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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.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
02 August 2016
Updated: 14 October 2020
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Leadership matters. This is the first line taken from our new report Leadership Development in the Third Sector: Learning Lessons.
We all know that leadership in the sector is important, but what really matters is leadership that can navigate through choppy waters while simultaneously capitalising on new opportunities. Sounds relatively straightforward, but it isn’t. This is because social sector leadership has to achieve the above while catering to a wide network of stakeholders, such as the government, private sector, volunteers and beneficiaries to name but a few, and do so in adherence with good governance. Today’s sector leaders are required to have a complex toolkit of skills at their fingertips to respond quickly to the demands being asked of them. But in these fast paced times leaders are often spinning too many plates to engage thoughtfully in how both they, and their staff, can become better leaders.
I have now been at Clore Social Leadership for exactly one year. During this time I have immersed myself in the world of leadership development, meeting with a wide range of CEOs, trustees and managers to understand their organisation’s leadership needs. Digesting all I’ve learned one clear message resounds: leadership development does indeed matter, but overall the sector doesn’t want to pay for it.
In these times of political uncertainty and austerity I can, to an extent, understand such reticence. Yet no one can deny that the sector is in the midst of some huge challenges, so good leadership is more important now than ever before. We know that leadership - and by this I mean leaders on all levels, not just CEOs - is imperative to ensure organisations are well run to effectively serve beneficiaries and the wider community. Leadership development improves productivity by 23%, but this requires an investment of time, finance and resources. It is therefore incumbent on the entire sector to come together to help find new ways of identifying and developing the next generation of leaders to make their organisations even more effective and create lasting social change.
To get under the skin of this, we are examining 21st century social leadership in a series of reports that analyse leadership development in the sector. We hope these reports will provoke further debates while also generating new ideas and solutions. What’s clear from our first report is that lessons can be learned from the past; wholly discounting previous attempts to systemise third sector leadership development is unwise, akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We can also learn from other sectors’ attempts to build leadership development practices, like the NHS Leadership Academy the National College for Teaching and Leadership, in addition to examining practices from our overseas counterparts. It’s interesting to note that they all share similar challenges as our sector, including the need for further investment alongside structured leadership development offerings.
Casting a critical eye on the past and wider sectors invites further questions which our subsequent reports will seek to answer such as: what is the right ‘ecosystem’ for leadership development in our sector? How can we sustain this in the future? What new solutions might Clore Social Leadership create and deliver, and might partnerships be the way forward?
Please read the full report here.
We encourage your feedback about this, and our upcoming reports. You can share your views and comments below, on Twitter or even contribute an opinion piece to our Leaders Now blog.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
14 December 2013
Updated: 12 October 2020
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"Big organisations have a crucial role to play in social innovation, but it's not the one they think." Ruth Marvel
Clore Social Fellows Ruth Marvel and Owen Jarvis have published research proposing that large charities and housing organisations can develop social innovation and improve their effectiveness by working to "scale up" the innovations of smaller organisations and individuals . However, for many organisations this would mean putting aside the image of themselves as innovators and changing the way they think, collaborate and organise themselves. The report sets out the challenges and opportunities of scale for large organisations, and provides a set of case studies of organisations already doing it. It also contains a toolkit for those organisations who want to explore it further.
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