Jane’s L2L messages: best of the past 12 months

Hello!

It is a privilege to be welcoming you to my first edition of Leader to Leader as I step into the role of CEO of ACEVO. I’m hugely excited to be here.

Last week we bade farewell to Vicky, who in her tenure transformed ACEVO into the excellent organisation it now is. Vicky has made ACEVO an effective membership body. She has done so with her particular blend of pragmatic determination, ego-free collaboration, and a wickedly dry sense of humour, and we are going to miss her enormously.

But she and I have both been very clear that as I take over the reins, my role is not to try and preserve ACEVO in aspic – there is more for us to do, and so as we start this new chapter these are some of the things I’m thinking about and that I look forward to exploring with you in the coming months.

Firstly, maintaining the current high levels of service and support that we offer to members and responding particularly to the specific challenges facing our sector’s leadership. Without you we are nothing, and our priority is and must always be to give you the services, connections and representation you need from us. 

We will continue to play our role as a key member of the infrastructure ecosystem to ensure that your voices are heard in the spaces where decisions are being made. Sometimes that means we speak on your behalf; just as often, I hope, it means that we create opportunities for you to speak directly with those who have influence.

The work already happening under the ACEVO banner around EDI, safe and inclusive working environments and climate change demonstrate that our sector’s leaders want to be part of a community that drives social action over and beyond their organisational roles. Our role is to facilitate and convene our members around the issues that matter to them, and there is more of that to be done.

And within our sector, perhaps our single biggest leadership challenge is to shift the dial on equality, diversity and inclusion, particularly at decision-making levels. I believe now is the time for us to build on ACEVO’s reputation for thought leadership in this space and start thinking about the practical role we can play in developing a genuinely diverse next generation of CEOs within our sector.

I can’t wait to meet as many of you as possible in the coming months. Even if you’ve never attended an ACEVO event before, do have a look at what’s on offer in our events programme – I’d love to meet you at a workshop or a member networking session. Most excitingly, we are now taking bookings for #ACEVOFest22, with a brilliant programme and a hybrid approach that we hope means we can meet the needs of the broadest number of members.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has sent me messages and good wishes through Twitter, LinkedIn and email. I feel incredibly aware that I am starting this role on a wave of goodwill that reflects how much ACEVO means to so many of you. I do not take that responsibility lightly, and I promise I will not waste your support. I look forward enormously to working with you – and for you – in the years to come.

I was reminded recently of the quote, ‘if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.’  To which I might add, if you want to go far as quickly as you can it pays to spend time early on investing in the relationships that will carry you there. 

There is nothing I enjoy more than having one-to-one conversations with the members we are here to support, and last week I had some great opportunities to do so.  Some were with CEOs having a tough time in their roles right now; others were with members who were proud to share with me the work they are doing and the impact they are having.  None of those conversations was a one-way street; I came away from each energised by the power of our network and reminded, as always, that we are stronger together. 

Last week I also had the opportunity to spend a good couple of hours with Sarah Vibert, CEO of NCVO.  We talked at length about the relationship between our two organisations, the different roles we play for our members and for the sector, and the ways in which we can work together to best support you and the sector at large.  We are both deeply committed to the concept of generous collaboration; and we know how important it is that we practice that if we are to play our role in helping our sector go as far, as fast, as it needs to in the face of the deep and challenging needs you all work to meet.  You can expect to hear me – and Sarah – talk more about that in coming months. 

I make no apology for repeating myself this week.  It’s blessedly cool compared to the extreme temperatures we experienced across England and Wales at the start of last week, and therein lies the danger.  Our planet grabbed our attention in the only way it can, but we quickly move on – especially when there are so many other pressing issues for us to respond to. 

I know many of our members are trying to work out how – and why – they should respond to the climate catastrophe. At the most basic level it’s a matter of survival.  Even if you (or your trustees) don’t feel it is part of your remit to work in this space the impacts of extreme weather events and their consequences should definitely be on your risk register and part of your business continuity planning. (Apologies again to anyone who tried to access our website on Wednesday morning to book an event or access support – next time extreme temperatures are forecast we’ll know to plan for the possibility that our hosting service will, literally, collapse in the heat.) 

