|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
19 November 2018
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
Blog written by Shaks Ghosh and Jessica Taplin
At a recent Clore Social CEO Masterclass, Julia Unwin gave us a sneak preview of her report into Civil Society and challenged us to rethink our social leadership model.
Julia painted a dark picture: social security in crisis, economic restructuring, challenges to managerialism and blurring boundaries between sectors, increasing pressure on places from localism and social fragmentation. We face a growing fear of polarisation of generations, both economic and cultural, environmental pressures, global volatility and the increase in nationalism, rising numbers of displaced people and geopolitical strife. Most significant, as Julia states, is the shift in focus from We to Me.
Cripes, that’s rather full on. In response, we know that our task as social leaders is to maintain and strengthen Civil Society by upskilling ourselves to navigate the next decade.
Our sector has shifted, professionalised and with it has come a reliance on structure, staff, institutions and funding. Whilst austerity might be “over” according to the powers that be, we know that the heady days of government largess from the noughties are not returning. Many organisations that were reliant on largess are already accelerating towards oblivion. Many others plough on from funded project to project, jumping through funder shaped hoops which might not run true to their own organisational mission.
So what resource do we have to continue our vital role in civil society? We have the resource that our sector has always relied on: people. People who never fail to surprise us by what they can achieve.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has." Margaret Meade
To social leaders everywhere our message is this: you have huge, incredible un-tapped resources, and that is your people. Great, inspirational, genuine, caring, committed, compassionate people – change makers.
And the best leaders amongst us will be able to unleash them for social good. People will follow and go to incredible lengths for authentic leaders and leaders they love. To do this we must rethink our leadership, growing the next generation of change-makers, sharing our wisdom and skills. For many of us it means the re-alignment to those virtues that lie at the core of what the social sector is about - kindness, bravery and honesty. In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks talks about shifting from a focus on external success to internal value.
Amongst the people who we must inspire are trustees and directors. Many charities still struggle with unskilled and egocentric trustee boards. Being a Trustee should be an act of humble leadership - to genuinely help and add wisdom, working alongside and in a critical friend way to the executive team. We must help trustees, no matter what their day job, to learn the skills of listening, empowering and appropriately challenging the Executive team in their own leadership role. Julia sums it up well: it’s about Power, Accountability, Connection, Trust.
"Julia sums it up well: it’s about Power, Accountability, Connection, Trust."
Modern leadership, getting the best from teams, resources and networks, is about rethinking the power dynamic. To lead is to have power, a privilege to be cherished. Leaders today need to find smart ways of sharing power to shift imbalances. We know that leaders must grow leaders, not monopolise their power.
As senior leaders we know that experience does count, but it doesn’t automatically mean we are right. So the trick is to encourage shared accountability, building relationships based on dialogue and feedback. There is little room for rigidity in a service based world, and Julia reminds us that we exist to serve. User needs are paramount, and to meet the constant evolution of need and circumstance, we need to be more adaptive, embrace the unknown, admit mistakes and adapt how we do things. We are all constantly learning and improving, as leaders we must encourage this in ourselves.
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
Leadership is fundamentally a relational activity. How many of us really meet all people as equals, recognising their complexity, frailty and value. We know that dispersed and egalitarian forms of leadership help build better solutions and approaches, yet we lack the courage to adopt these forms of leadership. During their study, Clore Social Fellows regularly ask each other a powerful question: what would you do if you were ten times braver? Social leaders are in their roles to make social change or to give social service. Both require bravery beyond belief and deep wells of resourcefulness and resilience.
Today’s leadership requires us to care for ourselves and be kinder others. The dog-eat-dog world many leaders live in is no good for our sector. Do we have the courage to change and adopt more generous and collaborative approaches?
To be clear, many social sector leaders have these qualities and more. These last years of austerity have seen many social sector leaders heroically steering ships that are already over the edge, parachutes and kites all desperately launched to try and slow the fall. They are feisty yet kind, resilient, generous. We can learn from them.
So to Julia’s challenge to find new models of leadership for the stormy waters ahead, we say: “I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship”. Louisa May Alcott
"I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship." Louisa May Alcott
Tags:
casestudy
challenges
change
collaboration
community
culture
event
future
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
05 February 2018
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
It may sound counterintuitive to criticise a word like ‘care’ as it is difficult to envisage any negative connotations. Many, many charities and social sector organisations are involved in the provision of ‘care’ and I have no doubt that the staff of those organisation genuinely want the best for the people with whom they work. But I would question whether it is enough for effective social leaders to want to offer care to people, and if instead we should be striving to ensure that those people no longer need to be cared for by an organisation.
The very notion of professionally ‘caring’ for someone is inherently limiting - it can eliminate hope and aspirations. A courageous social leader should cast aside their professional ego and strive to make their services redundant; this can’t be done through administering care but by encouraging an organisational culture of ambition and adventure, of mitigated risk taking.
