Hello KSKOers
Every Friday, I write a LinkedIn post, reflecting on my week. I’ve been doing this for the last few months. It’s a good habit to form and reminds you of just how much you’ve achieved. It also lets you celebrate your small wins and develop your transparency and ‘working-out-loud- skills. I realised that if you’re my Substack subscriber, you may never have stumbled on my posts. So, here’s a collection of reflections about leadership, my world of work and being people centric.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
🔵 I was introduced to a new organisation called Tech For Charities. Tom reviews organisations’ tech and data so that you can identify areas for improvement and development. Tom described the whole IT thing really simply: gathering and receiving information, analysing and evaluating it, and recording and storing it. I’ve been running all sorts through this process - emails, Ai chats, Google searches, case recordings and so far everything’s aligned with these 3 steps!!
🔵 I had an introductory chat with Greg, founder of Only A Pavement Away. They help homeless people rebuild their lives by brokering connections and facilitating employment into the hospitality industry. Greg shared lots of examples and success stories of people who had moved into job placements and gone on to be promoted into senior roles. If you’re an organisation working in and around the field of homelessness, please drop me a line and say hi. You never know when we’ll be able to help each other help someone else!
🔵 My team colleagues and I have been talking not only about what we do, but how we do it. We talked about our priorities and dependencies, what good looks like and how we ensure we have clarity for the future to do our best work, in an increasingly challenging fundraising climate. We know that communication, trust and support for each other are critical elements to working effectively. It was a good reminder about needing to be conscious and deliberate in rebalancing the weight of conversation between what we do and how we do it.
🔵 I realised that I hadn't left the office to visit our front line services since week 1 of my time at Maggs Day Centre. This was week 3! I visited our Day Centre and Clothing Project in Worcester and Day Centre and Hub in Redditch. I think it's very easy to become engrossed in paperwork, red tape and organisational bureaucracy to the detriment of meeting and talking to the real people who are using the very services your planning and protecting. If you have a corporate role and you haven't visited the services, day centres, facilities, hospital, schools and homes of your service, please do set aside time next week and get out there to remind yourself why you do what you do.
🔵 Coming home at the end of the day feeling really tired because you’ve achieved lots of things and worked to your purpose is the best kind of tired.
🔵 When time is short, doing purposeful things is even more important. Strategising, prioritising and including other are ways to make the time you have the most productive it can be.
🔵 Having people around you who will lean in and help you out, sharing experiences and resources are the kind of people you want in your network.
🔵 Prioritising the basics is essential to ensure you can move forward on a stable footing; ensuring you can weather storms and rely on your policies, processes and protocols to guide you through.
🔵 What we don’t say is just as important as what we do. Reading the room and knowing when not to make throw away comments that can come back to bite, protects you, your colleagues and your organisation.
🔵 I was also reminded of the importance of listening. As you know, listening is the 8th behaviour of my self-aware leadership compass and an essential component of good leadership. As the saying goes, 'we should listen to understand not to reply', but I'm a firm believer that you have to listen with the aim of understanding, supporting, replying, exploring and ultimately making positive change. And I'm very much looking forward to doing that with a brilliant team over the next few months.
🔵 On Tuesday, I joined Henny Maltby at The Growth Hub Cirencester for an excellent workshop on business marketing. My main take away was the relentlessness of it all. You need to have a clear and achievable plan to get your business seen in the right places and the right time, even on those days when you have other things to do and places to be.
🔵 Don’t let anyone tell you tax is boring. It’s not boring, it’s complex!! On Thursday, I joined Anita Rasheva MAAT at The Growth Hub Cheltenham helping to make tax less complex and make us all in to tax savvy businesses. We talked about real life situations and how good advice and planning now helps you maximise tax rules later.
🔵 I rounded the week off facilitating a group of Interims for Impact Ltd professionals working as sole traders, limited companies or considering the shift to limited company status. Having a group of peer supporters sharing advice, posing questions and offering solutions was hugely beneficial. If you’re thinking of making a business shift, I’d definitely recommend finding a community of likeminded people who want to help you get it right and are happy to share how they got it wrong.
🔵 My company officially graduated to being limited, and will henceforth be known as Knowing Self Knowing Others Ltd. Woop!
🔵 On Monday, Ruth, Edward, Peter and I met for a catch up, which we'd never done before, in a delightful cafe bistro I'd never been to before. We had a chance to establish some connections and share some experiences. It reminded me of the beautiful phrase by the late Jo Cox, now a key value of The Jo Cox Foundation, "We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us".
🔵 On Wednesday, I met Cherry at Read for Good for the first time, hearing about their brilliant organisation, seeing some of their wonderful books and sharing what they do with you. It was absolutely lovely to meet Cherry in person, hear about the history of the organisation and how it's grown from a few people in a home office to an impactful organisation with a national reach.
🔵 Today, I had my first volunteer shift at FoodLoose in Cheltenham, understanding how the shop works, the magnificence of volunteers and the needs of customers. As an incoming volunteer Director to this community benefit society, I really want to know what it looks like in action. I had such a great time I forgot to do any shopping for myself - so I'm going back tomorrow!!!
🔵 The week started with immersion in the Tech4Good South West's AI Peer Network, where I discovered that the government has an AI Innovation Hub doing all sorts of interesting things to make accessing past information for future decision-making much quicker and slicker.
🔵 Then I headed to The Growth Hub in Stroud for a social brunch networking session, where I met Erin Poppy Koronis pivoting into copywriting, Louise Romain rapidly growing her new Tech Fairy business and Umair Hotiana helping people to protect their intellectual property.
🔵 Mid week, I joined the Bath Digital Divide Collective exploring ways to connect people and shift from exclusion to inclusion. It was a brilliant discussion about their 4 work strands, one focusing particularly on storytelling and ensuring we’re hearing from all voices, to help make good decisions about effort and investment.
🔵 Finishing the week off, I joined the Glos AIspire Network, bringing together women in Gloucestershire focused on using AI for good, where we talked about tools for business cases, creating professional headshots, podcasts and accreditation for AI learning. Really enjoyed my conversation with Hannah Meek, Michaela Pearson and Sue Conboy!
The Last Word
My challenge to you and this week’s call to action is to reflect on 3 things that you have done or achieved over the last week and to write about them. It could be in a newsletter, social media post, blog or a staff newsletter. When you’re a leader of services or a leader of thoughts, people want to know what you’re doing, what you’re contributing and what they can learn from you. So, develop your discipline of reflecting and working out loud both so you can see just how much you’re achieving and so that your colleagues feel a part of what you do.
Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as an Interim CEO in a homelessness charity.
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