This year has been incredibly difficult for people who are used to working in an office environment. In my recent conversations, wellbeing and burnout have become resident features. So, here are my top seven things that can make a positive difference…
Many of us are facing huge choices about the immediate futures of our organisations. Scary choices, with big, long-term implications. There’s more than the typical burden of responsibility in these decisions. There’s the profound weight of legacy.
This detour back towards lockdown will be tough for business and especially for charities, but it will be even tougher for some of the people around us and those we serve.
As a sector, we obsess over public trust, or the lack of it, and for good reason. But the irony is, our standard approach for increasing others’ trust in us, is to reduce our trust in our own people.
It’s also increasingly apparent, as I said it would back in April, that the ability to rapidly and continuously innovate is becoming a key differentiator between those who doing well this year, and those who are still struggling to stay solvent.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks charities face when developing earned income, is a lack of sales expertise, cemented-in by a further lack of appetite to develop it.
There can be big benefits to being small; benefits that increasingly get lost as organisations grow; benefits that can be incredibly hard to recapture through downsizing unless you deliberately set out to realise them.
It may sound like a stereotype, but in my direct experience of both worlds, people in the charity sector are much more naturally inclined towards collaboration. And yet, in general, we do far, far less of it than our more competitive commercial counterparts.
Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but times of great change also create an opportunity to embrace great change in our response, through transformational thinking
Many of the charities I speak to are trapped within a cage of their own making as their income erodes and their business models become increasingly challenged…