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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
24 August 2016
Updated: 04 December 2020
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Andrew Barnett has been the director of the UK Branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation since 2007 and is the Convenor of the Funders’ Collaboration on the Leadership.
Social sector leadership is an issue that’s close to my heart. I’ve worked with some exceptional individuals during my career: passionate and empathetic, thoughtful and strategic, collaborative, outward looking, with vision and foresight. They’ve not just been effective; they’ve been an inspiration to me. These qualities are found across the 163,000 organisations that make up the sector but not consistently so. Some heading up organisations lack the sort of insightful, collaborative and ‘generous’ leadership that feels so necessary when organisations should be collaborating, rather than competing, in the interests of their beneficiaries. Understandably, the response of some leaders is to retreat in the face of the huge external challenges whilst a tiny few – a small fraction of the total - act in a way that brings discredit on the sector as a whole and the values it stands for.
We have often neglected to invest in developing the next generation of leaders with such investment perhaps regarded as an indulgence. The fragmented nature of the sector – with many smaller charities and a limited number of larger ones – creates conditions in which we just hope and pray for good people rather than identifying and developing them. And this happens at a time when the social sector plays an increasingly important part in the fabric of society and yet faces some of its biggest strategic challenges. We have huge potential to be forces for good if only we can address this deficit.
This was the context for a ‘retreat’ held six months ago in Windsor. The gathering was convened by Sally Bacon from the Clore Duffield Foundation (a pioneer in this field), Sara Llewellin from the Barrow Cadbury Trust and myself from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s UK Branch (another early supporter of Clore Social Leadership) with the support of Shaks Ghosh from Clore Social itself. We were joined by colleagues from thirteen other funders, from the sector’s major umbrella bodies and from government. It was an opportunity for challenge and critical assessment. The big question was how we, as sector “stewards”, could ensure that it was well led and governed now and in the future.
A sense of urgency was hung over our discussions and a number of observations emerged: there is no ‘market place’ where organisations can find affordable and accessible leadership education (and no sign-posting to what exists); for a variety of reasons, demand from the sector itself appears weak (whether driven by short-termism or lack of resource). We felt strongly the need to support charities in their work. This is not just to reclaim their place in the affections of the British public, challenged of late by the behaviours of the tiny few, but to fulfil their potential acting alongside the state and a private sector who share the mantle of meeting the demands and needs of the British public now and in the future. We committed to collaborate on a bold initiative to transform social sector leadership - what some call “pulling all the levers at once” and others as “a collective shot in the arm” - to be delivered within a fixed timeframe but with an impact that lasts beyond the activities themselves (or funding).
The Funders’ Collaboration on Leadership, as it has come to be known, has brought together 50 individuals from funders, umbrella bodies, social sector organisations, and government with the aim of developing innovative and scalable solutions to the problems identified at the retreat. The focus is on four main themes, each of which now has a working party:
- Restoring trust in the voluntary sector.
- Sharing foresight information and preparing the sector for the future.
- Improving the standard of governance by informing and skilling trustees.
- Developing a new leadership style for our sector.
Each working group has been challenged to develop a defined, time-limited experiment that tackles each priority head on. If we can demonstrate evidence of the potential to be transformative, the plan is to prototype, pilot and take each to scale. We have a strong interest in ensuring this initiative adds up to more than the sum of its parts and we will be seeking to link the work of the different groups in ways that create a multiplier effect. We have a strong commitment to avoid duplicating other sector initiatives on governance, leadership and trust, complementing and supplementing them, where we can. We will disseminate the findings from the work and keep the collaborative flame burning with events and communications.
This doesn't happen by accident. It happens because of the commitment of people like Shaks, those who joined us in Windsor and others besides. And, it doesn’t come free. We are pleased that the Office for Civil Society has set aside a budget of £1.7 million for the most innovative projects and the Big Lottery Fund has agreed to match this. This leaves £1.7m to be raised from other sources including trusts and foundations who will be encouraged to trial the approaches with the organisations in their grantee portfolios.
We intend that a real difference is felt by the organisations who make up our sector, those who work with us, who benefit and even those who have been of our detractors of late. We estimate that there are 1.3 million leaders in our sector. To empower them further, we must extend a rich but coordinated offer of support to remarkable people in a context in which their work is not only valued but sought out.
