Welcome to The Leader to Leader Podcast (season 1, episode 4)
In this episode (the final of this first series), Kiran Kaur, CEO of Girl Dreamer, sits down with Jane Ide, chief executive of ACEVO, for a rich and wide-ranging conversation about leadership, change, and what it means to stay grounded when the ground keeps shifting.
Jane opens by sharing something she hears consistently from leaders across the sector: exhaustion. Not universal burnout, she is careful to say — there are plenty of leaders who are energised and making progress — but a pervasive tiredness, and a difficulty finding the oomph that leadership demands. She locates much of this in the emotional labour of the current moment: the redundancies, the restructures, the budget-setting in conditions of deep uncertainty. She describes it, for some, as a kind of grief — particularly for newer chief executives who are discovering, for the first time, just how differently that weight lands when you are the one carrying it.
The conversation moves into geography and what it means to lead from outside London. Jane has spent her entire adult life in the north of England, and came into the sector not through the usual routes but through a membership role in Sheffield that introduced her first to NAVCA and eventually to ACEVO. She is candid about the practical realities: some things — Westminster meetings, events that members can actually get to — still pull towards London. But she argues that ACEVO’s decision to become a fully distributed organisation has been one of its most important, giving the team genuine connection to the communities and regions where most of the sector’s work actually happens. And on a personal level, she is clear: she could not do this job without being able to walk out of her front door and see the hills.
Jane and Kiran then turn to what has most changed about leadership since the pandemic. Jane identifies a significant cultural shift in what staff expect and demand — an expectation of inclusion, of voice, of being treated well — which she largely welcomes, even as she acknowledges that some leaders are finding it genuinely difficult to navigate. She also names something harder: the increasing polarisation of society, the fault lines that have opened up within teams, the difficulty of assuming that everyone in your organisation will simply go with you on mission and values. Brexit, she suggests, was perhaps the first moment many of us experienced communities and families on opposite sides of a fence — and that something has not fully settled since.
On the future of leadership, Jane is honest that she cannot predict it, but she is certain that the pace of change is accelerating in ways that make the old models feel inadequate. She raises the question of what a non-Western, non-capitalist model of leadership might look like — and notes, with some frustration, that when she has tried to explore this, she is usually told that most of the world simply follows the UK model. She finds more hope in the new generation of leaders who are not waiting for permission, who are starting their own things and bringing with them a different instinct around joy, creativity, rest, and collective ways of working. The north star, she argues, has to remain values and mission — those cannot be sacrificed to the pressures of the moment — but everything else may need to be rethought.
The episode closes on the question of what keeps Jane anchored when the pressure is high. Professionally, she returns always to the mission: does this decision serve the purpose? Personally, she is grateful to have come into a chief executive role later in her career, when she already knew that work was not all of her. Her family, her dogs, her allotment, her walks — these are not indulgences, she says, but necessities. She describes what she calls the CEO’s dilemma: how do you look after yourself in order to protect your organisation? Her answer is straightforward — if you don’t, you simply cannot lead well. It is not a sacrifice. It is essential.
Transcript
Kiran Kaur 00:00
Hi, Jane.
Jane Ide 00:01
Hi, Kiran. It’s so good to be talking to you at last.
Kiran Kaur 00:05
No, it truly is. I was just saying, I love that for the benefit of everybody listening. Our introduction to each other is this podcast. We’ve skipped right over LinkedIn and email formalities, and even an odd Zoom catch up, and we’ve gone straight for this, so I’m really looking forward to getting to know you in the context of this podcast, and I just think that’s the best way to start.
Jane Ide 00:29
Well, I completely agree, because I think you know I have known of you for many years, but we’ve never crossed paths before, so I’m really excited, really looking forward to this, and particularly because it’s the last link in the chain of this particular series of a new format podcast for us. So I’m a little bit in a slightly strange place, being at the receiving end rather than being the host. It’ll make a nice change for me. Looking forward to it.
Kiran Kaur 00:57
I was going to say, sit back and relax, no pressure at all. The last episode of the series, but we’ll see how it goes. Well, just to kick off, I thought, since we don’t actually know each other that well, and even people who might know you, they might not know these things, I wanted to start with a few quick fire round questions, just to warm the conversation up, a bit of this or that. This might divide a few things, Jane, but we’ll see, depending on your answers, where we go. But let’s start easy. Tea or coffee?
Jane Ide 01:34
Tea, but a very specific sort of tea. I only drink red bush tea, or rooibos tea, and I never know how to pronounce it, but I drink it by the gallon.
Kiran Kaur 01:44
Beach or mountains?