This approach comes with a certain amount of risk and we need to acknowledge that there are limits on an individual’s abilities. It is about giving people the same opportunities to flourish by being equitable, it is not about treating everyone the same: different people have different needs and need different types of support to have similar opportunities. In a time where virtuosity is seen as the minimum competency needed to engage in many activities, we must lead in a way that acknowledges that most activities have implicit value.
The trope of ‘social mobility’ suggests that there is a preferred position in society that we should all aspire to and that we can only reach it if we work hard enough. I challenge the notion that reaching for ‘social perfection’ is acceptable as a cultural norm and I suggest that there is a place for everyone in society to be themselves, and not be compelled to be reinvented as a social migrant. The flipside of social mobility is the implication that if someone is incapable of achieving the hallowed goal of being socially mobile, the best society can offer them is ‘care’: they offer no contribution to the greater good so all we can do is remove as much discomfort from their lives as possible.
I appreciate that challenging the notion of social mobility is an unfashionable stance as it criticises the notion of care. I am a proud, successful working class person. I don’t want to abandon my heritage to be seen as a success, and neither do I want to promote a binary offer of social mobility to the people with whom I work. As a social leader, I feel that supporting people to define their own criteria for a successful life takes significant courage, and it requires an approach that rejects the professional in favour of the human.
In my provocation piece, I offer ten ways in which social leaders can adopt this approach; it embraces the human in preference of the professional, and it sees people as having potential rather than problems. This isn’t the easiest approach to adopt as a social leader, but then when was anything worth doing easy?
Stuart Dexter is the CEO of the Daisy Chain Project and a 2017 Clore Social Leadership Fellow. He developed this blog and provocation piece as part of his Fellowship.
Please share your views and comments below, or you can contact Stuart on Twitter.
Tags:
casestudy
challenges
change
fellow
future
research
socialsector
value
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
10 October 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
Richard Harries’s paper for Clore Social Leadership, Facing the Future, highlights the main challenges for sector leaders over the coming decades. Fiscal constraint, geo-political shocks and technological advances are changing the nature of social need, as communities tackle inequality and people live longer. At the same time state resources continue to shrink and the mantra doing more with less is stretched to breaking point.
When faced with these pressures many charity leaders will naturally ask: how are we going to find someone to pay for what we do in the future? However, to be able to respond effectively our sector needs to think more profoundly about business models, and not simply where replacement funding is coming from.
Many charities have had a hand to mouth existence. The job of raising money has not always been closely connected to the delivery of value. This disconnect between who pays and who benefits matters because when those who have been paying stop doing so, they are not the ones who immediately lose out.
Much has been made of the potential for social investment to help charities adapt to the changing financial reality. However, the hype about social investment has sometimes missed the point and the adaptation required is more fundamental than is often understood. Loans are not a substitutes for income which has been lost. Rather they are a tool that can help some charities earn more revenue in the future. In a model where you are trading, the link between who pays and who benefits is stronger; and this can help build resilience.
Therefore the question for leaders to ask is not ‘where is the money going to come from?’ but more profoundly, ‘what sort of business model is appropriate as we respond to these future challenges?’
One of our roles at Access is to design and fund capacity building programmes which aim to help charities make this sort of transition. We have consulted widely on what support is needed and the clear top two areas are around leadership and governance. (The others are impact management capabilities, finance and business modelling skills, marketing and improving the use of data.)
For executive leaders in the sector the challenge is often one of having the time to step away from the day to day and consider these questions in a supportive and stimulating environment. Similarly having the confidence to try something new, especially in an organisation with a long history of doing things the same way, can be daunting. Peer learning is one way these challenges can be addressed and is a key design principle for our programmes.
Engaging charity trustees in these questions is the next task. As Richard points out, there are nearly a million charity trustees in the UK, with an average age of 57. They come into their roles often passionate about the cause, but not necessarily with the skills and experience to recast the way a complex organisation operates. Furthermore, trustees are increasingly operating in a risk adverse environment. Negative headlines, declining public trust and an increasingly pro-active regulator are all factors which might encourage trustees to batten down the hatches. However in our sector risk works in two ways; and the consequences of inactivity can be just as bad as making mistakes.
Trustees need to be encouraged to embrace and manage risk as they help their executive leaders to look to the future and consider what business model is right for their charity. Once the business model is defined, the job of financing it will be much clearer; and there will be a good starting point to answer the answers which investors and funders will have.
Please share your views and comments below or on Twitter @CloreSocial. You can also follow Seb on @sebelsworth, and Access here @si_access.
Tags:
challenges
change
charitysector
funding
tips
trustees
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
03 October 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
This guest blog was written by Robert Laycock who supports the organisational, leadership and management development of not-for-profit organisations across the North East.
