When Mark Simms wrote recently about “beige leadership” in the charity sector, I recognised a lot of what he described. But I think we need to look again at what – and who – is actually causing this.
I have also sat through countless charity events where the same panellists agree with each other or offer the same inoffensive answers.
I have invited leaders of major organisations onto my podcast, For Impact: the Charity Podcast, to speak on controversial subjects and been told they would rather not put their “head above the parapet”.
But the problem isn’t that the charity sector has somehow stopped producing courageous or distinctive leaders, consultants or thinkers.
The problem is that our sector concentrates power in institutions that are resistant to change and, as a result, rewards people who paint within the lines and avoid difficult conversations. Those people are more likely to be promoted, appointed to powerful roles and platformed.
When our system discourages and overlooks disruptive and original thinking, we shouldn’t blame the people in the system. We should look at the system itself.
You can succeed in any colour, as long as it’s beige
For a sector that spends so much time talking about participation, empowerment and shifting power, our own governance structures remain hierarchical and stuck in the past.
The standard charity model is a hangover from the male-dominated corporate boardroom. We tell chief executives to be bold, entrepreneurial and prepared to challenge injustice while placing them inside governance systems built around hierarchy, oversight, risk and control.
We imposed a for-profit structure on a for-impact context and failed to make the necessary adaptations.
Those structures both constrain people already in leadership and help determine who succeeds in the first place.
If making the board uncomfortable is treated as a leadership problem, we are selecting for safety. And if a CEO knows that saying something controversial might result in a closed board session followed by vague invoices arriving from law firms for “employment advice”, it is hardly surprising if that CEO decides to be a little more beige next time.
Meanwhile, our sector has an outspoken and active consultancy culture, because once we are no longer trying to keep a single board comfortable, we are much freer to speak up.
Who gets to speak for the sector?
Attending major charity conferences or sitting around board tables of the great and the good do not give you a representative sample of charity leadership. Instead, they demonstrate who gets access to power and platforms. But are big charity leaders the ones with the most to say?
What about small and medium charity leaders, who work at the coalface? Or consultants who see the same problems arise in dozens of their clients? How often do we see them platformed over leaders of large institutions, or consultants who don’t tend to shake the tree?
We need to acknowledge that the people who rise are very often those regarded as safe, who play the game in a way that is palatable to those holding power and who then become the next defenders of the status quo.
Given this, we should hardly be surprised if repeatedly platforming those at the top produces safe and repetitive conversations.
Protecting the beige status quo
Then there is the Charity Commission.
One of its core roles is to maintain public confidence in the sector, but it is profoundly conservative, rigid and closed to innovation.
We know our governance model is exclusionary. Our trustee diversity statistics are appalling, and our voluntary governance model inevitably privileges those with more time and funds.
The Australian charity regulator lets charities decide whether or not to pay their board members, putting the trust in charities to make the decision that works for them.
But what happens at UK sector events when someone asks whether targeted payment could enable a wider range of people to serve?
I have seen these questions repeatedly shut down by commission representatives. Instead of being open to conversations about what might be possible, the person asking the question is simply told “no”.
That is what it looks like when our key sector institution does not just embody beige but actively forces everyone else to be beige too.
Time to platform other perspectives
With all the challenges we face today, society needs an innovative and brave charity sector more than ever. The good news is that innovative and brave people are already here in abundance.
They are running charities, campaigning, consulting, questioning and pushing at boundaries across the sector. They continue to do this despite the system that rewards conformity, gives disproportionate access to safe voices, and too often stifles new ideas.
If we want less beige, we need to be prepared to put people on a stage who may not keep everyone comfortable, and give access to those who will challenge the premise of the conversation rather than reinforce it. And we need to be brutally honest about the structures that hold our sector back.
The non-beige sector is already here. It’s time we started letting it into the rooms that matter.
Felicia Willow is a charity governance, strategy and crisis expert and founder of Interims for Impact, which places interim leaders, co-pilots and specialist advisers, while supporting boards throughout the process. She is also the creator and co-host of For Impact: the Charity Podcast, supported by the Benefact Group.
