Welcome to The Leader to Leader Podcast (season 1, episode 2)
What does it mean to lead well when certainty is no longer an option? In this second episode of our series, Kye Lockwood sits down with Janet Thorne, CEO of Reach Volunteering, for a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation about leadership in a world where the rules keep changing.
Janet brings a distinctive perspective on trust, having to build it not just within her team, but across an entire two-sided platform where volunteers and organisations must learn to rely on each other, often without ever meeting face to face.
Kye and Janet explore how the pace and scale of change has transformed what leadership demands of us, drawing on frameworks like the Three Horizons model and the Bridges Transition Model to make sense of why everything feels so overwhelming right now. They discuss why clinging to five-year plans and KPIs in an unpredictable world is, as Janet puts it, “gripping onto a crumbling cliff”, and why preparing for uncertainty matters more than planning for a future we can’t see.
Janet speaks candidly about the leadership behaviours she models most for her team — including how to own your mistakes fearlessly and without defensiveness — and why a culture of bold experimentation is essential for any organisation trying to innovate its way through a perma-crisis.
The conversation also ventures into territory that doesn’t get talked about enough: the weight of leading an organisation while also grappling with the state of the world — from the retreat of anti-racism commitments to the looming reality of the climate and nature crisis. And Janet offers a quietly hopeful counterpoint, rooted in her belief that people are hardwired to care, to collaborate, and to step up when it matters most.
Janet closes by introducing her next guest: Kiran Kaur, co-founder and CEO of Girl Dreamer, and the questions she most wants to explore about the future of leadership with a group who have long had to navigate systems that weren’t designed for them.
Transcript
Kye Lockwood
Hi, Janet, how are you doing today?
Janet Thorne
Hi, Kye.
Kye Lockwood
So, we’re just carrying on from the conversation I had with Jane. And the question that I had posed was around trust and because a lot of our conversation was talking about psychological safety and trust and those sorts of areas. And I wondered, as the CEO of Reach Volunteering,
How do you manage that dynamic of trust when a lot of the people who are, you know, with the huge numbers of volunteers that you have coming through the platform and that you’re supporting the sector with, how do you kind of approach trust and how do you approach those relationships of building trusting relationships across your service delivery?
Janet Thorne
Yeah, it’s such a, for us, such an ever-present and interesting question — the question of trust. Because after all, online trust becomes something quite different sometimes as well, doesn’t it? I think the,
Kye Lockwood
Mm.
Janet Thorne
The interesting challenge for us, I think there’s twofold really. One is that a large focus on what we do is skills-based volunteering and trusteeship, but skills-based volunteering. And a lot of people don’t even know what that is, right? It’s a new concept to a lot of people and they don’t know what to expect of each other or what they should expect for themselves. And then the second thing is that our services essentially
co-produced, which I know is a bit of a buzzword, but your experience as you go on as a volunteer is very much determined by what kind of roles organisations have put up, how they respond to you when you go and search. And likewise for organisations, it’s how proactive are volunteers, do they follow through? And everyone’s communication is critical to how much trust is built up. So
It’s a really, it’s a really present question for us is how do we build trust in that context? And I think there’s probably three ways we think about it. One is the sort of creating the guardrails, like what are the basic expectations? And we created a kind of community agreement and things like that to try and set out what are the parameters.
But of course, people don’t really read that and you can’t put everything in it. Otherwise, it would be like a long list of restrictions. You know, it makes me think of the old days when you used to go to the swimming pool and there was that whole list of things you couldn’t do. And the one thing everyone remembers is no heavy petting, right, is that. So you don’t want a long list of no heavy petting type things. So that’s a kind of light touch thing. But then it’s about how do you align expectations? So how do you
get people to be clear and articulate what they’re after and what they’re expecting. How do you do that in a way that kind of…
educates them and informs them so they can do it in the best possible way, especially if they’re new to it. And then to align the expectations, because it’s like a two-sided marketplace. We draw quite a lot of inspiration on people like eBay and Airbnb, because you’ve got people coming from different angles with different things in mind and different motivations, and you’ve got to try and align expectations. And you can do quite a lot with the design of the platform in that, but it’s
Kye Lockwood
Yeah.
Janet Thorne
you’re trying to nudge people, you know, you can frame things in one way, it tends to encourage people to do something. If you name, if you frame it a slightly different way, they behave in a different way. So there’s quite a lot of nuance there. But I think the third part of it is about empowering people, because we were, and I’m sure you probably recognise, any infrastructure organisation will recognise this work, the sector is so diverse, right?
Kye Lockwood
Mhm.
Janet Thorne
There’s A plethora of amazing volunteer-run organisations which have no paid staff. There’s amazing huge established charities. There’s ones which are really quite campaigning and activisty and there are others which are very much service providers and they’ve all got different culture expectations. It’s just, you know, so you can’t, you can’t really, there’s only so far you can go.
with expectations, aligning expectations. So I think the third thing is about empowering people. So for example, empowering volunteers to ask good questions of charities when they’re thinking about joining them. And likewise for charities and groups and empowering them to ask searching questions of volunteers. People feel like they can’t say no to a volunteer, for example. If someone’s standing up and offering to help them, they kind of feel like they’re going to say yes. That’s often not the right answer.
Kye Lockwood
Yes.
