“Thank you for saying what you did in there,” they said.

I wanted to look them in the eye and ask, “Why didn’t you have my back?” but there was no point.

Back at my desk, someone else had sent me a Teams message. “Thank you for what you said in the meeting,” it read.

I sighed.

In 2022, the MIT Sloan Management Review published five attributes that define a toxic working culture:

1. Disrespectful

2. Noninclusive

3. Unethical

4. Cutthroat

5. Abusive

None of these speak explicitly to an environment where speaking up feels risky, rather, it swims in the undercurrent.

A fear of speaking your mind could be a symptom of feeling excluded (your voice isn’t welcome), a fear of abuse, or of knowing you’re not respected and having that compounded by any response to your words.

Leadership tends to be the thing that gets most airtime when we discuss toxic workplaces. But in any organisation, particularly ones that have many staff, the lone person at the top of the pyramid cannot be the sole arbiter of disrespect, exclusion, unethical conduct etc.

The fears listed above may not solely be aimed at leadership.

Followership as professional practice

The conceptualisation of “followership” within research is relatively recent.

It extends the idea that a leader needs followers in order to actual be a leader - I like to think of this as de facto leadership, as opposed to de jure leadership, where someone has the job title but not the respect! - and develops it into how people choose to follow.

Followership is the practice of effectively supporting and following a leader within an organization or team. It is a dynamic relationship that is essential for the success of any group, as leaders depend on followers to execute tasks and contribute to the overall mission.

EBSCO definition

There are several frameworks and theories around followership. One of the earliest is by Robert Kelley (1988), who suggested that followership is best understood using the axes of critical thinking and contribution to the organisation:

If you are a leader reading this, then you may recognise aspects of your team’s behaviour in this framework.

It may not surprise you to know that the use of Kelley’s styles in field studies using questionnaires, where people self-assessed themselves as passive/active and critical/uncritical, resulted in a larger proportion of people considering themselves actively engaged and critical thinkers. It is, after all, ‘exemplary’ behaviour among followers.

The cynic in me sees a framework like this as a way of communicating a quasi-institutionalised approach by good little workers.

However, a positive experience of what Kelley terms an ‘Exemplary Follower’ assumes that active engagement and critical thinking is not actively critical of leadership itself.

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No one’s a critic

In my last post, I introduced the Toxic Triangle model, which proposes that destructive leadership is not the sole reason for toxic working environments.

The other two factors in this model are a conducive environment (conditions that allow destructive leadership to thrive) and susceptible followers (people whose followership either passively or actively contributes to the culture).

In follow up research, an academic called Thoroughgood worked with Padilla from the original team to expand on the different types of ‘susceptible follower’ (Thoroughgood et al., 2012). Coincidentally another set of five, but split across the two categories of conformer and colluder:

Conformers

1. Lost souls - Followers with low self-esteem and a malleable sense of self, who become deeply attached to charismatic leaders that offer identity, belonging and direction, and may end up complying with toxic behaviours to preserve the relationship and the leader's approval.

2. Authoritarians - Followers with rigid, hierarchical worldviews who comply with destructive leaders not out of affection or fear but because they regard positional authority as inherently legitimate and feel a duty to obey those above them.

3. Bystanders - Followers who passively comply out of fear of punishment or loss, often privately disapproving of the leader while publicly going along to protect themselves from the costs of resistance.

Colluders

4. Acolytes - Followers that are “true believers”, who actively support destructive leaders out of genuine ideological alignment. They experience the leader’s mission as an expression of their own deeply held values rather than as something imposed on them.

5. Opportunists - Followers who actively support destructive leaders as a route to personal gain (promotion, wealth, status, power etc.) and who tend to share dark traits with the leader, including ambition, Machiavellianism, greed and low self-control.

These descriptors are largely theoretical. It is tricky to conduct research that explores the extent to which someone may be a colluder or conformer. For one thing, the participant information sheet has to be explicit about what's being measured, which may well put people off. For another, there isn’t a validated scale on which people might self-assess.

That said, followership typology is context-specific.

It feels unlikely that someone who acts like a ‘lost soul’ in one organisation will act the same way in another, since the conditions for lost soul compliance require the charismatic, yet destructive, leader.

The value of these descriptors is in their provocation.

In a working environment that is experienced as toxic, do you recognise the roles others play? Do you recognise yourself in them?

Quiz time!

Here’s a set of scenarios and options to explore these types yourself. Or perhaps you could leave it casually lying around the office, on the mandated 5 days a week you're reluctantly expected to be in for.

Scenario 1 - the all-staff meeting

The CEO has a habit of cutting people off in meetings, especially the same three colleagues. Today it’s happened again: someone was halfway through a thoughtful point about a programme they lead when the CEO interrupted with “Right, anyway, moving on.” There’s an awkward silence. You’re up next on the agenda. What do you do?

A) Acknowledge your colleague with a small nod, then move into your own item. Meetings need to run to time, and the CEO is the one running them.

B) Feel uncomfortable but launch into your own item slightly faster than usual. Get through it, get out of the room, debrief with the colleague later if they want to.

C) Take the cue and get on with it. The CEO carries a huge amount, and that bit of decisiveness is probably exactly what the meeting needs to stay focused on what matters.

D) Read the room: the CEO clearly doesn’t have patience for that kind of contribution today. Pitch your update tighter and more upbeat than you’d planned, matching their energy.

Scenario 2 - the 1-2-1 meeting

A junior colleague - one of the few people of colour in your organisation - has told you in a one-to-one that she’s been left out of two key conversations she should have been in. She says that this fits a pattern she’s noticed regarding how she and other colleagues of colour are treated in the organisation. She’s asked you, as someone more senior, whether you’ve seen the same. You have. She wants to know what you think she should do. What’s your response?

A) Suggest she raise it formally through HR. That’s what the processes are there for, and going outside them tends to make things worse.

B) Validate her feelings without confirming the pattern. Tell her you can see why it feels that way, but you don’t want to commit to something you might be asked to repeat in a formal setting.

C) Reassure her: this organisation genuinely cares about inclusion, the people leading it have good values, and what she’s describing is probably an oversight rather than something deeper.

D) Listen carefully, give her a sympathetic ear and some general advice, but stay out of it personally; it’s not a fight that has anything in it for you.

Scenario 3 - the impact report

You’ve been asked to prepare impact data for a funder report. Going through it, you realise the way the numbers have been presented overstates what the programme actually achieved last year, by enough that the picture is pretty misleading. When you raise this with your manager, they say: “It’s how everyone presents this kind of data. The funder knows the deal.” What do you do?

A) Present the data the way you’ve been told to. Your manager and the SLT have a wider view of the funder relationship than you do: if they’ve made the call, that’s their call to make.

B) Email about it once, diplomatically, so it’s on the record that you flagged it, then do what you’ve been told. You don’t want this to become a thing.

C) Present the data as instructed. The work this funding enables matters more than a small framing choice, and protecting that work is the priority.

D) Present the data as instructed without making a fuss, but make sure your manager knows you understand the decision that was made and support it. That’s the kind of thing that gets noticed.

Your results

Mostly As

You’re an Authoritarian. You comply because the person at the top is the person at the top. Your role is to follow the hierarchy, therefore decisions made above you deserve your support. This can work in functional organisations. In toxic ones, it’s the scaffolding that holds bad decisions in place.

When did you last disagree with leadership and actually do something about it?

Mostly Bs

You’re a Bystander. Congratulations, bystanders may well be the most common type of susceptible follower in toxic workplaces! You see what’s happening, you may privately disapprove, but the cost of taking action feels too high. This is how people survive workplaces where speaking up comes with consequences.

What, for you, would make speaking up feel less costly than staying quiet?

Mostly Cs

You’re an Acolyte. You’re aligned with the mission, you trust the people leading it, and you give them the benefit of the doubt in ways other followers wouldn’t. This is rooted in genuine conviction rather than sycophancy. However this alignment with mission and stated values can quietly shade into uncritical defence, especially when the leader appears to embody the cause.

Can you separate your loyalty to the cause from your responsibility to your colleagues’ wellbeing?

Mostly Ds

You’re an Opportunist. You know how to read a room. You’re proud of this skill, after all, being strategic gets people promoted. This same instinct makes you useful to a destructive leader. You may not cause the damage, at least not maliciously, but you’re in the vicinity and you quietly benefit.

Are the rewards worth what you’ve gone along with to earn them?

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But seriously…

The five types above have been developed within the context of a toxic environment.

Most of us work in organisations that are imperfect rather than actively toxic. What may look like authoritarian deference, for example, in one context may be ordinary institutionalism in another.

That colleague in the kitchen may have appreciated what was said without it being an instance of speaking truth to power in the name of workplace justice.

What is more relevant is that all those working across our sector who are not “leaders” - many thousands more people - recognise the influential role they can play as “followers”.

So I’ll ask you again: what kind of follower are you?

Share People and Purpose

The word ‘relentless’ reflected most honestly the culture I perceived. This is a company that expects their people to put in the extra hours, to demonstrate almost ruthless ambition. My learner’s line manager had worked there for years and loved it. He fully embraced the high pressure, high stakes ethos of the organisation.

He was unapologetic about it. Not that I would have asked him to apologise! It came across that the “go hard or go home” mentality was expressed openly within the company. This is who we are. We are relentless and we seek progress over perfection.

For some people this would be a nightmare. For others this is exactly the kind of workplace where they will thrive.

Somewhere that lets them try things without having to put a proposal together first, which is then reviewed by their manager, then the leadership team, with a mandate to make some changes and provide it in a different format. At which point it’s been 4 months and what started with enthusiasm has been drowned in bureaucracy.

Would it surprise you if this hypothetical organisation with all the layers of sign off describes itself as "innovative”? Probably not.

Evolution of culture

In the 1980s, the psychologist Benjamin Schneider proposed a model that explained how and why organisations can feel so different from each other, despite so many of them using similar software, management tools and organisational structures.

He called it the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) model.

• People are attracted to certain types of organisation,

• the organisation then selects people that match their preferred type of person,

• and finally people who don’t really fit the organisation leave, or follow the attrition process.

The inevitable outcome is that the organisation becomes more homogeneous, with the people who remain being those that both suit and shape the prevailing culture.

Schneider and his associates proposed that this ‘homogeneity hypothesis’ would ultimately result in dysfunction, as organisations become ingrown and resistant to change (Schneider et al. 1995).

This dysfunction, however, is likely in the eye of the beholder.

For the people who embrace the organisation’s ways, those who dissent - and eventually leave - are not speaking sense to power, they are a fly in the ointment.

For the person dissenting, this can be a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Especially because they will have been attracted to the organisation in the first place and likely excited to have been selected to join.

In a sector like ours - where pro-social motivation and intrinsic values play a greater role - it can be that much more damaging when the lived experience of an organisation does not live up to its promise.

What makes somewhere toxic?

A few weeks ago I wrote a LinkedIn post about toxic cultures in charities.

It got a lot of response, with a fair number of people messaging me directly.

There is little peer-reviewed research into the subject of toxic culture within charities and nonprofits specifically. There is more about toxic workplaces more generally.

In 2007, academics Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser proposed a framework called the Toxic Triangle, to try and explain how and why a workplace can be - and remain - toxic even after particularly noxious individuals leave.

The triangle is composed of three interconnected factors:

1. Destructive leaders (those who love power, coercion and may be so charming people don’t realise!)

2. Susceptible followers - both colluders (alignment with the leader to share in benefits) and conformers (compliance as a safety mechanism)

3. Conducive environment (conditions that allow destructive leadership to thrive)

The dependency of these factors means that changing one may not lead to change overall.

The narcissistic CEO might leave, but their weak and ineffective Board and susceptible followers remain.

It is the system at play which is important.

Working alongside those who choose to quietly comply can be particularly despairing. You know they’re as unhappy as you are, but instead of having your back when you try to speak up, they put their heads down.

Many of the people who contacted me were in a system like this, where they didn’t have enough influence to change anything and had come to the conclusion there was too much that needed to change.

