Welcome to The Leader to Leader Podcast!
What does it really take to lead a charity through constant uncertainty? In this first episode of our new series, Jane Ide sits down with Kye Lockwood — charity chief executive of DataKind UK — to explore one of the most fundamental challenges facing sector leaders today: building and sustaining trust.
From the seismic shift brought about by the pandemic, to the ongoing cost of living crisis and what Kye calls the “perma-crisis” of modern charity leadership, this conversation gets to the heart of what it means to lead with honesty and transparency — even when the news isn’t good.
Kye and Jane discuss why protecting your team by hiding difficult truths can actually undermine the psychological safety that organisations need most in tough times; how to read the culture of an organisation before trying to change it; and why making hay while the sun shines — building trust in the good times — is the single most important thing a leader can do to prepare for the hard ones.
They also reflect on the charity sector’s relationship with funders and commissioners, the fleeting moment of genuine partnership that emerged during the pandemic, and what it will take to stop the sector slipping back into a supplicant role when it has so much unique expertise to offer.
Kye closes by introducing his next guest: Janet Thorne, CEO of Reach Volunteering, and the question he most wants to explore with her about trust, platforms, and people-centred leadership.
This is a conversation full of hard-won wisdom, honesty, and genuine passion for a sector that — despite everything — remains a privilege to work in.
Transcript
Jane Ide
So Kye, welcome to this first episode of our new podcast series. It’s lovely to have you with me. I just wondered if, for the sake of our audience, you could just give a little bit of an introduction in terms of your leadership experience, your chief exec experience especially, and the context that you’re bringing to this conversation today.
Kye Lockwood
Sure thing, Jane, and thanks so much for inviting me on. Absolute privilege to be speaking with you today. So I suppose I started off. I started my very first chief exec gig, as it was back in November 2011, taking over as a maternity cover position. So it’s been nearly 15 years now operating in the charity sector at a sort of chief exec level. Mostly that’s been small charities, so under a million pound turnover. Occasionally we’ve gone over a million pounds, but always in that kind of threshold.
I suppose I’m not a chief exec that’s wedded to a particular cause. In that sense, I’m very passionate about the sector as a whole, and so I’ve moved around in a couple of different areas. I’ve worked in therapeutic garden spaces, I’ve worked in the health inequity space as well, food banks, and now, most recently, as the chief exec of DataKind UK, which is an infrastructure charity.
Jane Ide
And given, as you just said, Kye, you’ve been in the chief exec role for 15 years or so in our sector. That feels like a very long time in the sense that things change so much. I don’t mean that quite the way that sounded, but you know what I mean. So what do you think has really changed in terms of leadership in that time? What do you think the demands are of leaders now that perhaps weren’t the case five, six, seven years ago?
Kye Lockwood
Yeah, I suppose the biggest thing I would say is just the pace of change. It just feels like at the moment everything is speeding up again. I don’t know whether it’s a wave that we’re going to ride out, but I think over the last few years especially, especially since COVID, but even a little bit before that, it felt like we were having to juggle an awful lot in small organisations.
Then when COVID happened, and then when the cost of living crisis happened after that, and now we seem to be in this sort of perma-crisis, I think you’ve called it in the past, and I would agree with that. I would just say that we’re learning how to ride the wave of a very unstable sector. It’s exciting, it’s definitely challenging, but it doesn’t feel like there’s that stability that there once was in our sector.
Bear in mind, I joined at a really peak point for the sector, coming into the sector a few years before becoming a chief exec during quite a stable government, with a lot of investment in charities. That’s slowly but surely been worn away ever since.
I suppose that’s the biggest thing that feels tangibly different now. The people in the sector are still incredible. The optimism in the sector is fantastic. The energy, the passion — I mean, it’s such a privilege to work in the charity sector. It’s just brilliant. I would recommend it to anyone.
But I think that idea that you can have a long career in a particular place — there’s just this level of uncertainty that sits behind things that we have to be open about.
I suppose that’s something else that I’ve learned over the years: the role of the chief exec. Before — and maybe this was just my naivety at the time as well — you felt like you had to hold everything because you wanted to protect your teams. You wanted to make sure everybody felt as safe as possible. But actually, by doing that, by not necessarily being as transparent as one could be, you weren’t building that psychological safety that now I think your teams don’t just deserve.
Really, if you want to be able to support a team through periods of change, you have to build that trust all the way through the organisation.
Jane Ide
It’s really interesting you highlight that bit, and partly because I was talking just earlier today to one of our members who leads quite a large organisation. She was talking about how one of the things she feels has changed — and I think particularly in the last five years, it feels as though the pandemic was perhaps a bit of a tipping point — is that sense of needing to hold the emotional wellbeing of the people that you’re working with, not just the people that you’re serving.
I guess there’s always been an element of that, particularly for those leading organisations that are on that frontline of working directly with the people who need their services. You’re right — I think it’s really interesting that in some ways that feels like a new expectation of us as leaders, and on the other hand it’s also a really clear understanding of the value of doing that in our role as leaders of an organisation.
We’re always in that sort of balancing point, aren’t we, as leaders of organisations — particularly in our sector — of how we do what’s right for the people we work with, but how doing what’s right for the people we work with actually brings the real benefit that’s needed for the organisation and the mission that we’re here to serve. Does that kind of resonate?
Kye Lockwood
100%. But I think that’s the juggling act that we have to play all the time. I guess the difference now is that, if we can, trying to make sure our teams are aware that we’re having to do this. That we’re able to rally around a very clear understanding of what the mission and the vision is, a very clear understanding of why we all get out of bed and do what we do.
We put our beneficiaries at the centre of the work that we do. But as organisations, we put our staff and our teams and our people at the centre of looking after them.
There will be conflicts there. There will often be times — especially when funding is for project-specific work, or for a limited period of time, or contracts are up for renewal — when you have to balance that.
But I think that’s the case across so much of what the charity sector does. The way we’re set up as organisations, the governance structures, the whole shebang, is slightly antiquated. You wouldn’t necessarily do it the same way now if you were starting things off.
But deep within there — and I was reflecting on this with my board not so long ago — there is this element of trust. If you get that correct, the board as a set of trustees delegate that authority to you because you’re able to show them what you’re going to be doing, and they trust you with that.
As the executive team, you can then delegate that authority further down and trust your people. Treat them like adults and be honest: this is the situation.
I think where it goes wrong is when you hide things, or you feel you have to hide things because you don’t want to upset people. You don’t want to say it. I would say: hold the space, but make sure you hold the space to have those honest conversations. Don’t shy away from them just because it’s easier to have the sleepless nights yourself.
There is somewhere in between where you have to draw that line and say: we are going to work on this together. Everything we do in the charity sector is challenging. If it wasn’t, private business would do it — because half of our stuff is commissioned these days.
But the reality is we have to motivate volunteers, we have to motivate staff teams, and we are often trying to solve societal problems that have been around for aeons and haven’t been solved, or that the state can no longer afford to solve without commissioning a charity to support them.
Jane Ide
I think that I’d love to explore a little bit more the point that you just made about it being like you’re on a razor’s edge, isn’t it, in terms of how you balance that values-led, adult, mature approach that says we are all in this together. You know, I’m not the parent, you aren’t the children. You’re all adults, all making your own choices in your own lives. We can work through this together, and we can all understand what the situation is, against the potential impact of having those open conversations, particularly in difficult times.
I’ve seen this a lot in the sector at the moment anyway. A lot of leaders are having to lead through difficult decision-making, restructures, reshaping of teams, etc., etc., all the things that come with that. And I do think there’s something about where you can build that bank of trust in the good times, so that when you do have those difficult times, when you do have to have those difficult conversations, the people around you understand the values with which you’re coming to those conversations, and understand that sometimes you can’t tell them everything.
