Lasting leadership
Featured: Succession planning resources for you and your teams.
Part Four of our Sustainable Impact guide.
Workshop update: Guest speakers and new partners announced!
ICYMI: View our newsletter archive with all of the summer's news and resources.
|
|
Succession planning
This newsletter is all about succession: it's one of the four components of Lasting Leadership and it links to this week's Domain of sustainable impact.
|
|
|
Succession planning guide
This short PDF is a companion to the related section of the Lasting Leadership Guide. Discover the core principles and take straightforward steps.
|
|
Workshop notes
We've got standalone workshops for each of the Lasting Leadership capabilities (Lateral Leadership; Equalities; Attracting the Next Generation; Succession). Download notes from the recent Succession Planning pilot below and sign up for the next two masterclasses here.
|
|
Workshops and exciting news!
|
|
Lasting Difference masterclasses
We're thrilled to announce Merida Associates as the first consultancy licensed to use the Lasting Difference toolkit in their work. Polly Goodwin and Karen Garry from Merida join us as special guest speakers in the first of our upcoming sustainability masterclasses.
Based in the West Midlands, they were experts in Theory of Change years before it took off and they share our values. We're super excited about what we can learn together. Join us if you can:
|
|
|
Join our next e-learning cohort
Final Lasting Difference e-learning programme of 2020: starts October.
Learn in your own time - six hour course. Participatory activities with exclusive resources. Additional online interaction. Just £50+Vat!
|
|
|
Sustainable impact
Part 4 of 7:
Our organisations won't be around forever.
|
|
|
This series is about the 7 Domains of Sustainable Impact. Having explored individual factors, people and services, we turn to organisations. This is an abbreviated version for ease of reading. You can view the whole article online.
|
|
Provocations:
- Why was your organisation set up?
- Why does it still exist?
- How long does it plan to be around?
- What would happen if it focused on nothing else but its mission?
|
|
Putting ourselves out of a job?
Burning with punk passion, the Manic Street Preachers originally promised to split up after their debut album in 1992. They’re still going. Grey beards, acoustic guitars. Chwarae teg, as they say in Wales - fair play, success changed their goals, but it’s not what they set out for.
|
|
|
Many non-profits talk about doing themselves out of a job. I don’t know any that have made this rhetoric a reality, though I was once involved in creating a charity’s 10-year strategy, after which it promised to wind up. The issue would be mainstreamed in other organisations’ practice (the Fifth Domain), communities would be empowered to take action (the Seventh). Job done. Until, 10 years later. Guess what, the next strategy came out.
|
|
If our organisations are interested in making a lasting difference, shouldn’t they invest as much attention in putting themselves out of business as they do in keeping themselves going?
|
|
|
What would happen if your organisation focused on nothing else but achieving its mission? Would it still do the things it does, in the same ways? Would it use its resources differently? Is this a strange question? Or is it possible you spend time every day in activities that only contribute vaguely to your mission, if at all?
|
|
|
|
Our organisations won't be around for ever and we need to start planning and operating on that basis. Not because their demise is imminent (though it may be), but because they don’t have an inbuilt right to exist. Their only purpose is to pursue and achieve their aims, not to keep themselves going.
|
|
Strategy
Strategic decisions are as much about what you won’t do as what you will. They often mean letting go of things: for example old habits and beliefs; attractive but distracting opportunities; the need to be all things to all people.
|
|
|
|
Do some simple analysis of how your time is spent, where your money comes from and where it goes. Whatever your Strategic Plan might say, your true strategy will be reflected in these results – they are always revealing.
|
|
Keep your mission at the centre
As Stephen Covey said, ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.’ Keep your focus on the mission and use that to guide your choices.
No matter how big it seems, your mission is only impossible if it’s invisible.
|
|
|
In September our focus will be on 'The System'! Things that funders, commissioners and policy makers can do about sustainability. In the next edition:
- Sustainable Impact Part Five: Other organisations being more able to respond and take a lead.
|
|
|
|
|
