Putting your purpose into practice

Image

I feel like there has been an increase in the last five or so years of leaders coming into this sector from outside the charity world. Some take to it like ducks to water, but others sometimes just don’t have the authenticity needed to become the purposeful leader that charities inherently need.

Even if that sense of purpose comes to you and your charity quite naturally, you still have to work hard to ensure it has the desired effect across your organisation. I’m constantly trying to keep that purpose – which is to help everyone have the best later life that they possibly can – at the heart of what we do.

Key to that is something about which I’ve been very vocal, person-centred leadership. In an organisation like this, I think very hard about how exactly my leadership style serves the older people which we exist to support, in particular how I’m enabling our 150 employees and 600 volunteers to serve those people.

Purposeful leadership has to be visible – and a leader has to be resilient and continue to lead with that sense of purpose during the tough times as well as the good ones. In our sector this is also compounded by having to consider how to keep volunteers, who are the backbone of charities, motivated and engaged. This means being innovative, flexible and creative, and also having enough awareness of self to keep reflecting on personal leadership style.

Even if a sense of purpose comes quite naturally, you have to work hard to keep it at the heart of what you do.

Shared ownership of purpose

Allied to this are the concepts of co-production and shared ownership. We want to ensure that in everything we do as an organisation, there is a sense of shared ownership and common purpose between everyone both inside the charity and the outside. And so, our strategy has to be coproduced with the broadest group of stakeholders possible to ensure our destination is owned by our whole ecosystem. It’s not just about me at the top of the organisation deciding what happens – I’m very much trying to move away from that old style of command-and-control leadership – the ‘I’m the leader, I’m going to decide’ way of doing things.

This form of leadership is certainly not as simple as more traditional approaches to leadership. There’s a lot more balancing, thinking, and the need to be receptive to diverse viewpoints.

That old style of command-and-control leadership – ‘I’m the leader, I’m going to decide’ – isn’t the right way to lead.

Different perspectives

Those different perspectives are so important – I make sure I’m maintaining strong relationships with people both outside of my organisation and beyond the charity sector – private sector, NHS, government, and so on. Connecting with people from outside the sector is a great way to learn.

It’s particularly important for an organisation such as this operating in a specific geography, on a peninsula, where people can be quite insular. But of course, all organisations can be introspective.

We all need to make sure our organisations are the opposite of that - recreating the organisation on a constant cycle, ensuring that there isn’t complacency and a tendency to just do things the old way.

I’m very clear that you never stop learning in leadership. Covid-19 is a perfect example of why. There’s nobody in any organisation who was really prepared for what it would mean. I don’t think without the engagement I’ve had with other sectors through Pilotlight and the perspectives I’ve taken in, that our response could have been as strong as it has been. It’s also important to embrace the ability to change. Leaders for whom new things are scary, won’t be faring well in this pandemic. And they won’t fare well once it passes, either.

I look beyond Covid-19 and while a lot of people are thinking in terms of ‘restoration’ or going ‘back to normal’, I’m very clear that we’re not going backwards towards anything, we’ll be going forward to create a new, more appropriate, better future for the people we serve embodying all of the lessons we’ve learned from the pandemic.

Jay Anderson is the Chief Executive of Age UK Wirral. He joined the organisation, which is an independent charity and a brand partner of the national network of Age UK organisations, in 2001. Initially the Information Services Co-ordinator, he has since held a number of different roles and became Chief Executive in December 2015.