Janet Thorne
the right person. So how do you empower people to navigate that and make the right decisions for themselves? And then actually, it’s a very false dimension, because you can focus on what doesn’t work and how do you reduce that. But it’s also how do you really amplify what does work? Because there are some astounding organisations out there doing amazing. There’s quite often the volunteer run ones are the most
innovative? And how can you kind of share what they’re doing well? And how can you make sure that your platform, your service supports them to do more of it as well? Those are all, yeah, those are the questions that perplex us and we spend a lot of time thinking about.
Kye Lockwood
Wow, that’s incredible. I mean, I’ve got so many little things going off in my head now, wondering how you do that. I mean, I suppose when you were focusing on the clarity aspect, do you find that there are challenges there when you’ve got skilled-based volunteers who maybe don’t have a background in the sector?
Is there anything around the kind of culture of the skills, of matching skills based volunteering to the charity sector that you’ve noticed or being able to get those expectations aligned in a way that people do feel empowered, as you say, to be able to kind of set
set out what they’re hoping to achieve, but also what the charity wants the volunteer to achieve.
Janet Thorne
I mean, you know, these are our aspirations of what we’re trying to do. It’s, we’re a light touch platform. You know, we deal with, we’re a really small team of about 7 working on the actual call service in total. And, you know, we had what, 16,000 volunteers sign up last year.
Kye Lockwood
Yeah.
Janet Thorne
And we don’t have all the capacity we’d love to have to do in-depth user research and all these sorts of things. But I do think that by, for example, just framing it as you should be asking questions of each other at this stage, have the confidence to do it. Here’s A crib sheet. We’ve got quite a lot of stuff.
Kye Lockwood
That’s amazing.
Janet Thorne
in the trustee recruitment cycle. So when it comes to trustee recruitment, we’ve got more resources there, but we’d love to develop more. We started developing crowdsourcing very much in line with this whole, how do you empower people to do it themselves, the kind of citizen agency. But we started crowdsourcing advice from experienced volunteers to new volunteers last year. We’d love to do more of that because
Yeah, that’s the kind of way that you can disseminate good practice. And because you’re right, there’s so much, if someone’s coming in and they’ve never done consultancy, coming into a small organisation and trying to help them do something, there’s a whole raft of skills they need. They need to understand small charities. They also need to understand how to come in as an external person and be helpful. Yeah, and I can’t claim that we do it all, but we
We’re trying to do more of it.
Kye Lockwood
Amazing. And when you think about how the whole kind of sector has changed over the last sort of five years and volunteering has changed, but also how you as a leader have had to kind of change, how would you say the last five years has been and what would you what do you think feels the most different?
Janet Thorne
Well, I think it’s changed so much in the last five years, right?
I think most immediately, the kind of most everyday challenge is the change in funding. Five years ago, you know, okay, we were in COVID. Actually, there was quite a lot of money around, actually, wasn’t there? Funders were giving out money to help charities in an hour of need. That’s radically changed. And that’s changed.
Well, there’s less money around and it’s been much more targeted on a narrower range of things. So, and you’ll know this very well as a fellow infrastructure organization, but it’s an awful lot of things which are being, well, as funders narrow their objective, unintentionally, I think there’s a lot of things being left totally unfunded and it’s a real challenge.
Kye Lockwood
Oh yeah.
Janet Thorne
It’s a huge challenge. But I think, so I think that’s probably the most sort of immediate everyday thing that’s a problem. But the more widely, I think, and you and Jane talked about this quite a bit, and it really resonated, is just the rate of change, right? The scale of change and the velocity of change is just
so different to what it was. Okay, five years ago, we had COVID and that felt like a huge, it was a huge thing, but it was one thing. Now across every domain, public services, a crumbling, a justice, health service, wherever you look. We’ve got AI accelerating change across every dimension. We’ve got unexpected wars, you know,
There’s not one part of life which isn’t experiencing really seismic changes, and that’s…
Yeah, that’s a huge thing. I was, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the three horizons theory of transition. So yeah, so horizon one, I think it’s a fairly well known tool for thinking about change. But the idea is that horizon one is the current state of affairs, which is the
Kye Lockwood
Mm.
Janet Thorne
the system, the mindset, the governance, the processes, all of that. Horizon 3 is the new set, the whole shebang that’s going to arrive in the future. And Horizon 2 is the disruptions that come in between, which might contain elements of Horizon 1 and Horizon 3.
Kye Lockwood
Yeah.
Janet Thorne
and some disruptions might prolong the old institutions which are beginning to fall into…
disrepair, redundancy, and some of it might accelerate the coming of Horizon 3 and shape it. But I read something by Indy Johar. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across him. He’s just this, he’s such an amazing thinker. I follow, struggle sometimes to even understand what he’s saying. And then I realised about two years later that he was entirely right.
So he’s, I recommend following him. Anyway, he just wrote something recently about how Three Horizons still kind of holds true as a concept, but what’s happened is that the time has collapsed, right? The space between Horizon 1 and Horizon 3 has collapsed. And we’ve got all three things going on at the same time now. The job in hand really is to how can we protect
Kye Lockwood
Right.
Janet Thorne
the current systems enough that they can keep delivering all the things that we really need them to keep delivering until other things are in place? And how can we shape the disruption in a way that’s going to help us create the future we need to create? And how can we create really quite tangible examples of the future
Pragmatic examples that we can kind of lean towards all at the same time, and we’ve got a 10 to all three horizons, so…
The short answer is it feels quite overwhelming, right? I find that quite a useful tool, or I found that quite a useful way of thinking, trying to understand why it feels so overwhelming, but it is, it’s a lot that’s going on and it’s hard to make sense of it all.
