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From the frontline - Nayab Butt
Nayab Butt, team leader at Look Ahead, talks about providing help and support to young people
Tell us about your job.
I’m a team leader with Look Ahead. I’ve been with them for three years – I started as a support worker and worked in homelessness first, then in mental health, and now I am in a young people’s service. I’ve done floating support, too – I’ve been all around the company! I have been a team leader since August last year.
The role involves quite a lot. I manage my team of support workers, I make sure our customers are OK and I do a lot of housing management, like making sure voids are turned over quickly and maintenance is done properly. And then on top of that, I liaise with external agencies like social services.
How did you get into housing?
I studied psychology, and after I left university I only wanted a job in that field but I found it very hard. I thought – I’ll enjoy housing and I ended up as an estate agent, I enjoyed it but I knew it wasn’t my forever job. I left after a couple of months and thought I’d go back into something connected to my field – that’s when I joined Look Ahead. Helping people is something I really wanted to do.
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What’s the best part of your job?
To see progress in my customers. We support people to better themselves and attain their goals, and so when I see my customers doing well, that makes me feel good. It doesn’t have to be the biggest of things – it could even be a customer adhering to the house rules. And when my staff are happy and there aren’t incidents – that’s a good day.
And the worst part?
A bad day is stressed staff, unhappy customers and incidents.
If you could be prime minister for the day, what would you do?
This is the toughest question. I’d want to tackle homelessness, so I would set up a housing initiative to make it easy for people to access housing; not just social housing, but something to make it easier for people to buy property as well. And I’d lower taxes! And do something about car fines – parking fines are an absolute joke.
What’s the most private thing you’d be willing to admit to your colleagues?
I am quite open with my team. I’d like them to feel as though I would share a lot with them, and I do. The one thing I wouldn’t share with them, though, is my fears. If something is going on at work, and I’m quite nervous or fearful of it, I’d keep that from them because I wouldn’t want it to have a negative impact on them, or the job they are doing. It’s my role as team leader to manage things like that.
