It’s not every morning you get to facilitate a conversation with someone who sparks a marmite reaction across the social sector, so when Shaks Ghosh, CEO of Clore Social Leadership asked me to facilitate a breakfast leadership conversation with Toby Young, I jumped at the chance.

The Leaders Now events series is run in partnership by Clore Social Leadership and the House of St Barnabas. It brings together great speakers and leaders from the social sector to inspire, encourage debate and new thinking, and to provide an opportunity to network and meet other leaders.

April’s session featured a conversation with Toby Young, the journalist activist and reluctant leader of the free schools movement. However, he is so much more than that; an accomplished social commentator, journalist at the Spectator, former CEO of the West London Free School Trust, Brexiteer, published author, food judge, cyclist, father of four, keen QPR supporter, and the man most likely to polarise debate about education, freedom of choice, self-determination and the class system.

The night before the conversation, Radio 4 broadcasted Toby’s most recent programme, The Rise and Fall of the Meritocracy, where Toby asked whether his father, Michael Young’s dark prophesy is correct, if your genes determine your future, and whether the Brexit and Trump votes signal the death knell for the popular political vision of a modern meritocracy.

Suffice to say, as a former Director at the Young Foundation, the programme sparked a heated debate (aka row) in my household and I confess I carried this apprehension into the House of St Barnabas. With 40 people in the room from a variety of sectors including education, local government, heritage and more, Toby led us through in what I might call his reluctant leadership journey; from the denizens of NYC to having 150 people standing in his living room wanting to set up a school.

Obviously what goes on on tour, stays on tour but I do have permission to share Toby’s 9 tips for leadership which I surmised from his talk:

1. Admit when you are wrong
2. Look confident while doing it
3. Remain steadfast in purpose as it will steer your course
4. Build a thick skin
5. Having a strong moral purpose will help you get the best of people
6. Being engaged in a common venture with like minded people gives meaning to life in a way money and status does not
7. Co-opt the tools that work regardless of where the come from.
8. Sometimes being belligerent in bunker needs to happen to get you through tough times but don’t stay there too long
9. Collaborative decision making is miles better than individual decision making

When I read them back to him, Toby said, ‘when I hear them like that, it’s bleedin’ obvious really - I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to realise them.’

For me, Toby reflected a style of leadership I often see in movements - activists that have started with a passionate belief around fixing a perceived injustice who have realised that to go far, it helps to go with others. No one ever said that social change was a quick fix and Toby Young I think, would be the first to admit that.


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Esther Foreman is the CEO of the The Social Change Agency, connect with her 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.


In the 1980’s New York’s legendary mayor Ed Koch was known for his phrase ‘How am I doin’?’. This phrase was not just his public slogan, but also a genuine request for feedback and a meaningful and authentic way to connect with constituents and stakeholders. While we usually think of leaders as the individuals who provide feedback to those they motivate, inspire, organise, and manage; leaders, particularly social leaders, are also in a unique position to benefit from feedback. Feedback can come from diverse individuals to focus on a variety of individual, team, organisational, and system topics. Ultimately, feedback answers two fundamental questions: ‘How am I doing?’ and ‘How can I do better?’.

Feedback enables effective social leadership in three main ways. We can see the benefits of feedback for social leaders by applying the Clore Social Leadership Framework. The framework focuses on helping leaders develop their personal qualities, understand their context, and work with and through others. Feedback underpins each one of these three areas of social leadership.

1. Feedback helps social leaders to know and look after themselves. As evaluative type of information (i.e. ‘How am I doing?’), feedback increases self-awareness and tells social leaders whether their skills and actions match their intentions, goals, and values. As suggestive type of information (i.e. ‘How can I do better?’), feedback also provides social leaders with ideas and solutions on how to look after themselves, how to maintain wellbeing, and how to prevent burnout. It can also offer them suggestions on how to lead authentically in a way that reflects their personal values and ideas while balancing others’ expectations of who a leader is, and what a leader does.