Join in on the conversation with #FundersCollab and keep an eye on both the Calouste Gulbenkian (UK Branch) and Clore Social Leadership pages to stay abreast of the work being done by the Funders’ Collaboration on Leadership.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
01 July 2016
Updated: 04 December 2020
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As I have sat amongst the other 2016 Clore Social Leadership Fellows one thing is for sure, I am not like anyone here. When I began my Fellowship journey, this state of affairs concerned me - we are all supposed to be people who want social change and want to learn how we can be more effective in leading these changes amongst the communities we work with and the social sector in general.
From several of the different tools we have used within the programme to understand our strengths, our styles of working and ‘areas of development’ (apparently we don’t call them weaknesses anymore), I found myself as an outlier. I was one of a handful of reflective thinkers in my learning. This means I like to hear many people’s views before making my mind up on an issue, I don’t like to be rushed into a judgement without having some good facts and it seemed to explain why I don’t particularly like telephone calls where I have to make instant decisions! But looking to the rest of my cohort I saw that the majority of the group were ‘activist learners’, people who want to get up and do things, lots of energy, lots of trying things and not worrying if they don’t work.
We also looked at another tool called the ‘Four Seasons Model’ - which is essentially a less complicated Myers Briggs type test - and I found myself within a smaller group of the ‘Summer’ category. For Summer people their drive, and what gets them up in the morning, is all about people and relationships. Summers generally like balance and harmony in teams, they dislike conflict and like consultative decision-making. Amongst the other Fellows there was a large bunch of ‘Springs’, people who are very creative and love to get new projects off the ground. There was also a good set of ‘Winters’, those who want to get things done who are efficient and take decisions quickly, and each of these seasons obviously have their strengths and weaknesses.
So as these things emerged, and I found myself and my experience to be very different from everyone else's, I had a medium-sized charity existential crisis. I thought to myself, ‘What on earth am I doing working in the charity sector?! I am so different, perhaps I don’t have the right qualities to do this big thing called ‘social change’, and am I failing the Armed Forces communities I work with because I am nothing like any of these other Fellows, Fellows who I admire and am inspired by, and should be more like!’
Yet as I’ve progressed through my Fellowship year, a new perspective is seeping in which has calmed my crisis. If I take nothing else from my time on the Clore Social Leadership programme I will take this: difference is beauty and difference is strength.
Most of my life I have been told to concentrate on the things I am not good at. No doubt this has helped me pass some exams I might have otherwise failed, however this norm has definitely been to the detriment of celebrating what it is that I can do. I have learnt over the Fellowship that ‘positive psychology’ (hear me out) would say to focus on the very things I am good at and to make them excellent. This is because the things we are not very good at we will likely only make mediocre if we try to improve them. Now this doesn’t mean I can just ignore the areas I am uncomfortable with. The lesson however is: understand where you excel, where you don’t and try to put a team around you that is VERY different to you who can fill in the strengths you don’t have.
As I stood on my own at the second residential with the other Fellows playing some active games, we were asked to stand along a scale of 0-5 on what we felt about risk taking. I stood at zero or perhaps 0.1 - the rest of the Fellows stood at least at 3 and many around 5. Previously this difference would have made me feel awful, but that day with the Fellows I felt very important because I realised that this difference could make me invaluable to a team where that trait is not present. It also impresses upon me that in my work life, I need to have people around me who are further up the risk taking scale - if we give ourselves the space to learn from each other, we will be able to pull each other up and down scale to achieve our collective goals.
It may seem like such a small change in perspective as to how I look at myself and others, but it has freed up my mind to embrace what I am good at and stop berating myself for the things I am not. The beauty of Clore Social Leadership is in the diversity of its Fellows. It is all their experiences and skills and life histories that matter. It is the strength found in the difference of where Fellows have worked or currently work, whether grassroots organisations, small and large charities, social enterprises and the private sector. Our difference is how we learn to be better, learn to ally with people that help us to step out of our comfort zones and who challenge us to do more exciting and impactful things for the communities we serve. As the Fellowship moves forward, and new Fellows look to apply for places in 2017, I urge Clore Social Leadership to continue to enable diversity and access to the Fellowship. I finally encourage potential applicants to embrace and bring their difference to the group, because this is the gold dust on which to build success.
Here's a short video of Marie-Louise describing what makes a good leader.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
13 June 2016
Updated: 04 December 2020
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I have to confess, I am a tree-hugger. Ever since I was a small child, looking up into a dizzying canopy of branches and leaves reaching to the sky has filled me with awe, and I often succumb to the urge to wrap my arms around the trunk, make a connection and, well, hug the tree.