Jane Ide 01:46
Beach, probably. I love mountains in principle, but I’m not a big fan of heights.
Kiran Kaur 01:50
Breakfast or dinner?
Jane Ide 01:52
Probably breakfast. Breakfast is the start of the day, the day is full of hope.
Kiran Kaur 01:56
Depending on the day you’ve had, exciting as dinner becomes. Window seat or aisle seat?
Jane Ide 02:02
Now, again, a bit like beach and mountains — window in principle, but in practice, especially when I’m up and down from Derbyshire to London, always the aisle. Always the aisle, because then you can shove your elbows out a little bit and put your bag down.
Kiran Kaur 02:16
Summer or winter?
Jane Ide 02:18
That’s a really tricky one, because I have learnt as I’ve got older, I love every season for what it brings. Especially living in the middle of rural Derbyshire, winter has a very particular beauty, but I do also love not being frozen cold.
Kiran Kaur 02:34
Physical book, ebook, or Kindle?
Jane Ide 02:37
Kindle, I have to say. I can carry so much with me and read wherever I am.
Kiran Kaur 02:44
So much easier for travel. Sweet or salty?
Jane Ide 02:48
I have got a sweet tooth, I have definitely got one.
Kiran Kaur 02:53
Yeah.
Kiran Kaur 02:53
There are some additional benefits of living in Bakewell with a sweet tooth! Early bird or night owl?
Jane Ide 03:02
Early bird, very much so. As I’ve got older, I’m up literally at the crack of dawn, and I love that time of day when nobody else has really got going — whether it’s going out for a walk or doing some work. It’s like that’s my time. After about eight o’clock in the morning, the day is out of your control, up to other people. So I do like that.
Kiran Kaur 03:28
Love that. I’m very much learning that too. And finally, this is a divider, and I might judge you for this answer, Jane. On a scone, is it jam then cream, or cream then jam?
Jane Ide 03:40
Oh, it’s jam then cream. There is no other way of doing it, because if you put the cream on first, the jam is going to fall off. It’s ridiculous. I’ve never understood how anybody could argue any other way. And I’m impressed you didn’t ask me whether it’s scone or scone, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Kiran Kaur 03:56
Jane, that’s just put us on completely different ends of the podcast spectrum, because I’m the cream then jam person — it only makes sense to spread the cream and dollop the jam. I just don’t understand it the other way.
Jane Ide 04:11
The thing is, when we have common ground, you have to have both.
Kiran Kaur 04:14
Very true. If anybody’s ever had that debate and just can’t settle it, that’s the way to do it — just agree you have both.
Kiran Kaur 04:24
yeah.
Kiran Kaur 04:24
And how you have it is up to you, and you just secretly judge each other. Thank you for that, Jane. What better way to get to know people beyond the answers than to find out how they put jam and cream on a scone? I feel like that’s the important questions asked. Okay, well, now we move on to the questions specifically around leadership. There were two things I ended my conversation with the incredible Janet in the last episode, and when asked about how I wanted to start the conversation with you, two questions came up. So I just want to start there, and one of them was around being a central figure within the sector and being connected to so many CEOs all across the country — whether you find there is a sentiment right now that you think CEOs are sharing, but perhaps not openly. I wondered if you had any particular insight into that.
Jane Ide 05:34
I suppose one of the things about being in this role — and I’m never entirely comfortable with the idea of being a central figure, I don’t think I am — but I do think I’m in a privileged position in that I get to hear from a lot of people. Sometimes my role is to carry those voices forward, which is a real privilege. Because people share with me and with us at ACEVO in a way they don’t always share with others, I would say I’m hearing quite clearly, either very explicitly or quite implicitly, that people are tired. They find it difficult to find the energy and the oomph that is sometimes asked of us as leaders. I don’t mean everybody is drained all the time — there are lots of leaders I know who are really enjoying their work, really passionate about what they’re doing, they can see they’re making progress, and so on. But I think there is that general sense. One of the things I’ve certainly seen a lot of over the last few months — and we’re recording this at the beginning of April — is leaders coming to the end of the financial year, starting a new one, and all the challenges that come with that. How do you make those budgets work? I once described it as the Goldilocks budget-setting process: not too much, not too little, but somehow just right, when most of us, most of the time, don’t actually know for certain what income we have, unless we happen to be in an environment with long-term contracts, which is increasingly unlikely. It’s hard, it’s really hard work. One of the things I’m very acutely aware of — because ACEVO’s role is to support leaders as individuals — is that a lot of people look at chief executives in any context and think, well, they’re the ones that make the difficult decisions, they’ve got the power, once a decision is made it gets done. That’s kind of the general expectation. Whereas what I see is the emotional labour that comes with having to make redundancies, restructure, reduce costs, reduce capacity — pull your belt in, whatever it is you have to do in order to make the thing work. I’ve heard a lot about that recently, particularly from newer chief executives who’ve perhaps been through that process before as directors, as part of a collaborative senior leadership team, but who are now finding it’s rather different when you are the chief executive. It’s a lonely place, because ultimately, even if you’re not making that decision entirely by yourself — and the trustee board absolutely should be part of that — you’re the one carrying it. You’re the one there every day with the team, carrying the organisation forward. That, I think, is the prevailing mood I’m picking up, and it’s been like that for a while, though it does change in its nature. There’s a sort of — and I don’t know if grief is the better word for it — a sense of grief that people are having to lead through these difficult processes, knowing it’s necessary, knowing it’s absolutely part of the job, it’s what we’re paid to do. But that doesn’t make it something people choose to do as a general rule.