2. Feedback helps social leaders assess their current and potential context. While no one can predict the future of the complex and dynamic world we live in, feedback can give a meaningful voice to everyone involved in a system. Thus feedback from diverse perspectives can help social leaders to understand and assess the current position of their work. Feedback is also an essential element of how individuals and organisations learn, thus it can enable social leaders to adapt their work to meet the needs of their context. Feedback from diverse perspectives can also expose the challenges, options, and possible future directions of the system and give social leaders ideas for how to address or take advantage of them.

Feedback from diverse perspectives enables social leaders to set an inspiring vision that naturally brings others into the process of catalysing social change. Additionally, feedback gives voice to diverse individuals and communities, which allows social leaders to leverage the collective creativity in the system and address challenges and opportunities in a collaborative way. Therefore, feedback makes the social change process more social and collaborative, while also bringing additional resources and support from those who have a similar vision.

To maximise the benefits of feedback, social leaders need to address two main challenges. The first challenge for social leaders is to proactively seek feedback from diverse individuals in a way that makes others feel comfortable to share critical, honest, and objective feedback. The second challenge for leaders is to find the time and space to systematically reflect on the (hopefully) diverse feedback they receive, and decide how to use it to benefit their personal development and the development of their work.

Please share your views about this blog post below, or contact Andreana on Twitter.

Dr Henry Kippin is executive director of Collaborate an independent CIC focusing on the thinking, culture and practice of cross-sector collaboration.

Leadership is a slippery concept. A verb, not a noun. A spirit, not a skillset. It is a term that is broad and deep enough to mean both everything and nothing. But there is no doubt that if leadership matters (as Richard Harries’s excellent paper suggests), then we need to strive to make sure that the concept can hold the weight we ascribe to it. This means we need to work on it.

The concept of leadership development is becoming more tricky to grasp in line with the changing context around it. This throws up more questions than answers. But anyone OK with a degree of complexity and nuance should absolutely welcome that. Peoples’ lives are complex and multi-faceted, so why should we expect positively changing them to be any less so?

Collaborate’s work is about supporting people who want to lead change through collaboration. Our work is about blurring sector boundaries to improve outcomes for the public. By its very nature, it unpicks the way we define sectors and understand services, and in this context effective leadership may have some counterintuitive traits. Let me explain…

1. Great organisational leadership is necessary but not sufficient – those with an eye on health and social care reform (for example) will note the prevalence of high quality hospitals functioning brilliantly within places in which some social outcomes haven’t changed for decades. Does great leadership mean more of the same? Clearly not. But just as unwelcome is a narrow version of system change that might help to keep organisations sustainable but is just as far from real co-production as ever. If the Brexit vote shows us anything, it is the acute need to close this gap. Social sector leaders should be actively working together to do so.

2. Collaboration and consensus make awkward bedfellows – any meaningful change is hard to effect. Yet we often expect this to happen across different organizations with multiple incentives in a complex environment with a remarkable degree of ease. Hope over experience on a grand scale! Beyond creating good vibes in the room, collaborative leaders need to know how to be honest, when to say no (or even better: ‘I don’t know!’), and how to create the right commitment devices to support collective progress against shared goals with multiple stakeholders. That is why we talk about building ‘collaboration readiness’: it isn’t easy.

3. The social sector silo is dead. Long live collaborative social change – social change is not the preserve of the social sector, and nor can the sector deliver some of the aspirations it exists to address in-and-of-itself. Look at the JRF’s strategy for ending poverty: a clear role for business, government and society. Leaders need to care as much about their terms of engagement with other systems and sectors as their own independence, seeing their world through others’ eyes. For a 17-year old looking for work, a smartphone, a broadband connection and a mate with a job are the critical ingredients. None of these things are delivered as public services; none of these things are innate social goods. Yet social sector leaders recognize that part of their role is creating the conditions for these things to be accessible.

So how do we operationalise some of these insights in response to Shaks Gosh’s challenge of ‘new solutions’ and a need for ‘structured leadership development’? Collaborate’s own efforts have been written up recently as the Anatomy of Collaboration: the critical components of cross-sector leadership and delivery as defined by an expert group convened in partnership with Oxford University. One quote from a prominent social sector leader stands out for me: “Collaboration is an offer, not a demand. It should always come with a decent pitch”. One might say the same about leadership.

Please share your views and comments below, you can also follow Dr Kippin on Twitter @h_kippin.