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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
20 March 2020
Updated: 04 December 2020
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“No leader knows where their influence ends - the effect of your leadership is incalculably diffusive. It travels further and influences more than you can possibly imagine.”
Speaking at our Emerging Leader Programme celebration event on 12 March, Nick Wilkie, former NCT CEO, says that“no leader knows where their influence ends - the effect of your leadership is incalculably diffusive. It travels further and influences more than you can possibly imagine.” Looking at the socioeconomic context of the social sector, at the concept of leadership as an individual act, and at a picture of a beaver next to a dam, Nick thinks out loud about what it can be to lead in the social sector now. We’re delighted to have translated Nick’s reflections into a blog and hope you will enjoy reading it.
I’ve had the privilege of leading in a number of different organisations and whenever I am asked to discuss leadership, I am tempted to say nothing more than what two very different individuals from very different backgrounds, both of whom I respect greatly, said to me at different times.
The first is a woman called Laura McArthur who was in the People team at a charity where I worked, who once said to me: ‘If I ever write a book, it will be one page and will say: listen to what people say and what they don’t say; pay attention to the small stuff; treat everyone like a human being; do all of that all the time, never forget.’
The second is a man called Field Marshall, the Lord Guthrie, who was President of London Youth when I was chief executive. He had spent a lifetime in the military, ending up as Chief of the Defence Staff, having earlier commanded the Welsh Guards and SAS. He looked at me at a point at which I was rambling on and not perhaps thinking clearly, and said with both precision and kindness: “You just have to find great people, and love them a lot. I mean really love them.”
"You just have to find great people, and love them a lot. I mean really love them." Charles Guthrie
And I am often tempted as I am now to share these two perspectives and stop there, because I really do think that fundamentally there is nothing else to say. But I never do, because there is much to say about leadership. In fact, once you start thinking about what you might reflect on the challenge is what to cut, there is an almost infinite range of subjects we could cover.
First, whilst I don’t think we should define civil society by its relationship to the state, I do think that if the government can direct investment to an unparalleled degree and make laws, then if we get up every morning aiming to change the world, we do need to think carefully about our relationship with the state. And it’s a tricky one right now, I think. In the nineties and noughties, in a time of economic plenty and a sympathetic government with big majorities, a fairly typical theory of change for many charities was: grow through public service delivery and deliver these services better than the state; and use rational argumentation and insider tracks (through good relationships with civil servants and junior ministers) to effect policy change.
Now both these flushes feel busted - austerity doesn’t feel like it’s over, few charities are growing, and many are at the end of a decade of grinding budget rounds. Meanwhile Brexit has, of course, eclipsed social policy and, looking beyond Brexit (however it is ‘done’), neither a populist right nor statist left seem terribly interested in our sector.
Second, our sector feels to me quite inward looking at the moment. For understandable reasons, we’re beset with institutional pre-occupations, concerns about safeguarding, workplace culture, senior salaries, fundraising practice - many, especially more established charities, contending with massive technical debt, historic wrongs, pension deficits. It’s emphatically not a criticism to observe that most leaders are spending most of their time looking into their organisations. But it is a real challenge right now, and one we all need to meet, to find the space and energy and creativity, to look up and look out, to connect and keep connecting with people and ideas well beyond our immediate orbit.
"It’s emphatically not a criticism to observe that most leaders are spending most of their time looking into their organisations."
And third, of course, you are being asked to look up and lead in a time of pervasive mistrust in leaders (and perhaps even in the very idea of leadership). So I think leadership is hard and I think it is particularly hard in civil society right now. Of course that could be taken simply to depress you, I don’t mean it to at all. Quite the opposite in fact, because at a time of complexity, your leadership is going to count more than ever. I don’t think that the grand challenges and great opportunities of this ‘now-not-so-new’ century can be met by state or market without society in its organised form playing the pivotal part. And so if I look out and see storm clouds, I also think there really is always a golden sky at the end of the storm. I look out and see too much love and conviction and brilliance in our sector to be anything other than hopeful.
The second thing I wanted to address is something about this cartoon, because I think it contains an awful lot - or more specifically, three interrelated ideas about leadership. Namely that:
Leadership is a fundamentally collective and communal act. It isn’t about autonomous individuals.
An awful lot of good leadership isn’t about what is immediately visible, nor about the big and the heroic final act, but rather centred upon the quiet and the daily and all the ground-work that goes into building great things.