Kye Lockwood 14:44
Yeah.
I think you’re absolutely right. I think that it feels, I mean, there’s another, they love their three kind of phases models, don’t they? But there’s the Bridges transition model around kind of like change management and he kind of likes to breaks it up as kind of this ending stage and then
Kye Lockwood 15:13
a neutral zone stage and then the new beginning stage. But similarly, I feel like we are just stuck in the neutral zone, which is like this really uncomfortable middle phase because everything is collapsing in around the edges and it’s kind of full of ambiguity at the moment, isn’t it? And every time you think you know what’s about to…
happen or you think you’ve reached the edge of the next horizon, as it were, you just sort of get tumbled back into it like a, like a, you’re caught in the wash somehow. And I suppose, well, I guess if we’re thinking about that’s the current status now, what do you think has you’ve had to change as a leader or what do you think leaders in general need to be thinking about? about in the charity sector to be able to navigate this very stormy, these very stormy waters.
Janet Thorne
Yeah, I guess it’s work in progress for all of us, right? That tumble, being tumbled right, emotion sounds very right. I think there’s a few things that I could point to. So I think, is it Margaret Hefferman? I’m not even sure if I’m saying her name right. She’s very good on change, isn’t she? And she talks about how
Kye Lockwood
Mhm.
Janet Thorne
You can’t, things are unpredictable. You can’t plan for them, but you can prepare for them. And I feel like there’s a lot in that about how can we prepare, how can we rehearse multiple different scenarios, for example, how can we make plans but hold them lightly so that we can change them if we need to? How can we build in enough
resilience so that when the unexpected happens, which we can be pretty clear, sure it will happen, but we’ve got the capacity to be able to react to it. I mean, it all used to be right about optimizing, you know, and you know, such a nice reassuring thing. You had your inputs and your outputs and how could you get your KPIs and your
You assumed a static world and how could you make things better? And none of that holds true anymore. And I think if you’re holding on to that, I think you’re just, well, I think you’re sort of gripping onto a crumbling cliff to bring in another stressful analogy. So I think being, building in intentionally the ability to be prepared and preparedness rather than
Kye Lockwood
Yeah.
But.
Janet Thorne
Emphasising on planning, I think, is important. I think…
You know, when I first became chief exec, I really didn’t identify with the role because it was very much the way it’s presented frequently was a kind of gravitas and this kind of heroic leadership where the leader knows all. And I think it’s kind of, I think that’s pretty widely debunked now, especially in the sector anyway, maybe not elsewhere, I don’t know. But I think people are quite familiar now with the idea that the leader can’t
Know it all or do it all. But I think there’s some interesting questions about how do you distribute leadership more widely, whether it’s like co-CEO roles or whether it’s something broader, maybe even more radical, I don’t know. And how can you equip people to step up into these roles at a really different, difficult time, right, as well? It’s not a…
Kye Lockwood 17:49
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 18:08
an easy thing. And the other thing that’s been on my mind about what’s changing, relating to all of this really, is about certainty.
Because I think the traditional idea is that the leader is really certain, right, and they speak with great certainty, and that’s very reassuring and everyone can get behind them. But you’ve already mentioned the word ambiguity, and I think we have to be comfortable now with ambiguity, because to be certain now is to be a little bit delusional, I think. So we’ve got to be
Kye Lockwood 18:16
Mm.
Janet Thorne 18:36
comfortable with ambiguity and comfortable with holding.
the dynamic tension, like of those three horizons all operating at the same time, that’s a good example of it. Comfortable with holding that kind of ambiguity and complexity in a way where we don’t get overwhelmed and we don’t get confused and we can be coherent, but at the same time we do justice to it rather than, and you know what, there’s so much in the sector which
prompts you into certainty. Some of it is like, you know, maybe older school ideas of what leadership is about, but it’s also, you know, going back to funding, you know, funding is all about telling a really strong, compelling story without, you know, with total certainty about how your charity is going to deliver this change. You can attribute all of it to yourself and, you know,
Kye Lockwood 19:16
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 19:23
I got a freelance fundraiser in to help me quite recently and she just put red lines through all of my work. She ruled out all of the sort of where I was going to go, oh, we’ll experiment with this and maybe we can help with that. She was like, no, you’ve got to put it really, and I’m sure she’s right in terms of cutting through to funders, but
At the same time, it’s doesn’t feel very close to reality, right? So.
Yeah, I think those are all things that we’re going to need to learn to get better at doing.
Kye Lockwood 19:53
I mean, I think that’s a that is a really interesting point you raised, because…
You know, you want to be as honest as possible and you want to be speaking as authentically and as truthful as possible, especially to the people who are paying you, right? And who are putting their money behind you. But at the same point, we seem to be operating in an environment where
There’s so much competition for those funds. And there’s so that for a funder to be able to make an easier decision on something that feels more certain or sounds more certain. And I don’t know how we navigate that. And I wonder, you know, do you think the sector itself needs
Janet Thorne 20:20
Mm.
Kye Lockwood 20:37
some sort of change or some sort of dialogue about this? Because how can you balance that tension between being true to yourself and being true as an organisation and speaking with clarity, if not being able to be completely certain about the future?
