Reinventing leadership: building resilience through a period of uncertainty

May 3, 2022

With Positive Money’s Executive Director taking leave, and the Interim Director due to take on the role withdrawing unexpectedly, our team faced a period of change and uncertainty. Our response was developing and supporting existing staff and growing our team, which enabled us to strengthen our leadership and resilience for the future.

Sometimes in order to grow leadership in an organisation, you need the existing leader or decision maker to step aside and enable other team members to take up the challenge. So, as the Executive Director, going on maternity leave presented the perfect opportunity to deliberately grow greater leadership across the Positive Money team. However, we didn’t automatically get there: it took a failed Interim Executive Director recruitment round to nudge us into thinking differently about how to resource the team. When the successful candidate for the role turned it down, we decided against going back to the market. Collectively, we realised that instead of papering over a period of change and uncertainty with an Interim hire, we could embrace it as an opportunity to develop our existing team. We chose to make what was implicit within the temporary hire explicit, and in doing so thoroughly prepare everyone for this change and ensure the organisation remained robust, and in fact grew in resilience, throughout the period of absence.

This plan had the potential to work well because there was a clearly defined time period. I was due to begin maternity leave, so putting plans in place had to be done by a certain time. The fact I was coming back at the end of the year made it seem less daunting for staff members to step up their responsibilities for a limited period of time, knowing that people could then step back from their additional responsibilities if needed. In a small and busy organisation, whilst the team may make plans for different staff to step up to develop new skills and experience, in the fast-paced nature of the day to day, meetings, decisions, juggling several to-dos it’s easy to always go to the default person to make an important decision, or take responsibility for an interview. But repeatedly falling back to the status quo can stifle collective growth and leadership development.

So we chose to be more deliberate about seeing my maternity leave as an opportunity for the staff to develop and demonstrate more leadership and spokesperson skills, and discuss some of the uncertain areas before I went on leave. Preparation was key because it is critical to create psychological safety at work in order for people to do their best. We can’t do our best work, or indeed any meaningful work, if we are in fight-or-flight mode all the time. Ensuring we did a thorough job of planning how responsibilities and decision-making would be distributed was key so that everyone was aligned about the plans and felt that there was transparency and support around who was going to do what.

Doing something different from mainstream conventions and norms around hiring practices, even when approaching something as simple as resourcing maternity cover, can feel challenging. Reflecting on the idea of an externally recruited Interim Executive Director, it actually makes little sense: someone with no experience of an organisation arrives, and for nine months gets to hold the ultimate decision-making power on everything and anything. At Positive Money, the Executive Director holds the mission, vision, and culture of the organisation, as well as the strategy, brand, fundraising model, is on top of management, and ensuring staff are being developed, being responsible for external relations, being the chief spokesperson, and making sure the board is delivering good governance. This is all on top of day to day input into strategic decisions made within all parts of the organisation. No Interim Director could possibly cover all aspects fully, so staff would have to step up anyway. Therefore, the most useful role they could play would be coaching and developing staff to take on greater responsibility, to make the most of the opportunity. Why not just allocate more resources to team members directly? Instead of getting someone to juggle multiple and competing to-dos in a strained way, why not simply be deliberate about developing staff directly through coaching, training and allowing them to take on new responsibilities?

In my last five weeks before maternity leave, I spent a lot of time on the staff development that would be put in place during my absence, speaking to potential mentors, and coaches, booking management and project management training. Staff could be supported to develop in my absence and have the confidence to step up when required. All staff benefitted from the external coaching and mentoring support they were receiving. We had multiple staff delivering high profile broadcast interviews they hadn’t attempted before, our Chief Operating Officer (in the new temporary role of Acting Director) successfully renewing core funding agreements, and new leadership across the entire organisation.

Coming back to work at Positive Money over the last few months, it’s become clear that I am not taking on the role I had before I left — I’ve returned to a new organisation that has flourished in my absence. I can now add capacity in new ways, and I’m so excited to grow the organisation’s impact further.