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Posted By Zoe Amar,
14 September 2021
Updated: 14 September 2021
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September has always felt like a back to school month and this year even more so than normal. Perhaps you’re back from holiday, planning out a busy few months ahead, or maybe you’re going into the office for a few days each week. Either way this month marks the beginning of a new phase of how we all work together and arguably, a fresh chapter in how we lead.
18 months into the pandemic, many of us are pretty confident with Zoom, running remote meetings and collaborating online. You may not need support in the mechanics of managing a virtual team. Yet new challenges and opportunities may be emerging for you, and I’ve seen this through my own work and those of the social sector organisations we advise.
Some common concerns I’m hearing about are:
- Not having time to reflect on how you’ve led your team during the pandemic, and how you might need to shift your leadership style as ways of working evolve
- Worries about burnout. According to the recent Charity Digital Skills Report Just under a third of nonprofits (31%) say their staff are burned out from the demands of intense remote working. How can you protect your team’s wellbeing and your own after more than a year of hard graft in incredibly stressful conditions?
- With more emphasis on remote working and less on the four walls of the office, culture is at a premium. It’s the thing that will draw talented people to your team, and may also be the reason they leave. How might ‘the way we do things round here’ need to change from now?
- How can I hire the best people and give them a running start in role remotely?
- How might I keep finetuning the way my team and I work so we can keep improving and learning together?
We’ll be covering all of this plus how you and the people you lead can be productive, motivated, and successful as we enter the next phase of the pandemic in Clore’s new course for social sector leaders. We look forward to seeing you there.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
04 December 2020
Updated: 07 December 2020
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As a long-term Trustee of the wonderful organisation that is Clore Social, Shaks Ghosh (Clore Social CEO), asked me for some personal reflections on leadership, and in particular leading through difficult times.
I have been in the public service for my whole career, including some periods right in the spotlight. Periods when my work was in the national news more or less every day, and periods when what we were doing was particularly tough. I am currently the Director General responsible for the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire. My experiences have caused me to reflect a lot on what needs to be done to lead teams through periods of stress, and to build resilience. I don’t have any magic answers, or much book learning to share. All I can talk about is what has helped me. Some reflections:
Spreading the Load. Being good at what you do and surviving sticky moments is, in my view, mostly about the people who work for you, and about others who can help you to spread the load. Rarely can you do big things all by yourself. I certainly can’t. The more taxing the situation, the less likely I find myself to be the answer. As a leader, I think this has to mean gaining strength by giving away power. Why does the co-pilot and not the pilot fly the plane a lot of the time? I am told it is because the pilot can correct the actions of the co-pilot far more readily than the co-pilot can correct the actions of his or her boss. If you empower your team to get on with the job and hold yourself in reserve as coach, counsellor and advisor, you will (in the short run) create a more powerful unit, and (in the long run) grow your people. Furthermore, if you make a habit of recruiting people who are better than you and/or complement your skillset, and pay attention to their growth and development, you will end up with a stronger unit. Don’t then worry too much about losing great people to bigger jobs. Just make sure you are a leader even better people want to work for.
“As a leader, I think this has to mean gaining strength by giving away power." Mark Fisher
There are other ways of spreading the load too. Pester your allies and abuse your networks. In my experience even the busiest people are enormously generous with their advice. You will need it. Find and then work closely with partners - if there are others travelling willingly with you on your journey you are more likely to be right!
Creating Organisational Resilience. How resilient is the organisation, and how I can improve it? I have tried in particular to cement and communicate belief and purpose, and celebrate success. Few things are more important than giving people a powerful reason to come to work. I try to be calm in any crisis, and deal quickly with any internal problems. Nothing weakens a team as rapidly as a breakdown between team members. You need to be there when it matters for people, take the most difficult meetings, and be the lightning rod for criticism. Perhaps most importantly, you have to allow people to be affected by things, ensure there is proper counselling and wellbeing support, take advantage of it yourself, and be seen to do so.
"None of this is possible unless you look after yourself." Mark Fisher
Personal Resilience None of this is possible unless you look after yourself. Do things, and only do things, that you believe in, have purpose and play to your values. Find colleagues you want to work with. Avoid over-reach, and over-ambition, and give yourself time for other things!