Spare a thought for the person who replaces a destructive leader in this situation: the compliant followers desperate for something better but too cowed to be part of the solution, the colluding followers who miss their power and aren’t sure how to play this new leader, and the environment that hasn’t (yet) changed, which holds the new leader back from making a positive turnaround for the organisation.

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Differential experiences

In a situation like the ASA model, where the prevailing culture is one that is simply too entrenched to change, it is the people who recognise a desperate need for change that experience toxicity.

In a homogeneous organisation, being the sole representative of difference may not feel safe. Having the courage to suggest there should be even more representatives of difference feels even less safe. A workplace that feels unsafe can eventually feel toxic.

Ironically, it may even be that the “toxic” person in the organisation is perceived as the dissenter! Everyone else is happy with how things are, why does this person feel the need to keep rocking the boat?

This is where campaigns like CharitySoWhite and CharitySoStraight take the role of dissenter within our wider sector: challenging our collective homogeneity and resistance to change.

How unhelpful they are! How toxic to our reputation as a sector that does good things.

In a toxic triangle, however, there are people who are emboldened by the culture.

It can be quite nice sitting on a Board where the leader tells you everything is great, the papers are always positive and meetings are a pleasant conversation between peers.

Or being a colluder: for one, no one is going to tell you you’re a colluder. This isn’t post-war Germany! The attraction of collusion is that you’re far less likely to be caught in the destructive crosshairs of the leader. You’re also more likely to get promoted, to be told you’re doing a good job.

A toxic workplace is not an objective reality for everyone.

There’s a quote from the film Rounders that has been paraphrased heavily over the years:

“If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

In this context it speaks to the risk that if you’re thriving you may assume everyone else is too.

Unfortunately, finding out that your workplace may not be a safe space for everyone means you know now, and you can’t un-know it. This is when it gets tough for you too.

The question isn’t simply whether your culture is toxic, it’s whose experience of it you’ve never thought to ask, or whose feedback you’ve actively rejected.

This post was inspired by Ancient Sparta. Not the one in the film 300, the real one.

I posted on LinkedIn recently about Spartan social structure: the tiny elite at the top, the much larger group keeping everything running, and the complete absence of any pathway between them. I was making a point about leadership development and it got me thinking.

With the state pension age heading towards 70, someone who is 40 today, who is excellent at their job, but has no desire to manage anyone let alone lead, is looking at another 25-30 years of working life with essentially no development pathway designed for their needs.

So this piece is about that gap: between the huge number of ‘leadership’ courses and the actual number of people interested in leadership, what the research says, and what might actually help organisations plan progression better.

Enjoy!

Hannah

My uncle was a fantastic engineer. He worked in chemical engineering and in his spare time would build things like cars and bagatelle boards. He was such a good engineer that his employer wanted him to step up and be a ‘leader’.

Now my uncle was proud of his engineering skills, so he appreciated this tap on the shoulder. Unfortunately he didn’t have great people skills. He hoped that once in a management role, he would attain new, undiscovered skills; after all, he had always been excellent at everything else he tried his hand at.

It did not work out this way. Eventually his employer demoted him back to his technical role. He was livid.

The upside was that he kept his higher salary, but for him the money wasn’t the issue. It was about recognition. And they recognised his excellence in a way that ultimately undermined him and his abilities.

My uncle’s experience is more common than you might think. Although in our sector it’s more likely he’d be encouraged to leave completely than demoted and retained.

In hierarchical organisations - which represent the vast majority of those with paid employees - the number of non-leaders far outstrips the number of those in management and senior leadership roles (here’s my LinkedIn post comparing this to Ancient Sparta).

Research conducted by US analytics firm Visier in 2023 found that only 38% of ‘individual contributors’ (people whose roles do not involve management) were interested in becoming a manager at their current organisation.

This finding corroborated a 2014 survey by the Harvard Business School, which identified only 34% of people aspired to manage and a paltry 7% wanted a C-suite level role.

Meanwhile, research by UK-based Chartered Management Institute identified that as many as 82% of people are promoted into management roles without any formal training.

I have cited the Gallup research before, which suggests only 10% of people have the natural talent to manage effectively and only a further 20% can be taught it.

All of which describes a situation where:

• Most people don’t particularly want to ‘lead’

• Of those who are in leadership roles, most of them aren’t any good at it

• And most of these people didn’t get any training anyway.

Despite all of this, the professional development pathway for those in charities and nonprofits tends to run along these lines:

1. employability training (get that job!)

2. early career training (learn the job!)

3. project management, or other technical, training (get the job done!)

4. leadership training (get others to do their job!)

And that’s if you’re lucky enough to work somewhere that invests in training at all.

But what are the options for someone who is really good at their job and doesn’t want to lead?

High potential, nowhere to go

A 2019 paper by Aycan & Shelia with the rather wonderful name “Leadership? No, Thanks!” proposed a new psychological construct: ‘Worries About Leadership’ and validated scale for measuring it.

This is both inspired by and entirely distinct from ‘Motivation to Lead’, which was developed in 2001 by Chan and Drasgow. ‘Motivation to Lead’ represents how much someone wants to lead, and how hard they’ll work at it once they are in a leadership role. The worries someone might have about leadership are distinct from their motivations.

‘Worries About Leadership’ comprises three dimensions:

1. worries about failure (losing face, having to constantly prove yourself)

2. worries about work-life imbalance (less time for family, friends, self), and

3. worries about harming others (treating people unfairly, becoming harsh, causing harm through decisions)

Follow up research by Auvinen et al. in 2022 among Finnish employees, using this scale, found that only 6% of people were highly worried. Most were either average or low.

However when asked how likely (from 1-5) they were to seek out a leadership role in either their current, or another, organisation, the average response was below midway (mean = 2.18). With a very slight preference for seeking leadership elsewhere (mean = 2.4).

The average age of respondents in this survey was 45. So these were seasoned professionals, not currently in management, with few concerns about taking on a leadership role, and yet no huge desire to lead.

As the authors themselves conclude:

“No matter how much other members of an organization consider a person to have leadership potential and want to promote him or her to a leadership role, nothing is likely to happen unless the person in question decides to do so.”

Auvinen et al., 2022

And yet, despite all of this, the preferred professional development pathway tends to point towards leadership as the ultimate aim.

In my experience, the average 45 year old who is good at their job will be pushed towards a leadership training course, not because they want to do it, but because this is the default option for ‘professional development’ at this point in their career.

What are the options?

1. Dual career tracks

In my 2025 paper on factors affecting turnover in charities, I proposed that one way for-purpose organisations could retain staff is by adopting dual career tracks:

“Dual promotion tracks have been developed as a way of retaining and investing in people who are not good at managing people, but who do have excellent technical skills (Happy, 2023).

The non-managerial promotion track breaks the salary ceiling between non-managers and managers, allowing people who excel at the technical aspects of their job to be recognised for this in their job description, job title and salary.”

This is not easy. It requires very clear delineation between and recognition of technical expertise and management expertise.

For example, the Head of Policy would be responsible for strategy and project delivery, while someone else entirely would manage the people in the Policy team. Mind blown!

It also makes it very difficult for people to move between organisations, as moving would mean being forced to either forgo salary to focus on technical competence, or manage both people and strategy, doing neither well!

However despite the practical challenges, I still think it’s worth separating promotion opportunities from management responsibilities, if you want the latter to be done well.

2. Flexible salary bandings

Another option is for organisations to be more flexible about salary bandings, and salary increases in general.

Rather than create big leaps that reflect increasing management responsibilities, there is some flex for retaining excellent employees - who have intimated they would like a salary increase - without requiring them to take on a leadership role.

The cost of replacing someone who is really good at their job with someone completely new may not be worth it over the longterm. Especially if you consider the potential effect on your remaining employees, who see you so casually lose a high performer.

3. Non-leadership development

Change in our sector can be slow. Unless funders demand it, at which point it becomes a necessity!

It also relies on there being an incentive to change. I would love to know if these research statistics above are borne out in personal experience.

I think there is a gap in the market for investing in the professional development of non-leaders.

A course for people who are really good at their job and would like to feel confident and respected as a professional, without being pushed into taking a ‘leadership’ course.

My uncle retired from his technical role eventually, excellent until the end. But he never quite forgave them for that promotion.

I think about him when I look at professional development budgets. All that investment pointing in one direction. All the people who don’t want it pointing in another.

That’s why I‘m building a course for the people pointing in the other direction, starting in September.

If you think this sounds like something you, your colleague, or even people in your team might find valuable, get in touch at hello[at]peoplepurpose.co.uk or send me a message using the button below 👇🏻

Or the restructure finally comes to an end and you find out who’s being made redundant. “Not that person?” you think to yourself.

Or the worst of all: “Come to my leaving do!” the email proclaims. This is the first you heard of it, and you’re shocked.

Articles about people leaving organisations tend to treat resignation and redundancy as two separate topics.

I think they’re far more intertwined, especially in scenarios where it feels like the wrong person, or people, are the ones who leave.

The organisation has either pushed someone out who shouldn’t have gone, or created the conditions that made someone decide to leave.

The trade-offs and the compensation

A key aspect of an organisation’s culture is how it approaches endings: resignation, redundancy even retirement.

It’s not just the person who leaves that is affected.

There are trade-offs people make for working in for-purpose organisations.

The most visible is level of pay. Equivalent jobs in the private sector, even the public sector, could pay considerably more. And yet some people will choose a job that pays them less because of how it makes them feel.

Other trade-offs are less obvious. Lack of progression is one: in much larger organisations, including the civil service, there will be more opportunities to move upwards, sideways and generally out of feelings of stagnation.

The compensation for these trade-offs are often embedded in the strategy and culture of the organisation: alignment with mission, for example, or being part of a community that shares your values and purpose.

It may even be the personal pride in saying, “I work for a charity!” and how this affects your sense of identity and projection of self to others.

When someone leaves voluntarily it is because somewhere along the way, the compensations do not make up for the trade-offs.

My own research into drivers of turnover among charity sector staff, published by Rogare, identified that while people may join an organisation because of mission alignment, their experiences as an employee will affect their likelihood of leaving.

Research published in 2024 by the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance identified these top reasons for people voluntarily leaving:

• lack of opportunity for upward mobility / career growth (59.7%)

• compensation and benefits (47.6%)

• dissatisfaction / disengagement with current organisation / culture (26.2%)

However there are longer lasting effects, which it’s important to be aware of.

The domino effect

A badly handled redundancy can be the starting gun for a wave of resignations from the very people you may not want to lose.

In the early 1980s, Joel Brockner raised the profile of ‘survivors’ in a workplace. His research suggested that those who were not the subject of redundancies might experience guilt or disaffection with the organisation.

There has been further research into this idea, including a 2016 paper by van Dick et al., that showed after a redundancy period, employees may identify less with their employer (essentially lower affective commitment), leading to lower performance.

Meanwhile, a 2023 research study by Sajjadiani et al. explored how the departures of employees at 1,620 US retail stores affected the remaining employees. They found that redundancy announcements were most likely to lead to more voluntary resignations, while voluntary resignations had a longer lasting effect on people leaving further down the line. There was also the finding that the departure of ‘high’ performers, whether by resignation or dismissal, triggers an exodus of other high performers in the three months that follow.

Of course, there is little research on the effects of resignations and redundancies within the nonprofit sector. There rarely is!

I wonder if the potential timeline might be different - if people in for-purpose organisations may hold on, or hold out hope, just that little bit longer, because their affective commitment to the organisation is deeper?

I can think of times in my career where I’ve been both ‘survivor’ and ‘victim’, and neither felt good.

Could you have done things better?

The domino effect is not inevitable.

Brockner’s own research identified ways that ‘survivors’ were less likely to feel disaffected, along with later research by academics such as Davy et al. (1991)

One of these is perceived fairness, the sense that the process itself was ‘fair’.

Another is that ‘survivors’ felt there was adequate compensation for ‘victims’: that those who were made redundant had enough severance pay or other support, such as counselling. While sufficient communication about what had been done for the people who were let go was also more likely to make ‘survivors’ look more favourably on the organisation.

Reearch from Gallup in 2024 concluded that 42% of employees who had voluntarily resigned in the previous year reported their manager or organisation could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.

