A round-up of the big themes from series 1 of The Leader to Leader Podcast.
The Leader to Leader Podcast uses a relay format: each guest becomes the next interviewer, passing a question along, so the conversation builds over four episodes. What emerged wasn’t four separate interviews: it was one long, honest conversation about what it actually feels like to lead a charity right now.
Here are the themes that stayed with us.
The pace of change isn’t slowing down, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help
Kye Lockwood, CEO of DataKind UK, was direct about it: “We seem to be in this sort of perma-crisis… we’re learning how to ride the wave of a very unstable sector.” Janet Thorne, CEO of Reach Volunteering, brought a framework to help make sense of why it feels so overwhelming — the Three Horizons model of change — and her point was stark: the space between where we are now and where we’re heading has collapsed. We’re managing the present, navigating disruption, and trying to build the future all at the same time. That’s a lot to carry.
Trust isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s the whole infrastructure
Every conversation came back to trust: with boards, with staff, with funders, with communities. Jane Ide, CEO of ACEVO, put it clearly: building that “bank of trust in the good times” means that when difficult conversations have to happen, people understand the values behind them. Kye framed it from the inside: when trust is there across an organisation, boards can delegate to executives, executives can delegate to their teams, and people can be “treated like adults.” And Janet described a simple rule she lives by with her board: “no surprises.” When that’s in place, she said, it makes all the difference.
The loneliness of the CEO role is real, and we don’t talk about it enough
This came up in different ways across every episode. Kye described what happens when you don’t have people to share with: “You find yourself walking through supermarket aisles going, oh my goodness, what am I going to do about this? And why am I thinking about it on a Sunday?” Kiran Kaur, CEO of Girl Dreamer, named it differently — the pressure to constantly show up well publicly, particularly on LinkedIn, where the only acceptable register is celebration. “We don’t talk enough about the fact that we’re probably not okay all of the time,” she said. Jane spoke about the emotional labour of leading through redundancies and restructures, and the grief that can accompany them — particularly for newer chief executives encountering them for the first time in the role. Her message: it’s part of the job, and knowing that doesn’t make it easier, but naming it matters.
Who gets to be a leader, and who decides?
Kiran brought a perspective that pushed the conversation into important territory. She described an assumption still embedded in the sector: that the people charities support are not the ones to lead: “there’s an assumption that they need to be helped or empowered and they’re not the ones to lead on that.” She also challenged the idea that joy, play, and healing-centred approaches are “nice to haves” rather than real work: “in a lot of cultures and communities, that is how you drive change. That is a type of leadership.” Janet pointed to young people navigating structural injustice as often having the sharpest skills for doing so: “they’re so used to navigating around systems that weren’t designed for them.”
Values are a navigational tool
When the pressure is high, Jane described always coming back to the same question: “How does this serve the mission?” Whether navigating a difficult board conversation or a challenging colleague, that question cuts through the noise. She also reflected on a broader point: that the values underpinning the sector — the intent to do things the right way, for the people and causes we’re here to serve — are “the thing we hold on to absolutely firm” as everything else shifts around us. Kye made a similar point in his own way: the gap between the values organisations say they hold and the ones people actually experience day to day is one of the most important things a leader can close.
Series 1 didn’t resolve these questions. But it named them clearly, honestly, and with real warmth. We think that matters.
Series 2 is coming in the autumn. In the meantime, all four episodes of series 1 are available now.