved £1.4 million in three months. The funding ended anyway – a textbook example of siloed public sector budgets ignoring proven ROI.
- ADHD isn’t a leadership barrier, it’s a different operating system: Katherine’s never had a five-year plan. Her brain formulates four solutions instantly when problems hit. She’s also top quartile for KPIs across a 14,000-property portfolio.
- DEI becomes operational during crises: When the 2024 riots trapped colleagues in buildings or kept them home out of fear, Home Group’s response was taxis, shift changes, and safety protocols – not statements.
“I came to and I was in intensive care and it was awful. I remember every single second, feel and smell, emotion.”
Katherine Hernandez had emergency open heart surgery six years ago for a previously undiagnosed hole in her heart. The surgeons fixed the physical problem. Nobody warned her about the PTSD.
For 18 months, she managed clinical depression and anxiety whilst running Home Group’s regional operations – 14,000+ properties, nearly 100 supported services, full P&L responsibility. She told no one at work.
Then she started talking about it.
“Things just felt lighter and easier and better,” she says. Not immediately. Not perfectly. She still gets flashbacks on the anniversary of the surgery. Still processes the trauma. But the act of opening that particular bag of worries (she references reading a children’s book about this with her four-year-old daughter) changed how her team operated.
The Business Case Nobody Tracks for
Here’s what organisations don’t measure: how many people are sitting in meetings right now, managing significant mental health challenges, saying nothing because they’ve never seen anyone at director level admit to struggling.
Katherine grew up on a council estate in northeast England. Lived in social housing again later when she needed it. She’s got ADHD. She’s had open heart surgery. She’s LGBT. She’s mixed race. She’s a mum. She’s married.
And she’s Regional Director at Home Group with a board seat at Railway Housing Association.
“People have come to me and said, thank you so much for saying you have ADHD. I didn’t ever think you could be a director and have ADHD. I’ve never seen it,” Katherine tells me. “And I’m like, hi, here I am.”
The visibility gap perpetuates assumptions about who belongs in leadership. But there’s a harder question here: what’s the cost of everyone performing a version of professional competence that requires hiding significant parts of their reality?
Katherine’s team does quarterly reviews. She’s got a coach. Reflective practice – borrowed from her years in youth and social care work with looked-after children – is baked into how she operates. “It’s probably really common that we all just run from one thing to another thing to another and we don’t stop,” she says. “Sometimes you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.”
That honesty creates permission. Not in a soft-skills, feel-good way. In a “my team can actually tell me when they’re drowning instead of pretending until something breaks” way.
The £1.4 Million Problem With Siloed Budgets
Right. Let’s talk about the numbers that should matter but apparently don’t.
One in five people in hospital beds right now are clinically well with nowhere to go. Home Group ran a pilot working with one hospital trust. From admission through to discharge, they worked with patients to secure sustainable housing.
Three-month results:
- Average length of stay reduced by 99 days
- £1.4 million saved for the NHS
- Patients housed properly instead of discharged homeless back to the streets
The National Housing Federation research backs this up at scale: every £1 spent on supported housing saves £2 downstream in health and adult social care.
The funding for the programme ended.
And this is where Katherine’s frustration shows through. Not about Home Group specifically – about the systemic failure to recognise housing as infrastructure rather than charity.
“We’ve got the numbers,” she says. “We see it on a daily basis. Let’s really recognise the importance.” But housing remains politically marginalised. “It’s not seen as a core public service and it absolutely should be.”
The hospital gets its bed back. The housing provider scrambles for funding. The person in the middle ends up back on the street. Then re-admitted. The cycle repeats at higher cost.
This isn’t a failure of innovation or pilot programmes. The model worked. It saved £1.4 million in three months for one trust. The barrier is structural – budgets sitting in silos, each optimising for their own line item whilst the actual human (and the actual total cost) falls through the gap.
For executives in health, housing, or social care: the cross-sector integration isn’t aspirational. Katherine’s team did it. The spreadsheet proved it. We just keep pretending housing is a nice-to-have instead of essential infrastructure.
Leadership Without a Five-Year Plan
“I’m one of these people that has never had a career plan,” Katherine says. “I listen to all these other podcasts and read these books about how important it is to have a goal and set milestones. I’ve never ever done that.”
She’s got ADHD. It makes her flip from one thing to another. It also makes her formulate four different options instantly when she hits a problem. “My brain does work a bit differently. If I come across something, I find it to be a challenge. So I will formulate four different options. And my brain works that quickly that, you know, I’m over there and I’ve made the decision.”