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Mark Fisher CBE FRSA is a Clore Social Trustee and Director General and Secretary to the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
12 December 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Lynne Berry, OBE, is Chair of Breast Cancer Now and becomes Chair of Sustrans in January 2018. She is Vice Chair of Cumberland Lodge, a trustee of UnLtd and was until recently deputy chair of the Canal and River Trust (formerly British Waterways) and a trustee of Pro Bono Economics. She is a visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City, University of London.
Who would have thought a musical about charity governance would pack in the crowds at London’s Donmar theatre? The play about Committee Proceedings in Parliament concerning Kids Company did. I even spotted the board of the Association of Chairs there, on their summer outing. Governance is a hot topic.
So too is leadership, and whilst (nearly) everyone knows that trustees are responsible for governance, their role in leadership is less clear. It ought to be obvious: after all they are the people who are legally responsible for the charity and, in smaller organisations, the ones who run them and do all the work.
However, what about where there are paid staff? Do trustees still have a leadership role? Are they still leaders when there is an expert CEO and a skilled senior executive team, employed for their capacity to inspire and to make things happen?
It used to seem so easy: the CEO ran the organisation and the Chair ran the board. However, with a renewed focus on governance and accountability the relationship between the leaders of an organisation needs to be both more nuanced and more overt. The new Charity Governance Code, together with the renewed focus on safeguarding and fundraising, mean it is vital to have an honest conversation about what the shared leadership of trustees and senior executives really looks like, and who is responsible for what.
Once, looking at my Chair and me (when I was a CEO), the Queen asked: ‘which of you actually runs this charity?’ I suspect we each thought we did. And in reality, Chairs do much more than run the board and CEOs, so much more than run the organisation. Where it works well, there is also a shared leadership role based on a joint vision, agreed values and clarity of roles.
This shared leadership seems to me to be vital because it sets the dial about fundamental issues like behaviours, attitudes to risk and approaches to innovation. This isn’t about undermining good governance and I think some of recent complaints that boards are turning into risk-free zones are unfounded. It doesn’t feel like that on the boards on which I sit, but then, the trustees and executive spend a great deal of time together thinking both about governance and grasping opportunities.
For great leadership, both trustees and executives need to be innovative and to think about accountability. For any charity to change the world, there must be a sense that taking risks is acceptable, that it’s ok to try, and maybe not get it right every time.
However, when it comes to governance, if it comes to the crunch, trustees are responsible for the charity and that must affect what they do when things go badly wrong. Because, although trustees and executives both have leadership roles, they are not actually both ‘running the show’. Their responsibilities are different. And it’s vital to be very clear about that.
Please share your comments and views below, or join the conversation on Twitter.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
17 August 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Lisa Sofianos is an international leadership consultant and business author, she is the founder and Director of .
Measuring the value or impact of leadership development is a tricky, and not altogether satisfactory, pursuit. The more you dig into the subject the more slippery the idea becomes. When looking at the impact of leadership development on the behaviour of individual participants, perhaps as they return to the workplace, we may be able to identify important observable changes; returning participants may ask more questions instead of providing answers, they may work more collaboratively, engage more with their colleagues, that kind of thing. While these changes may be good and desirable, they are inevitably only part of the story. Firstly, to get a fuller picture of the impact of development we would have to be around to see all the changes taking place - requiring a level of omnipresence beyond the reach of most evaluators. Secondly, the story is partial because the new thinking that underpins observable changes in behaviour can run much deeper. The metaphor of an iceberg hiding so much more below the surface can hold true in this situation. In terms of this thinking finding its way to the surface and manifesting in behaviour or decision-making, the right conditions may need to be in place - a crisis, a big change programme or perhaps even a vacancy at the top – all triggers for the application of learning. And without some of these circumstances being in place, some of the most profound impacts of leadership development can remain invisible and dormant, and thought therefore not to exist, while they may in fact lie in waiting to pounce when the time is right.
