Alliance Online - December 2006
Leaders learning from each other?
Caroline Hartnell
EVENT acevo International Conference
Date 13 October
Venue London, UK
Organizer Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organizations
Theme Different Stories, Shared Future: Leaders and Leadership Across Borders
Acevo’s second international conference, held in London on 13 October, focused on third sector leadership in its ‘four key forms: Political, Economic, Social and Cultural’. Why is acevo, a national association of voluntary sector leaders, holding international conferences? According to their own CEO, Stephen Bubb, the idea is that CEOs from different countries should learn from each other.
The pre-conference publicity material expands on this idea: ‘This conference will bring together some of the most influential and innovative third sector leaders from around the world to share experiences and make new connections. Participants will increase their leadership and effectiveness in … peer-to-peer learning, and connect with leaders across thematic and geographical boundaries.’
Acevo certainly succeeded in bringing together an impressive array of speakers – among them Fazle Hasan Abed, Founder and Chairperson of BRAC (Bangladesh); Paul Chandler, CEO of Traidcraft (UK); Haoming Huang, CEO of the China Association for NGO Cooperation (China); and Bettina König, founder of the movement Fairwork (Germany).
Organizations or individual leaders?
Which is acevo’s focus? It wasn’t clear whether the speakers were supposed to be talking about their organizations or about their experience of acting as leaders. In the case of Abed and Chandler, in a session on economic leadership, they basically talked about the work of their own impressive organizations, both of which are taking on an economic leadership role.
Paul Chandler described how Traidcraft is helping to transform trade in order to transform the lives of producers. An organization with a turnover of £20 million a year is not going to change unjust trade structures and transform the world, but their aim is to demonstrate how fair trade can benefit producers in poor countries, influence other companies to adopt this approach, and help to build the fair trade movement. A measure of their success so far is the fact that the number of products carrying the fair trade mark has grown from 150 to 2,000 – but there is a long way to go.
Is there a risk as that as big companies adopt fair trade practices, the standards that have been established by organizations like Traidcraft will be diluted and fair trade will acquire a bad name? There must be a balance between risk and reward, said Chandler. ‘If Traidcraft is the only fair trade supplier, poverty will never be solved. We need companies like Nestlé to try it out. We must watch them like hawks and then encourage them to extend it.’
BRAC’s focus has been on solving poverty in Bangladesh – though their work has extended into Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and several African countries over the last four years, and BRAC UK was formally launched on 18 October (see p00). Fazle Abed told the always fascinating tale of how in 34 years BRAC grew into the world’s largest NGO, whose work – in areas as diverse as microfinance, education, disease eradication and empowerment of women – now reaches 100 million out of Bangladesh’s population of 140 million. Initially, Abed said, they hoped that the government would replicate their work, but when this didn't happen they realized they would have to do it on their own.[1]
No one can fail to be inspired by these two organizations. The question for acevo is whether peer learning would have been better served if the two speakers had been asked to address some specific questions common to both of them – and to those in other countries – for example, how you work with other sectors to achieve your aims. We might then have had a genuine comparison of different approaches to addressing poverty rather than parallel presentations.
Huaming Huang, by contrast, focused more on leadership itself, and particularly on the cultural aspects. It is time for a change for third sector leadership in China, he said. The concept of communicating with your board, for example, is very new in China.
Certainly the picture of his own leadership style that emerged was very different from the more macho style of some Western leaders. He stressed the need to listen to your colleagues; to distinguish self-expression and selfishness; to treat project partners as equal; to be able to admit limited knowledge as a reason for saying no; to take care of your family. ‘Smiling is the right way but be careful about amusedly laughing in Chinese culture,’ was one valuable tip for anyone contemplating work in China.
In the discussion that followed, questions arose about training leaders, and how people can be trained for wider cultural awareness rather than focusing simply on narrower organizational issues.
What next for acevo’s international activities?
Should the focus be on organizations themselves, on common themes, or on the qualities of leaders? These are all questions for acevo as they think about where to go from here.
Another question is who will attend future conferences from the UK side? The delegate list suggests that it is mainly, though not exclusively, people from UK-based NGOs that work internationally who are choosing to mix with the leaders from other countries. Stephen Bubb admits that it will be a challenge for acevo to bring the leaders of national organizations into the dialogue. An apparently very successful and stimulating two-day workshop just before the main conference and looking at the relationship between the British and the French third sectors suggests that exchanges between different country leaders could in fact be very fruitful.
1 See interview with Fazle Hasan Abed in the March 2005 issue of Alliance.
For more information
Contact Filippo Addarii at filippo.addarii@acevo.org.uk or visit www.acevo.org.uk or www.3rdsectorleaders.org.uk
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