Um, versus…
sounding convincing or speaking with conviction, I should say, about a world that, as you rightly say, is possibly a little delusional if we can sort of go back to those times where, oh, we’re going to write a five-year plan and this is what we’re going to do every quarter to be able to achieve it.
Janet Thorne 21:18
Yeah, I mean, I do.
I think there are funders who are aware of that and talking in that kind of language and
You know, there’s a whole move to trust-based, I say a whole move, there’s much more talk about trust-based philanthropy, which is really about investing in the organisation and kind of letting them get on with it.
and not requiring kind of detailed five-year plans where you specify what all of the activities and the outputs are going to be.
But it’s still not, I don’t know the answer. I actually don’t know what the answer is for funders because they’ve got this, you know, they’ve got this ever increasing demand and they’ve got to find a way of getting the money out. And a lot of them have retreated into invitation only, which in some ways,
Kye Lockwood 22:00
Mhm.
Janet Thorne 22:09
solves the problem but in other ways just exacerbates it because then it becomes about…
who they know, and it becomes even more of a, yeah, it becomes more about who you know, and therefore perhaps more unequal and more power in the hands of the funders, which I don’t think is the right answer. Which is a long-winded way of saying, I don’t know what the answer is, but I would love it if we, as a sector, could have a frank conversation about this, because it has implications, it really does. And
I mean, a lot of people have talked for many years about how funding can increase, reduce, undermine collaboration, right? And we really need to be collaborating now, not just within the same field, but across fields as well. And we need to be able to be really generous about not trying to claim all of the
credit for something or even like insist. Yeah. So I think funders do need, funders do have a huge role to play in this and I think they need to be bolder. But I know that, you know, a lot of them are working to perhaps quite long, slow moving, long term strategies. So that’s a break on it. But yeah.
Kye Lockwood 22:56
Mm.
Yeah, and funders are just one part of, I suppose, the picture of how the charity sector functions. And I wonder,
From your perspective, do you think that the charity sector demands particular skills or mindsets that other sectors might not or might undervalue?
Janet Thorne 23:34
Yeah, I think, I mean, there are amazing leaders in the sector and there are some less good leaders and, you know, and there are amazing leaders in other sectors as well. But I maybe, I think one of the things which actually is perhaps the silver lining of the way funding has worked in the past is, so there’s that concept,
I think it’s called pronounced Ikigai. I’ve only ever seen it written down. So it’s a Japanese concept of, and it’s like this, it’s like a Venn diagram with four, you’re the data man, you’ll know how to describe this, 4 overlapping circles which meet in the middle, right? And one of those.
Kye Lockwood 24:09
Yeah, for a happy life, right, Ricky guys, and it’s the Japanese kind of thing for a happy life.
Janet Thorne 24:11
Yes, exactly.
And one of those circles is what you love doing. One of those circles is what you’re good at. One of those circles is what the world needs. And one of those circles is what you can get paid to do. And I think there’s perhaps something that as a charity leader, you have to be good at doing, which is similar. Maybe there’s three circles. I don’t know.
There’s what the world needs, right, or your community needs. And then there’s what you’re good at doing as an organization. So what are you particularly well placed to do, given everyone else, all the other actors, and given what, yeah, what quality, those particular skills and expertise and resources you’ve got?
And then the third circle would be like, I guess opportunities, like what can you find resource to do? And I would be remiss of me to only focus on money as a skills-based volunteering organisation. And I have seen organisations grow and scale and develop purely through volunteers with
Kye Lockwood 25:00
Mm.
Janet Thorne 25:11
under 10K doing amazing things. So money is not the only part of the equation for sure. But what can you find resource to do? And I think navigating that sweet spot is quite, I think that’s quite unique to the sector. And that’s probably partly because of funding. It can suddenly appear as an opportunity and then suddenly disappears. You’re having to keep that in mind.
whilst trying to work out what you’re well placed to do and stay true to that. And I think that…
You know, I’ve been a school governor, probably like a lot of people, and it really struck me by how constrained you are actually as a school. You’ve got very little leeway about what you do and what you don’t do, and you’re just sort of defending yourself from your initiatives from the Department for Education. Whereas a charity, quite often, if you can be creative enough and lucky enough to school the resource, there’s a huge array of things that you can do. And it’s always about kind of
Kye Lockwood 25:49
Mm.
Janet Thorne 26:00
working out what’s the best thing to do in service of your mission in the communities and given what is your role to play. So I think that’s a mindset and a skill set that we don’t talk much about, but I think is probably going to be particularly useful in the next 5, 10 years. I think that’s a contribution that we can make that and the ability to work with a vast array of stakeholders who
might have quite different views on things and marshal them somehow into some sort of functioning organization. I think that’s another skill set that we have.
Kye Lockwood 26:32
I love that idea of the kind of like Venn diagram. I think that’s really great. And I think and it’s and you’re so right, we have to be we have to be very flexible in our sector. We have to be very creative in our sector. And it’s something that maybe when things are kind of we’re in this kind of Perma crisis phase, we forget how much freedom we still have within
to be able to think about that. And I guess when you’re in this space and you’re thinking about your team, you said you’re leading quite a small team, what would you say are the behaviours you try to model most for your team?
Janet Thorne 27:10
I think the one that I model most is how to own your mistakes well. I’m good at making them. I’ve been known to make a few, especially in a small charity or spinning plates, you’re going to make so many mistakes, right? But
Kye Lockwood 27:20
That’s great.
