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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
06 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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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.
Tags:
challenges
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charitysector
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
12 August 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Today is World Elephant Day, so I’m taking the opportunity to talk about the elephant in the room - the exclusiveness in our sector.
It’s almost two years since an analysis of the top 50 fundraising charities revealed that 88% of Chief Executives were white, and 70% male. In senior management roles 94% were white, and 56% male. This is a sharp contrast to the society that we all live in and yet not much seems to have changed. So, why all the white guys?
As part of my Clore Social Leadership journey, I am currently working with in Washington D.C. I’ll be here for six weeks and as I’m learning so much here, I explored with the organisation what I might feasibly do for them in such a short time. What are their priorities? I was delighted to hear the response of: ‘We’d like to be an even more welcoming and inclusive organisation’. Given my passion for leaders making decisions with, and not for the communities that we serve, I’m excited to see what I can do.
In exploring this important issue, I can’t ignore a social and political context to discussing diversity in our world today. Racial tensions in the U.S. are high as a result of disproportionate shootings of African American men killed by the police. Recent shootings of police officers have been called ‘revenge attacks’, and organisations such as are accused of race-baiting. Worldwide, we are hearing increased political rhetoric that risks inciting or spreading fear and can contribute to a feeling of different=DANGEROUS. I’m fortunate in Defender’s that the organisation understands the power of diversity, and have identified increasing diversity as a priority, so I don’t need to have the conversation here. But we absolutely need to be having the conversation in our sector.
In this context I ask myself, how do we have a conversation about diversity and inclusion that can create the change without making the white men feel excluded, or even threatened? (Then there’s a whole internal dialogue that argues ‘who cares if they’re threatened, they need to get over it’, but I’m not sure if that will affect the change we need).
Maybe we could start by making ‘diversity’ more inclusive?
Often our sector can see diversity as an HR issue, or we create tick-boxes to monitor how we’re doing. More progressive thinking recognises that diversity goes beyond race, gender, religion, age etc. It recongnises that I’m diverse in the speed in which I learn, as well my sexual identity. Diversity goes beyond the visible. As a sector, we should lead the way in celebrating all diversity. As a priority this must include recognising individual differences that cause disadvantage, such as the people’s race or religion, and making real and determined efforts to mitigate the impact of those differences in our employment practices.
I know that we need the best minds to solve the big challenges that face our sector today, and the more diverse those minds the better. I know that a diverse workforce can help to redress our unconscious bias, and give us the best chance to connect with and understand the communities that we serve. I strive to create an inclusive environment but I look at the teams that I’ve been responsible for recruiting and I know that we don’t represent Scotland’s vibrancy, and diversity. The question I really need to be asking myself is ‘why?’, and I invite you to do the same.
Tags:
chairs
challenges
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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.
Tags:
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
20 June 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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"Are you a brilliant public speaker?"
As chief officers of voluntary organisations there is increasing pressure on us all to be ‘great communicators’, so it’s a pretty loaded question.
I need to state straight away that I do not pretend to be a brilliant public speaker … but I am improving. I have been director of Barnardo’s Scotland for 9 years now and speeches go with the job. However, my early efforts were truly awful so from my own grim experience I am happy to offer my scale of public speaking:
Level 1: Read speech from prepared notes; success is reaching the end without being sick on stage.
Level 2: Look up occasionally from prepared notes; success is reaching the end with some of the audience still awake.
Level 3: Present a speech from notes with occasional ad libs; success is a polite round of applause at the end.
Level 4: Deliver a speech using only a prompt sheet; success is eye contact with the audience and questions at the end.
Level 5: Perform centre stage with no notes: success is energy and excitement, your own and your audience.
So, if you can do Level 5 are you a brilliant speaker? Not necessarily. You can be oozing self-confidence and have fun delivering what you think is the most moving and insightful speech since Nelson Mandela but the judgement of your brilliance rests with the audience.
So what is it that an audience wants from a speech? Well, in my view it’s a combination of three things: expertise, passion and gravitas. The balance between the three will shift on each occasion but as charity chiefs we have to demonstrate some degree of each.
The chief officer will rarely be the most expert on a subject and frontline workers are often the most passionate but the thing we should bring to a speech is gravitas – if the boss is talking about something then it must be important!
If we consider expertise, passion and gravitas as points on a triangle then as individuals we will each have a ‘comfort zone’ within the triangle in which we like to operate. As my public speaking has improved my comfort zone has expanded – I can appear to be expert, do a bit of passion and lay on the gravitas when needed.
But even if you are a confident speaker and tailor your speech to the audience, you won’t impress everyone. Because the problem is that an audience is made up of individual people all of whom receive communications differently. Some people like facts and figures, some people like visuals and some just want passion. One person’s inspiring speaker is another person’s show off!
This isn’t all an elaborate argument to say that Level 1 presentation skills are acceptable but it does mean that that you can answer the question “Are you a brilliant public speaker?” with a confident ‘no’ – because there is no such thing.
You can tweet Martin on @CreweMartin.
Would you like to contribute a blog to Leaders Now? Please email your ideas to info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
Tags:
confidence
culture
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
15 June 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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It is common to hear that effective leadership requires conviction: acting in accordance and pursuit of one’s beliefs. I’m not sure this is right – at least not all the time. I think there is a lot to said for being a humble and courageous leader, grounded in evidence, rather than one driven solely by conviction.
The word ‘conviction’ is derived from the Latin convincere, from con- ‘with’ and vincere ‘conquer’. It implies that one’s mind is made up, and the job is to persuade or convince others.
Humility, on the other hand, implies that one does not know the answer. It suggests modesty and an acceptance that one’s own opinion or proposed course of action may not be the best.
A leader that embodies only conviction with no humility will likely polarise those they seek to lead and in some cases make poorly informed or biased decisions. On the other hand, a leader that embodies only humility probably won’t make any decisions at all.
So what is the way forward? I think it is humble and courageous leadership, with just a small dose of conviction where required. This means a starting point of intellectual curiosity, not a mind made up. It means adopting a scientist’s way of thinking in which one does not know the answer but is curious to find out. It means having the courage to question honestly one’s own convictions.
Evidence has a role. This may be drawing on the experiences of others that have gone before (and learning from it). Or it may involve going out to generate new data to test out ideas. The trick is to be genuinely humble and not do what many leaders (and politicians) do in cherry-picking evidence to support one’s own pre-existing conviction.
Sometimes evidence can point to a clear way forwards. Happy days. Often it is not so straight-forward - which leads us to courage.
Adopting a starting point of humility and engagement with evidence can surface some challenging scenarios. Probably the most likely scenario is that evidence does not point to a clear-cut way forward. Evidence may be sparse or it may be contradictory. This requires skill and courage to navigate uncertain waters. It is times like this when that dose of conviction is useful, tempered with a little humility.
Or sometimes evidence can challenge preconceived notions or convictions. It takes a braver leader to change course in light of new evidence than one that belligerently sticks to their guns.
You can share your views with Tim directly on Twitter via @tim_data_hobbs or post your comments below.
Tags:
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conviction
courage
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