That no leader knows where their influence ends - the effect of your leadership is incalculably diffusive. It travels further and influences more than you can possibly imagine.
We are used, I think, to framing leadership as the work of individuals. Our narratives are cast by reference to individual leaders. Yet I wonder if we can be too ready to keep our conception of leadership as an individual act. We hear a lot about authentic leadership just now, which I absolutely think is a good thing. Yet I also wonder whether inadvertently the grail of authenticity, coupled with the call for leaders to show some personal vulnerability, and our desire to know our leaders on more human terms, can lead us to focus too much on individual personalities at the expense of exploring the collective ideas and endeavours of leadership. Indeed, I was asked to share something of my story. On Clore Social’s Emerging Leader Programme, you have done much work these past six months on your self-awareness and develop your personal learning journey, all the while, I hope, encouraged to practice self-care.
None of this is bad, please don’t misunderstand me. We all need to work from the inside out. And authenticity, self-awareness, self-care are all good things. It’s just that I think great leadership also pays homage to some older-fashioned ideas too - ideas of service and duty and selflessness, that perhaps we hear and read less about.
Because the collective is in some ways counter cultural and here I am very grateful to the ideas of a brilliant coach and thinker with whom I have had the privilege of working, called Douglas Board (@BoardWryter). Douglas notes, and I quote, that from the moment we step into our first places of learning, we are asked to write down and call out our own names. We get report cards telling us what we have accomplished on our own. Later when we submit longer pieces of writing, we have to sign our solemn promise that this is all my own work. This is absurd. Nothing is all our own work – how can it possibly be? We are inextricably linked - all part of a shared space and culture and it is in this reality that we lead.
"From the moment we step into our first places of learning, we are asked to write down and call out our own names." Douglas Board
We need to move from the idea that leadership springs simply from individual brilliance. As Douglas Board suggests, we would do well to move from Descartes’s ‘I think therefore I am’ to the South African idea of Ubuntu - ‘I am because you are’, as both a more honest, and a richer starting point. Because the great paradox of leadership of course is that it is both everything and nothing about us.
From this flows the thought that a lot of great leadership is found in continual attention to what we might think of as the small stuff, not even perhaps in leadership so much as good management. Of course, strategy, insight, judgement and personifying the brand - what we might think of as the analytical and externalising skillsets - matter enormously. Yet if leadership is at root about helping other people be the best they can be, we need to pay continual attention to another set of worker-bee traits: to the structures we build and habitual behaviours we exhibit.
Does everyone in your organisation, department or team have regular one-to-ones that focus on feelings and learning and happiness as much as on delivering and being accountable? Do team meetings start on time, do they and have a rich and varied agenda, are actions written up and shared promptly? Are budgets devolved as far as they possibly can be? Are your planning processes set up so that everyone plays their part in thinking about tomorrow? Do you say goodbye at the end of every day?
I wonder if we can all be guilty at times of being leadership snobs, looking to leadership and strategy over the heads of operations and management. Indeed, when we get promoted it’s often framed as moving beyond operations, yet the longer I spend in work, the more I think it’s in the day-to-day and the prosaic, in the long littleness of organisational life, in the consistent application of care, that great leaders make things tick and people want to come into work.
This leads to the last part of my ramblings on this cartoon, which is that our actions and our ideas and our actions as leaders reach far beyond us. Like Mrs Beaver here, what we think and do, how we behave and relate, has enormous consequences for those around us.
We are all near-obsessed about contagion right now. Nothing transmits more than leadership, for good or ill, energy is infectious and the effect of your being as a leader is incalculably diffusive.
It really matters.
"Nothing transmits more than leadership, for good or ill energy is infectious."
--
Nick Wilkie has been Chief Executive of the National Childbirth Trust and London Youth, Director of UK Programmes at Save the Children and head of sustainable funding at NCVO. He has also served on the boards of a number of charitable and public institutions, and as a policy advisor to Cabinet Office and HM Treasury. Now his time is spent mainly with his three young children, whilst supporting a small number of charities as a trustee and as an associate at the Centre for Charity Effectiveness at Cass Business School.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
19 November 2018
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Blog written by Shaks Ghosh and Jessica Taplin
At a recent Clore Social CEO Masterclass, Julia Unwin gave us a sneak preview of her report into Civil Society and challenged us to rethink our social leadership model.
