Leadership lessons from a?very strange year?

We’ve just published our annual report for 2020/2021. And like every CEO, this season is my time for reflection and discussion with colleagues – on the year past, and how we communicate that year to the world.?

It goes without saying that it was far from a normal year. We entered the year with every part of our operation disrupted by the pandemic. We were all adjusting and learning, but we didn’t have the luxury of time. Facing a projected 30% fall in our income, we were working more quickly than we ever had before, building the emergency plan that would protect our people, our mission, our finances – ultimately, to buy us the time we needed to plan for the longer-term.?

By mid-July we’d published that longer-term plan, covering a three-year period – which would see us contract as an organisation, return to growth in three years and use the time to adapt to this new world we found ourselves in.?

At the time of writing, we’re roughly at the halfway point of that plan – so I thought it an opportune moment to reflect on what I’ve learned as a leader over that very difficult year.?

The importance of clear objectives?

At the start of the pandemic, we set ourselves five key objectives: keeping our staff and volunteers safe, supporting people with cancer, supporting the COVID-19 effort, minimising the impact on our research and ensuring we stayed financially viable. Setting these was immensely valuable – as a leadership team we referred back to them at every decision point, and it has defined our response throughout the pandemic.?

This framework also helped us reprioritise during the whirlwind first few months, for example pivoting to providing information about COVID-19 for people with cancer. For me, it meant I spent a significant amount of time on financial stability and business continuity, and meeting with Government ministers and officials to ensure that people with cancer remained at the top of the agenda throughout.?

Over time, we’ve shifted to focus on staff wellbeing, as it became clear that this needed to be a priority. And I’m proud of what we’ve done – from holding reflection and celebration events, to providing an app for staff and volunteers, to making sure that as a leadership team we set clear priorities and managed our team’s resource. There’s only so much we can do – in the context of restructures and a pandemic – but I’m proud of how much we’ve built.?

Make decisions quickly on plan and budget – and don’t be afraid to be bold?

We moved very quickly to develop emergency measures and had developed an emergency budget within days. Some of our emergency measures were controversial and painful – for example freezing our recruitment or moving all staff to 80% pay and hours for four months and making ￡44m of in-year research cuts. But looking back, these measures bought us the time we needed to develop our longer-term plan, which was published a few months later.?

But in a year of such major disruption, we kept our bold ambitions and high standards. We pressed on with a game-changing ￡250m+ Cancer Grand Challenge partnership, with the US National Cancer Institute, and we’ve continued with work on our long-term strategy. We’ve kept up the pace with influencing too, and we’ll soon have the first ever bilateral UK/US cancer summit. We’ve got a huge mission, and we can’t afford to slow down.?

So far, this plan is working. Thanks to our incredible?staff,?fundraisers and supporters, and by keeping a tight rein on our costs, our position is better than expected. Of course, that’s all relative – and we now expect a ￡250m hit to our income over three years, down from an initial projection of ￡300m. At year-end, we were 11% down on income compared to the previous year – which was inevitable given the scale of disruption to our fundraising. We raised a total of ￡582m.?

Collaborate, and share your learning along the way?

It’s true that in a time of crisis, you find out who your friends are. And we found out that we have many – our supporters, who kept on giving throughout the crisis. Our network of expert advisers, philanthropic supporters and partners, who gave their time and pro bono resource to help shape our response to the pandemic. The network of charity CEOs, who shared notes and advice with each other throughout. Of course, our Chair and Board of Trustees, who gave immense support, and helpful challenge. These networks – alongside my friends and family, of course – made a huge personal difference to me, in the most challenging task of my career.?

Looking internally, our team of staff and volunteers gave a huge amount of discretionary effort, and flexibility, as our priorities and ways of working changed overnight. In return, we shared more than we ever had before – explaining our financial position, forecasts and decision-making. Of course, a redundancy programme was very difficult – but I was taken aback by the understanding, support and dedication the team has shown.?

Beating cancer is a long game?

A lot of what we did last year was new and unexpected. But our core activity didn’t change. We have solid foundations, which we’re building back from– and ultimately, that’s how we’ll transform how we prevent, diagnose and treat cancer in the years to come.?

That said, it is absolutely devastating that we’ve had to cut over ￡100m from our research so far. It’s worse knowing that we’ll have to cut more in the coming years. But the silver lining is that because we’ve outperformed our fundraising targets so far, we’ll have to cut less deeply than we initially feared – and I hope we’ll get back to our past level of spend within the next few years.?

But for a medical research charity like ours, impact is measured over years and decades – not weeks and months. So while this is incredibly painful in the short-term, in the long-term its impact will diminish.?

The reason I’m confident in the long-term is that in a horrible year, we still celebrated research breakthroughs, arising from decisions we’d made decades ago. In this horrible year, we still had cause for celebration. We saw trial results confirm the value of the HPV vaccine in reducing cervical cancer risk, and strides forward in pancreatic and lung cancer – two of our priorities.?

Despite every challenge the pandemic threw at us, I’m still optimistic. We’ll remember this year as a particularly difficult year for us all – as CRUK, for our mission, individually. But in the long-term, this year, this pandemic, will be a blip on a long history of decades worth of progress for people affected by cancer.?