The top four things they report that their manager or organisation could have done to prevent them leaving were:

1. provide additional compensation / benefits (30%)

2. more positive interpersonal interactions with my manager (21%)

3. organisational issues (13%)

4. career advancement (11%)

For organisations with tight budgets and tiny staff, 1 and 4 can be tricky. It may require imagination. Or it may be insurmountable.

In which case, having a similar approach to redundancy (perceived to be fair, well communicated etc.) as to voluntary resignation could reassure remaining employees that the break is amicable - that this is not a rejection, but a natural parting of the ways in a sector that has limited resources for both pay and in-organisation career progression.

So, did the wrong person just leave?

Does your organisation even have the mechanisms to notice?

Is anyone tracking not just that people are leaving, but who? If the answer is no, that’s not an oversight, that’s a cultural choice.

“For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”

Ted Lasso; S1, Ep.3

Have you ever worked somewhere that loved winning, where being the best was the unspoken driver for success?

Sometimes it’s obvious:

• massive internal celebrations for winning external awards;

• explicit comparisons to ‘competitor’ organisations;

• using the word “leading” on their website homepage.

Sometimes it’s more subtle:

• annual reviews weighted towards whether targets were hit rather than what was learned or improved;

• treating innovations by similar organisation as a threat rather than an opportunity;

• internal competition for budget allocation (or even income allocation) as the cultural norm.

When winning becomes the goal, the mission becomes the means rather than the end.

In practice, this is the charity that doesn’t grow its income in order to help more people. Rather, it helps more people in order to grow its income. Because income is how it keeps score.

What if the most effective organisations aren’t the ones trying to win, but the ones seeking to improve?

Playing to win

Being the biggest, the best, the most well-known: these are all very seductive things.

However, it may be that those perpetuating a culture of competition don’t even realise they’re doing it!

A 2021 paper by Curley et al. called ‘Competition and Collaboration in the Nonprofit Sector: Identifying the Potential for Cognitive Dissonance’ surveyed leaders taking part in a fundraising ‘tournament’ called Brackets for Good, where US-based nonprofits competed for funding.

Of the 12 respondents for the relevant open-ended question, five said their organisations did not “compete” despite actively participating in an explicitly competitive fundraising tournament at the time they completed the survey. One respondent acknowledged they “technically compete against other nonprofits for grant money all the time” yet still rated competition a two. Another said they had “never really used competitive concepts to raise money” while engaged in exactly that.

This is more an illustrative case study than it is empirical research, but for some of us working in the sector it could ring true.

The authors call this cognitive dissonance.

I call it a lack of organisational self-awareness.

This is because cognitive dissonance is an individual-level psychological phenomenon: it puts the onus on the individual leaders for missing the contrast between their external behaviour and their internalised values. I

n contrast, there is a collective tension between collaborative branding and competitive culture which is experienced by many more people across the organisation than simply those in charge.

A choice between performance or learning

You may have heard of being “goal orientated”. Did you know that there are two distinct goal orientations: performance and learning?

• Performance goal orientation is what the need-to-win culture looks like. Success is defined by comparisons with others.

• Learning goal orientation is focused instead on progress and growth. Success is defined by internal standards (Elliott & Dweck, 1988)

This particular 1988 research was conducted with children. However, the text in the abstract feels faintly analogous for organisations.

“Performance goals … were predicted to produce challenge-avoidance and learned helplessness when perceived ability was low and to promote certain forms of risk-avoidance even when perceived ability was high.”

Learned helplessness in an organisational context could look like: not bothering to innovate, since new ideas are constantly shut down; or not going for certain types of funding or fundraising, because of a previous lack of success; or even a disassociation from the charity’s mission, since impact is never discussed, let alone celebrated.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Learning goal orientation, in contrast, was “predicted to promote challenge-seeking and a mastery-oriented response to failure regardless of perceived ability.”

A mastery-oriented response to failure represents the difference between asking “what went wrong?” and “what did we learn?”

Failure is information rather than identity.

Learning must be cultural

The research above is not directly applicable to organisations, despite my clumsy attempts to suggest equivalence!

However, where senior and influential individuals commit to a performance goal orientation, it affects the prevailing culture of the organisation.

Learning behaviours can create conflict with a need-to-win culture. For example:

1. A fundraising team has just finished a major campaign that fell significantly short of the target.

2. Learning behaviours in this context include a proper debrief (What did we learn? What would we do differently?) with team members openly sharing what they think didn’t work.

3. In a need-to-win culture, the campaign has “failed”.

4. In this context, every learning behaviour becomes risky: someone saying “our ask was too high” sounds like making excuses; saying “the messaging didn’t land” sounds like blaming the comms team; the person leading the debrief is essentially asking people to associate themselves publicly with a loss for the organisation.

5. So with a prevailing culture of need-to-win, the debrief either becomes a defensive exercise, or never quite takes place despite suggestions.

6. The next campaign repeats the same mistakes, but everyone’s reputation stays intact, which in a need-to-win culture is what actually matters.

That’s the conflict. Learning behaviours require people to stand next to failure. A need-to-win culture makes standing next to failure dangerous, so people learn not to do it.

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The case for a learning culture

A learning culture is one where people are more likely to feel psychologically safe.

Psychological safety is a concept that has gained huge traction over the last decade or so. The phrase was first used in a 1965 book about change management and related to individual feelings rather than team dynamics.

In 1999, Amy Edmondson published a seminal paper called ‘Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams’, where she expanded the concept to define a shared team-level belief, as well as developing a validated survey for measuring it.

Edmondson’s research identified that teams where members felt psychologically safe were significantly more likely to seek feedback, discuss errors, experiment and ask for help.

In the paper, Edmondson provides two contrasting cases studies:

1. The Stain Team members openly admitted mistakes and actively sought feedback. One member described how if someone pointed out drips on a part, the response was now “thanks” rather than the old habit of watching for the other person’s mistakes to retaliate. She explained this was because team members believed others’ intentions were helpful rather than critical.

2. The Publications Team members described “underlying tensions,” a leader who “doesn’t want to know if things aren’t going well,” and a culture where “people are put down for being different.” Members developed coping strategies, such as planning to leave, or staying but becoming as insular as possible. The team was stuck in a self-reinforcing pattern where the lack of safety prevented the very conversations that might have improved things.

This suggests that people can only fully commit to learning behaviours once they feel safe to do so.

The argument I’m making therefore is that committing to a culture that puts psychological safety of your people before external validation will lay the groundwork for a learning culture.

Meanwhile here’s the argument for those who do prefer results over feelings: teams that engaged in more learning behaviour were rated as more effective by their independent observers and customers.

Winning as a side effect

The quote at the top is from the TV programme Ted Lasso.

Spoiler ahead for anyone who hasn’t yet watched the show…

In the show, an American with little understanding of football coaches a Premier League side.

He says this to a sports journalist, who is charmed by him but still thinks he will ultimately fail.

Initially, he does. They are relegated to the Championship, but he is allowed to keep his job (this is definitely more in the realm of fantasy than documentary!) and by the final season they are back in the Premier League and in contention for the title.

This is because change is slow. And a learning culture does not reap quick wins.

The same journalist describes Ted’s effect on the club as:

“slowly but surely building a club-wide culture of trust and support through thousands of imperceptible moments”

Ted Lasso; S3, Ep.7

A learning culture is one that evolves through practice and intention, not one imposed by process and procedure.

If we revisit my list at the top, what would be the signs of an organisation committed to learning over winning?

• massive internal celebrations for professional and organisational milestones (“It’s you against you, the paradox that drive you on”)

• curiosity about ‘competitor’ organisations, which drives inspiration rather than envy

• publishing openly about things that don’t go well, targets not met etc. and what this means for the future

• annual reviews that are weighted towards professional and personal improvement rather than whether targets were met

• collective budget allocation, incentivising sharing, income lines that provide insight for what’s working well and what isn’t.

These represent an authentic embrace of learning over performance: we don’t have to be the best because we’re confident enough in our commitment to improve.

“Every person has capabilities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capabilities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given.”

John McKnight

One of my bugbears with employability programmes is they put the onus on the person seeking employment to change, to improve, to make themselves employable. Re-write your CV enough times and eventually someone will give you a job.

This is not just unfair, it’s impractical.

Many of the people who seek out employability programmes simply can’t change the thing about them that makes them less attractive to employers.

According to research by the charity Mencap, 86% of people who have a learning disability and do not have a paid job would like one.

Meanwhile, 5.1% of adults with a learning disability known to their local councils are in paid employment (Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, 2025).

This gap represents a failure in the system, not a ceiling on capability.

If you’re looking to employ someone, a candidate with Down syndrome may feel a little too difficult to accommodate.

Sometimes this is true. Not everyone with Down syndrome can win an Oscar or be a TV presenter or compete on Strictly Come Dancing.

As inspiring as the annual CoorDown videos are, there are people with Down syndrome who will never be in a position to hold down a job. People will have varying degrees of intellectual impairment that can impact their abilities and some people may be completely non-verbal.

But that’s not what I want to focus on here!

This post is for anyone who may have any inclination, even the tiniest instinct, to consider hiring someone with Down syndrome (or similar conditions e.g. Williams or Fragile X syndrome).

What’s in it for you

A 2014 study conducted by McKinsey, in partnership with Instituto Alana in Brazil, used McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index (OHI) to explore whether employees with Down syndrome impact organisational health. Their findings were that five of the nine dimensions that comprise the Index were positively impacted. Here are direct quotes from the research for context and explanation:

1. Leadership
   “The survey showed that the presence of employees with Down Syndrome gave people a new view of the world, especially their direct supervisors. They believe that people with DS help others develop virtues such as patience and tolerance.”

2. External orientation
   “Employees and managers believed the interaction between people with Down Syndrome and business clients to be very successful…Their simple and direct way of communicating, and the empathy they typically display, seem to be very much appreciated by the public.”

3. Motivation
   “A person with disabilities in the work environment, performing tasks and overcoming challenges, makes the rest of the team think about how they can overcome their own limitations and exceed expectations.”

4. Coordination & control
   “The novel situations that arise from working with people with disabilities, such as asking questions of the manager in the middle of serving a client, help them acquire a resilience they did not have before.”

5. Culture & climate
   “The presence of people with Down Syndrome in the work environment has a positive impact on the organization’s culture & climate. These individuals seem to make the workplace more united and collaborative.”

This was just one study of Brazilian employers from over 10 years ago, but as the only one of its kind it’s a useful starting point for the case for yes.

Pre-empting potential resistance

Are you a “yes, and” or a “no, but” kind of person?

I was once at a session where we all had to practice “yes, and-ing” things: building on ideas with enthusiasm and openness.

Someone in my group kept saying “yes, but…” as if sounding positive was the way to make sure we all got stopped in our tracks before we got too excited.

This section is for the “yes, but-ers”.

“We don’t have the right kind of roles”

This was the biggest barrier expressed by people in a 2023 survey conducted by Hilton (the hotel company).

This may well be the case, depending on the nature of your work.

WorkFit, the national employment programme run by the Down’s Syndrome Association, has people working in hospitality, retail, catering, office administration and warehousing.

However, the McKinsey report expands on this, suggesting that people with Down syndrome tend to excel at tasks involving:

• routine

• organisation

• and customer-facing roles where their natural empathy and directness are assets.

If you reflect honestly on the nature of your work, there may well be tasks that fit this profile.

Remember that rarely will someone with Down syndrome have a full time role. Employment is more about being able to make a valuable contribution to your local community, improving quality of life, avoiding isolation and being more financially independent (DSA).

Therefore potential roles could be for a few hours a week, rather than 8 hours a day.

“We won’t know how to manage them”

Do you ever know how to manage someone until they start working with you? Someone with Down syndrome is no different.

WorkFit provides training on understanding the communication needs of people with Down syndrome. This could be summed up as: using short, clear sentences; giving people time to process and respond, not rushing or talking over them; confirming understanding; and supporting verbal instructions with visual cues where possible e.g. an image-based schedule on the wall.

People with Down syndrome typically understand more than they can express, so don’t mistake slower speech for slower comprehension.