Her career path: youth work, outdoor instruction (she lived in a shed on Lake Windermere where “when it rained I got wet”), adult social care, children’s social care. She’s got so many qualifications she can’t remember them all. Then 15 years at Home Group, trying different things within the organisation until she found where she needed to be.
No strategic career map. Just an organisation that could harness neurodiverse thinking patterns instead of trying to flatten them.
She’s competitive. Top of the leaderboard for KPIs. But she reframes what the numbers mean: “Not just because that’s more money in Home Group and I care about bottom line… it means that more people sustain a tenancy, so there’s less people at risk of eviction, less families going to end up in temporary accommodation.”
The ADHD that fills her drawer with abandoned crafts (her wife now has to water the plants from her plant propagation phase) is the same ADHD that gives her the plot-twist energy to enjoy setbacks. It’s not despite the neurodivergence. It’s how her brain operates.
And yeah, Home Group let her try things. That’s the organisational structure piece that matters. She’s been there 15 years because “they’ve given me so many opportunities and with the ADHD, it’s been brilliant.”
When DEI Becomes Crisis Management
During the 2024 riots, Katherine had colleagues who couldn’t get to work because they were afraid to leave their homes – people of colour watching their neighbourhoods become unsafe. Others couldn’t get home because rioters were outside the building setting bins alight.
Home Group’s response: shift pattern changes, taxis, safety protocols.
Not statements. Not campaigns. Operational crisis management that recognises workforce diversity as a reality requiring concrete support.
“We made sure that they were okay, we supported them afterwards, we did things like change the shift patterns or made sure they got taxis,” Katherine explains.
This is DEI as business continuity. When political changes threatened trans rights, “we said, no, we believe in the rights of trans people.” When major companies started pulling out of Pride events, Home Group held the line.
Katherine connects this to organisational heritage – Home Group formed from the Jarrow marches, “marching for equality… for equal rights.” But the practical application is less about values statements and more about: can your colleagues actually get to work safely? Do they trust you’ll support them when things get difficult?
“The main barrier is fear,” Katherine says about DEI conversations. “Fear of saying the wrong thing, offending somebody, ending up in front of HR. I think people are genuinely well intentioned, but really worried.”
Her solution: Home Group runs “Life Swaps” where customers and colleagues share their lived experiences. Not training modules. Actual humans explaining their actual lives. Creating space for the questions people are afraid to ask.
What Actually Changes Things
Three pieces of advice Katherine’s carried through her career:
From her mum (a nurse who became a clinical manager): “At the end of every shift, go and say thank you to everybody. No matter if it’s been an easy shift or a hard shift, thank people.”
From her brother (army): “Don’t ever ask anybody to do something that you’re not willing to do.”
Her own: “Put yourself in their shoes and understand what they need from you. It’s a people business rather than a bricks and mortar business.”
None of this is revolutionary. It’s almost frustratingly simple.
But simplicity isn’t the same as easy. Thanking your team when you’re knackered from a brutal day? Not asking people to be in situations you’d refuse? Actually thinking about the customer beyond the KPI?
That takes discipline. And it requires leaders who’ll admit when things are complicated, when the obvious solution failed, when they’re still processing trauma six years later.
“Leadership isn’t about hierarchy, but it’s about humanity,” Katherine says. “If you look at people as people, not as resources or pieces to be moved around a chessboard, but really, you know, you’re leading, you’re managing people who have wants, needs, aspirations the same as you.”
The £1.4 million saved should have been enough to keep the hospital discharge programme funded. It wasn’t. The business case for vulnerability doesn’t show up on a P&L. The value of representation – of someone in the boardroom saying “hi, here I am” with ADHD – isn’t trackable.
But Katherine’s been at Home Group for 15 years. Her team performs in top quartile. Railway Housing Association is gunning for #1 in UK tenant satisfaction with her on the board.
Sometimes the things we can’t easily measure matter more than the spreadsheet admits. And sometimes the spreadsheet is screaming the answer (£1.4 million!), and we still ignore it because the funding sits in the wrong column.
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Listen to the full interview with Katherine Hernandez on the GSC Executives podcast, via the player below or subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Youtube or anywhere else you get your podcasts:
This blog post is based on the GSC Executives Podcast episode “PTSD in the Boardroom: Leading Through Trauma, with Katherine Hernandez”.
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