I’m really inspired to hear this podcast featuring one of my previous Coaching clients, Marie Ward, CEO of Cranhill Community Development Trust. I think it shows the power of local community organisations and how they work as businesses. In this podcast Marie describes the way that ideas come together to create new projects that meet the needs of the local community. She describes the reality of how partnerships work to work on the themes that create resilience in the local community, which very much chimes with what I published about partnership working.

There are some great pieces about the way the team works, the way Marie works with the strengths of team members and how this creates a beating heart of a sustainable business.

I can hear in the podcast so many of the leadership and management strategies that we worked on together across the 3 years of coaching sessions, over ten years ago. These include themes like delegation, team development, working well with your board, balancing your life and work, partnership working, funding cycles and which networks to spend time in. There have been many aspects, like becoming a Development Trust, working with their current accountants and several of their strategic local partnerships which we explored in the coaching sessions.

There are so many ideas in what they are doing at Cranhill Development Trust that show the type of economy and fully connected society that we need. Towards the end of the podcast you can hear the plans for beyond the impact of these lockdowns.

Marie said to me ‘It has been a pleasure working with you, in particular, I loved my monthly mentoring sessions with you. I think the initial plan was 6 monthly sessions but we ended up continuing to meet for a couple of years. During that time you enabled me to find out so much about myself and the way I work and the best way for me to use my innate skills effectively for me and for others.” Marie Ward CEO Cranhill Development Trust

At the moment I’m in the early stages of researching what would be useful in co-creating a ‘Small is Sustainable’ development program for organisations of the size of Cranhill Development Trust to learn together about the advantages, tactics and features of what it is to be a sustainable organisation - creating a sustainable eco system of vibrant community economy.

I think there are so many lessons in these leaders for all of us to learn from helping us see the types of community that we need and want.

Find out more about my coaching work

I view the coaching work i do with leaders like Marie as a very grounding experience for both parties. Working through complex issues, yet also gaining what i call ‘extra-vision’. One of my current clients, Brenda Black, CEO of Edinburgh Community Food said about the coaching ‘It does make me take stock, helping me with where I’m going and identifying what I’m doing that is supporting that direction. Plus exploring what I’m formulating as ideas that aren’t ready for talking about with others yet.’

One further insight that I want to share is the importance of slowing down and attending to what the shifts that we are seeing in our communities mean for our real purpose and future work. One of my other leaders who I’ve supported over the last 20 years sent me a great book, with a letter and envelope addressed to ‘The wonderful Duncan’. The book is called The Energy Bus, and within it the author describes the process of becoming and holding on to being a Chief Energy Officer, inspiring and maintaining positive energy in your organisation. Yet through my work with youth organisations recently, and with carers organisations, I’ve been hearing about how the landscape of needs and opportunities is moving so dramatically with the impact of Covid. Together with Youth Scotland i facilitated an Action Learning Set which we called ‘Enthusiasm for the Edge’ with multiple youth organisations. The realities that they were describing of where and what many of the youth they work with are involved in, combined with the retreat and overwhelm of statutory services (community justice social work, education, health) means that youth work is having to respond and fill gaps that are definitely edgy.

Therefore I’m seeing a real need (and some significant wisdom in my clients) to take time out, slow down and to process what is going on.

In the recent support and supervision course I ran, I heard that small organisations are needing to meet the energy and needs of their staff more than ever. For example an organisation that was doing 3-6 monthly supervision meetings is now also doing 4-6 week ‘wellbeing meetings’. I’m hearing that many organisations, throughout this, have rediscovered the importance of team meetings. One of my international clients has brought in Action Learning Sets across the continents, connecting up the power of peers very significantly.

This constant attention to the energy of the system (team/organisation) has got to only be good and will enable a remodelling of what is sustainable. This year will be crucial to be doing organisational development days and team development days, where there is real facilitated time to work out what practices and innovations need to go forward from this year, where are we really at, what is changing in our communities and what do we not want to go back to.

I would love to hear from you about the changes you are making and how your creating the time to think.

Small is Sustainable - where are we going from here?