Another spanner in the works of quantifying impact is the gap that exists between the theoretical models and concepts taught through leadership development, and the real and lived experience of leaders. By this I mean that the cutting-edge ideas and frameworks that may be passed on in teaching, should not be understood as representing a guaranteed formula for success. Nor would it be reasonable to expect them to be carried out to the letter. What the keen-eyed evaluator may look for in the application of models and methods in the workplace just may not be there. And this is not because the leadership development investment hasn’t been useful, rather it may be because the participant absorbs them into their own knowledge and experience, and applies them in very different and sometimes unexpected ways. The line of sight between input and output, for some of the best reasons, may not be very clear; the ‘audit trail’ a little muddy.
So, it is perhaps worth acknowledging that the business of evaluation is complex and for this reason it may be more useful, if not less painful, when examining the value of leadership development, to imagine instead a world without it. To paint the picture of how organisations might operate if it weren’t there.
At first I suspect that this world might look very similar to ours. It would still be filled with a huge variety of enterprises busily engaged in their chosen activity. Organisations would still operate through hierarchies of one sort or another, and ‘leadership’ would still get done. From a distance it may be indiscernible from the current situation. But closer up, we may see some meaningful differences.
Let us start with one possible consequence, that without leadership development, organisations run the risk of becoming cul-de-sacs of knowledge. Importantly, all enterprises are engaged in competition; for resources, clients, expertise, assets, know-how and so on. And this is not an activity that is the preserve of the private sector. Competition may be less acute according to the sector to which we belong, but you can be sure that it is alive, well and driving a lot of behaviour in organisations. And whereas competition has the effect of keeping expertise and strategies under wraps, in order to protect a competitive edge, leadership development, in contrast, has a commitment to the exact opposite; to exposing new ideas, sharing wisdom, making sense of what works, and learning from experience. If it were not for the work of leadership developers and strategy analysts, who would we look to in order to make sense of and learn the lessons from the collapse of Borders, the bankruptcy of high street giant Woolworths, the rise of corporate universities, the leadership challenges of massive open online courses (MOOCS), the sharing economy models of working (Uber, airbnb), the new tech companies and so on? And if you think the answer lies in leaders doing research for themselves or reading business books, how many books a year do you think your senior leaders could get through alongside the day job?
Without leadership development we may see organisations becoming idiosyncratic, having been built upon foundations of commonsense thinking where faults and weaknesses become compounded and areas of unawareness and neglect left to fester. Folklore, rather than evidenced-based lessons drawn from a number of close and far away sources, might create an unbalanced and uninformed view about what good leadership constitutes. A not invented here approach to management might cause multiple re-inventions of the wheel, rather than taking a more efficient route of borrowing ideas from those have done this before.
In the absence of a common language of leadership and a shared set of organisational principles, collaboration could be severely hampered. Time and effort would need to be diverted to mapping and understanding unfamiliar systems and processes, and in our fast changing environment this could lead to missed opportunities.
For me one of the most important roles that leadership development can play for leaders is to provide ventilation to their thinking through sharing experiences, inputting new ideas from the cutting edge and holding a space for them to experiment and learn from experience in safety. The risk of creating an organisational cul-de-sac, or even a gated-community, without leadership development, is transformed into a thriving modern city with multiple crossroads, roundabouts and intersections that allow for ideas, experiences and learning to circulate.
Another consequence of the removal of leadership development relates to the pace of change in the operating environment and the risk that without assistance and rapid learning, organisations will struggle to stay relevant. Our paradigms of leadership, rooted in the past as they are, are no longer adequate for dealing with the “new normal” and leadership pioneers like Prof. Ronald Heifetz, with his Adaptive Leadership model, have made huge strides in constructing a leadership response that is more fit for purpose. That Command and Control leadership is now largely consigned to times of acute crisis isn’t new news to anyone, but would this ever be the case without leadership development? Where else would such concerted thought be devoted to the business of how we lead and then shared in service of helping leaders succeed? In a world without leadership development, ideas and traditions may long outstay their usefulness without the challenge presented by thought leaders.
