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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
12 April 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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In the last blog, Born leaders – you need to regress to progress, I explored the quality of curiosity and how we could benefit from learning to value this quality as we face increased leadership challenges in our sector. Now, I'd like to think about another child-like quality: courage.
When I was nine years old, my brother and salvaged four large pram wheels from the local tip. I was so excited – after what felt like months of searching we had finally found the only missing elements to our home-made go kart.
We fixed the axles to the old wooden door, secured an old blue rope as a steering device to the front axle and headed for the hill. The hill was notorious, it’s where anybody who was anybody went when it snowed. They took it on with bin lids, dinner trays, rubber rings, and the occasional sledge. But this was the height of the summer holidays, so we were going to set a new standard of bravery by tackling the hill on a homemade go kart. When we got back at school, we'd be heroes! I sat at the top of the hill, gripping the steering rope so tight it was sore. Wearing nothing more than my shell suit to protect me, I gave the nod to my brother to push me over the precipice. My heart was racing so fast, like it knew something that I didn’t…
I’m told that I made it to the bottom; I don’t remember it as well my brother. The last I recall he was shouting at me to use the soles of my plimsolls as brakes. Ah yes, brakes! Perhaps the pram wheels weren’t the only thing missing…
This might not be the most inspiring story to demonstrate my point but thinking back, I can't help but be a bit envious of my own courage. Coming on for thirty years later I wouldn’t dream of returning to the hill with a homemade Go Kart. I have learned to be cautious, to assess risk and make informed decisions based on the information that’s available to me.
Have I become too cautious? Does this same risk assessment prevent me from being brave, from speaking my truth in situations where I may be a lone voice, and from making unpopular decisions even though I know with confidence that they’re the right decision for the organisation?
In trying to find an example of where I have demonstrated courage recently, I asked some of my colleagues for examples of where I have led with courage. This feedback revealed the big differences that I have effected as a result of being willing to take appropriate risks, to challenge the status quo, and to make tough decisions. The feedback also revealed that courage manifests in small moments, like in being more open and vulnerable with my colleagues.
As our sector faces increasing challenges, both in number and complexity, it’s vital that we lead with the courage of our childhood, and true to our authentic selves.
In the next blog I’ll explore the quality of authenticity and how being true to our real self can enable us to be more courageous.
This blog was developed as part of Mark's 2016 Clore Social Fellowship Programme and originally published on Third Force News as part of a blog series.
Mark Kelvin is programme director at the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland and a 2016 Clore Social Fellow.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
04 January 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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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.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
01 December 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Joining Clore Social Leadership as the Director of Programmes and Leadership Innovation has given me the enviable role of meeting the social sector’s most ambitious and engaging leaders. Never more apparent than with the interviews for our 2017 cohort where they were asked ‘What is good leadership?’
This is one of the toughest questions to answer, not only because one search of that question presents 48,700,000 results on Google, so there’s no ‘right’ answer.
It is tough because we can all instinctively recall someone who we feel embodies good leadership and more often the opposite too, but distilling leadership can all too quickly become messy. Leadership is about people and they are complex, so it’s no surprise the topic can become full of confusing juxtapositions.
I’ve joined Clore Social Leadership at an exciting time where we want to make leadership development accessible for all in the social sector. We want to open up the conversation about social sector leadership so we have chosen to share our new Social Leaders’ Capability Framework. Developed using our experience of developing social sector leaders over the past eight years, and using our collective foresight to highlight the capabilities we believe social sector leaders need to face the complex challenges and opportunities over the coming weeks, months and years.
Our new cohort of 2017 Fellows will be the first to embody the mindset and behaviours exhibited in this Framework. They will help us critique it to ensure it stays relevant for the sector, and we hope that you’ll join us too, to help us continue to build a culture of good leadership.
So who should use this Capabilities Framework? My answer would be everyone because leadership is a mindset, a set of behaviours. A toolkit of skills and techniques. It can be developed in everyone and we should actively practice it every single day.
I believe this is leadership at it’s simplest. A demystified description of something that Joseph Rost, Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego found to have been defined in about 200 different ways over the past 75 years, detailed in his book ‘Leadership for the 21st Century’.
I agree with Barbara Kellerman that a leadership development ‘industry’ will only become an improved industry and deliver good or even great leadership to our communities, organisations and across the globe when it is ‘inclusive rather than exclusive’.
So whether you have leadership in your title or not, take a look at our Capabilities Framework. Share your views with us and help build a culture of great leadership in our sector where everyone has the opportunity to understand their strengths, and know what is required of them as social leaders.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
16 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Stephen Clare is a third sector business adviser and coach, and Director of Cyta Consultancy Ltd. Previously he was Deputy Chief Executive of Locality.