There are sometimes very good reasons, for obvious reasons, why you can’t say everything to everybody at all times. But trust is so key. How do you think leaders can best go about building that trust, particularly if they’re coming into—well, I suppose there’s a whole range of contexts, isn’t there? There are people who will be coming into a new organisation where they don’t know what those relationships are, and they’ve got to build them fairly rapidly. There are people who have been in a position for a long time, but the circumstances are changing.
What do you think, in your experience, have been the keys to building trust with the people around you, with your board and with your staff? Because, again, chief executives are very much at that balancing point between those two really key dynamics.
Kye Lockwood
This is a difficult one to answer, I think, because it depends on the organisation. That’s a really fudgy answer, but I think it depends on the culture of the organisation you’re coming into and what’s already there. What are the cultural norms? What are the practices that are happening on a day-to-day basis? Is there already an open and transparent culture present?
If not, you coming in saying, “Oh, I want to be totally transparent. I want distributed decision-making. I want to do all these things,” might just sound completely off-key and also put a bit of fear into people. And that is your enemy when you’re trying to build trust. It’s when people either don’t understand what you’re trying to do, or when you are changing the system so radically that they themselves feel very uncomfortable with that change.
So I think the first thing is to listen. Really get to know what people’s concerns are. Give them the opportunity. Some people might talk to you for days. Other people might not talk to you for weeks about what’s really on their mind.
Then, slowly but surely, once people feel that they’ve been heard and you’re able to reflect back what you’ve heard and check that you’re understanding what’s there, I think leading in a way that you would like to have been led, or in the way that you admire from other leaders, is a good approach as well.
Then bringing those concepts in, trying to get to a place where you can be vulnerable, where you can make mistakes, and you demonstrate that when other people make mistakes, that’s okay too. I think it’s a classic line, isn’t it, that you talk about the issue, not the person. That kind of thing.
But I think it’s very easy, especially coming into a challenging situation or when you’re about to hit a rocky period. Often things like funding issues might cause restructuring and that sort of thing. When you’re doing that, really focusing on the fact that it isn’t anyone’s fault. Often, if people have been doing the right thing, some of these decisions you’re now going to have to take as an organisation—as a senior leadership team, as trustees—are going to be very difficult. But they’re because of circumstances that are not necessarily fully in your control.
You can be transparent about that. I agree with you, though, that there’s that razor’s edge, because there is a lot of stuff you can’t talk about. There are things where you run up against certain rules, regulations, company law and so on, that mean it can be challenging.
But as you mentioned, make hay while the sun shines. I think that is really important. Put these practices in place when you start and get a temperature check from the moment you get in there. Work out what the rituals are. What’s the way people give feedback? How psychologically safe does the team feel? Does everybody know what the values of the organisation are? Do they believe them, or are they just things we espouse over there but don’t actually live by?
Once you start to get a picture of those norms and behaviours, you can begin to focus on the priorities.
Jane Ide
In a way, it’s a difficult question to answer, but depending on experience in other sectors, I wonder if there’s an element— I think that we, as a sector, the charity, social justice, or social action sector—can sometimes perhaps be a little arrogant about the fact that we’re better at this stuff than the commercial sector, the public sector, or other sectors. But at the same time, I guess the flip of that—first of all, I would say I don’t know if that’s actually true. I’ve seen very good examples and very poor examples in all sectors of leadership.
But I think the flip of that is also that sometimes it can feel as though there are expectations of our sector’s leaders that go beyond those made of leaders in a commercial environment—or, obviously, different expectations in terms of what we’re here to achieve. But there is a little bit of an element of somehow we’re supposed to be so much better than anybody else could possibly expect.
Do you—do you feel that? Well, first of all, would you agree with that analysis? And secondly, do you feel that there are some assumptions there that perhaps we need to rethink as a sector about what we’re actually asking our leaders to do and how we’re asking them to be in the world?
Kye Lockwood
I think good leadership shows up everywhere, for sure, and not just in our sector. I think that what we’re given as tools to lead sometimes means that we can’t compete with other sectors. Especially when you think about the things we would want to do for our teams—we often can’t afford to do for our teams the things we would want to do for our beneficiaries. We often would be challenged to do them.
And there’s a tension there as well, in terms of the philosophy of how you approach an issue or problem. A classic one, I suppose, is: is it better to do light-touch support for hundreds, or a deep intervention for a few? There’s no right or wrong answer, necessarily, but that’s where you start to think, “Okay, how do I collaborate with other organisations? How do I make sure I’ve got a whole system in place?”
And I suppose when it comes to what we are expected to do as leaders—we can’t do it all. Literally, we can’t do it all. I’ve had some fantastic colleagues in the past, and I think it’s really important that you recognise for yourself where your weaknesses are. For me, trusting the eyes and crossing the t’s isn’t really my vibe. But every time I’ve had a fantastic operations manager, or a person who loves that stuff and holds me to account, I’ve found that the team and organisation flourish because you find complementary aspects in each other.
When you’re looking across your senior leadership team, or your organisation, does everybody think the same? Is there something we need to think about when we’re doing that? Are we genuinely going to be able to support people in the way they need to be supported if we’re all sitting in one corner of the room thinking, “This is what good looks like,” when actually, for our teams, this isn’t necessarily what good looks like? We have to be able to adapt, and understand how to support different people in different ways.
And that’s a gift, I think, that the charity sector has that other sectors might not have: we are alive to this. We often understand it from the fact that we are serving a very diverse beneficiary group. So we are able to keep on top of these things—but it’s making sure that we are disciplined enough to put into practice what we see and hear, so that it isn’t just something we espouse in theory. Sometimes, in our sector, we espouse one set of values, but if you go in and speak to people, that’s not how they feel, and that’s not the practices they experience.
So it comes back to your earlier point: how do you balance all of these spinning plates? You can’t do it all by yourself. You have to know where to look for help and support.
Jane Ide
I completely agree. I’m also not necessarily the best person to look at the absolute detail of a contract agreement, or, you know, some very long research document, but others in my team absolutely are—and they love that stuff.
But it’s not just about filling in the gaps in your own capability, is it? It’s also about if you espouse that very old-fashioned model of, “I’m the boss, I’m in charge, what I say goes,” which I think very few people these days would think is the right way to go about things. If you do that, then you have no diversity of thought, no diversity of perspective when making decisions—and that’s going to undermine the quality of decision-making, isn’t it?
So I think, yes, one of the things I’ve learned in my time in the sector is that the sector has really educated me on the importance and value of diversity in all its senses—partly because it should just be the way we do things, but also because of the real benefit it brings to organisations and missions in terms of the way we think about things.
And I wonder if that leads me onto another question. I’m not wanting to lead you down that path particularly, but it’s just one of the things I see our sector wrestling with. Given your experience of leadership and your knowledge of the sector, is there a particular area of challenge that we actually don’t talk about enough? We talk a lot about certain things—diversity may be one of them—but what’s hidden, what’s under the surface? What are we all wrestling with without necessarily bringing it up and talking about it with our peers and colleagues? Do you think there’s something there for you?
Kye Lockwood
I might flip that on its head and say that one of the things I have benefited from over the last few years, more than anything, is having people to talk to. I think there’s a loneliness that comes with being a CEO. If you allow that to creep in, it just compounds itself more and more if you’re not able to share things for whatever reasons, or make efforts to be more transparent and open.
You find yourself in those moments where you catch yourself walking through supermarket aisles thinking, “Oh my goodness, what am I going to do about this? Why am I thinking about it on a Sunday?” The challenge is: how can you be open in difficult situations?
For me, I’ve had this amazing action learning set that we’ve been running voluntarily for a few years. Without it… even my daughter, when I was working from home, used to say, “Oh, you’re going to CEO therapy,” and I’d say, “Yes, we are.” It’s a group therapy session where we just talk. Just being able to share is one of the things we don’t do enough as CEOs.
