Fiona Dawe's 10th Anniversary Dinner Personal Insight |  Fiona Dawe's 10th Anniversary Dinner Personal Insight 10th Anniversary Dinner
14th September 2005, Banqueting House, Whitehall
Personal Insight Transcript : Fiona Dawe, Chief Executive, YouthNet
“Mr Chairman, Your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. It was a good plan. I have worked on many good plans but this was the best, except for the human element. This was Professor Marcus in the Ealing comedy for The Lady Killers. Except for the human element. It seemed to me as a new chief executive at YouthNet. And there are many voluntary sector friends here tonight who knew a bit about YouthNet but for those who don’t, it’s the first exclusively online charity providing information, advice and opportunities for sixteen to twenty four year olds, a month. We are TheSite.org which is the first place that all young adults turn to when they need support and guidance in life, and do-it.org.uk which provides a central place on the internet for finding out about volunteering.
And our vision is to create a socially inclusive environment where all young adults are engaged, informed and inspired to achieve their ambitions and dreams. So as you can imagine, the human element was going to be pretty important. After all, managing in the voluntary sector with passionate people and many of them volunteers has always been compared to herding cats! So leading rather than managing people is the order of the day.
On this tenth anniversary of the Windsor Leadership Trust I have great pleasure in sharing some reflections on why the Trust is a good thing and why I have made time and supported its work. In a small and medium sized enterprise and charity, how do you afford state of the art training and development for your workforce, when many funders would rather you spent precious cash on your beneficiaries? How do you at the top deal with the question of continuous professional development? Where do you find excellent, cost effective, challenging learning opportunities?
Well, one way is to agree to help the Windsor Leadership Trust. This way, you get to participate in their Rolls Royce model of experiential learning, under chat on house rules, with senior people and highfliers from all economic sectors, many areas of endeavour and across all sections of society. Faith, public service, global private companies, the armed forces, local and national government, charities and the voluntary and community sector. In fact, you get all this for free if you sing for your supper!
The Trust helpfully also has a bursary scheme and our Development Director was lucky enough to participate in an initial meeting last autumn and came back feeling hugely energised, validated as well as challenged.
In 2001, I had intended at Martyn Lewis’s suggestion and many of you may know Martyn is the Founder and Chairman of YouthNet as well as the Trustee of the Windsor Leadership Trust, to attend an initial meeting, but due to work commitments I missed my chance. So when, shortly after I was asked to do a spotlight session, and my co-spotlight colleague was none other than Sam Younger, the Chair of the Electoral Commission, I agreed, and in return for my five minutes and a grilling of twenty minutes each by two syndicate groups, I got rather more challenge than I bargained for. Because actually one of the groups was practically hostile, and I decided to put it down to experience and vowed never to do it again. But I have! Because I did have the sense following - the following November to attend the annual lecture, after which there is brilliant networking, facilitated by excellent hospitality. Indeed, the support and investment in its alumni marks the Trust out.
And I met a number of people from syndicate groups who had so traumatised me. In the spirit of, what doesn’t kill you, I asked those present what I had done wrong. Well, the short story is that it turned out that it had not been a particularly easy group, and a previous session had rather wound them up. So it really all about them. A great lesson. Because leadership really is all about them. As John Hider writes in the Dowel of Leadership, remember that you are facilitating another person’s process. It’s not your process. Do not intrude, do not control, do not force your own needs and insights into the foreground. If you do not trust the person’s process, that person will not trust you.
And having had the luxury of the space for reflection provided by participating in the Trust’s work, I have been able to unlearn some of the management habits of a lifetime of doing, and started to practice being a leader. Because managing is about controlling and leadership is about liberating. It’s living a role with integrity. Being authentic, finding your own tone of voice, or style if you like, taking responsibility for yourself so that others can do this too, and it doesn’t matter who or what you are leading. A family, because you have to be a parent, you can’t do one. A group, because you have to be a chair, you can’t do one. An organisation of any kind, large or small, and volunteers especially.
As we build our future society and here investing in young people is key, I firmly believe that although many leaders are in fact born, people can find the leader in themselves, with encouragement, learning and support from such organisations as the Trust and its Alumni. So I would very much like on this, their tenth birthday, to thank the Windsor Leadership Trust for all the opportunities it has afforded not only to me personally but also to YouthNet and all those others who have participated in its important work.
And finally, I would like to leave you with one of the favourite leadership mentors of my senior management team. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it do the pasa doble!
Thank you.”
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