Have you played the word game Bananagrams? Seek it out if not – it’s excellent. If you have, you might know that the best way to form good words yourself is to have a quick look at other players’ jumbled-up letters. There’s something about observing someone else’s game for a bit that ‘re-sets’ your perspective and clarifies your own moves.

I’m finishing the Clore6 programme feeling that spending time in other people’s shoes should be mandatory in the professional world – especially in the social sector.

Clore Social Leadership has been piloting a six-month programme – Clore6 – specifically for emerging leaders from organisations that work with young people. It couples the leadership development of Clore Social’s Fellowship Programme with an ambition to foster greater collaboration and collective solutions for the youth sector. The ‘job swap’ is the final component of Clore6.

Brathay Trust is renown for both its residential and community-based work with young people and families, and its innovative and insightful internal research team. In arranging a job swap at Brathay, I wanted to experience good youth work, good research and impact measurement. Brathay also places openness and learning at the heart of its organisational culture which, particularly pertinent for my work, facilitates a cyclical scenario in which youth work and impact measurement improve one another in turn.

Individuals from all levels of Brathay were prepared to engage openly and honestly with me. The openness and trust within the organisation was evident, and I felt like a member of the team for the short period I was there.

Reflections from the week that have stuck with me include:

• The centrality of relationships to everything: The most obvious being the relationships between young people and those working with them, but also between colleagues within organisations and across the sector. Facilitating open and trusting connections struck me as one of the most important aspects of leadership, and I’m returning with a clear focus to strengthen the relationships that drive our work at the Centre for Youth Impact.
• The impact of impact measurement: Many organisations still feel under huge pressure to use data to prove their value to others. Efforts to gather this have the potential undermine, rather than enhance their work with young people.
• ‘Measurement’ remains critically important: But this is so only when it is used to learn, and it must be meaningful for organisations and practitioners. Complex but critical work is done with young people in a whole range of settings, and impact measurement, done well, helps understand, improve and communicate this work.

These themes are familiar from frequent conversations with practitioners in our networks, but an immersive experience allowed me to feel, experience and therefore (hopefully!) address them with greater vigour, and greater empathy. The job swap wasn’t about learning new things, but it inculcated clarity and a sense of purpose, humility in some areas, and reassurance and validation in others.

So – take a minute to think about an environment that might shift your perspective, challenge and inspire you. I found it helpful to zero in on my potential blind spots, as well as what might energise me. I was surprised – and pleased – by the willingness of others to accommodate the placement. My hosts seemed to see the value of an external perspective on their work, which was reassuring in what could have felt like a slightly indulgent personal development exercise!

All this has reminded me of the importance of stepping out of my own reality, as far and as often as possible. A few days away has allowed many pieces to fall into place.

Please share your comments about this blog below, or you can connect with Pippa on Twitter.

Andreana Drencheva is a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the University of Sheffield where she helps social entrepreneurs to develop entrepreneurial and leadership capabilities.

“How am I doing?” and “How can I do better?” are two simple, yet powerful questions for social leaders. Using these two questions to seek feedback from diverse individuals is a fundamental strategy for social leaders. It can help them learn, develop and implement more creative solutions, build communities, and ultimately to create social change. Yet, the evidence shows that not all social leaders seek feedback. If asking these two questions is a simple way for social leaders to grow and develop, why don’t they seek feedback more often? I suggest that it is because seeking feedback presents five personal, professional, and organisational challenges.

