By former ActionAid UK CEO Frances Longley.
I have spent my career championing healthy cultures and brave leadership in the workplace. But the shocks and uncertainty of the last three years have placed that under more strain than ever.
Recently I’ve taken time out to reflect, drawing on my experience of more than 20 years as a senior leader. I’ve been talking with colleagues across the sector and reviewing research and articles about leadership and culture at UK charities today. There’s a lot to digest — what I have written about here are three of the main trends I’m seeing.
Culture shocks can leave scars
Three years ago we started an unprecedented experiment in working culture. One day in March 2020 we all went home. We abruptly switched to Teams and WhatsApp. We had no idea all this was coming — or how long it would last.
An exhausting schedule of online meetings became the norm for leaders as we fought fires every day. Our working lives rapidly became more timetabled, formal and transactional. Our circles of interaction shrank. New staff struggled to find their feet and understand the charity they had joined.
The subtle signals of intent, empathy and emotion we absorb face-to-face were masked online; our trust in each other started to erode, little by little. Disagreements and misunderstandings too often became entrenched conflicts, played out in ways which would not have happened away from the Zoom screen — in “real life”.
It was a huge, unplanned, untested change to our working cultures. It was dangerous and often caused real harm. Those wounds won’t heal on their own.
We need to talk about our boards
The extreme governance and financial pressures of the last three years meant boards were required to get much closer to the sharp end of charities: the often-delicate equilibrium between chief executive and board was disrupted.
We need to talk openly about the impact of this before those exceptional actions become the norm and our governance is permanently distorted.
I have seen too many recent examples of trustees stepping over governance boundaries without discussing it with their CEO. And examples of chief executives who were sidelined by voluntary trustees in an attempt to impose control in highly unpredictable times.
This intervention by trustees — often hidden — meant those chief executives were unable to lead, just when brave leadership was needed more than ever. Staff felt frustrated and disillusioned as a result. Cultures were left reeling as boundaries were crossed and trust failed within organisations.
But it is not all doom and gloom. I’ve seen some great responses to crises from boards: trustees stepping up, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their executive team and agreeing together how they can give visible, practical, accountable support alongside their role of strategy and scrutiny. Surely this is the way for boards and leadership teams to build trust between themselves and to earn the trust of their staff? And, when trust starts at the top, it makes a healthy culture possible across the whole organisation.
Culture needs company — and care
Trust and respect are at the heart of healthy cultures. During my career I’ve come across organisations where respect and trust have been neglected for years, taking cultures to breaking point – and I have never felt so powerless, isolated or unhappy. I’ve seen that culture doesn’t grow out of policies and PowerPoint: it needs people living and breathing it together, building confidence and respect day by day.
We learn to understand cultures by observing the small, informal things at least as much as the big, official ones. Everything I say and do as a leader is measured and judged. I can stand up at a staff meeting and champion our code of conduct. But, if I’m rude to a colleague in the kitchen, staff will understand that values don’t really matter if you have enough power to get away with it — so they will ignore them too.
The opposite is also true, of course. Every time I am seen to have treated colleagues with warmth and respect, to have applied our rules rigorously to myself and to have stood up for you or your teammate, your faith in our culture and values will grow.
But this daily witnessing of cultural conduct disappeared dramatically as we struggled with a series of pandemic lockdowns.
We need to see and hear culture, in small things and large, day after day. We learn from seeing it done well and feeling the benefits of it ourselves first-hand.
The successes I’ve witnessed are the organisations which have, deliberately and thoughtfully, set out to create something new after the Covid crisis. Designated office days are not for calls and desk time: they are for relationship-building, creativity, community.
All-staff lunches. One-to-one deep-dive catch-ups about how you really are and what you need. Talking about where you want the charity to get to — and why you work there. Sharing things that have stimulated your interest or brought you joy. Activities. Fun.
Make being together in the office a time of rebuilding and community — and do it regularly. Because the organisations that are doing this are experiencing a change: wounds are healing, and brave, healthy cultures are blooming again.
The last three years have been exceptional and exhausting, but we’re already on to the next crisis. Most of us haven’t had time to reflect or recover — and neither have our boards, teams and organisations.
We need to have brave and generous conversations about how all this has affected us. And we should talk about what we need to do to heal the wounds, recover our strength and move forward together.