It’s also a matter of social justice.  Whether we look globally or domestically we can see right now that the worst impacts are being felt by those who are already most disadvantaged – and that the level of disadvantage is growing and spreading.  There is a moral imperative for our sector to come together and act on this issue as well as a practical one. 

Our sector exists, by definition, to make the world a better place.  We have challenges but we also have many advantages. We can turn on a sixpence to respond rapidly to changing need, we know how to win hearts and minds in support of change, we have relationships of trust with communities and the public that politicians and business leaders would give their right arms for.  Let’s use those strengths, together.  If you are ready to make a start, take a look at our growing library of resources and sign up to our climate and environmental leadership principles. 

Someone asked me recently to sum up the role of a charity CEO in one sentence. Quite a challenge! For me, on the best days it can be summed up as ‘think; listen; engage; create’. On the tougher days it is better described as ‘a game of whack-a-mole as you deal with multiple crises on all fronts.’ (Ironically, even as I wrote that sentence a small mole popped its nose up and disrupted my plan for the day!)  

Overall though, I think our strapline pretty much says it all: imagine, inspire, improve.  Everything we do as CEOs should fit under one of those headings (even if occasionally they have to be shoehorned in!) and I find it invaluable sometimes to step back and think about which of the three I’m not doing as much of as I could or should be. 

If we’re lucky as CEOs we have a good chair who enables – and sometimes forces us – to step back in that way and regain our perspective, a chair who knows how to ask the right question at the right time to nudge us out of the weeds of the day-to-day issues and back into the strategic headspace we should be inhabiting. The CEO’s relationship with their chair is crucial to our organisation’s ability to thrive, and like any relationship, those dynamics can be tricky sometimes to navigate. We are currently taking bookings for our next Dynamic Duo event (the details are below) and wherever you are on the relationship curve with your chair I can highly recommend it as an opportunity to spend some dedicated, facilitated time together to work on your understanding of each other rather than your business plan or your strategic objectives. 

It really is quite hard to believe just how much has happened in the seven days since my last Monday morning newsletter. I for one am still trying to process the knowledge that in the space of one week we’ve seen the transition from one Prime Minister to another and from one monarch to another, and I have a strong sense that we cannot yet predict what these changes combined will mean – for our society, our communities and our sector.

As we move through the period of national mourning it feels as though every day needs a slightly different response, and we will all be treading carefully to ensure that we find the right balance between reflecting the public mood, supporting staff and volunteers who may have widely varying reactions to all that is happening, maintaining essential services to individuals and communities, and keeping the organisational boat afloat through yet another unprecedented national experience.

I and the team here at ACEVO spent a great deal of time on Friday considering what to do about ACEVOFest, which is due to start on Tuesday 20 September.  Having taken soundings from several members before the weekend, the confirmation that came on Saturday that Monday 19 September will be a bank holiday simply reinforced that this will be a disrupted week for most of our delegates in a variety of ways and that there is a high likelihood that many simply would not be able to attend the first day of the conference.

Our first priority is always to protect our members’ interests, and we know how important ACEVOFest is to so many of you as an opportunity to step away from the day job, to have space to imagine, be inspired and find new ways to improve, and to come together with your network of peers.  We don’t want that rare opportunity to be compromised for you by the complicated demands of a very unexpected week.

So we’ve taken the decision to postpone ACEVOFest – in its entirety, in order to hold the programme together – until the early part of 2023.  We will be writing later today to all booked delegates with further details. 

Shortly before the news of the Queen’s death was announced, we published our response to the Prime Minister’s statement on the cost of living crisis. I am increasingly concerned that the £2500 two year cap on energy bills will make little meaningful difference to those in greatest need already.  Knowing that your bill is going to go up a bit less than it might have done is little consolation if you can’t afford the bill you already have, and there is a particular risk around the impact on mental health for those who might feel that their one chance of seeing meaningful support has now been and gone.  We’ll continue to work with colleagues across the sector to try to ensure that the government is aware of the continuing urgency of need for so many. 