It depends on your situation, because there are inherent tensions—between bureaucratic structures and where we want organisations to be, and between collaboration and competition in our sector. The funding models—whether local government commissioning, national government commissioning, or grant funding—push you into a world where sometimes you can’t share, or feel you can’t share. That’s one of my big bugbears about our sector: how inefficient we are forced to be because we can’t be completely open about our plans.
We shouldn’t have to hide our USPs like private businesses do. But I remember when I first started as a CEO, a lot of the leadership courses I went on asked, “What’s your charity’s USP?” Guess what—there are 15 other charities within a 10-mile radius with the same USP. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all somehow work together without fearing for our teams or the impact it might have on the bottom line?
Jane Ide
Yeah, I think that’s a conversation I’ve heard many times over the last few years, and that whole principle of systems leadership—thinking about, if you’re working in child poverty, domestic abuse, or food poverty, what are the underlying issues creating those situations, and how can a group of organisations come together to put their weight behind real, fundamental change?
You and I both lead organisations that are not on that sort of frontline, but the opportunity for collaboration, working together, and achieving real change is still there. It does seem as though what stops us is often the fundamental definition of our charitable objects—what we can and cannot do in service of those objects, and what trustee boards feel comfortable doing—which can really limit people. Sometimes we know we could make real changes, but we’d have to go outside what we were set up to do, and that brings all sorts of challenges, understandably.
But I think also your point about that lack of sharing… I’m bound to say this because that’s what ACEVO is entirely about. I think it is so true that unless you’re in one of—and I have to say it’s a growing number, but still a minority of—chief executive roles where you’ve got a partner alongside you in a co-shared leadership role, you are in a unique position in your organisation. You’re on your own in a very specific place, with a foot in both camps of your board and your staff.
One of the beauties of being able to share with a network of peers is having other people who understand that burden, but who, by definition, can’t do anything about it for you. They’re not in your organisation, they’re not your trustee, they’re not your senior staff member—but they can understand what it feels like. They can share their experience and what they’ve done to navigate their version of that issue, which may or may not be helpful, but it’s always valuable just to know you’re not alone. Members tell me a lot that they really value knowing that they are not alone, and I think that’s so important.
I feel for people in chief executive leadership roles in other sectors where they don’t necessarily have that opportunity to know that someone else is in the same space. Maybe that’s one of the strengths of our sector. For all that, I think you’re right—we don’t use it enough generally. At least there’s a sense of camaraderie, or maybe not quite the right word, but that sort of peer network: a sense that there are other people doing an equally difficult and challenging job, with a very similar governance model and similar financial pressures, but in a different environment.
So, talking about what we perhaps don’t do as well as we might—what do you think? Do you think there’s something that, as a cohort of leaders across the sector, we should be doing more of? Something that’s really of its time, that puts us on the front foot going forward, and taps into that energy and passion you described so articulately, driving our sector to achieve more, do more, solve problems, and make the world a better place?
Kye Lockwood
I am a big fan of progressive leadership principles. I admire the work of people like Henry Stewart over at Happy Computers, and the writings of people like LA Lou. There’s a lot out there that suggests if you can distribute decision-making, coach people more than manage them, and make sure purpose is at the heart of your organisation—which should really be in the charity sector—you can create a truly empowering environment.
Taking the time to reflect on yourself, and also as a team, helps you create a culture where people can bring their whole selves to work and be fairly autonomous. You can give them pre-approval of what they’re doing because you trust them to do it.
I remember about ten years ago, when I first came across some of these concepts at the School of Social Entrepreneurs, one of the guest speakers was Henry Stewart. He had just written, I think, The Happy Manifesto, and I thought, “This is amazing. I’m going to be one of these servant leadership type people, giving people all this freedom.” It was a bit of a nightmare at first, because I didn’t understand where to hold the framework. The most important thing is giving people freedom, but within boundaries—otherwise it can be too daunting, and people might not know exactly what we’re trying to achieve.
Similarly, with decision-making, it can be through consent rather than always consensus, so that the ideals of a progressive organisation don’t hold the charity back from functioning properly. That was a sticky wicket early on for me.
But this way of leading—being vulnerable, steering the ship towards a North Star rather than commanding and micro-managing—can bring amazing people on the journey with you, and you can achieve so much more. That’s what our sector is about. Depending on what you call us—the third sector, community and voluntary sector, civil society sector—it takes society, volunteers, and a whole team of stakeholders. You need to engage them in ways that tap into their motivations and give them a sense of achievement when they interact with you.
I think leadership in our sector is moving in this direction. We’re more open to proper conversations about supporting people and flexible working. Many of the good practices introduced during the pandemic have stayed longer in the charity sector than elsewhere, which is positive.
We don’t always have the greatest career progression opportunities or the best pay packages, especially in small charities, but we have other things at our disposal to offer teams. You can create a culture and environment where people can really bring themselves to work. That safety and sense of being valued—that’s what a leader should be fostering now: building and maintaining that culture.
Jane Ide
So true. I’m 100% with you on all of that, because I think there’s a basic, fundamental thing: we can’t motivate—and we don’t motivate—our staff with a bonus, a fancy car, a bigger pay packet, or all the rest of it. That’s not what our sector is about.
At the same time, we are a sector that achieves incredible outcomes when you look at what we do with how little financial resource is put into the sector overall. By definition, our achievements are rocket-fueled by people—their willingness to work, their passion, their desire, their innovation, and their creativity.
We always have that double-edged sword. One of the things that worries me is that, as a sector—not necessarily as leaders, but as a whole sector—we assume too much of people’s goodwill. People themselves assume too much of their own goodwill. I’ve never known a sector where people are so willing to stretch themselves too thin, work for less than they deserve, and put in extra hours at every level of an organisation. Perhaps we take a little too much advantage of that, because we know how hard it would be to do what we want to do without that dedication. That’s a whole-sector challenge.
But I think you’re right, and I love your point about giving people autonomy—but with real clarity about what you need them to achieve. I remember years ago, in my earlier days when I was a bit of a control freak, there was a moment—the flash of the absolutely obvious—that I didn’t need people to do things the way I would do them. I needed them to do them as well as I would, but how they went about it could be entirely up to them. That was the moment I started focusing on outcomes rather than outputs.
That can be challenging. In a bigger organisation, with more people, it comes back to trust—you have to trust the whole process that runs through the organisation. But again, it also comes back to clarity: what’s your mission, what are you there to do, who are you doing it for? Does everything fit with that? If it doesn’t, is there a valid reason why it shouldn’t? That’s part of the conversation.
We could go into all of that at great length, but I want to move us on a little. You’ve got 15 years in the sector, and I’ve got nearly 10 years at chief executive level. Looking ahead, you touched on something earlier that I’ve talked about recently: the sustainability of the chief executive role, and whether people can expect to be in that role as long as they might have in the past. What do you think are the changes ahead in the next five to ten years for leaders—the leaders coming behind us now who will hopefully continue after we’ve stepped into quieter times? What’s the future of leadership in our sector?
Kye Lockwood
Oh, that is a great question, and very difficult to answer. I was talking to an old friend in the private sector who runs a marketing company, and he asked me: are you the type of leader that thrives in the good times, or the type that thrives in a crisis?
I would love to say I thrive in the good times, but actually, I think I’m a little addicted to the crisis side of things. As a sector, we need to come together and use our collective power to make it a little less crisis-driven. There are things we can do: keeping abreast of what’s going on, having a sense-and-respond attitude as an organisation, noticing opportunities, and moving within that framework to capitalise on them.
That said, another part of me thinks: why do we always have to look at risks and opportunities? Why can’t we just say, “We know what we’re doing is good. We’ve got a solid theory of change. We’ll test assumptions, and we’ll keep abreast of societal changes and changes for our beneficiaries—but can we just get on with it?” Can we report in a way that shows what good looks like, rather than what others think good looks like? Can we demonstrate our purpose, worth, and value to the sector?