Julia painted a dark picture: social security in crisis, economic restructuring, challenges to managerialism and blurring boundaries between sectors, increasing pressure on places from localism and social fragmentation. We face a growing fear of polarisation of generations, both economic and cultural, environmental pressures, global volatility and the increase in nationalism, rising numbers of displaced people and geopolitical strife. Most significant, as Julia states, is the shift in focus from We to Me.
Cripes, that’s rather full on. In response, we know that our task as social leaders is to maintain and strengthen Civil Society by upskilling ourselves to navigate the next decade.
Our sector has shifted, professionalised and with it has come a reliance on structure, staff, institutions and funding. Whilst austerity might be “over” according to the powers that be, we know that the heady days of government largess from the noughties are not returning. Many organisations that were reliant on largess are already accelerating towards oblivion. Many others plough on from funded project to project, jumping through funder shaped hoops which might not run true to their own organisational mission.
So what resource do we have to continue our vital role in civil society? We have the resource that our sector has always relied on: people. People who never fail to surprise us by what they can achieve.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has." Margaret Meade
To social leaders everywhere our message is this: you have huge, incredible un-tapped resources, and that is your people. Great, inspirational, genuine, caring, committed, compassionate people – change makers.
And the best leaders amongst us will be able to unleash them for social good. People will follow and go to incredible lengths for authentic leaders and leaders they love. To do this we must rethink our leadership, growing the next generation of change-makers, sharing our wisdom and skills. For many of us it means the re-alignment to those virtues that lie at the core of what the social sector is about - kindness, bravery and honesty. In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks talks about shifting from a focus on external success to internal value.
Amongst the people who we must inspire are trustees and directors. Many charities still struggle with unskilled and egocentric trustee boards. Being a Trustee should be an act of humble leadership - to genuinely help and add wisdom, working alongside and in a critical friend way to the executive team. We must help trustees, no matter what their day job, to learn the skills of listening, empowering and appropriately challenging the Executive team in their own leadership role. Julia sums it up well: it’s about Power, Accountability, Connection, Trust.
"Julia sums it up well: it’s about Power, Accountability, Connection, Trust."
Modern leadership, getting the best from teams, resources and networks, is about rethinking the power dynamic. To lead is to have power, a privilege to be cherished. Leaders today need to find smart ways of sharing power to shift imbalances. We know that leaders must grow leaders, not monopolise their power.
As senior leaders we know that experience does count, but it doesn’t automatically mean we are right. So the trick is to encourage shared accountability, building relationships based on dialogue and feedback. There is little room for rigidity in a service based world, and Julia reminds us that we exist to serve. User needs are paramount, and to meet the constant evolution of need and circumstance, we need to be more adaptive, embrace the unknown, admit mistakes and adapt how we do things. We are all constantly learning and improving, as leaders we must encourage this in ourselves.
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
Leadership is fundamentally a relational activity. How many of us really meet all people as equals, recognising their complexity, frailty and value. We know that dispersed and egalitarian forms of leadership help build better solutions and approaches, yet we lack the courage to adopt these forms of leadership. During their study, Clore Social Fellows regularly ask each other a powerful question: what would you do if you were ten times braver? Social leaders are in their roles to make social change or to give social service. Both require bravery beyond belief and deep wells of resourcefulness and resilience.
Today’s leadership requires us to care for ourselves and be kinder others. The dog-eat-dog world many leaders live in is no good for our sector. Do we have the courage to change and adopt more generous and collaborative approaches?
To be clear, many social sector leaders have these qualities and more. These last years of austerity have seen many social sector leaders heroically steering ships that are already over the edge, parachutes and kites all desperately launched to try and slow the fall. They are feisty yet kind, resilient, generous. We can learn from them.
So to Julia’s challenge to find new models of leadership for the stormy waters ahead, we say: “I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship”. Louisa May Alcott
"I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship." Louisa May Alcott
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
05 February 2018
Updated: 07 December 2020
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It may sound counterintuitive to criticise a word like ‘care’ as it is difficult to envisage any negative connotations. Many, many charities and social sector organisations are involved in the provision of ‘care’ and I have no doubt that the staff of those organisation genuinely want the best for the people with whom they work. But I would question whether it is enough for effective social leaders to want to offer care to people, and if instead we should be striving to ensure that those people no longer need to be cared for by an organisation.
The very notion of professionally ‘caring’ for someone is inherently limiting - it can eliminate hope and aspirations. A courageous social leader should cast aside their professional ego and strive to make their services redundant; this can’t be done through administering care but by encouraging an organisational culture of ambition and adventure, of mitigated risk taking.