So for me, the second Clore Social residential week at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham was a gift. Not only were the mature trees in full leaf, but there was an intoxicating array of plants and flowers, copses, hideaways, meandering paths around a serene lake – all inviting that same sense of connection and empathy with my surroundings, myself and my fellow Clore Social Fellows.
Over the course of the week, we questioned Clore Social, questioned each other, questioned society and the future of the social sector. We tried to listen, forgot to listen, became embroiled in our own individual anxieties associated with who was leading the group and why and where our place was within it. At one point, I engaged in somewhat exhaustive discussion with a facilitator about the definition of empathy itself: do we have to agree with the values and feelings of another, or is the key simply to acknowledge and respect the lens through which they experience the world – which may actually be very different to our own?
This discussion felt crucial to me because I sensed on some level, we were all negotiating the complexity on offer. I don’t think I was the only one to retreat somewhat bruised at times, wondering why I was here and what I could possibly offer. Neither do I think I was the only one who occasionally thought, deep down, that I have the answer, if only everyone would listen to me. Some of us were ready to go, leaping out of our chairs and practically out of the door in our bid to change things. Others of us sat quietly, immersed in our own internal dialogue, perhaps wondering whether to speak at all: did we have enough to say on behalf of the group, could we take our place in our own way or should we be more this, or less that? And what experiences had brought us here – did they include education, privilege and entitlement or trauma, poverty and marginalisation: how much was any combination of these influencing our ability to engage properly with others?
Our struggle at times to seek out, respect and harness different lenses within the group seemed to mirror a wider considerations within the social sector – whose voice get listened to, who gets the (dwindling) money and what about those who have neither the voice nor money to convince us that their needs and their cause are important?
Never has it been more imperative that we are able to think and behave tactically, influence funders, purchasers and policy makers, sometimes using our empathy for perhaps more Machiavellian purposes. Equally, never has it seemed wiser to engage our empathy in adaptive leadership, able to bring our organisations and beneficiaries with us as we negotiate ever more choppy seas. Against my collectivist, tree-hugging nature, I could see how, as individuals, we need to be able to stand up to these challenges regardless of our individual drivers, play the game on behalf of those less powerful than us and, dare I say it, take the lead.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
21 March 2016
Updated: 04 December 2020
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What happens when you get people from three different leadership programmes together for a day? The joint workshop with Clore Social Leadership, Clore Leadership and the BBC Senior Leadership Programme did just that.
When I arrived I wasn’t sure what Clore Social Fellows might have in common with the other two programmes, but by lunchtime the three groups were networking, comparing notes and sharing our work. Immediately I found myself talking to people who use theatre to celebrate diversity, cultural events to foster social change and art to promote mental well-being. Not so much difference between us after all.
On any day like this there will be one stand-out moment. For me, and I suspect for many of us, that was 2010 Clore Social Fellow Alexander McLean, founder of the African Prisons Project (APP). He stood out both because of his work with APP and and also his leadership story. Going to do voluntary work in a Ugandan Hospice many years ago, Alexander discovered the appalling conditions in prisons and set up APP to do something about it. It was a brilliant example of doing things with, rather than for, people with lived experience. APP tackles conditions in prisons by empowering prisoners to work on improvements such as enabling prisoners to take correspondence law degrees. Long term, as these prisoners come to the end of their sentences, this will mean that the legal profession will contain lawyers with experience of the prison system from the inside. APP also realised that they couldn’t bring about dignity for prisoners without tackling the needs of prison staff, and so staff began to be included in the work. Rather than seeing them as the problem they also became part of the solution.
Many of us used the term ‘blown away’ to describe our reaction to Alexander’s presentation. Not to undermine the fact that APP is an amazing organisation, but it was also Alexander’s ability at storytelling that impacted us so much. Many of us have been considering using part of our Fellowship budget for storytelling courses, and I suspect those of us who witnessed the power of good stories at the workshop will now be raising that up our list of priorities.
The final speaker of the day, John Kampfner, Clore Social Chair and Chief Executive of the Creative Industries Federation, gave some salutary warnings about the risks in the social sector at present; supermarkets have a higher trust rating than charities. ‘The more challenges there are, the more call there is for inspired leaders’. In Alexander McLean we all saw what an inspired leader looks like.
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