During COVID, the third sector essentially kept the country going. I’m biased—I was running food banks.
Jane Ide
I would absolutely agree with you. Our sector was first off the blocks, and we wouldn’t have got through without that work.
Kye Lockwood
Exactly. And the trust was there—it had to be. Funders said, “Just crack on. Do what you can, we won’t hold you to this framework.” Trust was there with local government too. Sharing of intelligence and information was like nothing I’d seen before. It was a moment that showed the third sector wasn’t a junior partner—we were equal partners. We provided things nobody else could, and we were recognised for it.
What frustrates me is how quickly that elastic band bounces back. We’re still pushing for a seat at the table, still ensuring promises are kept, and that the sector isn’t left to “die on the vine.” In infrastructure organisations, I’ve watched support being decimated. Without that support, CEOs have to take on too many risks because there’s no one to turn to. Advice can come six months too late.
Over the next decade, we have to make sure the sector retains support, promotes organisational culture, puts people first, moves away from command and control, and fosters coaching. At the same time, the sector itself must remain fit for purpose. There are no green shoots of stability; we have to equip ourselves to continue transforming. But we can look at good practice, successful collaborations, place-based work, and cross-sector collaboration—things that a single charity or team couldn’t achieve alone without risking burnout.
Jane Ide
You’ve put eloquently what we gained during the pandemic and what’s been lost since. My experience during the pandemic was that the sector was trusted because we knew what we were doing and it couldn’t be done without us. That confidence carried government and local authorities. But do you think we’ve too quickly slipped back into a supplicant role—asking for money, asking for a seat at the table—rather than asserting that we are equal partners with expertise they do not have? This is about building trust and confidence, which is the theme of our conversation today.
Kye Lockwood
I think the pandemic proved it’s possible. I’m not sure we’re too supplicant. The sector is naturally fragmented; many small charities do specialist work. That’s by design. But the system design also reinforces that fragmentation. The responsibility doesn’t fall on the sector—it falls on the power dynamics in the funding relationship. During the pandemic, those constraints loosened, allowing us to respond to community needs, channel resources, and innovate quickly. Regulations, lockdowns, furloughs—all of it was fluid, and we had to adapt.
Some funders gave us pre-approval and flexibility; that’s brilliant. But since the pandemic, much grant funding has reverted back to type, often due to supply-side pressures, not the sector’s actions.
Jane Ide
We need funders and commissioners who care about what we achieve, not how we do it. That’s a great place to pause this conversation and hand over to the next guest. Kai, before I thank you, could you introduce your next guest and the question you hope to ask?
Kye Lockwood
Absolutely. My next guest is Janet Thorne, CEO of Reach Volunteering—an inspirational organisation connecting so many people to opportunities despite being a small team. I’d like to explore trust with Janet: how she operates a platform that enables connections, where the tensions sit under her leadership, and how she ensures the service meets expectations from herself, her trustees, and stakeholders.
Jane Ide
That’s an excellent discussion point, and I look forward to listening to that episode. For now, Kai, thank you so much. It’s been a fantastic conversation, and the time has flown by.
Kye Lockwood
Thanks so much, Jane.
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Wed, Mar 04, 2026 1:55PM • 48:03
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Leadership experience, charity sector, chief executive, pace of change, emotional well-being, trust building, organisational culture, progressive leadership, collaboration, funding challenges, pandemic impact, staff motivation, diversity, sector sustainability, infrastructure support.
SPEAKERS
Kye Lockwood, Jane Ide
Jane Ide
So Kai, welcome to this first episode of our new podcast series. It’s lovely to have you with me. I just wondered if, for the sake of our audience, you could just give a little bit of an introduction in terms of your leadership experience, your chief exec experience, especially, and the context that you’re bringing to this conversation today.
Kye Lockwood
Sure thing, Jane, and thanks so much for inviting me on absolute privilege to be speaking with you today. So I suppose I started off. I started my very first chief exec gig, as it was back in November 2011 taking over as a maternity cover position. So it’s been nearly 15 years now, operating in the charity sector, at a sorna’s Chief Exec level, and mostly that’s been small charity, so under a million pound turnover. Occasionally they’ve we’ve gone over a million pounds, but always, always in that kind of threshold. And I suppose I’m not a chief exec that’s wedded to a particular cause. In that sense, I’m very passionate about the sector as a whole, and so I’ve moved around in a couple of different areas. So I’ve worked in sort of therapeutic garden spaces. I’ve worked in health inequity space as well food banks, and now, most recently, as the Chief Exec of data kind uk, which is an infrastructure charity,
Jane Ide
and given, as you just said, Kai, you’ve been in the chief exec role for 15 years or so in our sector. That feels like a very long time in the sense that things change so much. I don’t mean that quite the way that sounded, but you know what I mean. So what do you think has really changed in terms of leadership in that time? What do you think the demands are of leaders now that perhaps weren’t the case, 567, years ago.
Kye Lockwood
Yeah, I suppose the biggest thing I would say is just the pace of change. It just feels like at the moment, everything is speeding up again. And I don’t know whether it’s a wave that we’re going to ride out, but I think over the last few years, especially, especially since covid, but even a little bit before that, it felt like we were having to juggle an awful lot a small organisations and and then when covid happened, and then when the cost of living crisis happened after that. And now we seem to be in this sort of perma crisis, I think you’ve called it in the past, and, and I would agree with that. I would just say that we’re, we’re learning how to ride the wave of a very unstable sector. And it’s exciting, it’s definitely challenging, but it doesn’t feel like there’s that stability that there once was in our sector. And bear in mind, I joined, I suppose I joined at a really kind of peak point for the sector, coming into the sector a few years before becoming a chief exec, during quite a stable government, a lot of investment in charities. And that’s slowly but surely being worn away ever since. And I, I suppose that’s the biggest, the biggest thing that feels tangibly different now is that the people in the sector still incredible. The optimism in the sector, fantastic. The energy, the passion. I mean, it’s such a privilege to work in the charity sector, it’s just brilliant. I would recommend it to anyone. But I think that that idea that you can have that long career in a particular place, there’s just this level of uncertainty that sits behind things that we have to be we have to be open about and and I suppose that’s something else that I’ve learned over learned over the years, is that the role of the chief exec, whereas before, and maybe this was just my naivety at the time as well, you felt like you had to hold everything because you wanted to protect your teams. You wanted to make sure that everybody was felt as safe as possible. But actually by doing that, by not necessarily being as transparent as one could be. There wasn’t building that psychological safety that now, I think your teams don’t just deserve. But really, if you want to be able to support a team through periods of change, you have to build that trust all the way through the organisation. I think
Jane Ide
it’s really interesting you highlight that bit, and partly because I was talking just earlier today to one of our members who leads quite a large organisation, and she was talking about how one of the things she feels has changed, and I think particularly in the last five years, it feels as though the pandemic was perhaps a bit of a tipping point, is that that sense of needing to hold the emotional well being of the people that you’re working with, not just the people that you’re serving, I guess there’s always been an element of that for particularly for those that are leading organisations that are on that front line of working directly with the people that need their services and and you’re right. I think it’s, I think it’s really interesting that, in one, in some ways, that feels like a new expectation of us as leaders, and on the other hand, it’s also a really clear understanding of the value of doing that in our role as leaders of an organisation. We’re always in that sort of balancing point, aren’t we, I think, as leaders of organ. Organisations, particularly in our sector of how do we do what’s right for the people we work with? But how does doing what’s right for the people we work with actually bring the real benefit that’s needed for the organisation? And the mission that we’re here to serve Is that does that kind of resonate
Kye Lockwood