Janet Thorne 27:27
I think owning them well is something you can really helpfully model as a leader. So not being defensive about it, owning it straight up, looking quite fearlessly at what’s gone wrong, and then
And then if you cause harm to anyone, genuinely apologising for the harm that you caused rather than trying to focus it on yourself. And then thinking about how to change, you know, what to do differently. And I think it’s really useful for us at Reach.
Our values, a lot of organisations would say this, but you know, our values are genuinely a really important part of how we work. One of our values is to be bold and experimental, which I suspect a purist would say, well, that’s more than one value. But anyway, for us, it’s one value. And
Kye Lockwood 28:12
Yes.
Janet Thorne 28:15
You know, that’s really important, partly if you’re going to be like a digital service, because you need to have a test and learn approach and you need to be kind of iterating like that.
But I also think, you know, to be, and also we need to take risks and we need to put things out there which might not be perfect. And we need to be comfortable with doing that. And that will inevitably mean making mistakes or things not working sometimes. And I think it’s…
It’s definitely easier setting a culture in a small organization. I’m under no illusion than that. But I think even so, you can have a really strong culture, but the reality is that your team members are bringing a lifetime of experience in when they come. And that doesn’t all dissolve just because you’ve got a set of values, which include being bold and experimental. People feel a lot of, I think, probably particularly
particularly women, it’s probably not gendered actually, but people feel a lot of shame about getting things wrong, you know, and it can be, maybe if they had a critical parent or they worked in a place with a blame culture or whatever, they’re bringing that in. And I think, and moments of stress, people tend to sort of, yeah,
Kye Lockwood 29:07
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 29:20
struggle with it. So I think being, if you can genuinely model making mistakes, but owning them really fearlessly and taking the learning from them, then I think that’s a helpful thing for the team. So that’s the one I like to, it’s the one I’m very good at.
Kye Lockwood 29:36
No, that’s fantastic. I think you’re absolutely right. I think being able to create that trust amongst your team to create those conditions of psychological safety where you are able to kind of make mistakes and they see that and therefore they’re able to speak up when they make mistakes and everything else. And I think there is a
There is a balance there. I know that, what’s the phrase, intelligent failure, I think is what Amy Edmondson wrote about when she talks a bit about this. And I think it is so important that at this particular time, especially when you’ve been talking about how uncertain the world is, we need to be able to innovate. And the only way we can
is through what you were saying, testing and learning and taking those risks. And I wonder how you balance that with the kind of, well, with your board, but also with your funders and your kind of wider stakeholders. Because if there is an inbuilt kind of knowledge that there will be failures along this journey in order for us to learn and in order for us to develop as organisations and to create the best,
for our beneficiaries. How do you kind of navigate those tensions?
Janet Thorne 30:48
Yeah, I think, I mean, it is a lot about relationships, right? So I’m really lucky to have a very, a board that I totally trust and I feel trusts me as well, which is partly a product of, you know, the no surprises mantra, right? So they can be confident that I’m not hiding anything from them.
Kye Lockwood 31:04
Mm.
Janet Thorne 31:08
But it does mean then that I feel free to share with them things that are going wrong and knowing they won’t come down on me like a tonne of bricks. And that is not, I’ve got to say, not all boards are like that. The first board I worked with was the opposite. So I know how difficult that is if your board’s not like that. So I don’t say this lightly, but having a board that is like that, it makes all the world of difference.
And I’ve got to say, actually, funders, once they’re funding you, tend to be very…
My experience of funders has been that they’re actually very understanding if things don’t go according to plan, once you’re in that relationship with them. So.
I think there’s a lot of willingness on a kind of more, on a closer relationship. And when I’ve made mistakes and, or, you know, when we’ve done something which has impacted a lot of people and you’re kind of worried about their response, but when you go out with a genuinely honest and apologetic
Message people are amazingly forgiving, and I think it’s, I think it’s, we’re not sort of, yeah, I think it’s something we all need to get so much better at doing, right, because…
partly because of the way change is happening, but also we’ve, it’s kind of counter to the wider culture where quite often mistakes are jumped on and there’s a really low tolerance for people making mistakes. Everything from sort of, I don’t know, cancel culture through to
the way we treat our politicians. And I think we need to get a lot better at accepting that, you know, our lives are not airbrushed and we’re very, we’re messy human beings moving in a messy, imperfect world. And
Mistakes are just a core part of being human, and we just need to…
learn how to deal with them more gracefully. But yeah, so I find that on a one-to-one basis, I’ve never come across, you know, or any group that I’ve had a relationship with, I’ve never found that they’re unforgiving when it comes to things not going right. It’s always, you anticipate that they will be, but they never are. They’re always tolerant. So I think it’s about building those relationships and about being honest.
Kye Lockwood 32:56
Mm.
Yeah, it’s definitely that’s definitely the.
The relationship side of things and managing those relationships is such a key skill, I think, for leaders in our sector. And it’s such an important aspect of the role. And I wonder if there are any kind of challenges that you see CEOs in our sector wrestling with that we don’t necessarily talk enough about.
Janet Thorne 33:41
Yeah, it’s not maybe related to relationships so much, but well…
So I think one of the common things, one of the things we’re hearing a lot about now is burnout with chief execs. So that’s, and so I think that is being talked about.