This approach comes with a certain amount of risk and we need to acknowledge that there are limits on an individual’s abilities. It is about giving people the same opportunities to flourish by being equitable, it is not about treating everyone the same: different people have different needs and need different types of support to have similar opportunities. In a time where virtuosity is seen as the minimum competency needed to engage in many activities, we must lead in a way that acknowledges that most activities have implicit value.
The trope of ‘social mobility’ suggests that there is a preferred position in society that we should all aspire to and that we can only reach it if we work hard enough. I challenge the notion that reaching for ‘social perfection’ is acceptable as a cultural norm and I suggest that there is a place for everyone in society to be themselves, and not be compelled to be reinvented as a social migrant. The flipside of social mobility is the implication that if someone is incapable of achieving the hallowed goal of being socially mobile, the best society can offer them is ‘care’: they offer no contribution to the greater good so all we can do is remove as much discomfort from their lives as possible.
I appreciate that challenging the notion of social mobility is an unfashionable stance as it criticises the notion of care. I am a proud, successful working class person. I don’t want to abandon my heritage to be seen as a success, and neither do I want to promote a binary offer of social mobility to the people with whom I work. As a social leader, I feel that supporting people to define their own criteria for a successful life takes significant courage, and it requires an approach that rejects the professional in favour of the human.
In my provocation piece, I offer ten ways in which social leaders can adopt this approach; it embraces the human in preference of the professional, and it sees people as having potential rather than problems. This isn’t the easiest approach to adopt as a social leader, but then when was anything worth doing easy?
Stuart Dexter is the CEO of the Daisy Chain Project and a 2017 Clore Social Leadership Fellow. He developed this blog and provocation piece as part of his Fellowship.
Please share your views and comments below, or you can contact Stuart on Twitter.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
03 October 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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This guest blog was written by Robert Laycock who supports the organisational, leadership and management development of not-for-profit organisations across the North East.
By not joining up development opportunities for leaders of social change are we leaving the majority of them to fend for themselves in increasingly challenging times?
Earlier this week I was leading a seminar at the North East Fundraising Conference targeting delegates considering becoming a trustee for the first time. My introduction outlined the scale of the task citing the number of charities and trustees nationally (165,000 and 850,000 respectively in England and Wales) and in the North East region (6,900 formally constituted not-for-profit organisations, further 7,500+ smaller ‘under the radar’ groups). These stats suggest we need somewhere in the region of 25,000+ trustees in the North East alone; double this number including committee positions within smaller unconstituted groups. We perhaps shouldn't be surprised, therefore, that attracting the right calibre and number of trustees is an issue for many organisations.
These stats also help us to understand the scale of the task for those of us who are passionate about leadership development within civil society.
I’m absolutely of the view that the challenges we face as we strive for outstanding governance across the North East, can only be addressed through collaborative action; identifying, sharing and spreading best practice. I believe we need a similarly joined-up approach to developing leaders.
Reflecting on my own development, I now recognise the gateways and interventions that made the difference, leading to big shifts in practice. Here’s my timeline:
- 1993-1999: self-taught leadership and management (artist-led/community projects)
- 1999: appointed Co-Director of established regional charity (1999-2011)
- 2001/02: completed accredited leadership and management development programme (Northern Cultural Skills Partnership – this programme came to an end around 2008)
- 2005/06: Common Purpose Matrix programme
- 2007: first trusteeship
- 2009/10, 2013/14: executive coaching
- 2016/17: certificate in coaching and mentoring (self-organised)
- Particularly, I feel fortunate to have worked for Helix Arts, a charity committed to developing their people while I was in a critical phase in my development as a leader.
So what are we doing, collectively, to make sure our leaders of social change, at all stages of development, have access to the right type of support at the right time?
The good news is we have a reasonable range and diversity of opportunities currently available in the North East including, on my radar:
My concern is how leaders navigate these opportunities to identify the support they need.
My call to action is to all of us working to develop leaders to find ways to align our programmes and initiatives, raise awareness and strengthen connections, in order to provide pathways of support - a mosaic of opportunities - for the many thousands of leaders who may struggle without it.
Who’s in?
Please share your comments below, or you can join the conversation on Twitter.
*With thanks to the Garfield Weston Foundation
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
26 July 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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2017 Clore Social Fellows Stuart Dexter and Joanna McCreadie share their reflections about the commonalities and differences between their organisations, and their plans to collaborate.