for you 100% but I think that’s the that’s the juggling act that we have to play all the time, and I, I guess the difference now is, is that we, if we can trying to make sure that our teams are aware that we’re having to do this, you know that we, that we that we’re able to rally around a very clear understanding of what the mission and the vision is, a very clear understanding of why we all get out of bed and that we and that we do, put our beneficiaries in the centre of the work that we do. But as organisations, we put our staff and our team and our people at the centre of looking after them. And there will be conflicts there. There will often be times, and especially when funding is kind of, you know, for project specific work or for a particular limited period of time, or contracts up for renewal and those sorts of things. There might be times where you you have to balance that, but I think that that’s the case across so much of what the charity sector does. You know, charities the way we’re set up, as organisations, the governance structures, the whole the whole shebang, is to say, slightly antiquated. You wouldn’t necessarily do it the same way. Now, if you’re starting Starting things off, but but deep within there, though, and I was reflecting with this with my board not so long ago, deep within there, there is this element of trust that if you do get that correct, you know, the board as a set of Trustees, delegate that authority to you, because you’re able to show them what you’re going to be doing, and they trust you with that as the executive team, you as the executive team, can delegate that authority again down and trust your people to treat them like adults and be be honest about this is the situation. I think where it goes wrong is where you have to hide things, or you feel you have to hide things because you don’t want to upset people. You don’t want to kind of say, I would say, hold the space, but make sure you hold the space to have those honest conversations. Don’t, don’t shy away from them, just because it’s easier to kind of have the sleepless nights yourself. I think, I think there’s somewhere in between that you have to be able to to do that line that says we are going to work on this together. It’s a challenging thing. Everything we do in the charity sector is challenging. If it wasn’t private business would do it, because half of our stuff is commissioned these days. So you know. But the reality is, we are we have to motivate volunteers. We have to motivate our staff teams, and we are often trying to solve societal problems that have been around for aeons and and haven’t been solved, or that the state can no longer afford to solve without commissioning a charity to
Jane Ide
support them. I think that that I’d love to explore a little bit more that point that you just made about it’s like, it’s like you’re on a razor’s edge, isn’t it, in terms of, how do you balance that? Values led adult, mature approach that says we are all in this together. You know, I’m not the parent. You aren’t the children. We are. You know, you’re all adults, all making your own choices in your own lives. We can work, work through this together, and you can, we can all understand what the situation is against the potential impact of having those open, particularly in difficult times. And I’ve seen this. I mean, obviously we’re seeing this a lot anyway, in the sector at the moment, anyway, a lot of a lot of leaders having to lead through difficult decision making, restructures, reshaping of teams, etc, etc, etc, all the things that come with that. And I but I do think there’s, there’s something for me about where you can building that Bank of trust in the good times, so that when you do have those difficult times, when you do have to have those difficult conversations, the people around you understand the values with which you’re coming to those conversations, and understand that sometimes you can’t tell them everything. There’s, there’s sometimes some very good reasons for obvious, obvious reasons why you can’t say everything to everybody at all times. But trust is so key, and how, how do you think leaders can best go about building that trust, particularly if they’re coming into, well, I suppose there’s a whole range of contexts, isn’t there? There’s people who will be coming into a new organisation where they don’t know what those relationships are, and they’ve got to build them fairly rapidly. There are people who have been in a position for a long time, but the circumstances are changing. What do you think, what in your experience have been the keys to building trust with your with the people around you, with your board and with your staff, because, again, chief executives are very much at that balancing point between those two really key dynamics.
Kye Lockwood
This is a difficult one to answer, I think, because it depends on the organisation, and that’s a really fudgy answer, but I think it depends on. The culture of the organisation that you’re coming into, and what, and what’s already there, and what are the cultural norms, what are the practices that are happening on a day to day basis? Is there already an open and transparent culture present, if not, you coming in saying, oh, I want to be, like, totally transparent. I want, you know, distributed decision making. I want to do all these things might just sound completely off key and, and also put put a bit of fear into people and, and that is your enemy. I think, when you’re trying to build trust, is when people either don’t understand what you’re trying to do, or that you are changing the system so radically that they themselves feel very uncomfortable with that change. And so I think that the first thing is to listen, really, get to know what people’s concerns are. Give them the opportunity know that some people might you might come in and people might talk to you for days. Other people might not talk to you for weeks about what’s really on their mind. And then slowly but surely, once people feel that they’ve been heard, and you’re able to reflect back what you’ve heard and you’ve checked that in, that you that you’re understanding what’s there, I think leading in a way that you would like to have been led, or also in the way that you admire from other leaders, is a good way as well. And then bringing those concepts in, trying to get to a place where you can be vulnerable, where you’re you can make mistakes, and you demonstrate that when other people make mistakes, that’s okay too, that you’re I think it’s a classic line, isn’t that you that you talk about the issue, not the person, that kind of stuff. But I think it’s very easy, especially coming into a challenging situation, or you’ve you’re about to hit a rocky period. Often, you know, things like funding issues might, might cause restructuring and that sort of stuff, when you’re when you’re doing that really, really focusing on the fact that it isn’t anyone’s fault. Really often, you know, if you if people have been doing the right thing. Actually, often some of these decisions that you’re now going to have to take as an organisation, as a senior leadership team, as a bunch of Trustees, are going to be very difficult, but it’s because of circumstances that are often not necessarily fully in your control, and and you can be transparent about that, I agree with you, though, that there’s there’s that razor’s edge, because there’s a lot of stuff you can’t talk about, and there’s a lot of things that, you know, you abut against certain rules and regulations and law and company law and another such that that mean it can be challenging, but, but as you mentioned, you know, make a while the sun shines. I think that is really important just, just put these practices in place, when, when you start and get the temperature check from the moment you get in there. So work out, what are the rituals? What are the what’s the kind of way people are feeding back, how, how psychologically safe does the team feel? Does everybody know what the values are of the organisation? Does everybody believe the values of the organisation, or they just stuff that we espouse over there, and we’re not actually, they aren’t really the values, and they aren’t really the motivators. And then once you start to get a picture of what those norms and behaviours are, then you can start to focus in on the on the priorities.
Jane Ide
In a way, it’s a difficult question to answer, but depending on experience of other other sectors, I wonder if there’s, there’s, there’s an element, I think, that we as a sector, charity, social justice sector, social action sector, and so on. We can sometimes perhaps be a little arrogant about the fact we’re better at this stuff than the commercial sector, than the public sector, than the other sectors, but at the same time, I guess the flip of that. And first of all, I would say I don’t know if that’s actually true. I’ve seen very good examples and very poor examples in all sectors of leadership. But I think the flip of that is also sometimes it can feel as though there are expectations of our sector’s leaders that go beyond those that would be made of leaders in a commercial environment, or obviously different expectations in terms of what we’re here to achieve, but there is a little bit of an element of somehow we’re supposed to be so much better than anybody else could possibly expect to be. Do you? Do you feel that that’s that’s Well, first of all, would you agree with that analysis? And secondly, do you feel that that is a there are some assumptions there that perhaps we need to rethink as a sector about what we’re actually asking our leaders to do and how we’re asking them to be in the world.
