CHS Alliance [to 19 March 2016]
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15/03/2016
What makes an effective leadership team in a charity?
What are the characteristics of an outstanding leadership team? Charities are complex organisations that often work in challenging situations and rely heavily on their leadership teams to fulfil their mandates and missions. However, there isn’t a lot of documented research on senior leadership teams in charities.

The publication Building outstanding leadership teams – insights from charity chief executives, sheds light on the issue and key findings from it were shared by Compass Partnerships Director Mike Hudson at Agenda Consulting’s Third Sector Strategic People Conference in London last week..

The study sought to understand what it is that makes senior leadership teams effective by looking at the prevalence of 75 characteristics in the leadership teams of 100 large UK charities. These findings led Compass Partnerships to identify a number of key drivers of effective leadership teams.

Drivers of outstanding senior leadership teams:
:: Effective leadership of behaviour – this was defined as the leadership team modeling desired behaviour, acting as a team outside meetings, communicating well with managers, and managing stakeholder relations.
:: Great team working by valuing style and personality differences, maintaining a cohesive team, being open about mistakes and weaknesses, and good at compromising.
:: Effective team meetings characterised by listening to each other, using each other’s talent during meetings, following through agreed actions, taking good decisions.
:: Clear leadership of strategy and impact by tracking achievement of strategic objectives, focusing on strategic issues, focusing on achievement of impact, and bringing innovative and new ideas.
:: Investment in team development such as by days spent on working together better as a team, reviewing team performance, external support, and planning to improve team effectiveness. This was found to be the area that charities are currently not performing well in and need to improve…