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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,
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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