The McKinsey research revealed that, of the 170 managers they interviewed:

• 94% said working with a colleague with Down syndrome made them more empathetic

• 92% said it improved their conflict management

• and 86% said they became more collaborative leaders.

This is a pretty compelling argument for how learning to manage, or work alongside, someone with Down syndrome contributes substantively to your own professional development.

“Their time-keeping is excellent and we have had very little time lost to sickness.”

Steve Henwood, Southern Focus Trust Supported Employment Services

“They won’t be productive / it will be too expensive”

The accommodations for someone with Down syndrome are more about culture and attitude than they are about investing in technology or other above the line costs.

That said, AI-facilitated working could be a game-changer for people with learning disabilities in the workplace, providing things like AI-powered text simplification, task-support, voice to text etc. Let’s watch this space.

WorkFit’s entire service: workplace assessment, team training, ongoing support, is free to employers. (Although I would strongly recommend a thank you in the form of a donation to the charity would not go amiss!)

Employees with Down syndrome offer lower turnover, lower absenteeism and improved team morale. This feels like a bonus, not a barrier.

Their productivity is entirely down to whether you’ve designed the role in a way that plays to their strengths.

In a case study from 2002 published by Down Syndrome Education International, the manager, Steve Henwood, said: “All the employees have become very competent and capable of a much higher level of productivity than we anticipated.”

While there may be a need for greater supervision, this is not required 100% of the time. And depending on where your employee is situated, supervision may simply be part of their working environment.

“It could look like tokenism”

To the person being employed, it’s not tokenism, it’s a job.

You have to offer the right kind of role, and there may only be one. So be it.

If you plan it right, it will represent a positive cultural shift for your organisation. If you don’t plan, then it will be performative.

This is true of any employment where someone is visibly different. It’s not simply the technical accommodations that matter, it’s the openness to what they will offer you.

Still not convinced?

I get it. You’re part of an organisation that’s all about the knowledge economy: everyone is clever, everyone works with spreadsheets (ooh, spreadsheets!) there simply isn’t the space for someone with a learning disability in your operation.

But let’s flip the script.

What does it say about your organisation if you exist to help social good, but don’t employ people with learning disabilities?

Every employer from the research cited above says the same thing: it was easier than they expected it to be; their employees were more capable than anticipated; the benefits were bigger than they predicted.

The thing you’re afraid of is almost certainly worse in your head than it could be in practice.

Consultation on the draft statutory guidance for the Down Syndrome Act 2022 is open until the end of this month. Policy direction is moving closer to greater rights and protections for people with Down syndrome, better to be on the front foot!

Where do I start?

1. Reflect honestly on your culture. In the words of 2Unlimited, “Y’all ready for this?” Before you even consider taking action, you need to have a discussion. But if you’re nervous about how that discussion might go, your organisation isn’t yet the right place to bring someone in who won’t be welcome. And that’s a longer term process of cultural change. However, if you are ready, then move on to 2…

2. Audit your operations. Look at your organisation with fresh eyes: are there tasks that involve routine and organisation, are there customer- or service-user-facing roles where warmth and directness are assets, are there jobs your team finds repetitive, but someone else might find satisfying and purposeful? The McKinsey research found people with Down syndrome tend to thrive in these types of roles; most organisations have them, even if you might not immediately recognise them as employment opportunities.

3. Register your organisation with WorkFit. It’s free, and it commits you to nothing except a conversation.

4. Talk to someone who’s done it. I’ve included a case study below, and there are others on the WorkFit website. There is also a LinkedIn Group for WorkFit Employers, for which you need approval to join.

5. Consider volunteering and work placements as a starting point. I’m a little cautious suggesting this because there is a risk that someone starts as a volunteer and is never given the opportunity to join as an employee. (That said, this happens across the charity sector all the time!) Test your assumptions against reality.

Case Study: StandOut Socks

Ross Laing was one of the 86% of people with a learning disability who wanted a job but couldn’t get one.

Frustrated by this, Ross, his brother Christian and Christian’s partner Natalie started the company StandOut Socks.

In their own words, they are “a company dedicated to offering paid, meaningful employment to people with learning disabilities. Our team is at the heart of everything we do. More than just a business, it’s a movement aimed at challenging stereotypes and proving that talent knows no bounds.”

They now have five members of staff with Down syndrome, from a team of eight!

When you buy a pair of socks, you’re told who in the team packed them for you. My 2026 World Down Syndrome Day socks were packed by Joe, lucky me :)

“As we grow, we can show people what people with Down syndrome can do.”

Christian Laing, co-founder of StandOut Socks

This is an outlier in terms of employment, with the majority of staff with Down syndrome. But the reason I include it is because of the impetus for starting the company in the first place.

People across the for-purpose sector are motivated by a need for impact, we’re inspired by statistics that show how much progress is possible.

Let’s embrace the opportunity to have ‘ripple impact’: positive change that isn’t necessarily part of our primary charitable objectives, but is an outcome of our operational choices.

Hope for her future

My daughter has Down syndrome. She’s 4, so isn’t in a position to apply for a job anytime soon.

One day she will be an adult. I don’t know what her capabilities will be, frankly this matters less than her health and wellbeing. But if she does want a job, if she could add value to an organisation, I want her to have options.

I think of this like those famous recruitment posters from the early twentieth century: “Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?”

My hope is that when she’s old enough to ask me, I can say that I did my best to help.

This one has been sitting in my drafts for a while, in various forms. It started as a LinkedIn article, but I wanted to reframe it, including a story from my own experience I was slightly embarrassed to tell.

The short version: I once designed an exercise that made a candidate cry. This is what I learned from it.

I’d love to know what you think, please comment or hit reply.

Hannah

When I was hiring for a role that needed someone competent in Excel, I designed what I thought was a brilliant exercise (i.e. “work sample test”). It included a few Excel hacks I was proud of; the kind of thing that would separate people who really know the tool from people who’ve just put “good at Excel” on their CV.

Of the three candidates who sat it, one cried, one froze, and one questioned my judgement.

I hired the third one, who ended up being excellent in the role.

The test wasn’t testing what I thought it was testing.

This experience stuck with me. Not just because it was mortifying, but because it pointed to something bigger. Most of us in the charity sector spend a lot of time thinking about who we think we want to hire, and relatively little time thinking about how to assess their capabilities and attitude.

This matters enormously: both for whether you end up with the right person, and for whether your process is fair and transparent.

There’s a body of research in organisational psychology that maps this out. It’s not widely known outside the field, and I think it should be. So let’s get into it.

First: what are you actually looking for?

Before you pick your selection methods, it’s worth being honest about what the job actually requires, because a lot of job descriptions in our sector are not that great.

A job description typically covers two things: the tasks someone will do, and the knowledge, skills, and behaviours they need to do them. When thinking about requirements, it could be useful to borrow from something called the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition: a framework from organisational psychology that maps competence across five stages.

For practical job design, though, three levels is usually enough:

• novice

• competent

• expert

The question worth asking for each requirement is:

• do they need to arrive at that level, or can we develop them into it?

Let’s take an entry-level supporter services role as an example. Strip it right back:

What do they need to know? Honestly, not much. Anything specific to your organisation they should learn as part of their induction and probation. Assuming prior knowledge will screen out people who haven’t had the luck of working somewhere like yours before.

What do they need to be able to do? Communicate clearly and with warmth: in writing, on the phone. That’s the core skill. They don’t need to be expert on day one, but you need to be able to trust them to have this base level of approach.

How do they need to behave? With empathy and patience. Teamwork is lovely, but if they’ve never worked in a team, making that a requirement is just gatekeeping.

And that’s it!

There’s probably a few context-specific things to add, but if you’ve got a long list of requirements at this point, it’s worth asking yourself if you’re allowing potential candidates to develop into the role, or creating unnecessary barriers to entry.

The longer and more experience-dependent your requirements are, the more your selection process will reflect them; and the more likely you are to screen out talented people who simply haven’t had the “right” opportunities yet.

The tradeoff most people don’t know about

In 1998, psychologists Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published what became one of the most cited meta-analyses in occupational psychology: a synthesis of 85 years of research into which selection methods best predict whether someone will actually be good at their job.¹

They called this predictive validity: how accurately a selection method forecasts real job performance. Think of it as a score between 0 and 1, where 0 means the method tells you nothing useful, and 1 would be perfect prediction (nothing reaches 1, for the record).

This research was updated in 2022 by Sackett and colleagues,² who found the original estimates were slightly optimistic, but more interestingly, introduced a second dimension that Schmidt and Hunter hadn’t fully explored: the validity-diversity tradeoff.

Here’s the finding that should make every values-led organisation sit up:

• Some selection methods are good at predicting job performance and tend to produce broadly similar outcomes across different groups of candidates.

• Others are strong predictors but show significant score gaps between candidates from different backgrounds. The 2022 paper described these as “subgroup mean differences” specifically looking at Black-White score differences as the measure of differential impact.

A quick note on what this means: researchers use “Black-White score differences” to describe the average gap in scores between Black candidates and White candidates on a given selection method. It’s expressed as a standardised number (d): a d of 0 means no gap, and a d of 0.8 or above is considered ‘large’.

This doesn’t mean any individual candidate will score a certain way; it’s a population-level pattern. But those patterns matter, because selection processes that consistently produce large score gaps will, over time, produce less diverse workforces, even when no one intended that outcome.

This research is primarily US-based, and the picture will look different in different national and demographic contexts, but the principle holds.

The chart below plots nine common methods on both dimensions at once. The x-axis is predictive validity (further right = better predictor). The y-axis is the Black-White score difference (higher = bigger gap, so lower is better for equity).

What you want, ideally, is bottom-right: high validity, low disparity.

A few things jump out:

GMA tests (General Mental Ability: verbal, numerical, abstract reasoning, the kind used by big corporates in graduate schemes) score well on validity but sit very high on the disparity measure. For organisations that exist to do good in the world, this is an uncomfortable fact about a commonly aspirational selection method.

Structured interviews sit in a much better position: strong on validity, relatively low disparity. More on what makes an interview “structured” in a moment.

Integrity tests and emotional intelligence tests both sit low on the disparity axis, with reasonable validity scores. Interesting given that both feel very relevant to charity sector roles.

Now for the bit that should sting a little:

CV and cover letter screening doesn’t appear in the meta-analysis at all. The closest proxy is “job experience” measured by years of relevant experience, which scored very low on predictive validity, and relatively high on disparity.

Screening on experience is, in other words, both less predictive and less fair.

Which brings me back to my Excel test.

So what are the options?

Here’s a run-through of the nine methods in the analysis, and my honest take on each from a for-purpose sector perspective.

1. Structured interview

The most practical method for most organisations, and fortunately one of the best performers on both axes. “Structured” simply means the questions are standardised across all candidates: everyone gets the same ones, in the same order. My personal take is that this adherence to uniformity is not equitable, like the proverbial elephant being judged on their ability to climb a tree.

A good structured interview mixes behavioural questions (tell me about a time when…) with situational ones (what would you do if…). The situational questions matter because not everyone will have had experience directly relevant to your role. and if that’s the case, behavioural questions alone aren’t fair.

There’s growing recognition (although the academic research is still catching up) that sharing questions with candidates beforehand can make for a more useful process. The only reason not to do this is if thinking quickly under pressure is genuinely a core requirement of the job. For most roles in our sector, it isn’t.

2. Work sample tests

This is where you ask someone to do something that looks like the actual job. Not a presentation about the job, rather the job itself. If you’re hiring for a role that involves a lot of written communication: give them something to write. If data analysis is central: give them some data to analyse.

And unlike my Excel debacle, make sure the task tests the skill you actually need at the level you actually need it. My candidates didn’t need to know obscure Excel hacks. They needed to be reliable and accurate. I designed a test for the wrong thing.

Work samples score well on validity but sit in the middle of the disparity measure; so definitely worth using, but ideally in combination with methods that score better on equity.

3. Situational judgement tests

These are multiple choice questions that put candidates in hypothetical scenarios and ask what they’d do. Their big advantage: they don’t require prior experience. “Tell me a time when you dealt with a difficult stakeholder” excludes people who haven’t had that opportunity. A situational judgement test sidesteps this entirely.

