Fixing the system, not the leader

What 86 charity mentors told us

Late last year, Ruth Davison and I set out to answer a question that had been nagging at both of us. Between us we've spent five decades in charity leadership, and we kept hearing the same thing from CEOs and Chairs across the sector: it isn't one crisis they're wrestling with, it's several at once, and people are often too anxious to talk about it out loud. So we thought we would.

We set out to ask the people best placed to know, 86 volunteer mentors from ACEVO, Cranfield Trust, and the Elischer Foundation, who between them sit alongside charity leaders in their hardest moments. What they told us became the foundation of this piece of work, and of the two follow up workshops we ran in March to delve a little deeper into the issues and share our findings with the mentors who'd contributed.

The poly-crisis

The first thing the data confirmed is something leaders already know in their bones: these problems don't arrive one at a time. You don't sort out one issue neatly to free you up to get stuck into the next. Strategic planning came out as the single biggest challenge, cited by 77% of mentors, ahead even of money. Close behind, at 60 to 63%, sit governance conflict, financial pressure, and people management. A funding shortfall triggers board tension, which triggers staff stress, which tips a leader towards burnout. It's a complex web of causes and effects, not a single blow, and treating it as though it were one problem with one fix misses what's actually happening.

What actually helps

When we asked mentors what makes a difference, the answer was strikingly consistent. Ninety five percent pointed to coaching and reflective listening, not technical advice, not a consultancy report, but space to think. Leaders in the thick of a poly-crisis don't primarily need someone to hand them a solution. They need a thinking partner who can help them find their own way through it. Scenario planning came second, helping leaders rehearse an uncertain future rather than simply react to it, and peer networks came through again and again as the resource people wished they'd had more of. Isolation, it turns out, is doing almost as much damage as the crises themselves.

And the qualities mentors said leaders need most weren't the ones the sector has traditionally rewarded. Resilience topped the list at 85%, followed by strategic thinking at 80%, both ahead of financial acumen. The old model of the heroic, all-capable leader is being replaced by something more honest: someone who can stay steady, think clearly, and keep communicating, even when the ground is moving.

Our argument: fix the system, not the leader

This is where the workshop pushed further than the survey alone could. We know leaders are resilient. They prove it every day, often at real personal cost. The question we posed was why the environment demands something close to superhuman resilience just to survive in the role at all. Burnout gets treated as a personal failing when it's often a rational response to an unreasonable job. That's a design flaw, not a character flaw.

We asked participants to work through three systemic challenges rather than individual ones. Why can leaders rarely plan beyond the next funding cycle, when strategy needs stability to work at all. Why the CEO role so often expects one person to be fundraiser, HR director, strategist and emotional first responder, usually without the infrastructure to support any of it. And whether the nineteenth century model of the unpaid volunteer board still has what it takes to govern organisations through a genuinely complex crisis. The energy in the room, across two very different sessions, told us this reframing landed. People didn't want to talk about their own resilience. They wanted to talk about what needs to change around them.

If you want to read the slides we shared at the workshops they're here:

What's next

We're sharing this because we think the sector needs to hear it, and because the leaders who gave us their time and their honesty deserve to see it go further than a single workshop. Ruth and I have now carried this work as far as we can as volunteers, alongside our other work, and we've reached the point where we simply don't have the capacity to take it further ourselves.

But we think it deserves to go further.

If you or your organisation would be interested in picking this work up, whether that's the research, the systemic questions it's raised, or the conversations it could start, we'd love to hear from you.

This is a volunteer initiative from Ruth Davison and Lucy Caldicott. The survey was conducted with 86 mentors from ACEVO, Cranfield Trust and the Elischer Foundation in late 2025. We thank them all for their work supporting charity leaders and their time contributing to our survey.