Imagine this. You are the newly recruited chair of a charity. How are you going to move the charity forward in the direction required and from where will you access the support you need to successfully deliver your new role?

Our recent The Future Charity Chair: A research project looked ahead to the mid-2030’s and aimed to ascertain what the role of the charity chair will look like in the future.

We foresaw a rewarding but challenging role. We found a complex future environment with a series of ongoing trends leading to an even more demanding future. Small to medium sized charities were quite pessimistic. There was some recognition of opportunities identified by the larger charities, but the overall outlook was one of challenge and uncertainty.

Our collaborative report explored the current challenges facing charity chairs and the upcoming obstacles anticipated for future leaders. The research gathered the voices and experiences of 61 charity chairs in England and Wales together with 23 representatives of organisations that support them. Guided by the expertise within the project Steering Group, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with chairs followed by seven facilitated group discussions and a review of publicly available recent and relevant publications.

Our reseachers found that to effectively navigate what is to come, the role of the chair and chairs themselves will need to continually evolve and develop. The research underpinning the report sought to understand how the role of the chair might be reimagined to meet those future needs.

A distinctive leadership role
The research underscored the vital nature of the chair’s role as a leader, made more distinctive through being voluntary and holding collective responsibility along with their fellow trustees. It is an important leadership role that sits at the very heart of charity leadership and governance, and plays an essential part in shaping how charities respond to opportunities and challenges – ensuring they are sufficiently resilient and impactful.

Great charity chairs deal with the uncertainty of tomorrow

Challenges were identified in balancing the demands of the current environment with the need to future gaze to maintain a robust and sustainable organisation.

At our recent launch event, a young charity leader spoke out about his experiences as a new chair who in his words “doesn’t fit the average mould”. He raised the point of having to deal “with the uncertainties of tomorrow” and how these must be thought about by the board. He highlighted the challenges he had found in ensuring that both the known and the uncertain future were addressed equally well. The report findings concur, highlighting that to do this well there is a need for flexible and new approaches, an appetite to embrace change and an ability for foresight skills and techniques.

The link between innovation and diversity.

In our report, Dame Julia Cleverdon DCVO CBE sums it up nicely. “For charity sustainability there needs to be ongoing innovation. The most impactful charities understand that innovation is best done through diversity and diverse experiences. Therefore, how a chair is recruited and how they in turn lead their board to collectively recruit talent will make all the difference to whether a real diversity of views is heard.”

Dame Julia is right. In terms of progressing and maintaining a charity’s impact, a board needs to marry the challenges of today with being forward-thinking, and long-term planning for its leadership should be no less of a prime consideration.

We need to take a closer look at how to ‘open up’ boards and establish where their future leaders could be found and who they might be.

Build and maintain a charity chairs pipeline

The report talks about a real concern of where the pipeline of charity chairs will come from. Failure to pay attention to the future pipeline of chairs could lead to fewer people coming forward and increase the number of ill-suited candidates. There is a need to explore more widely where the future leaders are.

The role of a current chair and their board needs to be proactive, not reactive, in addressing the future pipeline, in offering support and reducing the onus on an individual getting themselves into a ready position to become chair.

Current chairs should encourage a collective board approach to look harder at where to find the chairs of the future. Everyone on the board needs to proactively seek to expand networks beyond their own circle, proactively meeting people from other communities, sectors, or organisations. Conversations and meetings need to identify more interesting and influential people as well as to understand what, if any, barriers exist to these people joining the board.

Networks full of loose ties are more effective and more productive than those with strong ties and lots of overlap.

Change the status quo

The report also asserts that we need to shake things up and change the status quo if future generations are to be motivated to join a charity board and aspire to a leadership role.
There are exceptional young leaders who have such a range of life experience, and we must do more to not only recruit them, but to listen, recognise and identify the barriers to them embracing charity governance. There is a need for more learning about what the motivations will be for future generations to aspire to the chair’s role and what support and reward structures (beyond the “to pay or not to pay” debate) will need to be in place to enable them to fully participate.

Provision of support

I believe that we can achieve all these things, and it starts with an open learning mindset: one that looks forward, that embraces enhanced connectivity, and does not shy away from the uncertainty that will lie ahead.

Accessible and appropriate support will be required, and our research identified that leadership development and foresight skills to inform strategic decision-making will be of particular importance. It is not about being able to predict the future but having the skills and tools to explore possible future developments and be better prepared.

Support is already present in many forms. There are piecemeal efforts already in place that have proved their worth. Now is the time for these efforts to be more joined up and taken to scale through engaging more support organisations and cross-sector players. Renewed sector effort is required to share existing resources and to improve signposting to that which is already available.

If the charity chairs are to succeed tomorrow, they need support to look ahead, today.

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