Kiran Kaur 09:17
Absolutely. Thank you for that, because I think, as much as it’s a difficulty that a lot of people are sharing, it’s still good to know that it is a feeling that is shared. Like you said, there’s a feeling of isolation that creeps up in the role, especially when you’re operating in different parts of the country where you don’t have a big community of fellow CEOs to lean on or pour into. On that point, when I learned where you reside I thought, oh, it’s not London — and I wondered then, as somebody connected to the heart of the sector, and as a fellow non-Londoner, I’ve always had the feeling the sector, and the country as a whole, is very London-centric. London has a lovely bubble, but I wondered, for somebody who resides outside of that, how you’ve navigated that journey of being at the heart of something within the sector when so much of it happens in and around London, and you’re not
Jane Ide 10:27
in that bubble on an everyday basis? Does that have any pros or cons, or what is that experience like as a whole? It definitely has aspects to it which, if you look at it logically, seem quite ridiculous. What difference does it make, especially these days? We at ACEVO are a completely — well, I don’t like the word remote, because that sounds like we’re distant from each other, and we’re anything but — but we don’t have an office base anymore. We used to be a London-based organisation, because that was how we were founded and set up, and certainly in years gone by part of the history of ACEVO was that the majority of our members were based in London, so where else would you be? But the pandemic obviously started to change that. I think general working practices started to change that too. I’ve been very lucky — whether it’s luck or whether I made it happen, I’m not entirely sure, because in some ways I’m just not prepared to do anything differently. I’ve spent all my adult life in the north of the country, or what we call the north. I know people up in Newcastle consider this to be southern, but I moved to Sheffield when I was a student and stayed in Yorkshire, and never worked anywhere other than somewhere within travelling distance of my home. I’ve been very fortunate over the last few years that technology has caught up with me and it’s now entirely possible for me to lead this organisation from anywhere in the country — technically anywhere in the world, with a decent Wi-Fi connection. I think there are also some really positive aspects to it for me. One is, exactly as you hinted at, people are still surprised to know that I, and we as an organisation, are not London-centric. That’s really important in our sector, because despite the fact that the majority of the biggest charities have a head office in London — and even that may not be quite true, I know some that are on the outskirts or in the home counties — actually the majority of the sector, and the vast majority of what happens in civil society, is happening everywhere else in the country. Without wanting to go into a long history of it, I only came into the sector because I was living in this part of the world. I had never thought about working in the sector, but I was looking for a new role. I particularly wanted to work in membership organisations, because that’s what I’d been doing anyway. I saw a job advertised for a Sheffield-based charity around membership engagement, thought I can do that, and before I knew it I got the job and was working in the sector. That was how I was introduced to NAVCA — the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action — which is where I then started my career as a chief executive in the sector, not straight away, but after about six months. That in itself was a fantastic introduction to the reality of the sector, rooted in the smallest localist community-based organisations, some volunteer-led, some formal charities, some with paid staff, some without. I couldn’t have asked for a better grounding or a better understanding that actually what happened in London was, exactly as you say, a bit of a bubble. When I was at NAVCA and here at ACEVO, obviously there are parts of my role where you need to be in London. You can’t go to Westminster without being in Westminster. You can’t,
Kiran Kaur 14:16
you know,
Jane Ide 14:16
you can’t go to meetings with ministers unless you’re where they are. There are some really basic realities. We’re a network of members, and we know it doesn’t matter how many times we try to do it differently: if you want to put on an event that the majority of members can get to, London is still the easier place, because whether you’re coming from the south coast or from the northeast, you can both get there, whereas other parts of the country are not so easy. But I think it’s really important — and it’s not just me being based outside of London that I think is the defining feature for me. It’s the fact that we are now a completely non-office-based team. This has evolved over the last three or four years. I think I was the first person to join a team that wasn’t based in London, but then as we started to recruit more staff, we took away any requirement to be in London, because there was no need. We’ve now got staff in every part of the country, and that means we’ve got connections, we’ve got perspectives — we understand that having an event in London is a bit of a pain in the neck, because it costs something like £150 to get there on the train, or it takes three hours door to door, or you have to sit on the aisle because otherwise you get squashed. We understand that because we live it ourselves. It’s not something members have to explain to us, and that comes back to that understanding of where the majority of our members are doing their work. That’s really important for us. I also ought to say — because we talk about leaders and the reality of being a leader — I don’t think I could do this job if I wasn’t able to come back to where I live, walk out of my front door and see the hills, walk along a river, get some fresh air. I’m very fortunate in terms of where I live, and I know that’s a huge privilege. But wherever you are, particularly now with technology — as with all these things, there’s a benefit and a cost — yes, we can do all of this work from wherever we are, but equally we never switch off. If you haven’t got a space that is not work, particularly if you work largely from home, you have to create that space, so that you can switch off and breathe. Otherwise you can’t function well as a leader on any sustainable level.