And, you know, there are a lot of chief execs who are leaving the role and not really wanting to go back into it, because it’s a lot. But I think there’s another thing which certainly I’m wrestling with, and I think quite a lot of other people are wrestling with, and I’d be interested to know how many, but it’s not talked about much, which is
Kye Lockwood 34:01
Mm.
Janet Thorne 34:15
Wrestling with, I think it’s one of the themes that we’ve been talking about today, but wrestling with…
The state of the world and their job, and how to do both at the same time. A not-so-long-ago
government, we were told to stick to our knitting, right? And that seemed a kind of plausible thing to do back in the day. But now everything is so interconnected and the interconnections kind of showing through. I just don’t think it’s
Realistic to.
It’s not easy, it’s not an easy equation just to sit down and say, right, I’m just like, I’m the chief executive of this charity and I’m just doing this and I’m not going to think about the wider pitch. And I think it’s showing up in a lot of different ways. There’s chief execs talking about how do I,
how do I navigate the boundaries of the organization’s responsibility to its staff and staff well-being? That’s quite a common one, right? And how much staff legitimately should expect of their organisation in terms of supporting them through things. And I think it’s been really interesting anti-racism as well, because that, again, is something which tends to be
Kye Lockwood 35:16
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 35:28
unless it’s your kind of specialist subject, is beyond the boundaries of your organization. But I think it’s become, or maybe that’s reverting now, I don’t know, but it was certainly for a while an accepted thing that yes, all leaders should engage with that, even though it kind of goes beyond the boundaries of your organisation in some ways, into bigger topics, let’s put it that way.
And COVID was interesting, right? Because it was hard, interesting to think about in retrospect.
Because COVID was a case where you couldn’t not engage with COVID. You couldn’t go, well, I’m not a health charity, so COVID’s not for me. I’ll not engage with that, right? That clearly wasn’t an option. And I think
Kye Lockwood 36:06
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 36:13
We’re seeing more and more things like that, that it’s going to, you know, polarisation is a classic one, right? That is storming across some charities’ bowels in a way that is totally upturning them. But
There are many more things like that. I mean, one thing that is not even being talked about, is not even on the news anymore, but climate and nature crises are going to have a huge impact on our abilities to deliver our missions and in a way that’s going to blow everything else out of the water. And I think we’re not talking about that kind of stuff.
And I understand why, partly because we’ve got too much going on and they’re overwhelmed. And partly because it feels like a scary thing to do, you know, because we don’t have the answers necessarily. And you know, we do have a responsibility not to
just spread panic or send people into a sort of sense of despair. So there is that. But I also think that by being silent about these things and not talking about them, we’re actively contributing to the illusion that they’re actually not things that we need to think about.
Um, and I think that’s…
harmful. And I think there is, there can be a sense of relief when people actually name stuff. It was really interesting a couple of months ago when Mark Carney stood up at Davos and he kind of basically said, you know, we’ve got to stop relying on Trump.
last couple of months, it sort of showed that, right? And middle income countries go bandied together. And, you know, and I think what was really interesting, so many people were talking about that afterwards, and they kind of felt this big sense of relief and excitement about it. And I think it wasn’t his strategy or his analysis, which weren’t, you know, all that. But it was, I think, the fact he named it, he named it as a rupture in the world.
Kye Lockwood 37:43
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 38:05
in the international rules-based order. And I think that in itself was a really powerful thing. And I think…
Something that I wrestle with, and I think other people wrestle with, is how much do we call things out and try and name them for what they are, even if we don’t necessarily have all of the solutions? And then how do we…
lead people forward with that. I don’t know. I don’t know if this is, I’d be interested to know, is this something that you wrestle with putting you on the spot?
Kye Lockwood 38:33
Oh, yes, I think that the…
I think that a lot of what you’ve just said, I was just kind of nodding to myself, thinking, yeah, there are these huge macro existential challenges that we as a charity and also as a sector are facing at the moment, not least, you know, disruptive technology. The fact that the anti-racism narrative seems to have shifted
it seems to have disappeared, if I’m perfectly honest, compared to how it was, you know, during COVID and during post, all the kind of real outpouring that there was as a sector and as a world from the corporate sector as well around kind of really trying to stand up to racist practices.
That seems to have, maybe because of the shift in government across the water and other kind of social shifts, is no longer nearly as prominent as it was, unless you’re a charity that’s completely focused on that. And then you’re right, the biggest crisis of our generation, of our time, of in fact humanity probably,
Is the climate collapse? And I think that each of what I found is, and I was going to ask you how this relates to your day-to-day work, actually, because what I found is that each of those different things have affected members of my team or members of our volunteer community in very different ways. But they, but it is a…
you know, there is something always there and there is something that we have to always be alive to as an organisation because they’re bringing that reality in through the door when they’re meeting our beneficiaries. They’re bringing that reality into the door when we’re having meetings and or when we’re trying to plan for the future. And sometimes it can feel incredibly desperate.
You know, I’ve definitely had folk in our organisation who we just have to take a pause to be able to recognise that, yeah, it’s just been another headline that is almost pulling the rug from underneath their feet because they are impacted by it either personally or are very emotionally invested in it. And I wonder,
On a day, on a day-to-day basis, there’s that.
Does that present itself in your organisation and with your team sometimes? Or do you find that you are kind of taking a more strategic view on this and making sure that you don’t not talk about it and that you don’t let it fall off the agenda?