Kye Lockwood
Think that good leadership shows up everywhere, for sure, and not just in our sector. I think that what we’re given as tools to be able to lead sometimes means that we can’t compete with other sectors, especially when you think about the things that we would want to do for our teams. We often can’t afford to do for our teams the things that we would want to do for our beneficiaries, we often would be challenged to be able to do. And there’s a tension there as well, you know, in terms of the philosophy of how you approach an issue and how you approach a problem with a classic one, I suppose, is, is it better to sort of do a light touch support for hundreds or or to do a deep intervention for a few and, and there’s no right or wrong answer to that, necessarily, but that’s where you start to think, Okay, well, how do I collaborate with other organisations? How do I how do I make sure that I’ve got a whole system in place, and, and, and I suppose when it comes to what we are expected to do as leaders, we can’t do it all, you know. We literally can’t do it all. And I’ve had some fantastic colleagues in the past, and I think it’s really important that you recognise for yourself where your weaknesses are so trusting the eyes and crossing the t’s not really my vibe and you know, but every time that I’ve had a fantastic operations manager or a fantastic person who loves that stuff and holds me to account, it’s we find that the or I have found that the team and the organisation has flourished because you find the complementary aspects in each other. And I think when you’re looking across your senior leadership team when you’re looking across your organisation. Does everybody think the same? Is there something we need to think about when we’re doing that? Because are we genuinely going to be able to support people in the way that they need to be supported if, if we’re all sitting in one corner of the room thinking that this is what good looks like when actually, for our teams, this isn’t necessarily what good looks like, and we have to be able to adapt, and we have to be able to to understand how to support different people in different ways and and that’s a gift, I think, that the charity sector has that other organisations might not have, other sectors might not have, is that we are alive to this. We often understand it from the fact that we are are serving a very diverse beneficiary group as well. So we are able to keep on top of these things, but it’s making sure that we are disciplined enough to put into practice what we see and what we hear, so that it isn’t this, this thing that sometimes happens in our sector where we espouse one thing or set of values. But actually, if you were to go in and speak to people, that’s not how they feel about things, and that’s and that’s not and that’s not the practices that they themselves experience. Yeah, so it comes back to your earlier point is, how do you balance all of these spinning plates? You can’t do it all by yourself. You have to. You have to know where to look for help and look for support
Jane Ide
I completely agree. I’m also not necessarily the best person to be looking at the absolute detail of a contract agreement or, you know, some very long research document, but others in my team absolutely are, and they love that stuff. But it’s not just about filling in the gaps in your own capability, is it? It’s also about if you, if you espouse that very old fashioned model of, I’m the boss, I’m in charge. What I say goes, and that’s, that’s an end of it, which I think very few people these days would would think would be the right way to go about things. But if you do then, then you have no diversity of thought, you have no diversity of perspective when you’re making decisions, and that’s going to undermine the quality of decision making, isn’t it? So so I think, yes, I think one of the things I’ve learned in my time in the sector is it’s the sector has really educated me on the importance and the value of diversity in all its senses, partly for the fact that it should just be the way we do things, but also because of that real benefit it brings to organisations and missions in terms of the way we think we think about things. And I wonder if that kind of leads me on to onto another question, because I’m not wanting to lead you down that path particularly, but I think it’s just just one of the things that I see our sector wrestling with. But given your experience of leadership and your knowledge of the sector, is there a particular area of challenge that we actually don’t talk enough about. We talk a lot about certain things. Diversity may be one of them. But what’s hidden, what’s under the surface? What? What? What are we all wrestling with, without actually, necessarily bringing it up to the surface and talking about with our our peers and our colleagues? Do you think there’s, there’s something there for you?
Kye Lockwood
Um, I might flip that a little bit on its head and say that one of the things that I have benefited from over the last few years, more than anything, is having people to talk to. I think that there’s a loneliness that comes with being a CEO, that if you allow that to creep in, that just becomes it just compounds itself more and more if you start to not so if you if you aren’t able to. To kind of share things for whatever reasons, or your your efforts to be more transparent and open on really working. And you find yourself just, you know, those moments where you catch yourself walking through the supermarket aisles going, oh my goodness, what am I? What am I going to do about this? And why am I thinking about it, we talk on a Sunday, but it’s, it’s that, it’s that thing where the challenge is, how do you how can you be open in difficult situations? And for me, I’ve had this amazing action learning set that we’ve been running voluntarily now for a few years, but without it. You know, even my daughter, when I was working from home, used to go, Oh, you’re going to CEO therapy. I’m like, Yes, we are. It’s a group therapy session where we just talk, but just being able to share, I think, is one of the things that we don’t we. So I suppose if there’s something that we don’t do enough of as CEOs, it’s necessarily share, and it depends as well on what your situation is, because, you know, it’s an inherent tension. I mean, there are many inherent tensions between, like, the bureaucratic structures and where we want organisations to be, but I think there is an inherent tension as well between collaboration and competition in our sector that isn’t necessarily helped by the funding models that we as AC whether that’s local government commissioning, national government commissioning, or kind of grant funding that pushes you into this world where sometimes you can’t share, or you feel you can’t share, but that’s that, I suppose, is the big thing that I would want to see a change to because it’s, it’s one of My big bug bears about our sector is how inefficient as a sector we are forced to be because we can’t be completely open about what our plans are. We shouldn’t have USPS in the way that private business does. But I know that when I first started as a CEO, a lot of the courses that I used to go on on leadership used to be, what’s your charities? USP, what should, guess what? There are 15 other charities within the 10 mile radius who also have that same USP, wouldn’t it be great if we could all somehow work together without fearing for our teams and fearing for for the kind of impact it might have on the bottom line?
Jane Ide
Yeah, I think, that’s a that’s a conversation I’ve heard many times over the last few years, and that whole principle of systems leadership, of thinking about actually, if you’re working in child poverty, if you’re working in domestic abuse, if you’re working in food poverty, what are the underlying issues that are creating those situations, and how can you as a group of organisations come together to really put your weight behind real fundamental change? And I think you know in other you and I both lead organisations that are not on that sort of frontline, but that opportunity for collaboration and working together and achieving real change. And it does seem as though the thing that that stops us is the fundamental definition of our charitable objects, and what we can and cannot do in service of those objects, and what trustee boards feel comfortable doing in service to those objects and so on, which can, can really limit people, I think sometimes in terms of, well, we know we could make real changes, but we’d have to go outside what we were set up to do. And that obviously has all sorts of challenges. And, you know, understandably so, but, yeah, complex. But I think also your point about that, that lack of sharing, I’m bound to say this, because that’s what ACEVO is entirely about. But I think, I think it is so true that unless you’re in one of the and I have to say it’s a growing number, but still a minority, definitely minority, of chief exec roles where you’ve got a partner alongside you, where you’re in a code shared leadership role, you are in a unique position in your organisation. You’re not you’ve got a foot in both camps of your board and your staff, but you’re in that very specific place by yourself. And one of the beauties I think, of being able to share with a network of peers is having other people who understand that burden, but who by definition, can’t do anything about it for you, because they’re not in your organisation, they’re not your trustee, they’re not your senior staff member, but they can understand what it feels like, and they can share their experience and what they’ve done to navigate their version of that issue, which may or may not be helpful, but it’s always valuable to just know that you’re something members say To me a lot is they really value a key though, for knowing that they are not alone. And I think that’s so important, isn’t it? And I do I feel for people in sort of chief exec leadership roles in other sectors where they don’t necessarily have that opportunity to know that there’s somebody else who’s in the same space. So maybe that’s one of the strengths of our sector. For all that, I think you’re right, but we don’t use it enough generally. You know, at least there is that sense of camaraderie. May not be quite the right word, but that sort of Peer, peer network that that sense that there are other people doing an equally difficult and challenging job with a very similar governance model and very similar financial pressures, but but in a different environment. So talking about what we perhaps don’t do as well as we might, what do you think or do you think that there’s something that as a cohort of leaders across the sector, we should be doing more of, something that’s really of its time, something that really puts us on the front foot going forward that really taps into that energy and passion that you you describe so articulately just now, that really drives our sector to achieve more, to do more, to solve problems, to make the world a better place.