Kiran Kaur 16:58
Absolutely. You touched on a really nice segue into my next question, around the changes that happened from the pandemic, the fact that we are more — for lack of a better word — remote, and how technology has changed. I wondered, as a whole, when you think about leadership today, what feels most different to five years ago? Is it some of the things you’ve already touched on, or is there something else where you think, no, there has definitely been a shift?
Jane Ide 17:32
Without a shadow of a doubt, the thing I hear a lot about, in various ways — sometimes positive, sometimes less so — is that cultural shift around workplaces. Not long after the pandemic, and not long after I came here, there seemed to be a period of about eight or nine months where things go cyclically in my job, and you find that for eight or nine months everybody’s talking about the same thing, and then it shifts. At that point there was a lot of conversation about whether to have everybody back in the office or not, and my only response to that could ever be: you’ve got to do what’s right for your organisation and the culture you want to build or protect. There is no one answer that fits all. But I think that evolved. What we’ve seen, and what I’ve certainly heard a lot about in the last couple of years, is — and I don’t know how much strong data there is underneath this, but it is a very prevalent conversation, and not just in our sector — there seems to have been a sea change in what staff expect and demand of us. I think that’s partly because, having been a member of staff myself for many years, I believe groups of staff have put up with things they perhaps wouldn’t put up with anymore. That expectation of inclusion, of having a voice, of being treated well and fairly — some of the things you’d hope in our sector you’d take for granted, but that isn’t always the case in other working environments. That has very much come to the fore. But I also know a number of leaders who are finding it challenging — not because they don’t want to get it right, because they absolutely do, which in a way makes it harder — who have found themselves trying to manage fault lines that perhaps didn’t used to be there. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s true as clichés usually are: things have become much more evidently polarised over the last five years. We’ve had wars, we’ve had a lot of contention in a lot of spaces about things people feel very strongly about. It probably dates back pre-pandemic to Brexit, which we tend to forget now, but that was the first experience many of us had in this country of families and communities being on opposite sides of a fence. And then, of course, we’ve had more of those sorts of issues arising. The way I see that being played out, particularly in medium to larger organisations — though not exclusively — particularly in campaigning organisations in our sector, where staff are by definition going to be politically aware and very keen to make sure the values at the heart of what’s being done are upheld — I think it has become much harder to assume that everybody in your organisation is going to go with you on what you want to do, or what the mission is. It feels like it’s a little bit of a wobbly time.
Jane Ide 21:24
I hear people talking about younger staff coming in not necessarily understanding what the contract is — the literal contract and the metaphorical one — about being here to do a job. And I go back to not knowing how much evidence there really is of that. I find it rather uncomfortable as a parent of two young men in their 30s who have their own views on how they want their employer to behave. I can’t say I fault them on it. But I do think there’s an increasing level of tension. We’ve certainly seen that play out in very real ways, particularly where you have people from different communities — communities of faith, communities of belief, other forms of community lifestyle — and the politicisation of our population in ways that aren’t terribly healthy. That polarisation is inevitably going to play out within staff teams as much as in any other community, and sometimes more so, because you’re in a more concentrated environment. That, I think, is the big thing, particularly since the pandemic. I’m speaking to you now from the room I worked in for eighteen hours a day for two and a half years during the pandemic — very vivid memories. One of the things I remember so clearly was how many conversations everyone was having about building back better, not going back to the way things were, it being a better world because now we understand what really matters. And of course the reality was that by the time we finally got to the end of the lockdowns and the restrictions, and the horrifying death rates, and hearing those numbers every day on the news, everybody was drained. Nobody had the energy to build back better, and
Kiran Kaur 23:29
we did
Jane Ide 23:30
we lost a lot of that very rapidly, because it just wasn’t strong enough against decades or centuries of culture, system, and approach. So there’s the thing that’s really changed, and there’s the thing that hasn’t changed, and it’s a tricky place for us to be. We’re still managing the long tail of all of that — the economics, the challenges our sector currently faces are absolutely rooted in it.