They’re particularly useful at the shortlisting stage: you could set one up in a Google Form (other form providers are available) and use it to screen a large applicant pool as part of shortlisting. They take a bit of thought to design well, but once you’ve built one it can be adapted for future roles.

This is probably the method I’d most encourage smaller charities to experiment with. It’s low-cost, scalable, and more equitable than a CV sift.

4. Empirical biodata scoring

This involves asking candidates to fill in structured questions about their experiences and behaviours, which are then scored against predetermined criteria: turning qualitative information into something numerical.

It scores well on validity and can feel reassuringly objective. The setup cost is high (you need to develop the questions and scoring framework), but once it’s done it’s reusable. The main watch-out: the questions and their scoring need to be carefully designed to avoid encoding the very biases you’re trying to reduce. The concept of quantifying someone’s biography can also feel a bit odd worth thinking about how you’d explain it to candidates.

5. Job knowledge tests

Tests that ask candidates to demonstrate their understanding of the knowledge required for the role: multiple choice, short answers, fill-in-the-blanks etc. Particularly valuable for roles with genuine technical or regulatory requirements (GDPR, anyone?!).

They score well on validity but less well on the disparity measure, so best used alongside more equitable methods rather than as a standalone screen.

6. Psychometric tests

This covers a range of official, qualified tests: integrity tests, emotional intelligence (EI) tests, conscientiousness measures, and the like. (N.B. Myers Briggs or MBTI, is in a different category the evidence base for it as a selection tool is pretty limited, but that’s a whole other article.)

Integrity and EI tests both performed well in the 2022 analysis on the disparity measure: integrity tests in particular sit almost at zero. Given how much we care in this sector about values-aligned behaviour and the ability to work with empathy, these feel under-explored. They do require buying in a qualified tool, which has cost implications, but worth knowing the option exists.

7. General mental ability (GMA) tests

The classic graduate-scheme battery: verbal, numerical, and abstract reasoning. Scores well on validity. Scores very badly on the disparity measure.

This is the method where I think the corporate playbook most clearly doesn’t apply to us. For organisations explicitly committed to equity and inclusion, deploying a tool with this level of documented differential impact needs serious justification.

8. Group assessment (Assessment Centres)

Multiple candidates working together, being assessed both individually and as part of a group. Most useful when you’re hiring several people at once, or when the role is heavily people-facing.

Good validity, moderate disparity, and logistically complex to run fairly. If you’ve ever tried to equitably assess six people simultaneously across a range of exercises, you’ll know what I mean. Worth doing for the right roles, but not to be taken on lightly.

9. Peer ratings

Only really relevant for internal candidates: this involves asking colleagues to rate a candidate’s performance, structured around the requirements of the role they’re applying for. Scores well on validity and gives useful insight into how someone is perceived by those they already work with. Also has significant potential for bias, especially in teams that lack diversity of thought. The 2022 analysis didn’t include updated research on this one, so no new data on disparity.

What this looks like in practice

Let’s go back to our entry-level supporter services role. Here’s how you might put together a process that uses multiple methods, is genuinely equitable, and - crucially- doesn’t require anyone to send a CV.

Screening stage: situational judgement test

You might get a lot of applicants for an entry-level role. Rather than sifting CVs (low validity, higher disparity, and quite dull for whoever has to do it), set up a short situational judgement test. A handful of scenarios: a difficult supporter interaction, a tricky email to write, a judgment call about priorities. Those whose answers align with what you’re looking for get invited to the next stage.

Shortlisting stage: work sample test

At this point you want to assess the main skill you’ve identified: competent written communication. Set two tasks: reply to an email from a hypothetical supporter, and write a letter response to a different one.

Will some candidates use AI? Probably. Your team might be doing the same. Assess on the outputs for now, and if it really matters to you, you can probe it at interview.

Interview stage: structured, with a role play

Plan your questions in advance and stick to them. Mix behavioural and situational. Give candidates the questions beforehand, there’s no good reason not to for this type of role.

Consider starting with a role play: have a colleague phone the candidate as a fictional supporter, from a completely different room so it doesn’t have that awkward eye-contact-while-pretending-to-call-each-other energy. Give the candidate a crib sheet to prepare from. Assess against clear criteria: politeness, warmth, how they handle uncertainty. Encourage those interviewing to give tangible examples of this in their notes, rather than “vibes”.

In the interview itself, give candidates the chance to revisit any question they didn’t feel they answered well. Think of it like a pub quiz: it’s fine to come back to one you weren’t sure about.

And treat them in the interview the way you’d treat them if they already worked for you. It sets the tone and helps candidates decide whether they would want to work for you.

Decision: consider the whole picture

Don’t fall into the Great British Bake Off trap: you’re not only as good as your most recent bake. Consider performance across all stages. Go back and look at their work sample test.

Think about who else is involved in the decision: do they bring diverse perspectives? Will they feel comfortable disagreeing with you?

Evidence your decision-making. This is what transparency should represent: if you were to publicly state how you came to the decision, would it make sense and appear equitable?

The bottom line

The research is clear: the methods we default to most often - CV screening, unstructured interviews, years-of-experience as a proxy for capability - are neither the most predictive nor the most equitable. The good news is that several methods which perform well on both counts are accessible, adaptable, and don’t require a large budget.

What’s often missing isn’t knowledge or resources. It’s permission to do things differently.

And maybe a better-designed Excel test.

This piece draws on peer-reviewed research. Full references for those who want to go deeper:

1. Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262.

2. Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040.

3. Dreyfus, S. E., & Dreyfus, H. L. (1980). A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition. University of California, Berkeley.

There’s a property show on Channel 4 called ‘Love it or List it’, presented by Kirstie & Phil, whose surnames have been lost to history.

The premise is simple: a couple own a property, one of them wants to stay despite its flaws, the other wants to move because they don’t think their family has a future in it.

Kirstie is on the side of Love It and spends the rest of the programme trying to fix the flaws of the property, usually through an expensive renovation project. (Sidebar: is it me or are the budgets that people have in property programmes eye-wateringly large?)

Phil is on the side of List It and spends the rest of the programme taking the couple to three properties that might be a better fit. At the end the couple is forced to choose between Loving it (staying) or Listing it (leaving). And sometimes the reasons they choose aren’t the ones we expect.

I love Kirstie’s renovation proposals because I love fixing things. My own house is full of hacks to try and eke out every spare centimetre of space; I am currently writing this from a 1mx2m office with air vents and no windows that used to be two cupboards.

The visits to other properties are illuminating: sometimes the grass is greener, sometimes it has a kitchen island. Once the couple stand in a new space, they’re more able to compare their current home.

How you feel about where you live matters.

How you feel about your job matters.

Even if you’re someone who thinks a job is “just” a job, how it makes you feel will still impact your life.

Some days you may love it, some days you may want to chuck it in and find something else. The challenge is how to navigate these feelings with intention.

Is it broke, can you fix it?

If you don’t love your job, leaving isn’t always the answer. There could be a way to ‘fix’ it.

This is particularly important in the current environment, when having a job can feel like a privilege to hold onto, no matter what.

Before knowing whether you could fix something, you need to understand what you might need to fix, or indeed if there’s anything that needs fixing.

It may be that any job - this one or your next one - will feel this way.

I studied Organisational Psychology, which is the study of human behaviour in the workplace. Like any academic discipline, it presents theories and frameworks to explain what’s happening. However, what tends to be missing from many of these theories is how individual priorities affect experiences inside work.

So rather than try to get a PhD and spend a decade developing a framework with my name on it, I sketched my theory out in a notebook, then refined it in Powerpoint:

The four quadrants represent the push and pull that we experience while in employment:

• Drifting - Primary focus is not work or career / Focus is your next job, not this one

• Comfortable - Primary focus is not work or career / Focus is this job

• Restless - Primary focus is work or career / Focus is your next job, not this one

• Invested - Primary focus is work or career / Focus is this job

While any employer can influence how you feel to some extent, these feelings are your own and they are influenced by many things beyond your immediate employment.

When you’re considering how you feel about your job, or indeed your wider career, it’s crucial to reflect on what these influences are.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

The things that motivate us can sit across a spectrum from the intrinsic to the extrinsic.

• Intrinsic = motivation to engage in a behaviour because of the inherent satisfaction of the activity

• Extrinsic = motivation driven by external rewards: tangible, such as money, or intangible, such as praise

There can be an assumption that people who work in charities are intrinsically motivated. We have chosen a career that aligns with our values but which doesn’t pay as well as other careers do. This intrinsic motivation is gold dust for employers. It’s the kind of thing that big companies pay thousands to consultants to help them make their employees feel, so they enjoy their jobs more! However, it’s rarely as simple as that in practice.

For example, when we hit our fundraising targets or deliver a particularly brilliant project, we want to be praised (extrinsic motivation), so if we’re not told well done, it can be demoralising.

Meanwhile, we want to know that the money we raised is going to be spent well or that the project we delivered actually helped people (intrinsic motivation), so if we’re not convinced that it is meeting a need or being used well, it can make us feel less secure.

Examples of influences

Drifting

• You hope to find a better balance elsewhere

• Doesn’t pay enough

• Employer doesn’t understand or respect your focus outside work

• Situation feels like enough is enough

​Comfortable

• Meets your need for balance

• Pays enough

• Employer understands & respects your focus

• You have no energy to shift your focus to a different or next job!

Restless

• You’re bored or frustrated with the job itself

• Doesn’t pay enough

• You’re frustrated with the organisation

• You don’t feel sense of autonomy / control / respect

Invested

• Meets your need for progress / competence

• Pays enough

• Satisfies your values / hoped-for impact

• You feel a sense of autonomy / control / respect

Work/career focus

68% of the charity workforce are women (NCVO, 2024), which means that as a sector we’re far more likely to be balancing work with caring responsibilities: from children, to ageing parents, to a partner that always forgets to walk the dog.

But the push/pull of a life outside work isn’t uniquely experienced by women, caregivers or both. For some people their paid job gives them the security to pursue passions outside of work.

This is not something that your employer can directly influence! And nor should they.

Much like the adage, “it won’t get better if you pick it,” if someone’s primary focus is not their job and they’re doing it well, employers should recognise and accept this.

Of course, if your passions outside of work do affect how well you’re performing in your job, that is a problem! There is only so much leeway an employer can give without both of you needing to work out how to ensure your priorities are met outside work, and your responsibilities are met within it.

In contrast, there’s a scene in the first series of The West Wing, a TV show about a (very) fictional American President and his staff, where his Chief of Staff tells his wife that his job is “more important than my marriage.”

This blows my mind every time I watch it. Much as I love my work, I can’t imagine prioritising work over family. But this is a personal and valid choice.

There should not be judgement when it comes to reflecting on the things that influence your feelings. Especially don’t judge yourself.

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This job / next job focus

​Do you want or need to earn more money? Remember, don’t judge yourself for your answer!

My weekly online shop used to be around £80-90. It’s now regularly over £100 and rising. My mortgage rate used to be 1.1%, it’s now nearly 4%, and I was pleased to even get that.

One of the main drivers for looking to another job will be how much you’re paid. And frankly, this can be a driver to consider something in the public or private sector instead. While the role of fundraiser doesn’t exist outside of our sector, our skills are chef’s kiss: other employers would be lucky to have us!

Or you may be feeling bored.

Day-to-day work can become repetitive, especially if you’re in an organisation that is risk averse, or doesn’t ‘allow’ people to have new ideas and try new things. This can become frustrating, especially if your focus is more aligned towards work than outside it.

There is a difference between occasionally thinking maybe you could do something else and regularly logging into jobs boards to see what’s out there.

If you’re genuinely itching to try something else, it’s worth reflecting on why. Give your employer a chance to respond to your needs, they might surprise you!

Non-negotiables

​When we moved into our first flat together, my now-husband knew that I wanted a bath. It was my non-negotiable.

There are things that feel important, but which - when forced to make a choice - aren’t that crucial. And then there are the things we won’t compromise on.

These change over time. Right now, raising a child with additional needs, I demand flexibility from my job. Perhaps in future it won’t be quite so necessary.

As you reflect, it is worth identifying what features and benefits, for you, are not up for debate.