Kye Lockwood
Well, I am a big fan of kind of progressive leadership principles. I’m a big fan of the work that people like Henry Stewart over at Happy computers have been doing the kind of writings of people like LA Lou. I mean, I just think that there’s, there’s a lot out there to say that if you are able to distribute kind of decision making, if you’re able to coach people more than manage them, if you’re able to make sure that purpose is at the heart of you know, which really should be in the charity sector, I think that all of those sorts of ideas and taking the time to reflect On your own, on yourself, but also as a team, making sure that you’re you’re really creating an environment where, not only can, people can feel like they can bring them whole selves to work, but that they can, they can be fairly autonomous in that work. You know that, that you can, can do a sort of pre approval of what they’re doing, because you trust them to do it. Now, I would say, though, that, you know, sort of 10 years or so ago, I first came across some of these concepts that when I was doing something at the School of Social entrepreneurs, and the one of the guest speakers was Henry Stewart. He was talking about this stuff, and he just written his, I think, was a happy manifesto, or something like that. And I thought, This is amazing, you know, I’m going to be one of these servant leadership type people, and I’m going to give people all this freedom. And it was a bit of a nightmare, if I’m honest, because I didn’t understand where you had to hold the framework. And I think that’s the most important thing, is that you have a is that you give people freedom, but within boundaries, otherwise, it can be a little bit a little bit too daunting for people. They might not know exactly what we’re trying to do. Similarly, when you’re thinking about kind of decision making, it can be decision making through consent, not necessarily always consensus, and that you don’t allow some of these ideals that you might want to hold around what a progressive organisation could or should look like in theory, to kind of hold back the charity from being able to function properly. And I think that was where I hit a kind of sticky wicket early on when trying to do this. But I think that this, this way of leading where you you are able to be vulnerable, and you are able to try to steer the ship towards the North Star, rather than being kind of command and control and micro manager and all the rest of it. I think that that you can bring some really amazing people on that journey with you, and you can achieve so much more and that. Again, you know, that’s what our sector is about. We are, you know, depending on what you want to call ourselves, the third sector, the community, voluntary sector, civil society sector, actually, it takes society, it takes volunteers, it takes a whole team of other stakeholders that you need to be able to engage in a way that taps into their motivations, that keeps them alive to that to your cause, that that genuinely gives them that sense of achievement when they have interacted with you. And I think that that’s where leadership is moving in our sector. It’s a it’s a great thing. I think we’re much more open to having proper conversations about how to support people. Were much more open to thinking about flexible working. I think a lot of the good stuff, you know, during the terrible times of the pandemic that were brought in through necessity have stayed in the charity sector a lot longer than they have in other sectors and and I think that’s a good thing. You know, I do think that we, we don’t often have the greatest career Well, I would say for a small charity, especially you don’t necessarily have this really massive career progression that you have you can offer people. You don’t always have the best kind of pay packages, but you do have all of these other things at your disposal that you can offer your teams, and you can create that culture, and you can create that environment where people can, you know, really bring themselves. Us to work and that that is a safety and a feeling that you once you’ve when you built that that’s what a leader, I think now should be fostering, is that culture is making sure that you keep an eye on that.
Jane Ide
So true. I’m 100% with you on all of that, because I think there’s, there’s the basic fundamental thing that we can’t motivate, and we don’t motivate our staff with a bonus, a fancy car, you know, bigger pay packet, all the rest of it. That’s not what our sector is about. And we are, at the same time, we are a sector that achieves the most incredible outcomes when you actually look in reality at what we do with how little financial resource actually is put into the sector overall, in general terms, and so by definition, our achievements are rocket fueled by people, by people’s willingness to work, by their passion, by their desire, by their innovation, their creativity. We do always have that slight, like everything, two edged sword. One of the things that does worry me is that as a sector, we we sometimes not necessarily as leaders, but I think as a whole sector, we assume too much on people’s goodwill, and people assume too much of their own goodwill there. I’ve never known a sector where people are so willing to stretch themselves too thin, work for less money than they deserve, put in the extra hours at every level of an organisation, in a way that perhaps we generally, perhaps we take a little bit too much advantage of, because we know how hard it would be to do what we want to do if we didn’t do that. And I guess that’s, that’s a, that’s a whole sector challenge as well. But I think you’re, you’re right, and I love your point about giving people, it’s that thing about giving people autonomy, but with real clarity about what you need them to achieve, isn’t it? And I remember, I remember years and years ago when I haven’t been a bit of a control freak, shall we say, in my earlier days. And I don’t know what it was that prompted, but it was a moment of the flash of the absolutely bleeding obvious that I didn’t need people to do things the way I would do them. I needed them to do them as well as I would do them, but how they went about that could be entirely up to them. And I think that was the moment at which I started focusing on outcomes rather than outputs. And that can be challenging. I think, obviously, if you’ve got a bigger organisation, the more people you’ve got, the more you’re having to again, we’re back to that thing about trust. You have to trust the whole process that runs through the whole organisation, haven’t you? But again, it also comes back to that clarity of what’s your mission, what you’re there to do who you there to do it for. Does everything fit with that? Or if it doesn’t, is there a valid reason why it shouldn’t? I guess is, is part of the conversation to be had. But yeah, we could. We could go into all of that at great length, I suspect, and cover all sorts of aspects, but I want to move us on a little bit. And you’ve got 15 years in the sector, and I’ve got nearly 10 years in the sector, chief exec level, looking ahead. And you touched on something earlier, which I’ve talked a lot about recently, which is about that sustainability of the chief exec role, and whether or not you know, people can expect to be in that role for as long as perhaps they would have done in the past. But what do you think are the changes ahead in the next 510, years for for leaders, for the leaders that you know, that are coming behind us now, and that may very well, well, hopefully, will carry on after we’ve stepped out into quieter times, whatever that might look like. What do you think is the future of leadership for the sector?
Kye Lockwood
Oh, that is a great question, I think, and very difficult to be able to answer I was, I was talking to an old friend who works in the in the private sector, runs a runs a marketing company over there, and he asked me, Are you, are you with the type of leader that thrives in the good times, or are you the type of leader that thrives in a crisis? I would love to say that I’m the leader that thrives in the good times, but actually, I think I’m a little bit addicted to the to the crisis side of things, and I and I think this is where as a sector, we have to, we have to come together and work out how we can use our collective power to shape some of this to make it a little less crisis. Because there are things we can do for sure. There are things we can do in terms of making sure that we as leaders are keeping ourselves abreast of what’s going on out there, and kind of getting a sense and respond attitude as an organisation, so that we can notice when things are happening, understand where there’s an opportunity, and kind of be able to move, move within that framework that we talked about, to be able to capitalise on these things. Of I just think that there’s this other part of me that thinks, but why should we always have to, you know, why are we looking at risks and opportunities all the time? Why can’t we just say, You know what? We know what we’re doing is good. We’ve got a solid theory of change. Yes, we’re going to test the assumptions on it. Yes, we’re going to make sure that we keep abreast of changes in society and changes for our beneficiaries. But can we just be left alone to get on with it a little bit like can we report in a way that allows us to show you what what good looks like, rather than what you might think good looks like? Can we be allowed to demonstrate our purpose and also our worth and the value that we bring to the sector, I think that there was a moment, you know, there was that amazing moment during covid where the third sector basically kept the country going as far as, I mean, I’m biassed and I was running food banks.