Inevitably perhaps the events of Thursday afternoon mean that it will take longer for us to get the detail of what is intended for businesses, charities and public sector organisations in terms of the six month support offer.  I was genuinely delighted to see charities referenced explicitly by the Prime Minister, but I know we will need to ensure that those civil society organisations that need longer term support are included in the government’s definition of ‘vulnerable’ business sectors.

An organisation’s culture is defined by the worst behaviour the chief executive is prepared to tolerate” is a phrase I find incredibly useful when I have to make the judgement calls that in leadership are so often put in front of us. 

In a values-based sector such as ours, the culture of our ecosystem is defined by the worst behaviours we are together prepared to tolerate. And even beyond our own boundaries while we don’t (sadly perhaps) get to define what is and is not tolerable within our society we do play a critically important role in holding up a mirror and asking people to think hard about the values we want to see and be held to account for in the way our society works. 

I am proud to be part of a sector that speaks up against racism, discrimination, abuse and intolerance – but of course the proof of the pudding is in the actions we are prepared to take when living those values might cost us something.  

It may mean taking a financial hit rather than tolerate sexual harassment in fundraising, or refusing to work with a corporate partner who wants to greenwash their reputation. It may mean being prepared to face direct personal criticism or abuse on social media in so as to take a stand against ill-informed or deliberately bad-faith actors in the culture wars, or, as the ACEVO team decided this week, not running an office sweepstake for the forthcoming World Cup in the light of the human rights abuses and attacks on the LGBT+ community practised by the Qatari regime.  

The challenges to our values can appear in the smallest moments as much as the big decisions, but it is in those moments that we demonstrate our integrity – and encourage others to have courage to do the same. 

I’ve fought (and lost) a decades-long battle to feel as though I am in control of my diary rather than the other way round, and I know that I am anything but alone in this.  So many conversations I have with leaders in our sector have threaded through them the sense that we are all trying to juggle too many priorities, answer too many calls on our time, be everything that everyone wants or needs us to be.  And when the circumstances in which we work are increasingly pressured it is easy to feel that all we can do is ‘more’.

One of the privileges of my role is that I am surrounded by colleagues that think – a lot – about leadership and the challenges it brings. I am able to draw on their wisdom and insight, and I am able to think and talk about the challenges of the role in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to in other contexts.  A few weeks ago a series of conversations made me think about the risk of burnout especially when you are in a role that you are deeply passionate about, as so many in our sector are; and I realised that I am by now plenty old enough (if not wise enough) to understand that the only person that can really control my workload is me.  I have to be intentional about the choices I make, the hours I work, and perhaps hardest of all, the things that will simply have to be left undone. If I am not, then eventually I will not be able to do the things that I am really needed for.

I’m concerned that post-pandemic there is still a very real sense of strain and exhaustion among many of our sector leaders and staff, now only exacerbated by the increasing pressures of the cost of living crisis.  We’ve seen for a while the steady trickle of experienced CEOs stepping away from their roles, from the sector and even from the world of work itself because they just need to take a break, and recently I’ve spoken to more than one who has been officially signed off sick with burnout.  I don’t want to see people I know and respect finding themselves in that situation, and I don’t want to see the sector I love and am passionate about losing great leaders and years of valuable experience in that way.

One of the things we know our members really value from us is our CEO in crisis service, which is there for you whenever you need it, whatever the crisis.  But we’d much rather support you in ways that avoid the pressures ever reaching that point.  If you feel that there’s a red flag waving somewhere in your peripheral vision, warning you that it is all getting a bit much, find a quiet ten minutes to work out what will make the difference.  Make some intentional choices that put your sustainable wellbeing first, because to do so is an act of generous leadership not one of selfishness.  And if you need us, give us a call.

Perhaps one of the most powerful drivers for the leaders of our sector is our sense of responsibility for fixing the difficulties we see around us.  We know that the problems we see have real consequences for dozens, hundreds, even millions of people, and as a values-driven group of individuals we are deeply motivated to try to solve those issues. 

Three different but equally wise people reminded me last week that ACEVO’s role cannot be to act as a lifeboat for the parts of the sector we see struggling right now.  Powerful though our desire is to do so we cannot solve all the problems we see around us.   

