Facing Elephants in the Room: Collaboration Lessons from the Learning Club

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Louise Ennis (Community First Yorkshire, pictured above centre with leaders from the Open University) and Catherine Oakley (The Rowntree Society) are co-facilitators of the North Yorkshire learning club, launched by Community First Yorkshire and the Open University’s Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership to provide opportunities for sector employees to develop energetic, practical and thoughtful leadership practice.

Here they share insights from the group’s learning around the OU’s free Collaborative Leadership online course.

 

What are your experiences of the challenges and opportunities of collaborative leadership?

Louise: We all agree that collaboration is the way forward for sustaining the voluntary sector given reduced resources and ever increasing demand. But it’s not always easy to know how to lead collaboratively.

A particular issue is the way that our services are commissioned by the public sector and funders. That process makes organisations who could collaborate into competitors, less likely to share, join forces, and less able to offer complementary solutions and services.

Collaborating brings so many benefits – greater voice and influence, greater share of funds and resources, and more joined up, holistic services for the communities we serve. But we need to know how to collaborate, and that’s where a shared leadership practice can really help.

Catherine: I remember thinking about the challenges of collaborating in my course activity. Time, obviously is one: identifying, building and maintaining collaborations is a big commitment and it requires a lot of energy. I’m the only employee in our organisation so our resources are limited.

Some practical advice from the online course was to ‘think about where the greatest early promise lies and go with this’. Also to ‘focus your attention on people with the power to enable or block the growth of the organisation’. Both are about being selective and strategic.

There’s an issue around ensuring that expectations on all sides are understood from the start of a collaboration. When collaborations emerge informally, there can be tough conversations when obstacles arise or circumstances change for one partner. And what can we learn from ‘failed collaborations’? Which partnerships didn’t go well and why? Would we have done anything differently?

Louise: The key to success is to agree expectations upfront and not be afraid to work through elephants in the room – that’s how things get sorted and progress is made. Striving for harmony won’t result in action or enable everyone to have a voice. Those thorny make or break issues are the ones that count and need to be openly discussed, and considering a range of viewpoints is the way to solve them.

 

Why should we collaborate with other sectors?

Catherine: For a small heritage organisation like ours, working collaboratively ensures that we can reach more people and extend the impact of our work. It also helps us build a cross-sector community of individuals, groups and organisations who can approach projects and problems in distinctive ways we wouldn’t otherwise have considered.

Louise: That’s so true. Our discussions in the club have shown that it’s much more effective to seek a range of collaborators – don’t just go to those people who think like you. Also ask volunteers for example, or funders as well as beneficiaries.

There is a clear opportunity for leaders to collaborate outside the sector by bridging cultures and challenging perceptions – such as that the private sector is all about profit, or that the voluntary sector is a bunch of well-meaning amateurs doing good work. Being open to wider perspectives and building trust and understanding creates a real opportunity for us to put the beneficiaries first and come up with solutions for our communities together.

I see the boundaries between work and volunteering becoming increasingly blurred – the CEO of a company may also be a trustee or have a CSR strategy and lots of employees carry out employee volunteering programmes in the workplace or deliver voluntary services in their own time. Just look at the Covid-19 response networks springing up across the UK, many manned by new volunteers sharing their professional skills.

The bottom line is that we all care about where we live and work, whatever sector we work in, and by taking a more collaborative approach, leaders can give all of us a voice and a way to contribute.

Catherine: I really believe that our colleagues right across the voluntary sector would benefit from getting together in a safe space to build relationships and explore collaborative leadership together, just as we have. There’s so much common experience to share – because it’s not just for senior leaders, it’s for everyone.

 

You can watch the video of the full discussion with Louise and Catherine here.

For more leadership support visit our Community Gateway.