Kiran Kaur 24:01
I think it’s really important that you named both of those things, because I think sometimes we kind of reference — or don’t reference — the pandemic. It’s almost like that time that shall not be named. It’s just over there now and we’ve distanced ourselves from it. But in the back of everyone’s mind there is that looming sense that, no, something fundamentally shifted our entire planet. I don’t know if I’m still processing that, or if I thought things would be different and they’re not, or how I sit with it. There still feels like there’s an element of processing, even this many years on. Like you said, because there wasn’t the capacity or time for things to be starkly different to how they were, you’re kind of sitting in this in-between space — are we still holding the hope that it’s all going to change for the better? Have we all gone back to so-called normal? Are we somewhere in between but not talking about it, just getting on as best we can? I’m really glad you said both, because I think the temptation is to think that was many years ago and we’re in a new place — but the question is, are we really? And I don’t know about that.
Jane Ide 25:04
The other thing that struck me at the time, and I’ve never lost this perspective, is that the strange thing about the pandemic — and I suppose this is probably true of other global or massively national events — is that we all experienced the same thing, but we all experienced it so differently. The perfect example I got of that was at a coaching event, probably mid-2022, just after I started here, at the very tail end of it. I’d signed up for some leadership event — can’t remember what it was, not an ACEVO thing, something I’d signed up for before I came into this role — and there were probably a dozen of us as leaders. The facilitator said, let’s just reflect on what the pandemic has meant to us, and we went around the room. I was one of the last to speak. The woman before me, a chief executive of a charity — though obviously a rather different sort from the one I was leading at the time — said it was the most amazing experience for her: she had all this time to think, took up yoga, went forest bathing. And I’m sitting there thinking, I was online from six o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night, pretty much every day, weekends included, taking phone calls from ministers about the community response. It was just a completely different experience. We’d both been through the same thing but had no commonality in that experience at all. In a way, I think that may be one of the reasons we didn’t hold on to the things we wanted to change — there were actually very limited shared touchpoints. It depended on what you were doing, where you were living, who you were living with, whether you were used to working online or whether that was a whole new thing. I’m not even going to go into political leadership in that environment. But I think one day I’ll be curious, in ten or twenty years — however much more time I have on this planet — to see whether historians have really started to shape what that experience was. I think you’re right, we’re all still processing it. We’ve now got people coming into our workforce who experienced that in a very different way, whose experience of being teenagers, of education, was completely unlike anything the rest of us had experienced. So how can we possibly expect their expectations of work are going to be the same? Funnily enough, I was talking to a colleague only earlier today about how one of the challenges as a leader is learning how much you have to adapt to the people you are leading. You cannot — certainly not in this day and age — just go in and say, this is who I am, I’m going to tell you what to do and expect you to do
Kiran Kaur 28:24
it.
Jane Ide 28:24
it just isn’t going to work. You have to be so much more flexible. That is, I think, quite hard work. We have that particular challenge now in the mid-2020s model of leadership: we have to be adaptable and flexible, and yet we also have to be authentic, because people will spot if you’re faking it. They will know, they will call you out on it, or they just won’t respond. It almost feels like if you think too hard about it you won’t be able to do it, because your brain will explode.
Kiran Kaur 29:03
Exactly. And the point you touched on about, in this time of change, different generations coming up — like you said, each person, let alone each generation, has had a really different experience over the past five years. A point we spoke about in the last episode was people talking a lot about Gen Z in the workplace and, increasingly, Gen Z leadership, because now these are young people taking up CEO roles — not just joining the workforce, but actually starting their own things. And while that’s been happening and everybody’s been focused over there, I don’t think everyone’s completely aware that Gen Alpha has also had their time and we’ve now officially moved to Gen Beta. By 2030, I think, will be the first time we have five generations in the workplace at the same time. So this brings me to my next question. Taking into account all these changes, which assumptions about leadership do you think the charity sector may need to rethink? It’s not necessarily just about the generational aspect — it could be broader. Feel free to take it in whichever direction you like.