Fix or Leave, not both

We only have so much energy to expend each day. Some more than others, but even the Duracell bunnies of fundraising (thanks Alex Evans) have an upper limit.

Your options are either to try and fix things that you think could potentially be fixed or to try and find another job or career.

I once quit a job with nothing to go to. At the time it felt incredible! But I also had no dependents and lower monthly outgoings.

The feeling of saying “I quit”, especially if you’re in the Drifting or Restless category can bring a clarity of purpose that is empowering in the moment. Unfortunately this does not last long.

Once you have identified the things that are influencing your feelings, you’re in a better position to make a choice about where to put your energy: whether to Love your job or Leave it.

If this sounds familiar and you’d like to talk through your influences, your feelings and your options, I offer a one-hour reflective session which you can book here: https://peoplepurpose.co.uk/your-job-love-it-or-leave-it

Charities and non-profits are, I think, held to a higher standard when it comes to feeling valued during a recruitment process, but too often we fall short. Below I explore three milestones when applying for and starting a new job that may well determine whether someone is likely to stay for the longer term.

I once had three interviews for a job. Three! I spent several hours in the company of the person who would be managing me, along with a parade of others.

The email informing me that I didn’t get the job was three lines long.

It was a strange kind of relief to realise that I didn’t want to work for someone who would put so little effort or thought into telling me I hadn’t been successful.

How you’re treated as a candidate is a window into how you’re likely to be treated as an employee.

For candidates that are hired there are three distinct pressure points that may impact whether they’re likely to stay:

1. How they feel treated throughout the hiring process

2. The consistency between how the job was advertised and what the job actually is

3. How they feel about the objectives they’re set - both written and unwritten

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How do your candidates feel about how they’re treated?

Do you ask them?

The power dynamic is similar to the one for people applying for grants, where the funder asks, “do you have any feedback on our application process?”

As Sarah-Jane Pickering put it so well in a recent post:

…lets be honest, how many charities are going to be really truly honest with a funder about their experiences? Not many, because maybe next time they will say yes right?

The academic term for how people feel about their recruitment experience is “applicant reaction”, which has numerous theories attached to it, but none particularly favoured (Hülsheger and Anderson, 2009).

One of the earliest was set out by an academic called Gilliland. He proposed that applicants consider the fairness of their experience using principles of organisational justice. These considerations shape both their attitudes and behaviour, regardless of whether they get the job (Gilliland, 1993; the CIPD adapted Gilliland’s model for a 2023 ‘scientific summary’ that you can enjoy here).

More recently, the academic Neil Anderson, expanded on this to propose that applicants experience, interpret, and emotionally respond to the process beyond selection itself, with perceptions of job discrimination particularly salient (Anderson, 2010).

These are crucial ideas for social purpose organisations because applicants are far more likely to expect fairness, or at least socially-minded values, which might feel like ‘fairness’.

At its absolute basic, ‘fairness’ in recruitment looks like:

• communicating with applicants, for example not ghosting or leaving people hanging

• managing expectations, for example will you give candidates feedback, if so at what stage, will it only be offered if you ask for it etc.

• clarity over what is being assessed, how and why, for example is the 10 minute presentation just a chance for you to steal people’s ideas, or are you genuinely expecting the successful candidate to regularly be doing this kind of thing

More recently ‘fairness’ also includes:

• Providing interview questions in advance

• Asking if there’s reasonable adjustments people might need and then following through with providing them.

The CIPD summary mentioned above is called ‘Fair Selection: an Evidence Review’ and it has a LOT more detail about this. But not a lot of recommendations.

I’m not sure it’s all that complicated. Treat people with respect and it is more likely to feel ‘fair’.

Is this the job you applied for?

For successful candidates who become employees, this can be the most important aspect of the recruitment process that affects how likely they are to leave.

Is the job they’re doing the one they applied for?

I once applied for a job that described my need to understand ‘strategy’. The interview included proposing a strategic approach for my area of responsibility.

I was really excited about the opportunity to step up, so when I got the job I was overjoyed.

When I started, though, all mentions of ‘strategy’ or ‘vision’ were slapped down. My job was entirely tactical.

I left after a year.

Job design at the point of recruitment isn’t simply about whether the list of tasks and responsibilities map to day to day work.

It’s about:

• what someone genuinely needs to know before they start the job (is it really ‘essential’?) or whether it’s ok for them to learn it later

• what someone genuinely needs to be able to do, or have experience doing previously (seriously, is it ‘essential’?), or whether it’s ok for them to develop these skills over time

• their level of responsibility and decision-making, for example if their job title is “head of” are they really going to be making the big decisions about their department, or will they be a glorified middle manager.

It can become painfully clear within a few weeks, days or even hours when a job is not as advertised.

People may well stay despite the problems: because they’ve been told their CV can’t have experience that is less than 12 months, because this is the first job they’ve been accepted to after months of nothing, because of pride, because they think they can fix it.

But they won’t be happy. And that’s on you for mis-selling the role before they even started!

What’s expected of them?

Probation objectives tend to be one-way.

They tend to outline all the things your new person needs to achieve by a certain date.

But what about the dependencies they need to navigate to achieve them? It goes back to the genuinely essential experience, skills and knowledge.

If you’ve hired someone on the understanding that they can do absolutely everything from a standing start, then maybe you can set high expectations. But where and how do they progress?

If you know this person has areas for development, what support, training, guidance will you be providing to help them meet their objectives?

There is also the psychological contract. The unspoken expectations between employee and employer.

This concept was first coined in 1960 by the academic Chris Argyris as a way of describing how workers under a foreman would be more likely to be productive if there’s a mutual - unspoken - understanding that the foreman would have their backs (e.g. arguing for good pay) and also not micro-manage.

However it was more theoretically developed by Denise Rousseau, who formalised the concept and suggested ways of understanding it within the workplace.

I remember this passage from a 2004 paper by Rousseau really hit a nerve:

“A manager’s own psychological contract also influences the contracts he or she creates with workers. Managers who see their own psychological contract as promising career development in exchange for high performance are likely to signal a similar psychological contract to their subordinates. In contrast, a manager who views his or her job as a stepping stone to employment elsewhere is less likely to encourage staff development.”

The psychological contract starts even before someone gets the job, as Anderson suggested above.

The culture of your organisation will affect the way someone experiences recruitment: from how the job is presented, to the way they’re treated throughout the process, to the expectations put upon them in the first few hours and days.

And the way someone experiences recruitment will affect how they feel about their job.

If turnover is swift and high in particular departments, at particular levels, or even for particular individual roles, it may be worth reflecting on whether it’s how you’re recruiting that’s the problem.

As it’s a new year, this feels like a good time to re-introduce myself. My name is Hannah Kowszun (pronounced ‘koff-shun’).

I have worked and volunteered in charities/non-profits since 2006, in a wide variety of roles: from membership to marketing, from fundraising to strategy, from Trustee to CEO.

Consistent across all of these experiences has been a sense of dysfunction, and of a sector informed by the practices of other sectors, rather than one carving its own identity and approach.

Make it make sense

In 2019 I started a Masters in Organizational Psychology to try and make sense of my experiences. I discovered that academic research into the nonprofit sector was limited and inconsistent, with very few theories that reflect our uniqueness.

Charities and nonprofits are not like private and public sector organisations. We are the only ones to employ fundraisers; in the UK our paid staff are outnumbered by volunteers around 15:1 (NCVO, 2025); our success is measured by our impact not our finances.

We need approaches to supporting our people that are our own.

My intention with People & Purpose is to explore how employment by charities and non-profits can be as positively impactful - and unique - as the sector itself.

Not small, but typical and why this matters

The vast majority of registered charities (95%) in the UK have an annual income of less than £1m per year. Many programmes designed for “small” charities use this income benchmark for eligibility.

• Estimated average (mean) income = c.£415,000*

• Estimated median (middle) income = c. £13,000**

But if the average charity (calculated only by income) has around £415,000 income - well within the ‘under £1m band’ - and the median charity has nearly 100 times less than £1m, why do we use the word ‘small’, rather than instead distinguishing those charities that are ‘large’?

I think there’s several reasons for this:

1. Adopting the language of SMEs

SMEs are small to medium enterprises. According to the UK government, they represent 99.9% of all businesses in the country.

An SME has fewer than 250 staff and less than or equal to £44m in annual turnover or a balance sheet total of less than or equal to £38m (gov.uk, 2026). This means that around 99.7% of charities are SMEs as well.

But the key difference between an SME and a charity is how they make money.

For example, many SMEs are non-employing sole traders, like me! We sell our products or services to those who can afford it for a profit. We are answerable only to HMRC and any legal and compliance requirements for our area of work.

However, a charity’s business model is built on finding ways to subsidise products and services provided to those who cannot afford to pay for them.

I can make more money by finding more customers.

When a charity finds more ‘customers’ they ALSO need to find more money.

An SME can become a not-small enterprise through integrated customer and income growth. It is a business definition rather than a charity one.

A charity is also answerable to slash led by an unpaid Board of Trustees. Most charities have no paid staff, so any work has to be planned and delivered by volunteers.

People being paid for the work they do for a charity is a massive operational leap, one that many charities have not and may never make. Whereas all SMEs assume someone is being paid.

Therefore adopting similar language to the private sector confuses understanding of how very differently these two sectors operate.

2. ‘Small’ charities have less purchasing power

Many of the programmes designed for ‘small’ charities are themselves subsidised in the way that charities’ own work is.

This is because those with less income are less likely to have headroom to pay for operational products and services, including staff!

Therefore our language reflects the idea that there are ‘charities’ (as opposed to ‘small charities’) - these are the organisations that have professional staff and operational capacity and purchasing power.

And everyone else is just ‘small’, with the implication they are, literally, less.

3. We’re oddly comfortable with being patronising

Aw, aren’t charities nice! The small ones are so lovely.

When 95% of the charities operating in the UK are described as ‘small’, their impact is diminished.

It stops being about income and becomes an interpretation of their role in wider society.

3% of the UK workforce, nearly 1 million people, work in the sector. This is around the same proportion as those in Finance and insurance (House of Commons Library)!

What if we gave the same professional respect to people in charities that we did to those in finance?

By using the language of ‘small’ to describe so many organisations, we perpetuate the idea that they are less significant.

Language matters

If we shifted our language to describe charities with over £1m income per year as ‘large’ or perhaps just the 900-or so that have over £10m per year as ‘large’, then we would be in a better position to understand and meet the different needs of different organisations.

There are currently 121 registered charities in the UK that recorded over £100m income in their most recent year (Charity Commission, 2026).

Their needs as organisations are very different to those with my estimated average charity income of £415k and vastly different to my estimated median income of £13k.

This means that programmes, products and services intended to meet the needs of charities are in reality meeting the needs of a very few charities. The ‘large’ charities, if you will.

I am supporting a new product called Raiser, which is designed from the starting point of being a charity with less income. Its founder, Luke, has worked in charities with very few staff and less purchasing power. As he puts it: “being small is the most ordinary way to be a charity.”

I would like to see a shift from charities being called ‘small’ to being called ‘charities’, in hopes that we can then shift attitudes to the enormous value that charities, and their people, provide.

If you enjoyed this and know anyone you think might be interested in this, please pass it on.

Thank you!

*Using the NCVO almanac numbers (from 2021/22 charity financials) I divided the total income, £69.1bn, by the total number of charities, 166,361.

**The median charity is no. 83,181, which puts it in the £10k-£100k band. However it’s only 3.5% of the way into that band. The band width is £90k and 3.5% of £90k is £3,150; I added this to £10k to estimate a median income.

But instead of levelling the field, this is boosting those already advantaged and leading to a huge rise in applications, which can be a drain on the time of the organisation trying to recruit.

For smaller organisations, who don’t have in-house recruitment machines that churn out job descriptions and outsource psychometric tests, this can mean more time being spent on the machinery of recruitment, without reciprocal benefit.

How can we find and assess people for their skills, experience and potential, rather than those proposed by an AI platform.

Go back to basics

What do you actually need from a candidate?

There may be some very specific, technical skills and experience that you need to know someone has before they start.

