David Green is director of Green Pepper Consulting, a social enterprise working with the third sector.

In the corporate world, ethics and success are not always synonymous. If they were, then we wouldn’t have activists such as Naomi Klein, or organisations like Greenpeace. But it isn’t just big oil or multinational mining companies that should be concerned with ethics.

Indeed, I recall the furore in 2013 when Comic Relief were found, at the time, to be investing in the likes of tobacco and armaments.

The fact remains that with a constant pressure to deliver, it can be tempting to push ethics aside. The outcome, it seems, then becomes more important than the means.

But does this actually matter if the result is the same?

The only ethical response, surely, is “yes it does”. It matters because no organisation operates outside of society. Indeed, for the voluntary and community sector (VCS), creating a better society is very much central to the role. So accounting for how you do this is important; and the reasons why should be clear:

• Greater public trust and confidence
• Credibility with local communities and the sector
• Better governance
• Inspiring loyalty, motivation, and the engagement of staff and volunteers
• More attractive to funders, donors and social partners

Of course the vast majority of VCS organisations spend their money with care; and e. But a wise VCS leader will want to embed ethics into the organisation’s culture at every level, from trustees, staff and volunteers, to its relations with beneficiaries, funders and other stakeholders.

This means not only putting the organisation’s values and mission centre stage, but also incorporating ethics into the leader’s own role.

A good place to start is with effective communications, consulting with staff and volunteers, engaging in external networks, and taking time to explain the organisation’s message, both internally and externally.

It also means adopting good and effective systems. Ethics should be embedded into recruitment, relationships, and practices. Creating an inclusive climate for staff, volunteers and beneficiaries to thrive, to speak up, and to develop will not only build trust and reinforce the organisation’s values, but help ensure sustainability in the longer term.

The leader’s personal behaviour must also reflect the organisation’s ethical values. Shouting and bullying, setting unrealistic targets, keeping people in the dark – none of these are compatible with ethical leadership. Instead empathy, honesty and respect should prevail.

Underpinning all of this should be basic principles of trust, honesty and integrity. As such, a commitment to model individual behaviour on the Nolan principles on standards in public life seems appropriate.

Clearly none of this is new, or particularly difficult to achieve. But it can be forgotten. So leaders should remind themselves, particularly when tough times need bold decisions, that how they get results is just as important to everyone involved, as the results themselves.

Please share your comments about this blog below, or you can join the conversation with David 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.

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