Jane Ide
No, I would agree with you, having been right in the middle of all of that. I think, I think, I think that our sector was first off the blocks, first down track, and yeah, we wouldn’t have, we wouldn’t have got through without so much of that work. So I’ll absolutely agree with
Kye Lockwood
you on that one. And the trust was there, though, between because it had to be there, and the trust was there between funders who said, Do you know what? Just crack on. Do what you can do. And we’re not going to hold you to this framework. The trust was there with local government, the sharing of intelligence, the sharing of information was like nothing I’d ever seen previously. And there was just this little moment that said, Actually, wow, the third sector isn’t the kind of third partner in this relationship. We’re equal partners in this relationship. We are providing things that nobody else can provide, and we are being recognised for that. And that was a beautiful moment. What, what frustrates me is how quickly the the elastic band seems to bounce back, and we’re still pushing, sometimes, to get a seat at that table, and still pushing to really ensure that some of the promises made are being kept, that some of the kind of nice attitudes are turned into action, and that the sector isn’t being left to kind of, you know, in the worst cases, die on the vine. I mean, we both work now in infrastructure organisations. I’ve watched infrastructure being decimated. You know, if I was coming in as a leader now and didn’t have the type of support I had from my local VCs, from my local kind of infrastructure organisations. At the earlier organisations that I was in, I wouldn’t been able to do half the things that I was able to do. You know that collective support was was part of what enables the sector to function well without the infrastructure. We run the risk of CEOs having to take on too many risks to operate safely because they don’t have anyone to turn to to ask for advice, and their boards not saying that you can go and speak to or you go to a pro bono lawyer, and they might come back to you six months after the, you know, after the after the advice would have been useful. So how do we make sure that, as over the course of the next 10 years, that we don’t lose the support for the sector, that we don’t lose the kind of trends that we’re seeing around being more involved in organisational culture, making sure that people, you’re putting people first, being less command and control and more kind of coaching, all of those things that we want to do, but equally, that the sector itself doesn’t find itself so stretched. And I know that I’ve heard this before, you know, and I have heard it before, and I’m sure we had conversations about it before that it feels like this. Move on the teacher of the edge, and then, guess what? We’re still here. But it does feel tangibly different the last few years. And I wonder if that speaks to a point you made earlier around, you know, making sure you don’t, you don’t abuse the fact that we as a sector do tend to have people involved who want to give more, but recognising that, putting their well being first, recognising that CEOs burnout, recognising that staff teams burn out, that that you have to be able to create the environment that supports your team and supports you as a leader, and ensures that the sector itself is also fit for purpose. And so if I answered your question, I think that what the next decade? I think the next decade is going to, I can’t see any green shoots of, oh, yeah, it’s going to be a nice stable period. So I think that, unfortunately, we are, we’re going to have to equip ourselves to continue to transform as a sector. But whilst we do that? Look at what good practice is out there. Look at where it is working. Look at where collaborations are proving to be fantastic. Look at some of the place based work that’s out there. Look at, you know, where cross sector pollination is working well and cross sector collaboration is working well to solve a to solve a challenge. And that you as a single charity or you as a single team can’t necessarily get behind and and solve by yourself without burning out.
Jane Ide
You just thought really eloquently about what we gained during the pandemic and what’s been lost since then. And I just want to push back a little bit in the sense that my recollection or my experience during the pandemic was one of the things that meant that we were given so much trust, was that we as a sector, we knew that we knew what we were doing, and we knew it couldn’t be done without us, and we had a confidence going into those rooms and those meetings and those discussions and those unending challenges of who was going to do, what that, I think carried, certainly, I saw it carrying the government of the day with us, because, to be frank, they didn’t know what they needed to be doing. And I think was certainly true at local authority level as well. Do you think that we as a sector have too quickly, slipped back into something I remember talking about a lot prior to the pandemic, in my previous role, slip back into, please give us some money, because we could do some really good stuff. And please let us have a seat at the table. And please, you know we could, we could do a bit more if you let us. And that supplicant role, as opposed to, we are equal partners. We’ve got expertise that the rest of you do not have. And building the confidence. This is the theme of the whole conversation today, isn’t it? Kai is, how do you build trust? How do you build confidence? We talked about it internally in terms of our teams, but I think there’s a whole piece there, isn’t there, about, how do we as a sector make sure that that we don’t leave any room for anything other than trust and confidence in our ability to do the work that we uniquely do. And I don’t know if that’s too big a too big a conversation for us to have right now, but it’s what came to mind when you were talking about the pandemic experience there.
Kye Lockwood
You think what the pandemic proved is that it’s possible. Jane, I don’t know whether I agree that we’re too supplicant, because I think that as a as a sector, we are quite fragmented, that we are designed to be quite fragmented. And in fact, yeah, lots of small charities are doing very specialist things or working for a particular cause. That means that that’s that would naturally be the case, but equally, it’s not necessarily helped by the way that the system is is designed. And I think that the responsibility for that so you’re pushing back on me. I’m going to push just I don’t think that the responsibility of that should fall on the charity sector. I think that the responsibility for that falls quite squarely, the power dynamic that is often not spoken about, which is the which is the funding relationship. And, you know, to come back to what we what don’t we talk about enough? It’s that, it’s the fact that actually, it’s not that we’re supplicant and we want the money. Yeah, of course we need money to be able to do the good work that we know we need to do well. But what happened during the pandemic was all of those rains were just loosened enough for us to be able to just go out there and do see the need that we saw in the communities that we were serving, and be able to channel our resources, whether that was financial or whether that was human resource, or whether that was because actually we were Having to make things up on the fly, test and learn things to see what would work, to see how we could approach things. Because every week, new things were being brought in, new regulations were being brought in. You didn’t know if you’re going to be locked down. You didn’t know if you had to furlough people. I mean, I had some unbelievable moments during that pandemic, which when I look back on now, I think, wow, you know the moment where furlough was suddenly re announced on on Halloween, I had sent out the redundancy consultation letters, you know? And then had to backtrack, and I just remember thinking, Gosh, this is crazy times in terms of being able to how you’re having to dynamically manage a very, very fluid situation. But equally, the fact that we were able to, you know, had a great funder who had given us a fairly large proportion of money to go out there and work in community centres with the particular communities and do group sessions. Now you couldn’t get more anti covid That, you know, in terms of the safety practices that you had to put in place. But they were absolutely fine with us, pivoting, trying new things. We ended up building a sort of online platform for these, for this community to to interact with during this time, to prevent loneliness. And it was, it was great, but that was nothing like the cultural dance sessions that were supposed to be happening for several with big kind of performances, that ability to be trusted to see what the problem is. I think if, if we could have a really open conversation with some of the umbrella bodies or some of the organisations that are designed to bring together. The very opaque world of funding, and say these are the standards that we would need to meet. But actually, if you do meet these standards, then we trust you to do stuff. And I suppose it goes back to this thing of that pre approval. I want to be able to give pre approval to my team to be able to do things. I would love for our funders to give us pre approval. Some funders are great like that. Some funders it truly is unrestricted funding. But I think what’s happened since the pandemic, and you know, you look at the great work of people like Jonah Jeffries and the list and all the rest of the stuff that’s out there, when you see what’s actually happening with the the grant funding situation, and also the kind of reverting back to type. I think that a lot of that reverting back to type happened at the supply side, not at the not on our side.
Jane Ide
Unfortunately, what we need are funders and commissioners who don’t mind if we do things the way they want us to do them. They just are interested in what we achieve and what we achieve together in doing that, I think that’s a great place for us to pause this conversation ready for you to pick it up with our next guest. I’m sure there’s lots of threads there that you you’ll want to pull out and develop that conversation. So maybe Kye at this point before I say thank you to you. Could you perhaps introduce for us who your next guest is going to be in the next episode of this series, and what question you want to ask them? If you know at this point?
Kye Lockwood
Oh, that is a that is a very good question. Well, my the next guest that I’m going to be interviewing is the fantastic Janet Thorne, who is CEO of Reach Volunteering, which is just an absolutely inspirational organisation, how they managed to connect so many people to so many opportunities in with, you know, being such a small organisation themselves is incredible. I think, I think I’d like to probably speak to because I think a lot of what we’ve spoken about today thematically has come down to trust. And I would love to know from Janet how she operates that in on a on a platform basis, because they’re not really a service provider. They’re a platform that enables people to connect and and where the where the tension sits there, I suppose, Under her leadership, to where the organisation is seeing. You know, so many volunteers coming through now, and how they managed, how they managed that, and how they managed to ensure that the service was still at the level that that she she would expect, or older her trustees and their stakeholders hope for
Jane Ide
I think that’s an excellent start for a discussion point with Janet, and I really look forward to listening to that episode when it when it lands, for now, Kai, thank you so much. That’s been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. The time has flown by. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Kye Lockwood
Thanks so much, Jane.