Britain's Charities Got Talent?

In early March 2020, when I first asked on LinkedIn for people to contact me with their own experiences demonstrating instances of good and bad Talent Management in UK charities and social enterprises, the charity sector was thriving. Yes, there were rumours of an illness in China, I first heard the dreaded word ‘coronavirus’ at the muted Chinese New Year celebrations in January in London.

A changed national landscape for charities

Since I asked my question on LinkedIn, the landscape for charities and social enterprises has completely changed. On the 8th April, the government announced a funding package to support charities, of ￡750m, and there is an additional ￡300m brought forward by the National Lottery Community Fund. But the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, NCVO, has estimated that UK charities stand to lose ￡4.3 billion in 12 weeks (data from the Institute of Fundraising survey of charities) so there is a clear, massive funding gap.

Pain at local level

Those may be the national headline figures but the pain at local level is palpable. A local charity I know well because I volunteer with it, serving as Treasurer, has a large foodbank and day-care services for the elderly, several projects for people with mental health issues, a community café, and projects for children and youth. The day-care services and projects had to stop immediately. The foodbank carried on for a week and then went completely delivery-based, using the buses and drivers that used to bring elderly people to the centre, to deliver food instead. Supermarkets could no longer donate unused stock to the foodbank, as they had no unused stock, and demand, which had always been strong, went sky high.

Income plummeted and demand shot up, and remains unsustainably high.

Crisis management

For this small charity and nearly every other charity and social enterprise in the land, most chief executives and senior managers are thinking fast, firefighting and trying to plan in an incredibly difficult situation, fraught with uncertainty. Supporting the people who depend on the charity is paramount, organisational survival is next, and managing talent has surely fallen off the priority list altogether.

Has talent management fallen off the agenda?

Surprisingly, another effect of many people suddenly working from home or furloughed, is that the number of responses to my request for instances of good and bad talent management has been higher than expected. The strong response, and thoughtfulness of most of the responses, appears to be because anyone who works for a charity or social enterprise cares a great deal about how the charity’s resources of money and people are used. Or it could just be that many people unexpectedly have weeks of new, enforced reflection time. Whatever people’s reasons, their emailed contributions have only just stopped coming in, having reached 43.

How can it possibly matter now?

I wasn’t going to write up this particular blog at this time until one of my regular consultancy clients, a Chief Executive of a medium sized charity, mentioned that actually, Talent Management had risen to the top of her mind at the moment. She had learned so much about her management and staff team in the past few weeks, about their commitment, adaptability, innovative ideas and sheer grit, and even the personal circumstances they are navigating, that she was mentally reassessing her talent management strategy, and wanted to keep doing this when things return to relative normality. She was also doing some deep thinking about her own role in the charity, about succession, and about nurturing others.

Managing talent could be relevant right now

It’s possible that other senior staff and CEOs have been ‘bounced’ into considering Talent Management too, in which case this piece of ‘straw poll’ research might help. Although I hold research qualifications and have experience of conducting ‘proper’ research, what I present here isn’t robust research, it is almost as informal as a conversation about how employees in charities view the way they are managed.

What is Talent Management?

Talent Management is the new Human Resources (HR), or stretching further back in living memory, Personnel. ‘Personnel’ used to be the sign on the door of the office where new recruits signed their employment contracts, were given a rarely opened file with all the company policies in, and were put onto the payroll. The terms used over the years show a progression from Personnel as an administrative function, to Human Resources which at least acknowledged that employees are in fact HUMAN, with strengths and weaknesses, foibles, caring responsibilities, ambitions, and abilities, to Talent Management, a far more active term.

Talent Management began in large US corporations, it changed dramatically on transfer to the UK, and it is presently undergoing further change as different organisational types grapple with its implications. Charities are amongst the very last to consider it, and this is a theme that comes out in my informal research results.

Talent Management is about creating the right conditions for talented employees to flourish, alongside recognising that there are many forms of talent and a Chief Executive should be looking for the talent in every single employee, not just those most like him- or herself. For senior staff, it is always essential, but now even more critical, to ensure that wherever talent is to be found in an organisation, in a team, group, or individual, that it is actively encouraged and supported to realise the maximum benefit to the charity.

Good, active Talent Management should lead to far better organisational outcomes than relying on traditional models of line management and automatic promotion through timeserving.

Are charities on board with actively managing talent?

This article seeks to examine that question with some informal research into the experience of people who have worked, or work now in UK-based charities, over the last two years. No sources or charities are named, and I have asked for examples of good practice as well as dubious practice. Of the 43 responses, 41 were usable, and help to create a picture of some common scenarios and blockages.

There are inevitably some aggrieved people, and in these cases I have tried to look past justifiable anger and frustration and find the learning points; and there are many examples of good practice, most at the very start of recruitment and induction processes, that seem to be showing the way in terms of professionalism.

