I have spent much of the past year moving between conferences, board meetings, roundtables, strategy days and the various gatherings that seem to occupy an ever-growing proportion of life in the charity sector.
The venues differ, the speakers change and the coffee varies in quality but the conversations themselves are often strikingly similar. Whether the subject is funding, safeguarding, workforce pressures, commissioning, public trust, governance or the latest political announcement, a familiar set of concerns emerges and, more noticeably, a familiar set of responses.
The people participating in those discussions are usually thoughtful, committed and highly capable. Yet I found myself leaving one such event last year with a nagging sense that I had heard the same conversation many times before. It might have been a conference, leadership forum or one of the countless panel discussions that now populate our calendars. What stayed with me was the uncomfortable feeling that, had I closed my eyes, I might have struggled to identify who was speaking.
The language was familiar. The assumptions were familiar. Even the disagreements felt familiar. Nobody said anything objectionable. Equally, very little that was said felt particularly distinctive. There was a broad consensus about the challenges facing the sector and an equally broad consensus about the solutions.
It left an impression on me because it touches on something I have been observing for some time. After more than 35 years working in and around charities, I increasingly wonder whether, in becoming more professional, more accountable and more sophisticated, we have also become more uniform.
Distinct personalities
This is not an argument for a return to the past. The sector I entered as a newly qualified mental health nurse in 1990 was, in many respects, a far less effective place than the one we inhabit today. Charities now are generally better governed, better managed and more accountable than they have ever been. Leadership has become more professional and organisations are stronger as a result.
Yet progress rarely arrives without bringing new challenges in its wake. When I think back to many of the leaders I encountered during the early years of my career, what strikes me is not that they were necessarily better than today's leaders. Quite often they were not.
What they possessed, however, was a strong sense of individuality. They had distinct personalities, distinct views and distinct ways of seeing the world. You have might disagreed with them, occasionally quite strongly, but you were rarely left uncertain about what they believed or what they stood for.
Leadership is not simply a technical exercise, it is not a just a collection of competencies, behaviours and frameworks. Good leadership ought to leave an impression, it should shape organisations, influence culture and move people. It should involve judgement, courage and conviction. Most importantly, it should be visible.
I do not mean visible in the modern sense of personal branding or constant self-promotion. Some of the finest leaders I have worked alongside would have been horrified by the idea of becoming influencers.
What I mean is that people should know what matters to their leaders. They should know what they care about, what they are prepared to defend and where their red lines sit. Leadership should not pass unnoticed.
Human challenges
Increasingly, however, I find myself wondering whether the sector has become so focused on producing competent leaders that it has become less comfortable with distinctive ones.
The analogy that comes to mind is beige.
Beige is a perfectly respectable colour. It offends nobody, it sits comfortably alongside almost everything else, it is practical, sensible and reassuringly unlikely to generate disagreement. If a committee cannot agree on a colour scheme, beige will often emerge as the compromise position.
The difficulty is that nobody remembers beige and more importantly, nobody builds movements around it.
The causes charities exist to address are not beige. Homelessness is not beige, poverty is not beige, mental ill health is not beige and social injustice certainly is not beige. They are complex, uncomfortable and deeply human challenges that require leaders capable of doing more than managing the status quo.
Pressure to be liked
Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in the way we now recruit, develop and promote leaders. The sector has created its own leadership merry go round, same podcasts, same panel discussions, same recruiters, same professional networks and the same names appearing on conference programmes year after year. None of this is inherently problematic yet it creates powerful incentives towards conformity.
Leaders are expected not only to run organisations but also to cultivate profiles, they are expected to contribute to debates, comment on current events, appear on panels, maintain social media accounts and demonstrate thought leadership. In some quarters there is a subtle but unmistakable pressure to be seen, to be heard and perhaps most importantly, to be liked.
The result is that leadership can begin to resemble a perpetual popularity contest, not in any crude sense but in the way that all public environments encourage people to read the room before speaking, align themselves with prevailing opinion and avoid positions that might attract criticism.
Social media amplifies this tendency because approval arrives quickly and publicly, agreement attracts likes, reposts and applause. Disagreement often attracts something rather different and none of us are entirely immune to that dynamic.
The irony is that the sector often talks about authentic leadership while creating conditions that reward performative leadership. We should not be surprised if some leaders begin optimising for approval when it has become one of the currencies of success.
Lack of individuality
Few sectors spend more time discussing diversity than the charity sector and rightly so. For too long many leadership teams failed to reflect the communities they served, progress has been hard won and remains unfinished.
Yet I sometimes wonder whether, alongside those efforts, we have become less comfortable with another form of diversity: individuality. The people who make us stop and think, people who challenge assumptions, people who arrive at different conclusions, people who do not quite fit the mould.
A sector that prides itself on inclusion can occasionally be uncomfortable with genuine difference, particularly when that extends beyond background and into thought, behaviour and perspective.
We celebrate difference while quietly rewarding conformity and that should concern us because charities do not exist to preserve the status quo. They exist to challenge it.
The longer I spend in this sector, the more convinced I become that we do not have a competence problem. We may, however, be developing a conviction problem.
The answer is not to abandon professionalism or romanticise a past that was often deeply flawed. The challenge is to retain the benefits of stronger governance, greater accountability and better leadership development without creating a culture that rewards conformity above courage.
That may require us to become more curious about people who make us uncomfortable. It may require boards to place a little more value on originality and a less on familiarity. It may require recruiters to ask themselves whether they are selecting the best candidate or simply the one who most resembles the last appointment.
Most of all, it may require us to remember that leadership is supposed to be noticed because causes that change the world have rarely been led by people content to blend into the background.
Beige goes with almost everything. The difficulty is that nobody ever changed very much with it.
