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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
09 December 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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OK, I was wrong, and it took a fellowship to Canada in 2015 to realise it.
I have been involved in the food movement for a decade, specialising in building good food communities. I continue to see many benefits to putting good food at the heart of a community, including increases in social capital and benefits to mental and physical health.
I became increasingly aware of the increase in the number of people visiting food banks and I thought that the sorts of programmes I worked on could reduce this number. I then went to Canada thanks to a Winston Churchill fellowship.
One of the reasons I went to Canada, a country where food banks have existed for almost 30 years longer than in the UK, was to learn how emergency food aid providers in Canada have gone beyond basic food provision to reduce people’s food bills and dependency on the state.
What I actually found was that food aid providers were increasingly disassociating themselves from the message that they were reducing food poverty. They realised that while people need feeding they must also raise awareness of the need to advocate for wider systemic change as, ultimately, that is what’s required to have the necessary impact.
Measurement of food poverty had helped greatly in bringing this to the fore. Whereas the UK government continues to reject calls to undertake national measurement, Canada has been doing so for many years. As a result they understand very clearly that the situation has only got worse despite an increase in food aid, and research from the likes of Valerie Tarasuk at the University of Toronto has provided evidence of the lack of impact that food aid provision has.
I’m not here to bash food banks though. People are hungry and hundreds of groups across the country, very often run by volunteers, are working tirelessly to feed them.
Instead, in my article I call for a need to change the narrative on food poverty and highlight the importance of all of us, including food aid providers, in getting behind this new narrative to prevent the further institutionalisation of food aid. I provide more evidence for why this new narrative is required, offer up suggestions for what we can all do to get behind this new narrative and highlight how in the UK we’re in danger of creating a segregated food system for the poor if we don’t take action now.
Please share your views and comments below, or start a conversation with Seb 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
Tags:
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
13 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Dawn Austwick is Chief Executive of Big Lottery Fund.
Anyone interested in the role and nature of leadership will not have been short of food for thought lately. The recent referendum debated at length Britain’s role on the world stage – with both sides keen to paint a picture of leadership either within or without the EU. In that debate, we will rarely have seen a more eclectic array of personalities seeking to burnish their own leadership credentials. And both the Conservatives and Labour have engaged in (albeit very different) internal soul-searching about the leadership they need to tackle the post-Brexit era. Theresa May now leads the country – tasked with bringing the country back together and forging a socially just, economically sound, future. A task not without challenges.
But for all this leadership talk, the referendum laid bare the fact that large numbers of people feel disenfranchised and ignored by the powers-that-be. That’s an immediate challenge, and one that civil society has a key role to play in tackling. At the heart of this is giving people and communities a sense of agency over their lives. Here at the Fund, our new strategic framework sets out what sounds like a simple vision: putting people in the lead in shaping their lives and communities. That means people and communities defining their own aspirations, and organisations (including us) supporting them to achieve it. It’s nicely encapsulated by the phrase ‘nothing about us, without us, is for us’. And, in leadership terms that can be quite a challenge to what we are used to.
So what does great leadership look like in a thriving civil society? There’s a conversation starting to emerge around a concept I am calling ‘generous leadership’. John Donne has it in a nutshell:
"No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main."
And if I think back to my time as a trustee of conservation charity the Woodland Trust, it absolutely mirrors how we think of biodiversity - 'it's an ecology, stupid!' Everything is inter-linked and ultimately inter-dependent.
I’ve spent quite a lot of my professional career in the cultural sector. Over the last 25 years a pattern of generous leadership has evolved and developed: with national institutions like Tate and the British Museum jointly curating and displaying their collections with regional museums, training and developing curators and conservators of the future. The National Theatre has pioneered co-productions with smaller production companies and regional houses and sees its own box office as a platform for other companies to benefit from. And we have co-funded Battersea Arts Centre's ‘The Agency’ partnership with People’s Palace Projects, based on a model founded in the favelas of Rio to support young people to make entrepreneurial ideas a reality.
Fundamentally, these cultural institutions developed a more acute awareness of their place in a delicate ecosystem. Civil society has no less rich and diverse an ecosystem (the NCVO Almanac is a useful reference point). ‘Generous’ leaders need to think clearly about what they have that they can share with others – be it money, time, or assets. And that shouldn’t be thought of as a simple act of altruism, but as an exercise in mutual benefit.
Take for example, the acquisition of Only Connect by Catch 22. The latter provides strategic support, scale and greater financial security, the former provides a new innovative arm of the business alongside skills and closeness to community. For this to work, the generous leader has to have a burning focus on mission rather than organisational preservation. This might mean supporting other organisations working with a similar mission to thrive rather than pursuing perpetual growth. Or it might mean offering space and time for an emerging leader from outside the organisation to reflect and develop their ideas, as the Catch22 Fellowship programme does. Generous leadership with a focus on mission may also lead a CEO and Board to decide that income growth is not always the path to achieving that mission - a decision EveryChild took under Anna Feuchtwang’s leadership.
Charlie Howard’s MAC-UK initiative goes even further – set up on a ten year basis with the intention of changing the nature of mental health provision for young people, before exiting stage left. And that points to a further characteristic of generous leadership, of being networked with other people working hard for social change. Rather than simply telling a single story, generous leaders seek to be a part of a wider movement and to share in that narrative instead. That’s a lesson that we funders need to particularly reflect on, having traditionally been criticised for thinking in terms of ‘our’ money and what it achieves, rather than the bigger picture for people and communities: sometimes attribution can get in the way of the best solution. The Early Action Funders Alliance is an example of positive steps in the right direction, bringing together a cluster of UK funders to explore and test ways of preventing problems from occurring rather than simply coping with the consequences.
And so we return to ‘nothing about us, without us, is for us’. As generous leaders, we must renew our championing of the grassroots, staying focused on our mission and how best we can facilitate the work of those we support – the people in the lead. We must be listeners and collaborators with our colleagues in the sector, recognising where and how we can add value. And, as generous leaders, we must welcome the opportunity to challenge our own assumptions of what good leadership looks like, and fully embrace the complexity that will provoke.
Tags:
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
09 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Our Chief Executive Shaks Ghosh shares the personal lessons she learned from Mother Teresa’s leadership, following the humanitarian's recent cannonisation.
While Mother Teresa was doing her missionary work in Calcutta, I was a student at the city's Loreto Convent, the place where Mother Teresa started her leadership journey. It was a source of some amusement to us students - our politics and views about social action could not have been further from hers.
As young socialist students, we did not always appreciate her methods and devotion and often criticised her actions. We wished that she would do more to address the causes of suffering. We felt that simply offering love and dignity to the starving thousands was going to change nothing.
How wrong we were! The Mother did much to raise the issues of poverty globally; her advocacy for the poor, and her courageous admonishment of governments, the wealthy and the powerful have become legendary. She lived the life of the poor - to her dying day she shared a room with four other women. I now regret that as young politicos, we were so harsh in trivialising her preachings of love, humility and service.
Last week when she was being cannonised we heard about her doubts, her questions of her God and her faith. A salutary reminder that the road of meaningful leadership is paved with loneliness, sacrifice and self doubt. Mother Teresa was not always at peace.
My own mother served with Mother Teresa, working with children in her leprosy orphanage and raising funds for the houses where poor people of Calcutta still go to die. She met The Mother only once, and received one of her famous 'calling cards' which were what she called her business cards. Printed on the reverse were the powerful words, 'The fruit of love is service, and the fruit of service is peace'. RIP Mother Teresa.
Tags:
culture
peace
service
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