There may also be hangover from whoever you’re replacing - does a new person need to be fully developed from day 1, or would it be better to hire someone with the intention of providing additional training.

Dust off that job description. Review it and rewrite it. Consider what is genuinely ‘essential’ from day 1, and what is a nice to have.

Knowledge

What does your candidate need to know already?

If your organisation works in a really niche area, then expecting deep knowledge may limit your pool of candidates.

Alternatively, if you’re hiring for a key role that genuinely requires niche and specialist knowledge, you may not need to promote this role too widely as there will only be a few people suitable.

If you recognise that a candidate may not need to know everything before they start, then consider how much they might need to learn and by when.

Perhaps what you’re recruiting for is an ability to learn. Or perhaps they don’t need specialist knowledge for the role.

Assessing for knowledge - shortlisting stage

If you’ve done the work and decided that yes, your candidate definitely needs to demonstrate specialist knowledge, then don’t ask them to explain it at the shortlisting stage: this is begging to have the same crapplication (thank you ) text from all your applicants.

Instead ask for a short paragraph that gives the context of where they developed and applied their knowledge.

You may also want to double down on the ‘essential’ nature of this criterion with a line that says, “This is essential for this role, if you do not have specialist knowledge of this issue, then this is not the right job for you.”

If you have decided you don’t need specialist knowledge, but you do need someone with the ability to learn well, then ask for a short paragraph explaining a situation where they have had to do exactly this. Again, it’s the context that matters.

Candidates could use an LLM to develop what feels like a confident answer, but it is less likely to be generic gumpf.

Assessing for knowledge - meeting stage

If you’re not sending candidates questions before the interview, please start!

The only context where it is useful not to give questions in advance is if you need someone who responds well to unexpected questions.

However, when assessing for specialist knowledge, don’t provide the question verbatim. Instead provide a prompt that tells candidates they will be asked about their understanding of the topic. That way they know to expect a question but are less likely to plan out their answer in detail with the help of AI.

Experience (not skills)

Like knowledge, there may be some crucial experience that a candidate must have in order to be even considered for the role. In that case make it genuinely essential in your criteria.

The longlist of ‘essential’ experience in some job descriptions can become laughable, especially when experience and skills are contained in the same list.

Which is it? Do you want someone with the skills, or are you only interested in the specific context in which these skills were applied?

Here’s an example:

• You’re hiring for someone in the finance department of your charity

• You need to have someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to finance (skills)

• And you’re adamant that you need someone who has experience of finance in a charity (experience).

It is this certainty that I think people find most difficult. They worry that being too prescriptive will limit their potential pool of candidates.

Yes, it will. But equally, if you’re not upfront with candidates, and those who have context-specific experience will be taken forward where those who do not will not, then you have wasted their time applying and you’re time sifting.

Assessing for experience - shortlisting stage

If you have had the courage of your convictions to recognise that context-specific experience will advantage candidates, then include it in your application process.

Ask for a short paragraph that explains how their experience meets your criteria.

Do this for each essential experience you mention.

Once they have met your expectations of experience, it’s less relevant to assess this further at interview stage.

Skills (not experience)

Does anyone have “communication skills” on their job description bingo card? Everyone?

Sigh.

I think skills may be the hardest area to reflect on when writing a job description. It can also be the biggest barrier for entry level roles, where someone has the potential but not the experience.

This is also the one most likely to be written by an AI, which I get completely because it’s a tough one to explain.

If you’re hiring at entry level, then it may be better to consider attitude and values (more below) than skills. The more skills you demand, the harder it can be for someone to provide evidence.

Assessing for skills - shortlisting stage

Consider what evidence someone could provide for the skills you need.

If you can’t really pinpoint what this evidence would look like, it may be a skill to assess at the meeting stage.

For example:

• If you need written communication skills, ask them to upload an example of their work.

• If you need event management skills, ask them to describe the event that they managed, including dates and times (context-specific!)

• If you need budgeting skills, ask them to describe a budget they managed, within the bounds of sensitive data.

Rather than list a bunch of skills and then give the blank page of a covering letter to fill, provide individual prompts. This should take less time (albeit more time than asking the AI to write it for them).

Assessing for skills - meeting stage

Will an interview provide evidence for all your ‘essential’ skills? Even the one about managing different stakeholders?

Thought not.

So don’t put all your eggs in the interview basket!

Consider which is the most important skill you want this person to have. Now consider how you might assess this skill.

Hint: unless it’s ‘communication’, it won’t be by interview.

For example:

• You need someone who is confident managing different stakeholders

• Set them a role play

• Provide the context for the meeting, assign roles to your interview panel colleagues and a script guide.

• Ask the candidates to guide everyone through an issue, for which you’ve given them the background and the research.

If you need someone who knows how to use Excel, give them an Excel scenario.

If you need someone who knows how to glean the most important information from a report, give them a report to work from and a timeframe to feedback.

If you need someone who can give a useful and succinct report on performance figures, give them some hypotheticals and enough time to shine.

It is better to map your scenarios to skills needed for the every day, than for one-off activities like ‘design and present a strategy’. Strategy development happens every few years, reporting is far more often.

Yes, it requires a little more effort on your part, but it should be worth it if the skill you most need is about engaging with people rather than sounding impressive in an interview!

Values

You have a set of values as an organisation. These are values that you want to see reflected in how your people treat each other, how they make decisions and behave day to day.

So include them in your recruitment process!

Happy Ltd put it this way:

Recruit for Attitude, Train for Skill

You don’t have to include all of them, but you may want to consider which are most important in a potential candidate.

Assessing for values - shortlisting stage

As with the shortlisting examples above, ask for a short paragraph that gives a context-specific example of demonstrating that value in action.

You could also ask them to upload/include a testimonial from a friend or colleague (or both).

Sure, this could be made up, but let them know you will ask about the example they gave further if they make it to the meeting stage. Hopefully this might make them more likely to ask a real person for their help.

If you have a value that is essential, then let candidates know. This gives them the opportunity to decide whether they want to work somewhere where this is a core part of organisational culture.

Of course, this does assume that your values do reflect your culture! How awkward to say that you’re inclusive only for new people to join and feel excluded.

Assessing for values - meeting stage

Assuming you have provided questions beforehand for interview, this can work in a structured interview to assess values.

It can also be integrated with the scenario(s) you might set as part of skills assessment.

An example that comes to mind is an organisation I worked for that had the value:

• “We value honesty and integrity, even when it’s hard”

In an interview this organisation could ask candidates to suggest where and how their organisation could improve.

If you’re serious about your values and you expect your people to demonstrate them in their behaviour, then give your candidates the opportunity to demonstrate them through your recruitment process.

Better to hire someone with the right attitude and room to develop, than someone with all the right skills and an attitude at odds with your culture.

In summary

1. Don’t simply dust off the old job description

2. Take time to consider genuinely essential knowledge, experience, skills and values

3. Avoid asking candidates to fill a blank page, instead provide structured question prompts that highlight context and examples in practice

4. Be creative

Many discussions around how humans can distinguish themselves from AI centre around creativity, around leaps of imagination.

Lets put this into practice with how we recruit people!

“Your actions speak so loudly I cannot hear what you are saying.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pay principles tend to focus on concepts like fairness, transparency and value for money. They also tend to look broadly across the spectrum of pay, rather than focus on either the highest pay scales or the lowest (ACEVO, 2013; NCVO, 2025).

This guide is intended to encourage charities, nonprofits and social purpose organisations to consider how they approach pay for people at the lowest salary levels.

It explores the potential risk of a baseline informed by the statutory minimum, and the prospective benefits from adopting the real living wage.

It also proposes a set of principles that organisations could adopt, which articulate the value and impact of paying above statutory minimum for starter salaries.

The description of ‘starter’ salaries aims to encompass the idea of ‘entry-level’ (as opposed to ‘junior’) roles, those without management responsibilities, as well as the starting point for all salaries as a baseline at your organisation.

Differentiating a voluntary role from a paid one

Many charities and nonprofits are run entirely by volunteers. Taking the leap to paying staff can be daunting.

People can feel nervous about using charitable funds to pay staff. This is likely due to media reporting on supposedly high salaries of senior executives, and misunderstandings about the role of “overhead” in charitable delivery (CAF, 2018).

Choosing to pay people low salaries to compensate out of a sense of concern is an illogical reaction.

There are several reasons why you would pay someone to do a job, rather than hope they will do it for free:

1. A contractual relationship, which means your organisation can commit to delivery at fixed times and with quality assurance. Volunteers cannot and should not be held to anything that looks like a ‘contract’.
   

2. Recognition of professional competence. Charitable delivery should be done well and recognised for being a professional (as opposed to voluntary) service.
   

3. To support ‘core’ service delivery and operations. As an organisation you should be held accountable for what you promise to deliver through funding. While volunteers are crucial, they are less reliable. Once promises have been made, it’s more likely you will need staff to deliver on them. This includes operational support such as fundraising, not just frontline delivery.
   

4. To widen access, since not everyone can afford to give their time unpaid.

The other side of the equation is whether your organisation has sufficient regular income to afford the leap to paid staff.

In making this calculation it is worth considering the wider implication of what you pay: the relative value in skills and motivation, rather than underselling the true cost of investing in professional staff.

The statutory minimum

Once you have identified that a role should be paid rather than voluntary, there is a statutory minimum that you’re expected to meet as an employer (UK Government, 2025). The rates below are those set to come into effect in April 2026.

Statutory National Minimum Wage (NMW) and apprenticeship rates

This is only for employees aged 20 or younger, or who are on apprenticeships.

For 18 to 20 year olds it’s £10.85 per hour:

• For a 37.5 hour week, this is £21,157.50

• Monthly take-home is around £1,562.75

For apprentices and 16 to 17 year olds it’s £8 per hour:

• For a 37.5 hour week, this is £15,600

• Monthly take-home is around £1,229.30

Statutory National Living Wage (NLW)

For those 21 and over, minimum wage is described as the ‘National Living Wage’.

For employees 21 and over it’s £12.71 per hour:

• For a 37.5 hour week, this is £24,784.50

• Monthly take-home is around £1,780.37

It is worth asking people whether their take-home pay is sufficient, not just for their basic needs but for their sense of wellbeing.

Beyond the statutory minimum

The ‘real’ Living Wage is calculated every year by the Living Wage Foundation (Living Wage Foundation, 2025). This calculation is made according to the cost of living, based on a basket of household goods and services. It also makes a differentiation for cost of living in London compared with the rest of the UK.

The real Living Wage is £13.45 per hour:

• For a 37.5 hour week, this is £26,227.50

• Monthly take-home is around £1,866.95

The real Living Wage for London is £14.80 per hour:

• For a 37.5 hour week, this is £28,860

• Monthly take-home is around £2,024

This could be considered a new ‘baseline’ minimum, with the option of considering whether an increase on the real Living Wage would have proportional benefits to the organisation.

There are now over 3,000 Living Wage accredited charities who commit to paying their staff, and third party employees like cleaners, the real Living Wage. In addition, over 80 Living Wage Funders are committed to supporting and enabling their grantees to pay grant-funded roles at the real Living Wage.

A 2022 analysis of Government data showed that one in eight charity jobs are paid at less than the real Living Wage (Living Wage Foundation, 2022).

Practical effects of a statutory minimum approach

The cost of living in the UK has increased hugely over the last 5 years. One of the impacts of higher interest rates has been an increase in mortgage costs, and a knock-on effect on the cost of privately renting. Food and utility bills have also gone up (Pittaway & Try, 2025).

It is hoped that having employment will protect people from the risks of poverty. However a survey in 2024 reported 23% of Londoners in employment were having to use a food bank once a week (Living Wage Foundation, 2024). This is detrimental not only to physical health, but mental wellbeing.

Each person’s situation is unique, so it is difficult to ascertain an ‘average’ for someone’s costs. That said, there are some people, based on their background and living situation, who are less vulnerable to higher costs and therefore more able to afford a lower salary.

What are the practical effects of paying people less than they can afford?

1. Inequitable and exclusive employment

Equity and inclusion policies set out how an organisation will treat everyone with respect, prevent discrimination, and ensure everyone has the opportunity to succeed.

