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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
27 September 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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David Green is director at Green Pepper Consulting and associate consultant at Action Planning.
Many people don’t trust banks or estate agents but they still use them; most don’t trust politicians, yet they still vote for them. But what about a charity? It needs to be more than good at what it does. It needs to convince funders, partners and the public that it is fundamentally trustworthy. So while good leadership is visionary and inspiring, a social leader also requires an understanding of their organisation’s unique nature and status in civil society.
According to a survey published in March this year, the public believes charities spend around 57% of their income on running costs, when in reality, typical running costs are just 14%. This image problem is of such concern that the National Council for Voluntary Organisations have even set up to explain how charities work.
But earning trust requires more than just a website. Financial integrity and an absence of conflicting interests should come first, but as I’ve argued before, investments should also be ethical. And social leaders need to ensure a level of genuine openness and transparency in dealing with the public which just hasn’t been the case in the sector thus far. Publishing the percentage of income spent on running costs will help. Perhaps too, we should heed the advice of those to also be made more readily available.
Of course, to function, an organisation needs people. So trust in the leadership from staff and volunteers is arguably just as vital as that of donors. As such, leaders should listen to and, above all, value and respect the contributions made by staff and volunteers. This may sound obvious, but to disregard this rather than inspire.
Indeed, leadership is people focused rather than purely organisational. In my experience staff and volunteers will respond when given a voice. So let them help shape how your organisation works and what it becomes. Ask, listen and respond, rather than simply tell. But don’t leave it to the annual away day. Make engaging with, and responding to staff and volunteers, part of your organisation’s culture.
Significantly, social leaders have a level of commitment and authenticity that often can’t be replicated in other sectors. This makes them well placed to promote trust. By being proactive, highlighting values, and demonstrating solidarity with those they are helping, social leaders add value to their message and to their organisation. A good leader will be a great advocate, demonstrating success, as well as being clear about where the money goes.
Trust is not an entitlement, nor should it be disposable. But to lead social change it is certainly a requirement. As the former chief executive of Centrepoint, Anthony Lawton, said to me recently: ‘What would happen if you took away trust? As a leader, you are the face of your organisation. But take away the trust of your team, your beneficiaries or the public, and you will soon be lost.’
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
22 August 2017
Updated: 22 October 2020
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This guest blog was written by David Orr, the Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation.
Investing in the talent of our future leaders is vital for growing our organisations. Nobody quite knows what the future will look like but housing associations will no doubt need leaders that are adept in a range of skills.
In the future it will not be enough for organisations to simply provide a service and then step back. It is going to be a much more engaged world where people will be asking questions and expecting answers quickly - our young leaders will therefore need to be strategic thinkers and have a vision for a future that they in their organisations will be trying to craft. They will also need to be technically savvy and digitally aware, to understand the power of social media, and the potential for talking to people that comes from having a whole new range of communication channels.
Having said that, an engagement with the future starts not with technology but with creative thinking. Housing Associations have a clear ambition - to deliver up to 120,000 new homes a year, to be making an offer to people right across all different parts of the housing market – across different geographies and tenures. If we are to end the housing crisis, we need to be in a position to think imaginatively and creatively and be prepared to take some risks. Existing leaders have got where they are by being bold, by putting themselves forward and taking risks. Now we need to create a nurturing environment that makes it essential that young talented people will want to work in our business and want to be creative and bring their ideas to how we create that future.
As a chief executive, leader or a board in any organisation the ability to encourage people to question and challenge you is, at root, a statement of confidence in yourself. If you as a leader are committed to the future you are trying to create then you will want people to be challenging you and asking awkward questions because that's the best way to test your own thinking as well as testing theirs. It should not be an optional extra to be investing in talent - our future depends on housing associations being able to attract, retain and develop talented people.
To do this requires investment in those people. The National Housing Federation’s Young Leaders Experience on 19-20 September, provides a way for housing associations to invest in talent management and develop the skills they need in their future cohort of leaders. The heart of leadership is ultimately about creating and articulating a vision of the future that is better than the present. Young people are just as capable at doing that. They just need confidence and a bit of coaching to get them there.
Register your place for the Young Leaders Experience by visiting here and use the priority code YLE0917CL. Group discounts are also available – book 6 places and get the 7th free. Call 020 7067 1066 or email events@housing.org.uk to find out more.
Tags:
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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.
Tags:
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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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