Charity leaders (both staff and Trustees) with strong emotional intelligence make better decisions, lead happier, more engaged and healthier teams and promote greater degrees of collaboration within the team and outside it.
In the charity sector, this crucial set of values and skills can often be taken for granted in leadership recruitment for both senior managers and Trustees. There’s an assumption sometimes wrongfully made that it’s a given, or that focusing on it as a part of a process costs precious capacity to focus on hard skills. Unfortunately, this has led to a crisis of wellbeing in organisations which did not adequately focus on this.
I would argue that it’s a critical factor in the long term success of the leader’s impact on the charity and on everyone who comes into contact with it. We can all think of the examples from our own experiences where a leader’s lack of a compassionate and empathetic approach has left a mark on us.
We also remember the times when a leader’s empathy and compassion made a significant difference or uplifted us at a critical time.
It runs deeper than this - culture eats strategy, and delivery requires the right behaviours and values at the top.
So my appeal to anyone scoping out leadership recruitment this autumn and beyond - for senior staff or trustees, is to work an active focus on empathy and compassionate leadership into your plans for the process.
Really work it in - I don’t mean just adding into the list of criteria. Think about ways you can allow those who have the right outlook (and examples to back it up) to shine through as part of your process to arrive at the right choice.
Give space for candidates to show how they’re led by their values, and examples of where they’ve led with compassion and empathy. Put them into situations or scenarios that test for it.
Over the long term, the investment made in selecting the right leadership style and values-based approach will pay off.
#charity #recruitment #tip #leadership #empathy #compassion #EmotionalIntelligence #trustees #ceo
[image: a picture of beads reading empathy]
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