September 23, 2020

5 things we’ve learned about leadership

Local Welcome meals are run by people who want to welcome refugees to their community, we call them leaders. 

We’ve recruited 120 of them so far and they’re helping us to learn some really interesting things about what it means to be a leader.

The lessons we’re learning challenge some of the cultural norms around leadership that we take for granted. What makes a good leader? is a classic question to which there are hundreds of pithy answers, but it’s not what’s important to us.

Rather, we’ve been asking how do we find good leaders? and when we have them, how do we make it easy for them to lead? 

It’s the answers to these questions that are helping us to grow Local Welcome and make it possible for more types of people to lead. 

Here’s what we’ve been learning about leadership from our leaders:

1 - Stop holding out for a hero

Much of the world is obsessed with the heroic model of leadership. It’s the strong figureheads, the great orators, the innovative geniuses that spring to mind when we think about iconic leaders. 

But Local Welcome isn’t looking for the Gandhis, the Churchills or the Steve Jobss of the world, we’re after Sonia from Liverpool with two kids and a busy job. 

In a community setting, heroic leadership tends to lead to dependence upon a very narrow group of people, individuals who - whether willingly or not - bear the weight of an organisation on their shoulders. 

Heroes may be effective at ‘getting things done’ but this style doesn’t leave much room for the things that are important to Local Welcome - including more people from diverse backgrounds, having groups that are sustainable in the long term and giving people the freedom to stand back from leadership if they want to. 

This is why each of our groups has a large pool of leaders - between 20 and 30 people - with each of them committing to leading one meal a month. When they do lead, it’s within a team of five people who run the meal together.

This model doesn’t rely on a heroic leader so different leadership styles can exist at the same time. People are free to lead from the back and from the side, they can be the person spotting mistakes or noticing the new member who looks a little lost. 

This kind of humble leadership is underrepresented and undervalued in our society, but it’s absolutely essential to our meals. It’s also more sustainable, more forgiving and much easier for someone to fit into their lives.

2 - Structure helps to free our leaders from heroic leadership

Any community event whether it’s a coffee morning, a protest or one of our meals, requires structure to see it through from start to finish.

With heroic leadership, the structure is taken care of by the leader - people follow their guidance and the event runs smoothly (or that’s the idea). But if you have five people leading together, like we do, the structure has to exist externally to the group. 

In the context of our meals, this structure has to be strong enough for the meal to unfold as intended and flexible enough so that leaders can bring their own personality, skills and style into the room. 

Our solution for this is our leader guide. It’s a hot-pink binder filled with clear step-by-step instructions on how to set up, run and pack down a meal. The content is always the same, so whether you’re in Cardiff, Glasgow or Wakefield, it’s one binder to rule them all. 

We’re not shy about creating this structure either. We have strong opinions on how best to run a meal because we’ve been developing them for five years and our ideas are regularly improved based on leader feedback.

The leader guide is the physical embodiment of our vision for meals and each week different teams of leaders, in different cities and different venues, bring that vision to life.

The structure helps different styles of leadership to co-exist and ensures our members and guests always have a consistently good experience, no matter which group they belong to or who is leading that week. 

3 - Our leaders don’t need to go the extra mile 

Community leadership can exclude people who are busy - especially working parents and carers - because the heroic leadership model demands so much time. 

Society in general has come to expect its community leaders to be the ones going the extra mile; giving people lifts to meetings, staying up til the small hours writing emails or spending their weekends planning an event. 

People don’t need to do any of this stuff as a Local Welcome leader, in fact, we specifically ask them not to go the extra mile so it doesn’t create an expectation for others. For example, leaders often ask us if they can bring cakes for dessert and we always say a polite no thank you, so that other leaders never feel like they have to spend their Sunday morning whipping up a Victoria sponge.

We ask our leaders to commit to four hours for one Sunday each month (and it doesn’t matter if they miss a month) and to pay a £5/month subscription.

That’s it. You don’t have to do anything else to be a leader, though, full disclosure, some leaders do visit refugee drop-in sessions held by other charities to invite people to meals, but this isn’t a prerequisite for leadership.

We always have a chat with people interested in becoming a leader before they book onto their first meal and many come with assumptions about what they’ll have to do - find a venue, invite people to come, raise money etc.

It’s a pleasure to tell them no, all you have to do is come along once a month, lead with a team and be your lovely self for a few hours.

We’ve not been looking for heroes but we still recruited great leaders who were ready, willing and able to answer our call once we made it possible for them to fit Local Welcome into their lives.

4 - Our leaders sometimes leave and that’s ok

When a heroic leader needs to move on, it can seriously impact a group if that leader hasn’t imparted their knowledge, skills and expertise to a successor.

In Local Welcome’s leadership model, if someone chooses to leave, our meals go on without them because we still have a large pool of leaders and the structure that helps them to lead remains intact.

Our meals are supposed to be fun and easy for our leaders. We don’t want people in the room out of a sense of duty, we want them there because it’s something they love to do.

Having a large team of leaders in any one city means that if people do decide to move on, rather than begging them to stay, we can say a proper thank you and bid them a fond farewell.

No-one should feel like they have to scurry out of the door with their head down because they’re taking a break from leading. We love our leaders so we’re sad when they go but we respect their decision and we always leave our door wide open for them to come back.

5 - Calling people leaders turns them into leaders

One of the best things about being in the team at Local Welcome is watching our leaders grow in confidence. 

We’re really proud of the fact that more than a third of our leaders had no experience of leading groups of people before joining us. Some of them even tell us how anxious the idea of leading makes them feel, and yet they still show up!

What’s become apparent to us is that if you keep relentlessly calling someone a leader, they start to internalise it. This persistent affirmation of their leader status is genuinely impacting some people’s perception of themselves and in a few cases, their lives. 

One leader told us this:

“Since joining Local Welcome my confidence has increased and when a better position came up at work I applied and I have got the job. That's because of the faith Local Welcome has in people. Local Welcome gave me the skills to be a leader which I never thought I could ever do. I would never have applied for this position without Local Welcome. I not only help others but I help myself.”

We don’t mind telling you there were a few tears in the office when we read this. 

We have found a new way for people to lead and this is strengthening communities

We’ve learned that it’s possible for us to lower the barriers to entry for leadership and still recruit excellent leaders.

We started by asking how do we find good leaders? In our experience, good leaders found us because what we were offering made it easy for them to lead. 

And how did we make it easy for people to lead? We didn’t make them into heroes, gave them a solid structure instead, and limited our expectations of them.

We’ve had to work a little harder but it’s worth it because to make the kind of impact we want in communities we have to bring people who are different along with us.

We’re in the business of connecting people, this means that our leaders need to reflect the communities they serve so that everyone feels welcomed and included.

There’s more work for us to do - for example we need to recruit more leaders who are men, more leaders who are black and more leaders from working class backgrounds - but we think we have solid foundations to build upon and we’re confident that with a bit more work we can bring even more diverse people into leadership roles.

Sonia from Liverpool with two kids and a busy job already has everything she needs to be a good leader, she just needs a bit of help from us to make it happen.