Jane Ide 30:24
That’s a really good question, and I’m not sure I’ve got the best answer immediately. It touches on that point about needing to be adaptable. I’ve been very privileged throughout most of my working life — more than a couple of decades now — to have worked with some brilliant leaders. I’ve also worked with some very bad ones, and I’ve learned from both, as you hope you would. I’m very fortunate that one of the very first leaders I worked closely with — reporting directly to them, sitting in board meetings listening to how conversations were flying — and this was 35, maybe 40 years ago — had quite a new approach to leadership at the time. It was that leadership that said: yes, I’ve got a wealth of experience and knowledge, and if I have to make a decision I’ll make it, but actually I’ll make better decisions if I can hear from the people around me, if I can listen to my staff, if I’ve got routes for people to tell me when things are going wrong. That openness was really powerful for me, because I could see it and I could see it being really effective — in performance and, in this case it was in the NHS, in delivering genuinely incredible innovation for patient care. One of the things I learned over those decades is that every generation has to learn those lessons again. We mentor, we role model, we do what we do, and the people coming up behind us will watch us and either say, I really like the way she did that, or I’m never going to do that as a leader. That’s the way the world works. But they still have to learn those lessons themselves. So no generation of leaders can afford to assume they’re getting it right, and every generation has something to bring to the table — every generation should be respected and valued for what they bring, but never put on a pedestal as though they’ve got all the answers. Perhaps the biggest challenge — and I don’t know if biggest is overstating it — but something I’ve had on my mind for years is this concept of the Western model of leadership, and what are we missing? What are we not picking up? One of the challenges I’ve found when I’ve tried to explore this, particularly in the world of nonprofits — and I’ll be honest, there’s a lot more for me to do on this, maybe it’s a post-ACEVO retirement project — is that when I’ve tried to explore what models of leadership, regulation, and governance are used elsewhere in the world, what I tend to get told by those in the know is: well, the problem is most parts of the world follow the UK model.
Jane Ide 33:46
We set the bar, we set the model — we’ve got the regulatory environment, we’ve got the governance practices, and however many challenges we might have within that space, we have been seen for a very long time as the way you do it. The management theory, the leadership models — they all come from that UK environment and then get adapted elsewhere. In more general terms, it’s all founded in the American universities, you know, the Harvard toolbox model, or whatever it
Kiran Kaur 34:26
might be.
Jane Ide 34:27
So it’s really hard to get a sense of what leadership could look like — and I’m not just talking about diversity, or even diversity of thought. What could a completely different, non-Western, non-capitalist model of leadership really look like? I think that could be so exciting, because there’s got to be stuff we’re missing. There’s got to be stuff that could have more impact if we did it differently. I’m hoping that some of these new generation leaders — and this is where the exciting piece is, as you say, younger leaders who are not sitting around waiting to get the job, but going out and starting their own thing, doing the thing that matters to them — I’m seeing way more inclusion, way more diversity in those spaces than in the more traditional ones. I’m hoping they will bring some of this different way of doing things. One example I’ve seen — slightly bleakly, but I think it’s a relevant one — is around work we’ve done at ACEVO on anti-racism and anti-oppression. Still so much more to do, but one of the things I’ve really enjoyed learning from since the pandemic, since 2020 and Black Lives Matter and George Floyd — the learning that has and hasn’t happened since then — but that shift, that rising up of people from within marginalised and underrepresented communities taking that space and saying: we’re going to show you how to do this, we’re going to be your consultants, your advisors, your trustees, your facilitators. One of the things coming through in that community of practitioners is this very explicit understanding that rest is resistance, that joy is important, that creativity is essential, that fun, listening, using music, using creative skills — all of that is part of leadership. And when I think back to the leaders I’ve worked with, even that very first one I talked about, the idea that you might go into a room and get people drawing something, or using artwork as a means of group facilitation — there is stuff there we could learn from and should learn from. If we do start learning those lessons, then leadership in 30, 40, 50, 100 years’ time could be totally unrecognisable from what it is now. When you link that to changes in technology — what exactly is AI? What are the implications of AI for us? That’s something else I need to get to understand, and I don’t yet know how. You put all those things together and you think: what actually is the future of leadership, per se, but particularly leadership in our sector, and where are the really exciting opportunities for us to do it differently? But how do we do it differently when, right here right now in 2026, too many of our leaders don’t have the capacity, the resource, the time, or the knowledge? Is it just going to happen to us — which is probably the way change has always happened, driven by external factors? It has the potential to be a really exciting time for those willing to allow themselves to be swept along a little by the waves, and a very scary time for those who are not willing to adapt.
