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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
17 January 2017
Updated: 15 October 2020
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Paul Farmer is the CEO of Mind, and Chair of ACEVO. Paul’s blog is in response to our third report, Leadership Development in the Third Sector: Bridging Supply and Demand.
A New Year always means new plans, good intentions, and aspirations for what we as a charitable and social sector can deliver for our beneficiaries and wider society.
2017 is no exception. It would be easy to argue that 2015 had its challenges as the year when our sector was put under scrutiny like no other, and last year saw seismic changes which we are yet to see the effects of.
So what about this year? I suggest this is the year when we need to define the nature and requirements of the 21st century charity leader, and it is the point where we must start to invest in our people.
To achieve this, I see three key areas of development.
First, we have to prioritise leadership development for all leaders within an organisation. As an example, Mind runs a leadership development programme which brings together senior leaders from local Minds and the national charity to learn together. This will be the third year we have run this, and it imbues a culture of investing in and prioritising leadership across the network.
Secondly, we have to respect that we all learn in different ways. For me, the power of the Acevo membership is the strong networks it creates. I learn from experience and conversation, others learn through courses, others from learning sets and so it goes on. There is no leader that cannot learn from another leader.
Finally, we each have to keep on learning. There is no leader that cannot learn more: about themselves, their own people, the wider world. If we think we know it all, we should pack up and go home now.
The challenges we now face as sector leaders are huge. We have to earn the trust of all our stakeholders, we have to recognise the balance between managing risk and becoming overwhelmed by compliance and bureaucracy. We have to operate in a 24/7 multimedia world without succumbing to always being available all the time for everyone. We have to recognise our limitations and those of our environment. But we also have to be bold, brave and ambitious for our beneficiaries.
If we don’t invest now in learning about leadership, our organisations probably won’t survive into the 22nd century.
Please share your comments below or reach out to Paul on Twitter.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
13 December 2016
Updated: 15 October 2020
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As 2016 winds down, I find myself considering the fervent sector debates that have taken place over the year in the media and beyond. One thing is clear: strong leadership is more important than ever before, and the demands on leaders are increasingly complex.
In partnership with The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, The Barrow Cadbury Trust, The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and ACEVO, we commissioned a survey to get to grips with the leadership development issues that matter most in our sector. Richard Harries took a hard look at the results and produced his third report for us, Leadership Development in the Third Sector: Bridging Supply and Demand, which serves as a plea for more support for the sector’s tireless and hard pressed leaders.
Almost 500 medium and large charities and social enterprises responded to the survey, and what emerged from the data is a picture of a sector which has a push-pull relationship with leadership development. Although the majority of respondents stated they saw the benefits and criticality of leadership development, a lack of time and money significantly impacted their ability to invest in it. What this boils down to is that of the organisations surveyed, only 0.5% of their annual income was spent on leadership development. Furthermore when compared with the wider economy, our sector is three times less likely to invest in leadership development.
Undoubtedly there is a demand for leadership development, but time and the financial capacity to invest in it is stymied. Also, questions arise as to whether the current market offering fully serves the leadership needs of the sector. Taken together this begs the question: How do we bridge the gap in supply and demand?
Having digested leadership development lessons from the past (report 1), and how to face future sector opportunities and challenges (report 2), we have devised a 12-part strategy to transform social leadership. Coupled with this is our recently launched Social Leaders’ Capabilities Framework which sets out the capabilities we believe emerging leaders need to be truly transformational.
By sharing these assets - our three reports, the 12-part strategy, and our Framework - we are inviting the sector to make full use of them to develop leaders, and we are also petitioning leaders of all levels to continue the debate. By now we all know that leadership really matters, and we can’t afford not to act. As we head into the New Year, it is incumbent upon all of us to focus on a sure-fire way of ensuring that the organisations we love continue to serve the people they were built for.
