Why won't we pay for civil society leaders?
Funders won't pay for us. We know we're needed. But we also struggle to describe what we do...
Why won't we fund leaders? You see so much better practices among grantmakers these days regarding 'core' costs. But there is still a weird reluctance to fund the CEO, or any kind of management.
People are happier to pay for the loo roll or photocopier or rent than they once were, but this feels like the Rubicon that cannot be crossed. What does a charity without a leader look like? What does a service without managers look like? With pages and pages of questions about leadership and governance on many applications, why can't the people responsible for delivering that be funded in themselves?
Yes, you can ask people to cut things up into full-cost recovery (charge a percentage on every bid, if you're allowed to). You can say you will pay management costs based on hourly/ proportional rates - so the manager will spend 8.5 hours a week on this project. You can cut up the CEO's time - we have twenty projects so the CEO will spend 0.05% of their time on this project. What do you think the chances are of coming to the end of the year and finding you have covered the costs of management? I've spent many many years carving up management like this myself, and helping other organisations do it so that it just about works. But honestly, the salami-slicing is exhausting.
And it leads to doing things you don't have time to do, and taking managers away from managing, leaders away from leading. I think that 90% of the (failed) community cafes created, random public sector black box contracts, hire of spaces that could be used for proper charitable purposes, are to try and pay for managers. And those things, of course, increase the management burden and take people away from the work itself.
The myths of VCS management
Are CEOs sitting on a golf course, making a 7 figure salary? Funder trustees may well think that's what it is, given their backgrounds - so many come from the corp[orate finance sector, I suspect that will chime with their experience. And when I talked about the horrific underpay of front-line staff in the charity sector, I remember a friend stating confidently that one of the biggest problems was outrageous CEO pay inflation. I corrected them that studies show CEO pay in the VCS has stayed pretty much static for 10 years. I think there was just an assumption that since this was a problem in the private sector, it must be so in civil society.
Then there is the overhead myth. Management is waste. Management is luxury. Managers are bureaucratic addenda who fill in forms and take money away from the 'real' work.
Coming from trusts and foundations, that's pretty rich. 🤔
And there's that popular press mentality - that the voluntary sector should be voluntary. If so, perhaps 'CEO' seems the antithesis of that vibe. Funders should know better, and officers do. But as ever, so much educational work in grantmakers needs to be done with trustees. And indeed, in a sector where we are all supposed to be so ego-less and egalitarian (as long as all senior people are white, upper middle class and called Giles or Eleanor), doesn’t CEO sound a bit too grand? Aren’t we supposed to be in sackcloth and ashes? Suffering servants shouldn’t be paid - much less so when they dare to hold themselves above others.
But…. what do we actually do all day?
But there is a more complex problem. How do we express the impact of managers and leaders? It's hard. I mean, it’s especially hard in the social sector - assessing social impact is a nightmare at the best of times. But even in terms of organisational impact, it can be really hard to pin down what belongs to you - what did you get over the touchline? I know I have sat in meetings with staff, well-disposed to me and grateful for my efforts, doing a round robin of what projects we've been working on. It comes to me, and I have to say, 'Well... yours.' The 2 hours I spent in a crisis meeting, or 12 hours on a tender, 15 hours kissing funders' arses, writing a strategy, or poking a spreadsheet. It's for ALL of our projects - all of them.
And indeed, one of the most confronting questions I was ever asked as a CEO was ‘what does a CEO actually do?’ The Friday afternoon headache (and creeping sense of burnout) always suggested it was quite a lot. (That headache moved to Thursday, then to Wednesday, and eventually started on Monday morning. By which stage I wasn’t even sure if it was early or late.) I would attempt a glib and only half-joking answer along the lines of ‘Answering emails. HR. Sucking up to funders. Endless meetings. Calming trustees. Crisis of the week.’ I remember a friend suggesting I should answer ‘Whatever someone else doesn’t.’
But I remember at the time reading a 2017 academic study of what private sector CEOs spent their time on. They found the same rather prosaic answers I did. I actually forced myself to sit down and write what I did at one point - otherwise, the time just seemed to pass by in an endless sea of emails and vague conflict. (And soemtimes not so vague.) And yes, that, essentially, was what I wrote down. ‘Don’t forget mopping up tears and sick’ said another CEO. And neither she nor I were in children-focused organisations.
As leaders and managers, we have to be Jacks/ Jackies of all trades. We come with our own professional backgrounds, but we all have to be something like the liquid poured into a jar of stones – we provide the connective matter between all the constituent parts, but also plug the gaps. And that can be so hard to express as real value. I have even struggled in this when applying for non-CEO jobs. It’s not even that people don;t trust those taking ‘a step down’ - it’s that in many ways, a CEO job, the ultimate leader, the ultimate manager, is uniquely nebulous. And yet vital. Absolutely vital.
What if Civil Society were organised….?
But overall, I think partly this is because civil society leadership is treated like a luxury. It is almost as if its decentred nature, and, especially in the last 14 years, its deliberate derogation and persecution by the formal political, means that that it does not deserve leadership. And perhaps there is an element of, not just ideological value judgment here, but also, a sense, from charitable funders, and indeed, wider society, that these kinds of people - and organisations - should not get above their station. Perhaps competent leadership within those organisations could make this part of society much more threatening.
Just as politicians have in recent years started to see civil society leadership as a threat, is there a sense that philanthropists also see strong sector leadership as a threat to their own power and primacy? After all, the narrative over the last few years from grantmakers and commissioners has been two-fold - that they are only servants of the grassroots charities they fund; but also, that they are the ones who need to take that strategic, overarching view that the wider VCS cannot. Grant-makers, and their paymasters, have been working harder and harder to carve out a leadership role for themselves - especially in terms of the intellectual and epistemological underpinnings for social action.
But more broadly - and I’m sure, only subconsciously - is there an underlying concern among the political and ruling classes that highly-skilled, properly paid, strategic leaders in each organisation, with time to think act, and argue, are a bit threatening? To those who like ‘charity’ to keep a more submissive role. To those who like civil society to do as it’s told. And more generally, organisations who have no managers or leaders literally won’t have the time to really organise - or perhaps to challenge some of those problems, and their sources, at the root.