What is leadership? Such a simple question, and yet it has generated thousands of books and an industry in its own right. Everywhere managers are told that they need to be leaders – but leadership is nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the hierarchy of an organisation. Leadership has nothing to do with titles. Leadership isn’t even necessarily anything to do with personal attributes. We don’t need extroverted charismatic traits to practice leadership. And those with charisma don’t automatically lead.
Leadership and management are not synonymous. They are two different things. Of course, good management is needed. Managers need to plan, measure, monitor, coordinate, solve, hire, fire, and so many other things. Typically, managers manage things. And leaders lead people. However, I would also argue that one of the major barriers to change we face today is that people think they have to wait for a ‘leader’ to emerge – somebody who ‘knows better’, the traditional ‘hero’ who embodies the future. I think the very opposite is true.
Over the years, I’ve learned to define leadership differently. A leader is anyone willing to help, anyone who sees something that needs to change and takes the first steps to influence that situation. It might be a parent who intervenes in their child’s school; or a woman in a rural village in India who works to get clean water; or a citizen who rallies the community to stop a library closure. Everywhere in the world, no matter the economic or social circumstances, people step forward to try and make a small difference. That, for me, is the starting position in understanding leadership – it’s about taking action, it’s about doing something, it’s about changing the world in some way. And leadership is also an act of humility – an act of service to others. To quote management guru Tom Peters: “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”
Today, many of us are ‘swimming in the same river’ – trying to cultivate collective leadership in diverse settings around the world even while our larger cultural contexts remain firmly anchored to the myth of the heroic leader. Even in the VCSE sector, there is still an over-emphasis on the individual ‘hero-leader’ which perhaps reflects our tendency to look to business for answers rather than developing approaches that make sense in an environment that is very different. Indeed, I would go further: we need to recognise the dangers and potentially destructive consequences of singling out the individual VCSE leader and heralding them as exceptional (1).
Our challenge is therefore to nurture a new type of leadership that doesn’t depend on the illusion of extraordinary individuals. The leadership of the future will not be provided simply by individuals but by groups, communities and networks. And these leaders must '… work to create the space where people living with a problem can come together to tell the truth, think more deeply about what is really happening, explore options beyond popular thinking, and search for higher leverage changes through progressive cycles of action and reflection and learning over time' (2).
1. Pennington, Hilary, Why Rewarding Leaders Might Hurt Collaboration, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2016. See http://ssir.org/articles/entry/why_rewarding_leaders_might_hurt_collaboration
2. Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton & John Kania, The Dawn of System Leadership, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2015. See http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
01 August 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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John Williams is Vice Chair at the Association of Chairs.
It’s been a tough 12 months for Chairs and trustees. The charity sector has faced unprecedented challenge and criticism, and much of it has focused on apparent failings in governance and leadership. Chairs especially are under pressure to ensure their boards are responsible and effective, while continuing to deliver the maximum impact for their beneficiaries.
The Association of Chairs (AoC) was set up three years ago to support charity and other non-profit Chairs, and to champion good governance and leadership in the sector. Chairs tell us they find their role rewarding, but a surprising number say that they find it more lonely, demanding and complex than they expected. Even those with the most stellar CVs and broad skills and experience can find themselves outside their comfort zone.
Yet it is clear to us that there is neither a consistent nor sufficient level of support offered to Chairs, and this has been starkly confirmed by our recent survey.
Using our substantial database, we researched 360 respondents in a chairing role, including 140 AoC members. We found high levels of commitment to the role - 54% of Chairs spend four days or more per month on their chairing role - but there are significant gaps in support.
Overall 46% of boards have no budget for board development; only 19% had a formal allocated budget, with the remainder addressing development on a case by case basis. Perhaps more surprisingly is that only 34% of Chairs had an induction, arguably the most basic form of support.
The main support Chairs received was access to publications, conferences and events, and administrative support. Apart from publications, fewer than 50% had accessed any kind of development support in the last 12 months, with many restricting themselves to free sources of support.
It’s clear that there is too little financial and practical support given to Chairs for induction, training and personal development. A host of commentators and reports have argued that we need to raise the bar on charity governance. This is not optional - good leadership is critical to ensure charities achieve the social impact they seek. Both our experience and this research suggests that the appetite to learn and develop is there, but we need to find new and imaginative ways to step up that support. We will all benefit from this.
You can download more information regarding the survey results on the Association’s website.
We welcome your comments in response to this article which you can submit beneath this article, or contact John via Twitter.
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