Instead, those conversations suggested, ACEVO’s role is perhaps more to be the lighthouse, guiding those of our members in need into a safe harbour where they can be supported and have their energies replenished while the storm continues to rage around them. 

The same, I suspect, has to be true for many of us in our own individual leadership.  We don’t have the magic wand to fix every difficulty, whether for our colleagues or for our beneficiaries, and that feels hard to accept.  But over the coming weeks and months I will certainly, for myself and for ACEVO, be reflecting on what being a lighthouse rather than a lifeboat looks like in the storm around us.

I suspect that if I’m ever asked to write a chapter for the book that will inevitably one day be written about leadership in the 2020s I will be reflecting on how our expectations of  ourselves as leaders had to change in response to such a hugely unsettled and unpredictable period of time. 

I don’t like the word permacrisis – maybe because it suggests that, like permafrost, we find ourselves in a landscape that is frozen and unchanging and I don’t think anything could be much further from the truth than that. 

Instead I feel that the pandemic was the earthquake and we are now living – and leading – through the biggest of aftershocks. When the tectonic plates beneath us shift as radically as they did in 2020 they throw up volcanoes of fire and ash that cause chaos and disruption; but eventually those eruptions settle into new landscapes, even whole new islands, and the maps have to be rewritten.

Right now many of us are trying to plot our course for the coming year through our business plans and budgets.  The most striking aspect of our recent snapshot survey on members’ plans for cost of living increases was how very few people were able to answer with any certainty compared with the same questions asked at the same time the previous year. If you feel that you are struggling to make your plans make sense because there are too many unknowns and moving parts, trust me when I say you are absolutely not alone.

The truth is, none of us can really see ahead clearly enough yet to set a path with any certainty. The ash is still falling around us and the aftershocks are a way off settling yet.  As we each explore what leading in the 2020s is really going to be like maybe our greatest challenge is learning to lead through an unmappable landscape. 

But when you can’t see what is on the ground ahead of you, look instead to the stars above.  A very wise fellow leader once said to me, ‘when in doubt, whatever you are struggling with, always go back to your mission.’  Our mission, our purpose, the cause we are here to serve is for each and every one of us our north star.  Keep your eyes fixed on that star, and your feet will find the way.

The commentary on Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland last week has largely focused on her achievements (or otherwise) in the role and on the impact on Scottish politics of her unexpected departure.  But when I heard the news almost the first thought in my mind was of whoever steps into her role and wondering how long will it take them to feel that they really understand what that role is. 

My response may well have been prompted by the fact that on the same day as the news broke I’d been talking with a member who has just celebrated her third year in post, her first as a CEO.  She spoke about how three years in she finally feels as though she is getting to grips with what the organisation is, how it works and the real depth of her role, and as she said that I was reminded of feeling exactly the same in my first CEO role.  There is something about the depth of understanding not only of the operation of the organisation but also of the reality of the role of CEO, in all its glories good and bad, that you simply can’t reach in the first year or two in post. 

And however experienced you may be as a CEO, each time you step into a new role you have to go through that process again.  Obviously you have a different set of past experiences to draw on, things that help you navigate the uncertainties and challenges differently to your first time round the CEO block, but each time you step into a new organisation you have to grow into understanding what your leadership in this particular role is going to look like.   

I think the same is equally true if you are stepping up into the CEO role as an internal appointee – and I have met a number of new members recently who are in that position.  You may feel you know the organisation inside out, and in many ways you do, but this role is different in ways you cannot fully predict. So it still takes time to make not just the initial transition but also the deeper transformation in yourself and your relationships with those around you that enable you to experience the real richness of your position. 

All of which I find really reassuring as I start to reflect on what will soon be my first year in post here at ACEVO.  There comes a point in any transition where you start to understand that there is more that you still don’t know than there is that you do, and that’s OK.  Because understanding that means you are firmly on the path towards that deeper, richer experience of the role.  You just have to give yourself time to get there.  