Our Starter for 12 - How to Transform the Social Leadership of our sector (for full descriptions, please read report 3, pages 12-14):
- Use the current challenging climate to promote the value of leadership
- Achieve scale and critical mass quickly
- Understand and segment the market
- Make training affordable
- Focus on the elements of ‘making a market’: (a) stimulate demand (b) organise supply and (c) advice and brokerage
- Innovate - especially around digital technology
- Invest in good infrastructure
- Create a supportive leadership community
- Create an appetite for leadership education
- Adopt a policy-led and evidence-based approach to leadership
- Know what good leadership looks like
- Deliver a short period of sustained and substantial investment
Please share your views and comments below, on Twitter, or even contribute an opinion piece to our Leaders Now blog.
Tags:
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
31 October 2016
Updated: 15 October 2020
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Steve McGuirk is the former County Fire Officer of Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, and Chairman of Warrington and Halton Hospitals Foundation Trust.
This blog is written in response to Clore Social Leadership’s reports about third sector leadership development. Read report 1 here, and report 2 here.
It has always been tough leading change in a challenging world, but there are an increasing number of factors that support the idea, ‘it’s never been like this before’.
This presents a huge number of paradoxes for people in any leadership position trying to figure their way through this complexity – but I think there are added layers for those leading social change.
For despite the millions of words written and advice offered by gurus and consultants, there are no tailor made solutions. Each person (leader) and each organisation is unique; there is no unilinear solution to change.
Nevertheless, I think it is helpful to play around with some of the paradoxes of modern leadership – I talk about three here - if nothing else to provide a sanity check.
First, and I think most significant, is the paradox of the ordinary versus the extraordinary.
What I mean by this is that the last twenty or so years has seen the evolution of a much more technocratic, engineered approach to people management and organisational development. Whilst, in many respects this is vital and positive, the approach has also resulted a complex and vast set of expectations of leaders, wrapped up in the language of competences, values, emotional intelligence and so on. Each dimension is inarguable its own right, but collectively they represent a huge personal challenge with an anticipation that those who eventually make it ‘to the top’ will be some kind of upgraded version of our species – Human Beings 2.0 if you like. In the charity and social enterprise sector there is the added aspect of judgement around the ethical and moral compass of the leaders concerned.
The paradox, though, is that the majority of those leaders don’t ‘feel’ extraordinary – they just see themselves as ‘normal’ with all the insecurities and anxieties everyone else has to deal with.
But this first paradox is further heightened by the second, which is the paradox of the speed in making decisions versus the need for thoughtfulness and reflection.
There was a time - not that many years ago – when the decisions of leaders took time firstly even to be noticed, then to filter through an organisation and have an impact. That is clearly no longer the case as the immediacy of communication pervades every dimension of life (closely linked, of course, to social media).
The paradox here, though, is that figuring out solutions to the wicked problems we face requires time and more considered analysis than the 140 characters available on Twitter. Yet that thinking space and time is more compressed now than ever before. In fact, it’s virtually disappeared.
And, as if that wasn’t enough to contend with, the third paradox kicks in.
So, this is the paradox of the clamour for rapid and transparent decision making – only possible by using instinct and intuition (often built upon experience), but against the backdrop of a society or constituency seeking to apportion blame for anything that goes wrong.
By definition, real innovation (the disruptive kind we need to generate social change) is unlikely to have a strong evidence base of its potential success. If it did, it would be improvement not innovation. The point here is that innovation is more about courage and a leap of faith – the difference being now that every aspect of that leap will be visible and open to the analysis of everyone and ‘there’ on the Internet forever more.
So, where does this leave leaders going forward?
As I have indicated, there are no answers to these paradoxes and there are many other paradoxes that could be considered.
The best leaders, therefore, don’t agonise about trying to be superhuman or find elusive answers.
Instead, they use their ‘ordinariness’ as an asset to engage people at all levels and they are savvy enough to join or create their own leadership networks and safe spaces to experiment. But, most of all, they understand the need to invest in their own learning and personal development because if one thing is certain, it is that the world will continue on its change trajectory which will result in more, rather than less, ambiguity and complexity.
We are keen to hear your views about this blog and our reports either by submitting blog ideas for Leaders Now, commenting below or joining the conversation on Twitter @CloreSocial. You can contact Steve on Twitter @gmccfo.
Tags:
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