Kiran Kaur 38:23
Like you said, it’s going to happen whether anybody likes it or not. It might just be the shift that we really need and didn’t know we needed. For things to truly be done differently is going to require a completely different way of thinking and approaching things — even to the point of questioning the models we use. Just because they’ve been used, or just because they’re from the places we live and work, does that mean they’re the right ones that serve everyone? This follow-on question is going to be hard, because trying to timeframe anything just feels impossible right now. But if I were to say: how do you see the role of the CEO changing in the next decade? I know sometimes you can’t think beyond a year at the moment, but if we do try and put the decade in there — how do you see the role of the CEO changing?
Jane Ide 39:25
I honestly and genuinely I don’t think I could foresee it, and one of the things I was just thinking about as you were throwing me that question was how time is telescoping inward, and I was just thinking, so go again, go back to this point. I promise this is coming back to your question, but going back to the point about the Gen Z, or the Gen Alter, or the Gen Beta, or the.. I don’t know, whatever. I remember really clearly, and again, this goes back to that first experience I had of working at a senior level, where the leadership of the organisation understood, or is better.. As it possibly would at that point understood about culture and one of the things we had to do as a whole leadership team was to deliver some quite major change inside the organisation and I can remember standing in the car park talking to a colleague who was just out for goodness sake you know these old guys they’ve been around for 20 years, they don’t like change. They’re not going to go there. They’re just such dinosaurs. And I don’t know what prompted it, but I looked at this colleague and I said, “You do realise one day we’re going to be the dinosaurs. And I’ve never forgotten that. And, of course, the reality is again, but if you’re not willing to adapt, and if you don’t make the active choice to go on adapting as you get older, you will become the dinosaur, but I think the thing is, I had 30 years in which to become a dinosaur. When you were talking, you said it almost as a passing moment. You said something about Jen Alphas, time has been and gone, is now Generation Beta, and I’m thinking, how the hell does that feel for somebody who’s, I don’t know, whatever, Jen Alford definition is 20 years old or whatever, that already, but I see that, and I see that there is that sense that time is everything is moving so much faster now that you can be a dinosaur within five years if you’re not careful, and and so I think whatever the future of leadership looks like, some of it will change, some of it won’t. I mean, I look back a while ago, it’s Kevos’ 40th birthday next year, and for our 30th birthday, we published a series of blogs, I think it was, you know, talking about, you know, 30 things to be thinking about, and it’s quite noticeable how most of those, with a little bit of tweaking, you could just pop, we could just publish them again next year, and nobody did know the difference, almost, because the things that people were worried about then very much, you know, the same as they are now. So, in that sense, I think some things won’t change, but I think it is the world that will have changed, and therefore, as leaders, and as leaders of a sector that is here solely to respond to the needs of the world around us, that is the only reason we exist to make the world a better place, in whatever way, shape, or form that lands on our particular desks. I think that is the thing that we can’t foresee, and I remember we’ve just delivered ACEVO Fest, which is our two-day conference, annual conference, and my first ACEVO conference as host in, actually, technically in 2023 One of our speakers was Margaret Heffernan, who has written extensively, is really well regarded as a, as a somebody who helps us navigate the future, and she basically said you can’t predict the future, but you can prepare for it, and she was talking about that context of what hadn’t been done pre-pandemic, and it was that, and of course, in 2023 it was still again going back to our own concept, it’s still very live, it was very much in people’s minds, and you know what lessons can we be learning, and it was very much this very strong message of you learn, you prepare for the unpredictable future by practising innovation, by practising adaptability, by encouraging and helping your colleagues and your team and your board and yourself to to try things that are different to be for me to be comfortable with change and challenge, because if you’re prepared for change, you can handle whatever the change is.