1. Seeking feedback can bruise the ego. Like all of us, social leaders have personal egos. While they are often described as heroic figures, they are human beings with personal feelings and identities. As social leaders often pour their hearts and souls into their work, seeking feedback requires putting personal feelings and identities aside to receive developmental, critical, and useful feedback, which is can be negative. Yet this can be difficult because these emotions and identities are what motivates them to do their work in the first place.
2. Seeking feedback requires resources. Seeking feedback takes time, effort, and energy. While it may seem like a simple act, asking for feedback competes for resources with other important activities at work, such as strategy or fundraising, and in their personal lives, such as childcare or quality family time.
3. Seeking feedback can disappoint others. Social leaders recognise that seeking feedback comes with the implicit assumption that the provided feedback will be used in some way. Yet they may not always be in a position to act on their feedback even when they agree with it. This might be due to a lack of resources or institutional and organisational constraints that make it difficult or even impossible to implement specific changes. Thus, instead of giving false hope by seeking feedback, they may choose to refrain from it.
4. Seeking feedback can damage social leaders’ reputation. One of our expectations of social leaders is that they are competent, knowledgeable, and strong individuals. Recognising this assumption, social leaders are sometimes concerned that seeking feedback might portray them in front of others as weak, indecisive, and incompetent. They fear this portrayal might damage their reputation as well as the reputation of their work.
5. Seeking feedback can limit organisational advantages. Seeking feedback often requires at least partial disclosure of information related to ideas, approaches, and methods unique to the work of the social leader. We might think or at least hope that the social sector is guided by ethical decision making. However, there are numerous examples of individuals and organisations appropriating the ideas of social leaders after giving them feedback. Therefore instead of creating opportunities for collaboration and improvement for social leaders, seeking feedback might enhance the competition.

 

How can social leaders address these five challenges? The first step is to recognise the trade-offs between seeking feedback and refraining from seeking feedback; to recognise both the bright and the dark side of seeking feedback. The second step is to make active choices between the trade-offs and to balance the benefits and costs with a long-term view.

Do you agree with these points, or do you have further suggestions on the topic? Please share your views about this blog post below, or contact Andreana on Twitter.

John Sennett is a volunteering spokesperson who runs the blog John's Road to Volunteering. He uses his experiences to influence change, motivate social action and to challenge strategy for leadership development.

Who? What? When? How? Why?

These are the five questions I think about regularly when it comes to understanding the greater need of volunteer influence on infrastructure and development in the so called ‘hierarchy’ many charities take prime views on. When asked to read through Clore Social’s recent ‘Facing the future’ report, I wanted to put forward my personal outlook on the findings and thoughts.

I’m a 90’s baby, classed within the report as a millennial from the collaborative era. This led me to question what happened beforehand. Before the digital age became the norm, how did charities collaborate?

Many would think such information is irrelevant to those of my age and to the future, but until we identify the need for mindset alternations, and identify what happened previously, it is hard to know how to face the future to ensure our sector is secure. Social media and other forms of digital platforms are now playing a significant role in amplifying a charity’s voice, and when I come to look at ‘the future of leadership development’, how can we move forward if we haven’t fully grasped what’s happening now?

Are we missing something when we’re looking at future trends? Are we taking into consideration that current leadership might not be as effective as we think?

Look at the Millennial outlook of ‘we’. ‘We’ is the perfect example of identifying the need for greater collaboration among third sector parties. Collaboration teaches us that within the meaning of charity, there’s ‘giving’.

Millennials are the ‘giving’ age. Identifying gaps in the sector or looking at it deeper within each individual charity is becoming the norm for the next generation. The term ‘leap of faith’ will be used more with the need for charities to collaborate with their volunteers. Working with volunteers in reaching more beneficiaries can be a simple process. How can we collaborate with each other to develop the next-generation of leaders for the sector? It’s that word again ‘giving’. Giving volunteers the opportunity to pitch in their ideas is just one step to collaboration.

What happens after the pitch? We can collaborate in the sector and give each other a platform to voice our views, but does that create a tool to develop new leaders? Influencing those with spoken word is a form of leadership, and training is another. Do we provide volunteers with the opportunity to pitch their ideas? We should listen to volunteers and understand their needs and wants, and in turn translate this into action for the benefit of the sector.

I’m a firm believer in internal education. By this, I mean learning from others within the organisation. This could be staff or in this specific piece, volunteers. Rather than looking instantaneously to collaborate externally, start internally. Let volunteers be a form of internal training. ‘Giving’ volunteers the opportunity to teach and educate is a basic example of leadership development.

I might be missing the point, or the sector might be missing the point with the advantages of collaboration, especially with volunteers, but what I do know is that there are boundless opportunities to develop the sector. We need to stop looking at ourselves as individuals and take the ‘we’ approach.

Once we consider growth to be integral for everyone involved, we’ll then be able to identify strategic approaches to form long-lasting collaborations.

Isn’t this what the sector is about? Helping others?

It’s time to take the sector forward and I believe that by investing in volunteers’ development and utilising their skills, they’ll have an integral role to play in the future of our sector.

Feel free to comment below or you can contact John on Twitter.