The impact on leaders’ wellbeing
Many leaders want to create cultures of openness and authenticity within their organisations. Staff should bring their whole selves to work; they should feel safe to express themselves and share their challenges, both personal and professional.
Modelling this kind of culture as a leader is difficult.
Leaders in all charities struggle to balance their visible humanity with being a trusted, confident leader who is able, when required, to make difficult decisions.
CEOs may feel that to be authentic, they should be honest and open – at the same time, it might not be appropriate to share business or personal struggles across the organisation. Expressing vulnerability and being approachable can mean feeling pressure to ‘rescue’ the people within the organisation who need support. These feelings are in constant tension for charity leaders. They feel acute pressure to be personable, and guilt when they cannot be.
For CEOs this can be combined with feeling the pressure to put the organisation first and deliver as much as possible, especially as state support in areas such as social care, mental health and youth services has decreased while demand continues to rise. Pressure from donors to spend money wisely and media coverage about the ‘privileges’ of being a charity compounds the need to pursue the best working cultures possible, while delivering low-cost services and keeping overheads down. In many organisations the CEO is the only member of staff, and therefore this pressure is particularly acutely felt. Juggling so many key operational issues and organisational reputation often means that the last priority is CEO well-being.
There are also unique challenges around well-being and knowing what is normal for new CEOs. Most first-time CEOs will start in a smaller or perhaps younger organisation; these organisations can also lack infrastructure and second-in-command support. New CEOs may need to make very difficult decisions that directly impact staff wellbeing, especially if they join an organisation needing large-scale change. It is easy for first-time CEOs to attach shame to redundancies and restructuring, as they are simultaneously responsible for staff wellbeing but need to take decisions that may cause staff harm. For all CEOs, but particularly for CEOs doing this for the first time, spaces where they can seek reassurance from others in the same situation and know they are not alone are crucial.
The first steps to finding that reassurance is taking an individual responsibility to share your challenges visibly with other leaders. In some sense this enables CEOs to give one another ‘peer permission’ to switch off and leave work alone. This personal responsibility could manifest in many ways: it could be sharing with all staff that you are leaving early, or taking a mental heath day; it could be an email signature explaining that if you send emails late at night or at weekends, you will have already or will in the future take the time back; or it could be making the most of peer-learning events, setting up a WhatsApp group with other leaders to share experiences, or taking on a new hobby. Whatever you decide to do, talking about it really helps. Knowing we are not alone is the first step to changing our own situation.
The CEO role is unique – in most charities, the buck stops with the CEO. This is stressful and lonely, but also a role full of joy and pride.
Sustaining the CEO’s positive energy in their role should be seen as a managerial responsibility of trustees. Even if they cannot monitor day-to-day operations, boards can take the lead on promoting positive organisational cultures, by granting leaders the permission needed to take time off, support themselves, and in times of crisis share the load.
We explore the role of governance and strategy later in this report.