 Informal research results – starting with the negative

16 of the people who responded to my request for contributions are vociferous in their assertion that the charity they worked for had no idea that talent existed at all in the organisation, that everything was skewed to senior managers’ (often CEOs) thoughts and ideas, and that the lack of any possibility of recognition, encouragement to explore alternatives, or any possibility of promotion, however remote, was the reason they no longer work there or are seeking another post.

Even if these respondents self-selected to respond at all because they had something to say, and saw in my research a channel for saying it, 16 out of 43 responses is still a high proportion (37%) of responses I have put into the ‘vociferous negative’ category.

4 out of the of the 16 ‘vociferous negative’ group patiently explain at length how their original desire to work for a particular charity, because of its cause, chiming with theirs and wanting to do something about making the world a better place, became gradually disillusioned. These are the most heart-breaking stories, because the people concerned have not only lost their zeal for the cause that once motivated them, they have all found or are looking for jobs outside of the charity sector.

In looking more closely of these 4 stories of gradual disillusionment, there are some learning points for senior managers of charities. In no particular order, the ‘learning points’ I can find are:

Learning points for CEOs

Congruence: (3 responses) the external reputation of the charity being very different from what goes on inside;

Directness: (1 response) the route from passionate concern of employees to impact on the beneficiaries being obscured by organisational complexity so dense that any sense of having impact is lost;  

Progression: (14 responses) people who opt to work in charities have already accepted they won’t earn as well as their counterparts in other sectors, but the sacrifice they find hardest is finding themselves stuck with very limited routes for progression;

Timeserving/high value put on stability: (5 responses) CEOs in particular are criticised in 5 of the 16 ‘vociferous negative’ responses, for being the only well-paid person in the charity, and hanging onto their position despite the world changing around them. In 2 cases CEOs kept hold of their positions despite Board attempts to remove them. Where possible motivations for hanging on were explored, respondents said that the CEO involved believed strongly that the stability they bring is more important to the organisation than making way for ‘new people and up to date methods’;

Equality and Diversity: (8 responses) People of colour and people with disabilities are less represented at Board and senior management level, and they are acutely aware of this; 8 out of 16 responses asserted the existence of a culture of ‘hiring people who look and sound like the CEO’ in the charity they worked for.

Of the 41 usable responses, 16 are negative, 5 are positive, and 20 are a mixture of good and bad practice, as seen from the point of view of an employee.

Moving onto the positive responses!

Internships: (9 responses)  It’s debatable whether internships should be in the ‘positive’ category, but they are here because 9 of my positive responses came from staff citing the opportunity to work as an unpaid intern as their start point for a charity career that they enjoy. Interns are often highly qualified graduates, who have to find their own living expenses during their internship, so in effect they are paying to work at the charity. Internships are a contested area because for many talented candidates without family backing, an internship is not a financially viable option.

Proper recruitment process: (20 responses) all 20 responses that were positive mentioned that the way they were recruited felt rigorous and fair, and that they had been given the chance to demonstrate their suitability for the post. Some had been interns (see above) and others had volunteered for the charity in question.

Assigned mentor: (5 responses) Although only 5 people were formally assigned a mentor, which was definitely a good instance of talent management in the opinion of respondents, others cited a particular person who took an interest in their development, and this was almost as effective.

Early recognition of special interests/abilities and ‘plugged in’ to relevant task groups: (2 respondents) These 2 respondents spoke of having a particular ability noticed informally, and then being asked to join a group or team that would bring opportunities to use their particular talent. This was wildly exciting and approved of by the respondents, and (author’s comment) a shame that something so simple only had two instances.

Culture of continual improvement: (10 responses) although there is some dissonance between a charity’s published statements about having a culture of continuous improvement and the felt experience of employees, generally those employees enjoyed and benefitted from being allowed to ask for training and development opportunities, and having an expectation that their request would be approved.

Training and development opportunities: (10 responses) The development opportunities themselves are crucial. Formal training courses appear to be least popular and useful(!) and informal opportunities such as attending conferences, preparing speeches for another speaker, speaking at conferences, leading task groups, chairing meetings, attending high level meetings as an observer, travelling somewhere with a senior manager and having the chance to connect; being allowed and encouraged to make suggestions; trusted to manage a small part of a budget; organising an event, campaign, or social media campaign, deputising for more senior staff, being interviewed on the radio, are all cited as development opportunities that could have been coveted by the CEO but were, in these instances, positively used as informal opportunities for senior staff to nurture their employees.

Conclusion

From reading these contributions and in some cases corresponding with these respondents, I can conclude that many charities are actively managing their talent. There are some charities that are well behind the curve with this, and maybe when the urgency of survival has passed over, a calm look at the way talent is identified, encouraged, supported, progressed, and rewarded could be a valuable activity at the start of a charity or social enterprise’s next chapter.

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