Jane Ide 43:34
It doesn’t really matter what the detail of that change is. One of the things we all as leaders have to think about right now — and this ties into something else somebody said to me a while ago — is that we seem to have had this golden age of stability, but actually that was the blip. That wasn’t the normal. The level of change, the level of uncertainty, the level of pressure we’re experiencing right now: this is what normal actually is. So there’s no point harking back for something that is never going to happen. What we have to do is be prepared for it. Maybe to give a slightly different answer — the thing we have to absolutely hold on to, whatever changes are ahead, is what I’ve described in the past as our north star: our values, our mission, our purpose. Because your purpose as a leader of a charity or civil society organisation might adapt and change. The things people need from us now are not what they might have needed from us fifty years ago. The values that underpin that, our willingness to stand firm by our values — even if the way we describe them changes, even if we find ourselves having to think differently — that matters. Just as a very simple example, ACEVO’s values didn’t used to include inclusion. That was added in relatively recent times, because it wasn’t something people were thinking about at that point, but now it is. There will no doubt be something else we will have to think about in terms of our values. But having that sense of being a values-led sector, with an ethical foundation, with an intent — we don’t always meet it — but an intent to do things the right way, to the very best of our ability, for the sake of the people and causes we’re here to serve: that’s got to be the thing we hold on absolutely firm to. Because if we let that go, there’s no point in being here. That, for me, is the thing we hold on to as we go through the stormy seasons, the challenging times, and the change around us — the exciting, the negative, whatever it might
Kiran Kaur 45:58
be. Oh, there are so many things you said, Jane, that I was thinking, if only we could do a part two, three, and four. There are so many topics — we could stay on the generations one, we could stay on the pandemic, we could stay on the shifts and tides. But I want to end on one last question. You used the word pressure just now, so: when the pressure is high, what is the thing that helps you stay anchored as a leader? I think that would be a really nice thing to tie this conversation up with. We all need an anchor — and you said it at the beginning, that thing away from work, whether that’s physical space or that balance. Right now more than ever, understanding our anchors, understanding our balance is truly, truly vital.
Jane Ide 46:55
You’re absolutely right. Professionally, if I’ve got a challenging situation in my work life that I need to resolve, I always come back to: how does this serve the mission? What’s the way forward that serves our purpose? That’s a really helpful guiding light, whether I’m not sure how to take something to a board or whether I’ve got to have a difficult conversation with a colleague. That’s really helpful. But outside of that, I’m very thankful in a way that I didn’t come into a chief executive role until the later part of my career. I love all the younger chief executives we have around — they bring so much energy and passion and excitement and new thinking, and it’s brilliant — but one of the advantages of coming into it later in life is knowing that this is not all of me. I have other parts of my life: my family, two sons who I absolutely adore, my allotment, my dogs, being able to walk out of my front door, my health. One of the things I think younger leaders sometimes haven’t learned — and actually quite a lot of more experienced leaders haven’t learned either — is you have to switch off. You have to put boundaries around your non-working time. My leave is my leave. Of course I can be contacted if there’s a major crisis, but I don’t work in an environment with those sorts of crises — I’ve done that before. Going back to that first experience of leadership: I was working in an ambulance service, running the press office, literally on call 365 days a year, and it was life and death. I think that gave me a perspective on every job I’ve done since that nothing was ever going to be quite as time-critical or life-critical as that, and so nothing else is important enough for me to sacrifice my well-being for. I commit to delivering to the very best of my ability, and I’m very happy to do that because I love the job, but I protect myself as well. If I don’t do that, I can’t do the job, I can’t be the leader I need to be. I’ve got a little note to myself — something I want to write about in one of my weekly blogs for members — because somebody I was talking to earlier this week described it as the CEO’s dilemma: how do you look after yourself in order to protect your organisation? Because sometimes it feels like a sacrifice, but it’s not a sacrifice. It’s absolutely essential.
Kiran Kaur 49:48
That was such a wholesome way to end, and a really important reminder. Because at the end of it all, when we talk about the future, the challenges, the past — at the end of it all, we are human beings at the core. We have lives and things that exist outside of our roles. It takes me back to something my meditation teacher once said to me, a life philosophy: be in it, not of it. I carried that through into my CEO role early on, especially because I was so attached — my identity was what I do, is my organisation. That philosophy gave me permission to detach and say, like you said, I can absolutely do my very best, I can have all the passion and everything in the world that I give to it, but outside of that I also exist as a human being. I’m really glad you said that. I think now, where pressure feels really high and people are feeling things in so many ways — and there might be guilt if you don’t feel like your whole world is the work or the mission — it’s important for CEOs to really understand that balance is key and well-being is number one. To be able to serve others, like you said, we have to be well enough to do that in the first place. That was just the best way to end not only this episode but the series as a whole. Like I said at the beginning — no pressure, Jane — but you have ended what the season’s message is, and I think that’s probably the best way to have closed it. It’s been such a lovely conversation to get to know you in this way, and to talk about things that, had we crossed paths on a regular work Zoom call or LinkedIn, I don’t think I would have known so much about you in this depth. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to have spoken to you, and to be a part of this podcast. Thank you so much for your time, and for talking to me today.
Jane Ide 51:59
Oh, thank you, Kiran. It’s been an absolute joy talking to you. I’ve really enjoyed it. And thank you as well, and a nod to Janet. This new series has been a bit of an experiment for us in terms of format, and I’m really excited about it. I hope everybody listening has found it valuable. Thank you, it’s been lovely talking to you.