Janet Thorne 41:04
If I’m honest, it’s not something that we’ve had a lot of conversations inside Reach about. And I think that’s partly because I don’t really know how to do it, if I’m totally honest. And we’re not all sharing the same jumping off point. I know, we did that, it was interesting, we did that, what’s it called, common…
Kye Lockwood 41:16
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 41:24
more in common test. You know, they’ve segmented the UK population. And we did it internally just as a bit of fun, really, to see where everyone came out. And it was interesting. A lot of people came out as progressive activists, but they really didn’t want to be. They were like trying to retake the test so they could come up with a different answer. Anyway, it made me laugh. But
Kye Lockwood 41:29
Yeah.
Ha ha ha.
Janet Thorne 41:44
We’re not all starting from the same place. And these conversations are so big. So I don’t know, honestly, how to have those conversations and what the right way is to do it internally. But I think strategically, I would say the way I try and make sense of it is everything from reach committing quite early on to trying to address the climate and nature crisis. And obviously, we’re a tiny organization. It sounds sounding a bit ridiculous and grandiose, right? We’re a tiny organization.
But there are things that we could do, right? We could embed it in our mission, recognising that it’s going to impact civil society in a way that nothing else has. And then we can create a little micro project almost of people who want to volunteer with climate and nature groups. And so we’ve done that and it kind of all makes sense, right? So
There’s things that you can do like that, which…
kind of fit within what you’re already doing, but it just bringing a different filter. And I guess, I mean, maybe going back to the almost the three horizon thing, thinking about.
thinking about it, it’s like, I guess the way I try and think of how I try and lead reach is to think, well, we need to support civil society, do what we, a bit of supporting civil society as it exists through this period, which is a lot about trying to help boards recruit well and become more diverse, for example.
So that’s the kind of more supporting established stuff. And then we’re developing our work with movements. We have a lot of grassroots and volunteer-led organisations which are quite often sort of very much at the in that disruptor.
Kye Lockwood 43:04
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 43:22
Level, um, and then I guess…
of the future that we’re trying to help build towards, which is 1 which is more sustainable and more equitable, then it’s something about what are the values and the muscles of civic participation that we’re going to need in society to really flourish so that, because it’s going to come down to all of us, right? I mean, like we saw in COVID,
like you and Jane were saying, it was the grassroots community organisations that stepped up and really played a massive role. And I think this is going to be again in the future very much the case. So what is the…
What are the conditions that we can create to try and help that kind of flourishing and try and…
help more people build the muscles that they need to learn to engage on a, you know, about how to work together for collective good, how to tolerate difference, how to, and how to believe in their own agency as well. So, and one of the values that we need to put the spotlight on that we, you know, because what you pay attention to grows, right? So the more we can pay attention to
The amazing fact of how many people volunteer, for example, the more we can reinforce that belief that people do care, because people do care, you know, that’s undoubtedly true, people care. I mean, you wouldn’t get that idea from looking at the news, but we know from so much reach, every time there’s a disaster in the world, it’s people who step up.
Kye Lockwood 44:33
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 44:49
People do care and they are hardwired to be collaborative. You know, volunteering is good for your gut. There’s a piece of research which shows it actually reduces inflammation in your gut because it makes you feel so much better. And this is not any old volunteering. This will be volunteering which has got a purpose. It’s not just a purpose beyond your own life. So
We’re hardwired to to to work well together and to be happier doing so, so.
I think it’s how can we, that’s where I kind of put my hope into. And actually I love the, there’s this new initiative, A Million Acts of Hope, which is being led by Hope Not Hate and NCVO. And I think it’s such a well-judged campaign because it’s exactly the kind of thing we need to be highlighting is the million ways that people are stepping up and helping. So yeah.
I don’t know if that answered your question, probably didn’t. I feel like I went off on a tangent.
Kye Lockwood 45:38
No, but I loved that. I really did. And I think you’re right. What COVID taught us was that working together for the collective good, no matter what small action you were taking, actually did have a huge impact, both on individuals, on communities and on the sector as a whole. And, you know, and I love the fact that you’ve got these initiatives.
reach, you know, links in with the environment, because it’s the same reason why we all recycle at home right now, because actually, yes, it’s a small act, but we know that collectively it’s having a huge impact. And thinking about, you know, what you’re talking about, about, you know, how to plan into the future and
and kind of what’s going to happen over the next sort of five, 10 years? How do you see the role, your role maybe, and also the role of CEOs in our sector changing over the next kind of decade?
Janet Thorne 46:33
I mean, I find that really hard to even imagine what it’s going to be like. I think, you know, building the qualities that we’ve already talked about, you know, about being able to prepare well, building in, dealing with ambiguity and all of those sorts of things, I think are going to be really important.
I think distributing leadership so it’s not just one person, but it’s more of a collective style of leadership is going to be really important. And I know that that comes with its challenges, right? It’s not an easy answer. So I think getting the right balance for the right organisation is going to be key. But there’s just no way, there’s no way that one person could hold it all because it’s too exhausting. Although I do think a leader’s role to
hold the difference and the complexity is important, actually. And I think that is a role that leaders will need to keep playing. But yeah, having everything, all the answers, all the solutions and all the ideas of one person is just no way is that going to happen. No way is that going to be effective. So I think that’s going to be a key part of it. I really don’t know. I honestly can’t
think what new organisations are going to look like over the next decade. I find it’s just too, I think there’s going to be so much change. But I do think that there are…
A lot of the young people who come through, who are and are in leadership positions, I think they’re gonna…
They have a lot of amazing qualities. We can’t just, you know, sometimes people go, oh, we’ll leave it to the young people. I’ve heard that before now and they kind of feel like they’re being good, but I think that’s unfair, you know, it’s a great big mess here we need. We can’t just leave it to the young people. But I do think that there’s a lot we can learn from them and a lot of qualities they have that will be really useful. I’ve always found when I’m in the presence of young people who put experience in leadership, they’re so good at
listening, for example. And they’re really fluent at navigating difference. And they’re much better at not letting their egos rule the activity that, you know, and so all of those things, I mean, that’s not all young people, you know, those are things people, those people have learned, but they’re really good at doing it. I think they’re much better than them.