By not joining up development opportunities for leaders of social change are we leaving the majority of them to fend for themselves in increasingly challenging times?
Earlier this week I was leading a seminar at the North East Fundraising Conference targeting delegates considering becoming a trustee for the first time. My introduction outlined the scale of the task citing the number of charities and trustees nationally (165,000 and 850,000 respectively in England and Wales) and in the North East region (6,900 formally constituted not-for-profit organisations, further 7,500+ smaller ‘under the radar’ groups). These stats suggest we need somewhere in the region of 25,000+ trustees in the North East alone; double this number including committee positions within smaller unconstituted groups. We perhaps shouldn't be surprised, therefore, that attracting the right calibre and number of trustees is an issue for many organisations.
These stats also help us to understand the scale of the task for those of us who are passionate about leadership development within civil society.
I’m absolutely of the view that the challenges we face as we strive for outstanding governance across the North East, can only be addressed through collaborative action; identifying, sharing and spreading best practice. I believe we need a similarly joined-up approach to developing leaders.
Reflecting on my own development, I now recognise the gateways and interventions that made the difference, leading to big shifts in practice. Here’s my timeline:
- 1993-1999: self-taught leadership and management (artist-led/community projects)
- 1999: appointed Co-Director of established regional charity (1999-2011)
- 2001/02: completed accredited leadership and management development programme (Northern Cultural Skills Partnership – this programme came to an end around 2008)
- 2005/06: Common Purpose Matrix programme
- 2007: first trusteeship
- 2009/10, 2013/14: executive coaching
- 2016/17: certificate in coaching and mentoring (self-organised)
- Particularly, I feel fortunate to have worked for Helix Arts, a charity committed to developing their people while I was in a critical phase in my development as a leader.
So what are we doing, collectively, to make sure our leaders of social change, at all stages of development, have access to the right type of support at the right time?
The good news is we have a reasonable range and diversity of opportunities currently available in the North East including, on my radar:
My concern is how leaders navigate these opportunities to identify the support they need.
My call to action is to all of us working to develop leaders to find ways to align our programmes and initiatives, raise awareness and strengthen connections, in order to provide pathways of support - a mosaic of opportunities - for the many thousands of leaders who may struggle without it.
Who’s in?
Please share your comments below, or you can join the conversation on Twitter.
*With thanks to the Garfield Weston Foundation
Tags:
casestudy
challenges
change
culture
event
future
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
27 September 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
David Green is director at Green Pepper Consulting and associate consultant at Action Planning.
Many people don’t trust banks or estate agents but they still use them; most don’t trust politicians, yet they still vote for them. But what about a charity? It needs to be more than good at what it does. It needs to convince funders, partners and the public that it is fundamentally trustworthy. So while good leadership is visionary and inspiring, a social leader also requires an understanding of their organisation’s unique nature and status in civil society.
According to a survey published in March this year, the public believes charities spend around 57% of their income on running costs, when in reality, typical running costs are just 14%. This image problem is of such concern that the National Council for Voluntary Organisations have even set up to explain how charities work.
But earning trust requires more than just a website. Financial integrity and an absence of conflicting interests should come first, but as I’ve argued before, investments should also be ethical. And social leaders need to ensure a level of genuine openness and transparency in dealing with the public which just hasn’t been the case in the sector thus far. Publishing the percentage of income spent on running costs will help. Perhaps too, we should heed the advice of those to also be made more readily available.
Of course, to function, an organisation needs people. So trust in the leadership from staff and volunteers is arguably just as vital as that of donors. As such, leaders should listen to and, above all, value and respect the contributions made by staff and volunteers. This may sound obvious, but to disregard this rather than inspire.
Indeed, leadership is people focused rather than purely organisational. In my experience staff and volunteers will respond when given a voice. So let them help shape how your organisation works and what it becomes. Ask, listen and respond, rather than simply tell. But don’t leave it to the annual away day. Make engaging with, and responding to staff and volunteers, part of your organisation’s culture.
Significantly, social leaders have a level of commitment and authenticity that often can’t be replicated in other sectors. This makes them well placed to promote trust. By being proactive, highlighting values, and demonstrating solidarity with those they are helping, social leaders add value to their message and to their organisation. A good leader will be a great advocate, demonstrating success, as well as being clear about where the money goes.
Trust is not an entitlement, nor should it be disposable. But to lead social change it is certainly a requirement. As the former chief executive of Centrepoint, Anthony Lawton, said to me recently: ‘What would happen if you took away trust? As a leader, you are the face of your organisation. But take away the trust of your team, your beneficiaries or the public, and you will soon be lost.’
Please share your comments about this blog below, or your can join the conversation on Twitter.
Tags:
challenges
collaboration
community
connection
culture
future
socialsector
trust
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
Blog Home
All Blogs
RSS