The charity sector is “particularly vulnerable” to hiring unsuitable leaders based on their past experience, a leadership expert said yesterday.
Geraldine Kilbride, a business psychologist and specialist in leadership behaviour at the London Business School, said organisations often hire based on a person’s job history and whether they have done the same role somewhere else.
Kilbride was speaking at an event in London yesterday, entitled What does real leadership look like? organised by the Resource Alliance.
“I think the NGO sector is particularly vulnerable to hiring based on past experience,” she said. “Particularly from the private sector, thinking the situations are replicable and matchable. But unfortunately they’re not.”
Kilbride, who is also programme director of the Resource Alliance’s Future Leaders Programme, said other organisations promote leaders internally, but this can also lead to people with the wrong skills being pushed up the job ladder.
She said research on hiring leaders internally was “consistent and scary”, finding 50 per cent of those promoted within will fail to cut it once they have to manage managers.
Her advice for hiring externally was to look for a broad range of experiences, use personality testing and role-modelling situations.
“Leadership is a rare commodity,” she said and because we are evolutionarily geared to seek leadership, we will pick people, who are often not the right people.
“The bright side of personalities, socially confident people, interview well,” she said. “It’s like some marriages, you hire, or marry, the bright, sunny person and then you get Frankenstein or the monster. And your organisation suffers.”
When promoting people internally she said, using the example of fundraisers: “Give your key fundraisers different things to do, spread their experience base. Challenge them by putting them in new circumstances and new functions because that increases their mental bandwidth, which increases their likelihood of success.”
Women leaders and development goals
Justina Mutale, founder and chief executive of Positive Runway, a global campaign to stop the spread of HIV/Aids that gets it message across to young people by working with models, fashion designers, musicians, and celebrities, also spoke at the event.
She said that women had been heavily involved in development work for decades but “continue to be denied access to leadership positions”.
She said NGOs must engage women at all levels, from decision-making through to frontline projects, in order to stay relevant.
She highlighted the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s report on the post-2015 development agenda. She said the document showed it was vital ensure the full participation of women and girls in the economic, political and public spheres.
“For decades women have been involved in international development efforts as participants, professionals, volunteers, activists, and yet within these efforts women continue to be denied access to leadership positions,” she said.
“To remain relevant NGOs should engage women at all levels from decision-making right through the project delivery and management. Nothing is as important today in development as adequate recognition of political, economic, and social participation and leadership of women.”
Mutale said there are not enough women in leadership roles due to a lack of training, education and leadership development.
She said women’s empowerment was “intrinsically bound” to economic growth, education, food security, environmental sustainability, peace-building and governance.
She spoke of entrenched gender inequalities that mean the majority of people living in poverty are women. She said while women do two thirds of the world’s work and produce half of its food, they only earn 10 per cent of the world’s income.
“Not only are their interests under-represented, their skills, ingenuity resilience and knowledge are unused,” she said. “Raising women’s voices, increasing their influence and making decision-making more accountable to women are needed to overcome poverty and hunger and ensure sustainable development.”