Kye Lockwood 48:18
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 48:37
my generation, for example. So I think they’ll have a lot of the answers. But also I think the answers need to be a lot more plural, a lot less.
top-down, centralized. I think we’re going to a lot of the innovation is going to happen around the edges. That is normally where it comes from, right? And so I guess we’ll see new forms of…
collaborating and working together. That’s a very woolly answer, isn’t it?
Kye Lockwood 49:02
No, but I’d love to see it happen. You know, I think, do you think that it’s…
I said, no, I completely agree with the sentiment behind that, but I wonder, given the, given, circling back to what you said right at the beginning about the kind of funding situations and that being the biggest change, do you think that the environment is there to be as collaborative as we could be as a sector?
Janet Thorne 49:29
Yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of things could go very different ways in the next few years, right? I mean, we are…
I wouldn’t want to call it. I think there’s the possibility and I think it’s amazing what people do when they need to. And it’s amazing how…
If you could think back to COVID, there were so many things that we couldn’t have possibly imagined which happened, right? You know, I don’t know, Conservative government paying billions of people not to work or telling us whether we could hug each other or not. I mean, no one would have imagined that might happen, right? There was just so, and then the long tail of the impact of all the policies that they put in place, like the schools closure and stuff.
Kye Lockwood 49:54
Yeah.
This.
Janet Thorne 50:12
So I think it’s really hard to predict, but I do think there’s an amazing creativity and resilience in people when
When the…
And so much change can happen when…
things that weren’t imaginable suddenly become imaginable. So I do think that’s the case, but I also do think that people are exhausted and our ability to…
collaborate is being undermined. We’re living in a very atomized society and doesn’t help an AI. I mean, that’s a wild card, right? How’s that going to play out? I have no idea.
Yeah.
Kye Lockwood 50:53
I don’t think anybody does. I think that’s the problem, Janet. I think there’s an awful lot of hype around it, but who knows how it’s actually going to really land. So I guess as we sort of come towards the end of this conversation, you’ve talked a lot about resilience. You’ve talked a lot about kind of being able to navigate different
and quite choppy situations and not being able to have that certainty that we used to be able to have maybe. And I just wondered when things are kind of very ambiguous and when the pressure is really on, what helps you as a leader to kind of stay anchored?
Still be able to function in this world.
Janet Thorne 51:39
I think that’s probably, I think it’s probably similar to what a lot of people say, right? I think some of it is about having a network of people or even just individuals that you can speak to, frankly, other CEOs who understand what the role is like. That is really helpful. But also just stuff outside the job. My family is very good at keeping me grounded. I go home and
talk to them and none of them listened to me and I realised that I’m maybe not as important as I thought I was. That’s helpful, right? And just doing, you know, spending time in nature, getting rest, exercise, you know, a lot of these small things, these habits that are quite easy to lose when you’re feeling stressed turn out to be the ones which are really protective at keeping you
Kye Lockwood 52:05
Yeah.
Janet Thorne 52:18
balanced. I found that really helpful. Those are probably my go-to ones. And just doing other things that you really enjoy that take you totally out, but going to listen to some good music or something like that. I just, yeah.
Kye Lockwood 52:36
Excellent. Well, thanks so much for having this conversation, Janet. It’s been really, really lovely. I just wonder if we could end with you introducing who you’d be interviewing next time round and any question that might be coming to mind that you would like to ask them.
Janet Thorne 52:41
Yes.
Yeah, I’m going to be interviewing Kiran Kaur, who’s the co-founder and the CEO of Girl Dreamer. And I’m really looking forward to speaking to her because, well, there’s two particular things I want to ask her. One is that quite recently she did a post on LinkedIn, which was along the theme of Doing my relatively insignificant job when the world is burning. So I’d love to talk to her about that and hear a little bit more about what her take on that. And then the other thing is, Girl Dreamer is all about leadership of young women of color. So I just think there’s probably no better group. right? They must be one of the best groups to talk to us about what kind of leadership is needed for the future. And what does that group, what kind of leadership qualities that group have that are different to what maybe more established leaders have? I think people who have needed, had to navigate
structural injustice are almost always the one. They’re so used to navigating around systems that weren’t designed for them or don’t treat them fairly. And there’s such a, yeah, they have so many great insights and mindsets about how to do that and how to, and I think that’s, yeah, I think we’ll see. So I’m looking forward to hearing her thoughts on that as well.
Kye Lockwood 54:19
I can’t wait to listen to that. I think it will speak so much to the qualities of leadership that you were talking about throughout today’s conversation.
Janet Thorne 54:28
Thanks, Kye. It’s been a real pleasure.
Kye Lockwood 54:32
No, thanks, Janet. Loved it. Really did.