Stuart Dexter, Chief Executive of Daisy Chain
And so it came to pass, four intrepid explorers finished their board meeting and set off to cross the border in search of a half decent curry and some ideas of how to integrate animals into their work. The coalescing of like-minds felt like the start of something bigger, inspiring all involved to dare to aim high. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, let’s go back to the beginning…
Stuart was telling Joanna about his new role at an autism charity, Daisy Chain. Joanna said that she’d be interested in learning more about Daisy Chain’s use of animals. Joanna is CEO of , a residential school in Scotland for children with multiple and complex needs. They have just started to keep some animals at the school, and thus plans were made for a team from Seamab to visit the Daisy Chain farm.
We got to know each other over a fiery jalfrezi and bountiful thalis and began to realise how well aligned our approach to working with children and young people who have faced significant challenges were. What become apparent was that a youth and community work approach was beneficial in engaging with children and young people for whom mainstream schooling just didn’t work. We learnt of a shared appetite to take risks but, most of all, we learnt of a shared value of being ‘human’ when working with people. We learned that we were not afraid to show that we care.
An early start followed and we talked in more detail about the two organisations and realised further the significant commonalities. Fortified, we had a look around the Daisy Chain centre and toured the grounds, ending at the Daisy Chain farm.
All was going well until our Scottish friends were introduced to Daisy Chain’s skinny pigs. For those of you unaware, skinny pigs are a mutant, hairless guinea pig. Usually, once the initial revulsion has passed people find them cute. Alas, for one of the Seamab team the revulsion intensified, eliciting a surprisingly strong reaction.
We split into two teams; Jody and Alistair stayed on the farm with Michelle, Daisy Chain’s Farm Manager and Stuart, Gary and Joanna retired once more to Stuart’s office to talk future plans and building developments.
So what did we learn and does this partnership have a future? To the latter question the answer is almost certainly yes. Daisy Chain has been invited to Seamab for a return visit, an invitation we intend to accept. We’re also considering opportunities for a formal partnership project.
And the learning? That there is an approach to the work, a set of values and a value in people that we have in common. That a desire to aim high and innovate, to have aspirations and not accept the orthodoxy as the only way things can be done goes a long way when working with some of the most vulnerable members of society.
And we had a nice curry.
Joanna McCreadie, Chief Executive of Seamab
It’s not that often that the Seamab team has had the chance to visit other charities, or have open and in depth discussions about the joy and challenges of working with children. Our focus is usually on what is happening now, and what we are planning to do next in Seamab.
One of the unanticipated strengths of the Clore Social Fellowship is the opportunity for teams from separate charities to engage with each other, learn from each other and potentially work together. Talking with Stuart after an action learning set, it became clear that while our two charities deliver different services, we share a commitment to finding, and implementing interesting ways of working, always with the aim of making a positive difference. As well, having recently rescued some chickens, at Seamab we were beginning to think that we were on to a new idea of having more animals around to support the children. Of course, Daisy Chain have already had this idea, and added pretty impressive bells and whistles, so we thought we could borrow some of their thinking and expertise….
Our first impressions on arrival at Daisy Chain were of an open, welcoming space and buildings. There was a mixture of new development and old farm buildings. We were all really impressed by the services Daisy Chain offers, and their approach to how they support children, young people, and families. It was obvious this is an organisation interested in how they can make a practical difference. There was an acceptance of the challenges of this and an interest in continuing to develop and improve.
While the farm is wonderful – it’s not an end in itself. Rather, caring for the animals and spending time with them, supported by skilled adults, is a positive experience that has multiple benefits for children and young people across all aspects of their lives.
And the skinny pigs…well, it’s the first time any of us has seen our colleague move that fast (away from the skinny pig) and maintain that kind of distance (clearly he thought it would be able to leap out the farm manager's arms) or deny so vociferously any fear. As supportive colleagues we respected his feelings and haven’t mentioned it since – those skinny pig photos that found their way into his office were, honestly, a surprise to all of us.
What next? Stuart and I think we (and our teams) share values and a philosophy about practice. We can feel that there will be opportunities to learn from each other, and potentially, work together. We’re already planning to purchase some pigs for the children at Seamab, and have the offer of expert advice from Daisy Chain’s farm manager. Our next step is a visit to Seamab by the Daisy Chain team. We think we can see that curry and raise it brilliant fish and chips in our local hostelry!
Please share your views and comments below, or join the conversation on Twitter.
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