I made my first foray into the world of artificial intelligence a couple of weeks ago.  Having seen a number of social media posts from people who had used ChatGPT to do everything from writing their homework essays to developing a long term strategy for resolving youth crime I thought I would see what this new tool had to say about how civil society leadership will look twenty years from now.

One thing to understand about this particular piece of AI is that it is not creating new ideas or thoughts – rather it is, as my son puts it, Google on steroids.  It scrapes the entire internet in seconds to gather all the relevant information.  What you get back is pretty much what you’d expect, but with the reassurance that you probably haven’t missed anything important from within the whole planet’s collective wisdom.

So, the synthesised view of our world’s commentators is this:  civil society leadership in 2045 is likely to be characterised by a greater emphasis on technology, with leaders needing to understand how best to use the tech of the time to advance their missions.  There will be ever more pressure to demonstrate impact, and therefore even more emphasis on data, how to collect it, how to understand it and how to use it. 

But that drive for impact will also require a strong focus on collaboration and the understanding of how working in genuine partnerships with others can achieve greater results – so the leaders of the future will need to have the skills to build those partnerships.

The expectation and need for civil society leadership in 2043 to be far more diverse than it is now will mean our sector has to change how we identify and develop leaders as well as being genuine and authentic in our commitment to creating more inclusive cultures within our organisations and our sector as a whole. Inevitably perhaps, the expectation is also that the leaders of 2043 will have to prioritise environmental sustainability and responsibility.  (Clearly, we really can’t afford to wait twenty years to do either of those things.)

Finally ChatGPT reports that there will be a continued increase in the demand for transparency and accountability.  So the leaders of the day will need to have the skills and the habits that enable clear, open, authentic communication with their stakeholders, and the resilience to thrive in an environment of ever greater scrutiny – which could make for some interesting implications for the trustees and boards of the future as much as for our CEOs.

Perhaps its not surprising (I am a CEO after all, it’s what we do) that I find myself wondering what the collective wisdom has missed.  What the really radical differences will be in terms of what is asked of our sector’s leadership, and whether there are other skills that we need to be exploring if we are to ensure a sector that is truly resilient, effective and of value to the people we are here to serve. 

But in the meantime I also find myself thinking that the leaders of 2043 are already among us, working in less senior or entry level roles, finding their way in the first stages of their careers, working out what their future might look like. 

The question is, are we smart enough to spot them? And are we capable of recognising the very different skills they may already have that could be exactly what will equip them to lead our sector effectively when we are no longer the people to do it?

If you were on social media last week – or are a reader of the Telegraph – you might have noticed that we had a small flurry of activity around the comments made by Orlando Fraser, chair of the Charity Commission, in his speech to our members as part of last month’s ACEVOFest.

If you read the full text you’ll see that he covered a whole range of topics; but perhaps inevitably the bit that caught the press attention was his call for charity leaders to “remain separate to the political fray … to model a better, more constructive public discourse.”

What he absolutely didn’t do, regardless of the press headlines, was tell charity leaders that they should stay out of politics.  As chair of the Commission (and a lawyer to boot) he of course confirmed that charities have the right and the responsibility to speak out on political issues of the day in furtherance of their mission and on behalf of their beneficiaries.

Those of you who were in attendance at our session will know that I challenged Orlando Fraser on his previously reported comments that in our political discourse we should be ‘kind.’ 

I don’t believe that is our job; when we speak for those that have no voice we must be clear, bold, brave, above all effective.  But that is a matter of semantics, and a discussion I’m more than happy to have with him to explore further.

What I will always do, on behalf of our members and of our sector, is be robust in saying that the boundaries clearly set out in law and regulation that govern what political activities charities can and cannot do also define the space that we can and must take up when we advocate for the communities and causes we are here to serve. 

Whether and how much you choose to use that space to further your mission is a matter for you and your trustees to decide.  If a charity CEO steps across the boundary of the law then they do the rest of the sector a disservice and undermine our hard won, vitally needed, rights to campaign. But the law does not require us to be ‘kind’.  It does not require us to be polite. And if we allow others to redefine the boundaries by stealth, like a neighbour planting their hedge a few inches the wrong side of the line, then we risk ultimately giving away all the space we have.