How to spot and stop poor charity leadership

During recent years of austerity, the sector has had to operate with fewer resources and higher demand for services. This has put an increased strain on decision makers, and as a result good leadership was, and is, more essential than ever for charities. But while success is easy to spot, how do you know when bad leadership is holding you back? And if you detect it among your staff, can you fix it before disaster strikes?

Identifying problems

Denise Fellows is director and chief executive of consultancy and talent development at the Cass Business School Centre for Charity Effectiveness. She says it is possible to detect poor leadership simply by observing your organisation’s environment: a room of employees experiencing poor leadership will look unhappy, demotivated, and unsure of what they are doing. They keep their heads down, their opinions to themselves, and are afraid of making mistakes.

If this scenario sounds familiar, Fellows advises bosses to performance-review managers. She suggests 360-degree feedback as a good way to identify problems. “It could be very small things that people need to be aware of, such as the coaching style they use,” she says. “People often know what they should be doing – they just need a little prompt.”

Fellows says helping managers understand how they operate, and providing mentoring and coaching to develop skills where they fall short, is the way to develop good leadership. She also notes that staff respond differently to different leadership styles. Once a manager is aware of this, he or she can adapt to suit the situation.

If seriously poor leadership is threatening to disrupt an organisation (by causing staff to resign, for example), Fellows advises two options. Workers can complain to the board of trustees, or raise a serious incident with the Charity Commission.

Balancing demands

Organisational needs can also cause poor leadership. Ksenia Zheltoukhova, research adviser for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, says managers should hire leaders who can meet both operational and personnel demands. She gives an example of a charity she recently advised. “They are concerned because they recognise people come into leadership roles because they are technical specialists, such as doctors,” she explains. “But they’re not necessarily good leaders because they’ve never led a team before.”

Research published by CIPD in 2013 found that 30% of line managers working in the voluntary sector had received no guidance or training. Zheltoukhova says this is often the cause of poor leadership, and the answer is to put staff into leadership development programmes. “Don’t have a leadership programme for the sake of it. Make sure the practices are aligned with organisational strategy,” she advises.

Zheltoukhova cautions that it is not always easy to identify the cause of poor leadership. “Imagine a situation where the organisation rewards you for being a bad leader,” she suggests. “Sometimes you’re asked to do things you don’t agree with as a leader.”

Watch the ego

Nigel Kippax, head of consulting and training at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, says one way to weed out bad leadership is to look for staff with big egos. “You see it in personalities whose idea of leadership is to rescue the situation – it’s quite a macho thing,” he suggests. “People leading in that style often wait for a problem to become a crisis before they act.”

He says assessing how people make decisions is a good test. If they are risk-averse, too slow, or fail to consult others, their ego, rather than the needs of the charity and its people, are dominating their judgement. In such cases, Kippax advises that organisations set up confidential groups for colleagues of equal status to encourage debate about what is failing organisationally.

Fellows agrees with Kippax’s ego test. Both point to US business consultant and author Jim Collins, who argues that great leaders blend personal humility and professional will. Fellows says this trait is particularly important in the voluntary sector. Ideally, she says, “You’re focused on what you’re trying to achieve for the beneficiaries and your organisation, rather than salary or what you’re doing for yourself”.

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