The Power of Small: Leadership Lessons from the Learning Club

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Louise Ennis (Community First Yorkshire) and Catherine Oakley (The Rowntree Society) are co-facilitators of the North Yorkshire learning club, launched by Community First Yorkshire and the Open University’s Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership to provide opportunities for sector employees to develop energetic, practical and thoughtful leadership practice. In preparation for Small Charity Week they have been interviewed by the Open University to share the group’s learning.

Watch this video of their conversation.

 

Why did you start a leadership learning club?

Louise: It was a way to offer the Open University’s Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership’s free, accessible leadership programmes to everyone in our sector – not just larger organisations and existing leaders.

The club complements the Centre’s online courses on ‘Developing Leadership Practice in the Voluntary Sector’ and ‘Collaborative Leadership’ with face-to-face sharing sessions where we explore our thoughts and experiences and discuss course activities as a group.

We’ve had to move online during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions but that has enabled the club to keep going, and it’s been interesting to study leadership against this backdrop.

Catherine: We are all very aware of how important leadership is in the voluntary sector, but the opportunity to network and access training can be limited alongside so many other time and financial pressures, particularly for smaller charities and community groups.

The great thing about our club is that it’s peer-led, so we take it in turns to facilitate the sessions and we run it at a time and pace that suits us. It’s relaxed, informal and a safe space for us to share experiences and learning. Fellow participants have also been able to use it to learn more about starting a career in the sector or moving into formal leadership positions.

If someone had asked you to define leadership before the course, what would you have said?

Catherine: Well, I would have struggled not to imagine a single person. Someone with certain qualities. A charismatic and inspirational figure. I would also have thought about someone senior – a key-decision maker with a lot of power.

Louise: I was expecting to learn about personal leadership styles, how to sell a vision, and bring people with you as a strong leader.

Catherine: One of the first things we covered was the fact that you don’t need to be in a senior or managerial role to be a ‘leader’. Leadership isn’t a set of innate qualities, but a practice you can learn and nurture consciously.

Louise: I think the course has been a real eye-opener for all of us because it focuses instead on leadership as something that’s shared. It can apply to anyone, not just formal leaders or CEOs.

Catherine: Once I had made that shift in my mind from leadership being the remit of one individual to it being a practice that anyone can take on, it took root. It’s changed my perception of what being a leader means in ways that will be hard to ‘un-learn’ or ‘un-see’.

The alternative to the ‘dominant’ leader model is to seek out diverse voices and perspectives beyond our own ideas and experiences. It feels absolutely fundamental in the context of the renewed urgency of campaigns for racial justice globally now.

Participatory leadership is about ceding power: using the platforms and privileges you have to open up new channels for the empowerment of marginalised and oppressed individuals. And not just through ‘consultation’, or through peripheral advisory groups, but at every level of an organisation, whatever it’s size.

Louise: I’ve found it so helpful to discuss with others what collaborative and participative leadership mean in practice. A democratic approach to leadership is about giving everyone a chance to reflect and contribute to difficult decision-making, not about aiming for a unanimous decision. We’ve seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, that smaller voluntary organisations with empowered decision making, have been able to provide a more rapid response on the frontline to communicate with and deliver services to those in need.

It’s not about being a hero and saving the day, it’s about all of us practicing a leadership approach – communicating, collaborating and tackling difficult problems by debating and deciding on a course of action and sticking by it. Looking for the path that will cause maximum benefit with minimum fallout for everyone concerned.

Catherine: We talked about the need to be directive at times and how this is possible within a shared leadership model. It’s about finding a balance, even when the temptation during a crisis can be to move into a totally directive mode because you are under pressure to deliver fast.

What changes from your learning will you introduce to your leadership practice?

Louise: A really strong theme from the courses that I’m building on in my leadership approach is the power of critical reflection. This means building in time to ask questions, consult, discuss and explore options inside and beyond the organisation or even the sector.