Notwithstanding the changes swirling around externally in the operating environment, organisations are facing major change from within. The challenges of reconciling an aging population with rapid technological advancements are already being felt by workforces that span Baby Boomers and Digital Natives. It’s tempting to wonder if the fate of HMV would have been different if the senior team could have had a useful conversation with their younger store employees about how their generation consumes music. How much more seriously might they have taken the phenomenon of downloadable music if they had done so?
Rapid technological advancement is here to stay, and Gordon Moore’s assertion that processing speed doubles every two years has held true for decades. In fact the timescale is now closer to 18 months. Leaders on the brink of paradigm-shifting innovations such as the application of Artificial Intelligence will need to look far beyond themselves in order to make sense of the implications and impacts.
New technology conditions the behavior of workforces in other ways too. People have grown used to accessing a seemingly unlimited store of knowledge and information through the internet and are exercising a greater level of engagement and autonomy in their lives. They question experts; shop around; bypass intermediaries; and they are beginning to expect similar levels of involvement in their workplace. This may demand from leaders a new approach to the distribution of executive power and accountability and directly challenge the hierarchical structures that they have grown up with. Pioneers such as Timpsons, with their “Upside Down Leadership” approach, are already working to find ways of unlocking the benefits of this cultural shift, although this would be outside of the awareness of most leaders without the shared learning commitment of leadership developers.
Leaders are faced with steep learning curves on all sides as they grapple with a complex and volatile world. Often they are breaking new ground as the emerging effects of technology, climate change and shifting demographics present novel challenges. In this context it is seldom enough to rely on the relatively small store of experience and expertise that can be accrued by a senior team in order to meet these challenges and thrive. Leaders need shortcuts to best practice; new frames of reference and provocations to generate new thinking; and a reflective space to meet with peers to make sense of it all. In this way I believe that leadership development is one of our best tools to engage with the “new normal”. To return to the beginning of this piece, and the thorny subject of measuring impact, perhaps we should concede the point that leadership development has a profound and meaningful contribution to make to the business of leading. With this framing principle we should be directing much more of our effort away from proving that value and much more of it towards creating the conditions for success.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
18 July 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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This blog was written jointly by Claire Haigh and Julia Wolfendale from Collaborate Out Loud. Together they create social spaces for public service innovation.
We live in a social world, a world where we are surrounded by technology that allows us to communicate and connect like never before. Successful social leaders are able to authentically and skilfully use not just the digital tools at their fingertips, but to also bring people together to form communities that can make a difference in the places we live.
Making connections across boundaries is key for social leadership. Some of the formal constraints of traditional working literally get in the way. As we move towards widening our social connections across social media platforms, we are seeing the opportunity to include our ‘work allies and work friends’ into our real lives. What would happen if we truly brought our whole selves to work? Perhaps this could help us to transcend the boundaries of hierarchy and formal structures, sidestep silos and really connect around shared interests - inside and outside of work - through shared personal values and interest in mutual outcomes.
Is this a modern workplace dilemma? Have we been busy crafting a work persona that is so different to our real selves that we struggle to let people in and see who we really are, what we care about, and what we have to offer? Do we hold back our potential to connect fully with each other at work because of this? If we are working in public service, is it not important to show we have real lives too? Would this help build our affinity with the people we serve? Would this help develop the authenticity and credibility that is needed in leaders today?
We think so. We have been developing ways to help social leaders connect with who they really are as people first, and then around what skills, knowledge, connections, abilities and interests that they have to offer beyond the role and job description.
People naturally seek connections. We are hardwired to connect, although we might fight it at work and hide behind the work role, finding ourselves segregated in isolation, distanced by a fear of difference. With more transparency and authenticity in public service, we could develop greater empathy and rapport, and connect more wholly with others. We could unlock the potential of people in public services by connecting as people who live in a community who have chosen to serve a community.
Embracing difference, connecting across boundaries, seeking out the unusual suspects and having surprising conversations help us to innovate and collaborate better. If we want to truly innovate we need to collaborate not only with those around us who are our trusted friends, but with those who we don’t know, who are different and are removed from our inner circle. Why not just have a coffee with someone you don’t really know, or follow some new people on Twitter?
Please share your comments below, or join the conversation on Twitter.
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