The charity sector is three times less likely to invest in leadership development than private sector bodies, and is being damaged as a result, according to a report published today.
The report, Leadership Development in the Third Sector: Bridging Supply and Demand, is published by Clore Social Leadership, and finds that charities spend at most 50 pence in every £100 of income on leadership development. The typical figure is more like 10 to 40 pence.
The report was based on research involving almost 500 charities and social enterprises. It was written by Richard Harries, and supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Barrow Cadbury Trust, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Acevo.
Shaks Ghosh, director of Clore Social Leadership, wrote today that her organisation has developed a 12-step strategy to grow social leadership and improve investment.
What the report said
"What emerges from this report is a landscape where leadership is recognised as an issue critical not only to success of the individual respondents, but to the sector as a whole. However, both time and money are in short supply and this is restricting levels of investment, with charities and social enterprises spending at most 0.5 per cent of their annual income on leadership development.
"Charities and social enterprises were also asked how much they spent on leadership development. Despite many individual comments about the affordability of training, relatively few respondents actually spent nothing at all.
"For medium and large organisations, the most likely response was between £1,001 and £5,000; for major organisations it was some ten times larger. In practice, this would suggest that respondents are typically spending between 0.1 per cent and 0.4 per cent of their annual income on leadership development
"It is not surprising to find that seven in ten respondents’ report undertaking some form of development activity over the previous 12 months. Again, however, this proportion varies considerably by size of organisation: from well under 50 per cent of those with an income less than £500,000 to nearly 90 per cent of those with an income over £5m."