We are so solutions-oriented, that we often try to avoid what Grint called ‘wicked’ problems1 – problems that are ongoing and for which there is no perfect answer. By questioning our assumptions and going beyond our own experience, we can make better decisions that everyone is accountable for. Explaining why we are taking a decision and the likely fall out demonstrates clear leadership and direction.

Catherine: I agree about being open. We talked in the club about vulnerability as a positive trait in leadership. A traditional view might identify the leader as the person with the answers, rather than the person asking the questions. It’s difficult to resist these expectations and to identify your own limitations instead. But doing this opens up new possibilities for shared leadership.

In my current role I’ve been getting more comfortable saying to our volunteers, trustees and partners when I don’t have the answers. We can then work together on something that no single one of us could achieve alone.

I am also looking at how I can support colleagues and collaborators to share their ideas at an early stage. We had a really interesting group discussion about feeling pressure at work to put forward fully-formed ideas – the ‘elevator pitch’. We talked instead about the benefits of exploring problems earlier together.

Helpful suggestions from the course material were to hold back from interrupting people if they’re trying to work through something out loud and not to feel self-conscious when this happens to us – and it does happen to me, quite often! Those moments when language starts to falter can be when we are pushing our understanding and ideas forward.

Louise: We talked in the club about being brave and taking that leap into the unknown with partners as well as colleagues. There’s a great quote from the course that ‘Unknowns in leadership practice are most powerfully explored collectively.’

Visit our Leadership Hub to find out more about the OU course.

1 Grint K. (2010) Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: The Role of Leadership. In: Brookes S., Grint K. (eds) The New Public Leadership Challenge. Palgrave Macmillan, London

Taking the one out of loneliness

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The Loneliness Campaign North Yorkshire’s project development officer, Colleen Allwood, tells us about Loneliness Awareness Week 15 – 19 June 2020: ‘Taking the one out of loneliness’

Loneliness Awareness Week is almost upon us, but what it is and why should we bother with it? Hosted by the Marmalade Trust in conjunction with The Great Get Together and Jo Cox Foundation, the campaign started in 2016, aiming to raise awareness of loneliness and encouraging people to speak about it openly. This year, due to Covid-19 the campaign has gone virtual, taking the ‘one’ out of loneliness by asking people to talk about it one conversation at a time;  conversations which can build understanding,  create connectedness and reduce the stigma surrounding loneliness.

According to a recent report from the Office of National Statistics, during the first month of lockdown the equivalent of 7.4 million (30.9%) people said that their wellbeing had been affected through feeling lonely. Those who experienced loneliness were ‘more likely than others to be struggling to find things to help them cope and were also less likely to feel they had support networks to fall back on.’[1] With many working-aged adults furloughed or working from home, those who lived alone or were shielding for health reasons were more likely to report loneliness, have lower personal wellbeing scores and experience higher anxiety levels.  This is not normally a group associated with loneliness, and it has perhaps made society take a step back and re-examine loneliness and what it means for us a whole.

Loneliness is certainly not something new, with 6% of the population of Great Britain saying pre-lockdown that they were chronically lonely, often or always experiencing loneliness.  And whilst North Yorkshire has a reputation for resilience, relatively high levels of happiness and good quality of living compared to many other places in England, that does not mean that pre Covid-19, the county was as connected and resourceful as it might have been.  Over the past year The Loneliness Campaign North Yorkshire has been working hard to create a strategic framework to inspire everyone to tackle issues of loneliness for the long-term, preventing and alleviating the feelings of loneliness, and overcoming barriers that cause social isolation.

Building stronger, more connected communities with kindness one conversation at a time will tackle loneliness and isolation. It will result in better resilience and greater wellbeing within the communities and neighbourhoods that we live in. We have seen many examples of great kindness, neighbourliness and resourcefulness in the past few months with many new Covid-19 networks springing up and many people volunteering to support others in their community and neighbourhood. Let us keep that conversation going, start looking to the future and become more aware of loneliness within our own communities one conversation at a time.

 

[1] (Office for National Statistics, 2020)