Salary levels for the lowest paid in an organisation are fundamental to meeting this aim.

If a salary is too low, then it is discriminatory because it advantages those who can afford to be paid less.

This can look like:

• People living rent- or mortgage-free. For example those able to live with their parent/s, or those without a mortgage. Not everyone comes from a background where they have access to a rent-free or mortgage-free lifestyle, particularly young adults, who cannot all be assumed to have the opportunity to live with their parent/s.
  

• People with a security network that allows them to work for less. This could be a partner who earns more, or inherited wealth, or they may have earned enough for several years that they have the financial mattress to take a lower paid position.
  

• People without caring responsibilities. There can be extra costs related to caring, from raising typical children to raising children - or even adult children - with additional needs. With the UK population living longer, these responsibilities now extend to costs related to looking after old parents. People with these additional responsibilities may have related additional costs they need to cover somehow.

As a 2022 report from Pro Bono Economics puts it: “people from more privileged backgrounds are more likely to both ‘get in’ and ‘get on’ within civil society. Systemic low pay risks further entrenching this position.” (Pro Bono Economics, 2022). Another 2022 report from the Living Wage Foundation stated that “low pay in the third sector is reinforcing inequality” (Living Wage Foundation, 2022).

If your organisation has an Equity and Inclusion policy, then it should include how remuneration at the lowest end of the pay scale contributes to being more equitable and inclusive.

2. Poor wellbeing and sense of value

Wellbeing is a complex and nuanced concept. It is both an antecedent for positive workplace experience and an outcome from positive workplace cultures.

Living precariously due to in-work poverty has a negative effect on wellbeing (Living Wage Foundation, 2025). This means that a salary insufficient to create a sense of stability will have longer term negative impacts on an employee’s wellbeing.

Another negative impact on wellbeing could stem from a sense of being less valued as an employee, as a result of being paid less.

Frontline roles that do not have management responsibility will often be paid at ‘starter’ salary levels. While these roles do have huge value because they’re so often how charitable outcomes and impact are achieved, their remuneration at the lowest level of the organisation suggests differently.

3. Issues with retention and recruitment

Paying poorly at starter levels can cost an organisation more in the long run due to costs of managing high voluntary turnover.

What this means in practice is that savings from paying lower starter salaries are lost to the cost of recruitment and staff absence.

This isn’t just an issue for individual organisations, it’s a challenge for the nonprofit sector as a whole.

In a 2015 survey of charities, 29% said that the low pay they were offering was likely a factor for why vacancies were hard to fill. Of these, only 6% increased the salaries to try and compensate (UK Commission for Employment and Skills, 2015).

Someone’s experience at the very beginning of their employment will stay with them. Paying better at the beginning is far more likely to lead to a positive relationship with staff than paying poorly and hoping they stay anyway.

Benefits to going beyond the statutory minimum

The obvious benefits of choosing to pay starter salaries at a higher rate are the reverse of the negative effects, that is:

1. More equitable and inclusive employment

2. Improved wellbeing and employees feeling valued

3. Improved retention and recruitment.

There are other benefits, which should be considered alongside these more practical ones.

1. Values-led leadership

Charities and nonprofits exist to have a positive effect on the world. They are constituted with the purpose of making change happen.

While funding is crucial to seeing this through, charitable organisations’ success is considered through the lens of impact rather than profitability.

Efficiency in delivering services is a good thing to aim for, but it should not be at the expense of paying staff what they need in order to thrive.

Imagine a scenario where someone who works for a foundation, that gives out millions to combat homelessness, is living on a friend’s sofa because they can’t afford to rent a room.

Or someone who works frontline at a foodbank relies on a foodbank themselves.

These are extreme examples, but they speak to the holistic nature of values-led leadership, where how you do things is as important as what you achieve.

2. Respect for the frontline

In many careers promotion moves people further from the work that they love.

Teachers move further from the classroom the higher up the management ladder they go. Doctors spend more time in meetings than wardrooms.

Not everyone wants to be a manager. And many people who are managers probably shouldn’t be (Beck and Harter, 2014).

The hierarchical structures of most charities value ambition by rewarding it with better pay. Guidance around setting salaries speak to the idea that jobs with more “responsibility” should be paid more (NCVO, 2025).

The nature of responsibility in the context of charitable delivery is one that deserves deeper consideration than simply management responsibility. This includes how much an organisation values the responsibility of frontline and administrative workers, and reflects that in their pay.

3. Collaboration not competition

As a sector we are all pushing towards a better future, but the free market forces of competition discourage collaboration. Competition for the best people pits one cause against another.

Similarly, treating starter salaries as a race to the bottom sets up a structure where people are expected to graft for less early on, to reap greater rewards later.

The majority of the 170,000 registered charities in England and Wales have fewer than 50 employees, and of these a quarter have fewer than 10 (NCVO, 2024). This means that internal promotions are less available than they might be in other sectors.

By having a more consistent approach to starter salaries across the sector, organisations can attract people with a particular interest in supporting that change they want to see, rather than salaries being a barrier to entry.

Funding considerations

Charities and nonprofits generally rely on fundraising to pay staff salaries.

Fundraising is not like sales, where customers pay a surplus on a product or service that meets a need.

Rather, fundraising connects individuals and institutions with an aspiration they choose to support.

These individuals and institutions want to know their support is being used well. This does not equate to “cheap”.

When a customer buys a cheap t-shirt, they may be aware that someone somewhere is being exploited. However, in that moment they are willing to embrace a bargain rather than feel confronted by a corrupt supply chain.

When a donor supports a charity, they are less connected with the concept of profit and loss. Their donation is one part of a larger whole. While some charities may suggest a shopping list e.g. “£5 could pay for a mosquito net”, this is an illustration to connect them with impact, rather than a product they’re buying for themselves.

Charities and nonprofits aren’t expected to be exploiting people. If anything, it’s the opposite.

In their 2022 report, the Living Wage Foundation found that 78% of those surveyed thought all directly employed staff and third party staff operating within the third sector should be paid the real Living Wage (Living Wage Foundation, 2022).

People misunderstand what charities do and how they operate (NPC, 2014; Charity Commission, 2016). While larger salaries for executive roles might garner negative attention, statutory pay for frontline roles could also be considered poor practice. A charity that exists to have a positive effect on the world might consider how their treatment of the lowest paid speaks to this aim.

As a sector we have an opportunity to explain the value of what we do, the professionalism required to work towards a better world.

In 2024 62% of charities reported that they do not receive the full value it costs for delivering government contracts (NPC, 2024).

This means that the general public is paying twice for services provided by charities: once in taxes and again in donations.

The underselling of our professional skills is endemic and deserves to be challenged. This starts with the lowest salaries we pay our people.

The statutory minimum suggests the lowest level of skill and ability. Is this the message we want to give not only those who work for us, but those who donate to our cause?

Starter Salary Principles

Below is a set of principles that a charity, nonprofit or social purpose organisation could consider adopting, to shape their approach to starter salaries.

1. We pay salaries that prevent in-work poverty

2. We set starter salaries that support equity and inclusion

3. We value frontline, administrative and early-career roles as core to our mission

4. We differentiate volunteer and paid roles with clarity, integrity and intention

5. We invest in wellbeing and employment stability through our salary choices

6. We communicate openly and transparently about how we set our lowest salaries

7. We reflect our values in every salary decision we make.

What do you think? I welcome any and all feedback! Comment below or get in touch at hello@peoplepurpose.co.uk.

I once made a big mistake: I took away management responsibility from one of my team because I viewed management through the lens of hierarchy and control.

I could blame the organisation I was in, where the prevailing culture encouraged hierarchy and control, but that would be cowardly, and lacking in self-awareness.

My understanding of ‘management’ had been shaped by my experiences within the sector: structure charts and reporting lines, approval processes and paperwork. These can provide comfort but they can also breed discontent.

The importance of management to how people progress and, perhaps most importantly, increase their pay has knock-on effects that can be detrimental to the effectiveness of an organisation.

‘Good’ managers are relatively rare. At least from the perspective of those they manage.

A 2014 research report by Gallup suggested that around 10% of people have the talent to be good managers, and a further 20% have the potential to be good managers with support and coaching.

More recently, a 2023 report by the Chartered Management Institute identified that only 27% of UK-based workers assessed their manager as ‘highly effective’, with 24% rating their manager as ‘somewhat’ or ‘highly ineffective’.

By the laws of averages this means that most of the managers in any large enough organisation aren’t that great at their job.

But I think this is because we’ve lost sight of what the role of management potentially involves.

Management is not about telling people what to do

I think this might be the biggest misconception around managing people. It’s certainly the trap that I fell into.

Many organisations have become used to the idea that objectives are set at the top and then filtered down. Each layer of bureaucracy takes on responsibility for an increasingly specific area within the wider aims of the organisation.

This has the unfortunate knock-on effect of creating fiefdoms and silos. I have worked in organisations where multiple fundraising teams would fight over who took credit for income raised. Where it sat on the budget line became a battle, because managers knew that what “their team” raised determined how successful their superiors considered their work.

A management structure that tells those reporting to them what they’re individually responsible for devolves collective responsibility for the organisation’s successes, and failures.

It should not take a meeting with your manager to find out your responsibilities. Rather these responsibilities should be clear from a combination of:

1. the transparent and clearly articulated aims of the organisation and

2. your job description.

For example, a homelessness charity works regionally to provide holistic support. Their aims are to move as many homeless people into sustainable housing arrangements. The Policy Assistant has a job description that includes their responsibility for keeping abreast of the latest research, updating contact records for local and regional stakeholders and the planning and delivery of events to engage policy stakeholders throughout the year.

They should not need to wait for a meeting with their manager to find out what this looks like in practice. Instead, they should be able to put 1 and 2 together to propose to their manager what this looks like for the year ahead.

By encouraging managers to treat their direct reports as people who need to be told what to do there is a risk of disenfranchising them or even infantilising them.

Some ‘bad’ managers enjoy the inherent power in direct reports rendered incapable of deciding how to approach their work, without running every suggestion past them.

My guess is that most of these managers aren’t aware of this feeling, rather they misdiagnose it as effectiveness.

Management is not about training people

This is related to the concept above. Particularly in larger organisations we have become used to the idea that a subject matter expert is promoted, manages new people and trains them how to do their job.

This is unsustainable. Rarely is there a perfect through-line between a particular subject expertise and everyone in the team. A Head of Operations, for example, will rarely have expertise in all aspects of an Operations team, which can often cover everything from HR to accountancy to facilities to database management.

It may be that a manager has at least one direct report whom they can support with knowledge and skill development. But this means that other reports are not supported in the same way.

A manager has a role in their reports’ on-the-job learning, of course, but they should not be considered their sole source of training support. Not least because managers usually also have delivery responsibilities, which means that layering training on top of that can be a stretch too far.

‘Bad’ managers can either find themselves lost in responsibilities of training that distracts from more important responsibilities, or not realise that they should take time to coach, confusing it for training.

Management is not about paperwork

This is one for the HR teams out there!

Management can end up being about paperwork, but this is usually a side effect of how bureaucratic an organisation is.

‘Bad’ managers love paperwork because it is a useful distraction from the real work of management that makes them look more effective than they really are.

Management should not be the only route to progress

Invariably the route to a higher salary and a more impressive job title is taking on management responsibility.

This is why there are so many bad managers.

The desire to be paid more; the desire to be recognised for technical progress by being given more responsibility: these are mutually exclusive motivations from the desire to take on management responsibility.

Our current system is one where the only way to feel like you’re progressing professionally is to take on management responsibility. But there is no additional criterion for whether you have genuine management skills. This means we’re constantly paving the way for ‘bad’ managers to affect the experiences of those being managed, with incentives skewed towards ambition rather than competence.

If management isn’t, or shouldn’t, be about these things above, then what is it about?

Management is about coaching

Coaching is distinct from training. Coaching builds the confidence and competence of individuals by encouraging them to make their own decisions, not have them thrust upon them.

When an organisation recognises the coaching role of managers - and drops any suggestion that their role is to train or tell people what to do - then management becomes something that can be provisioned across an organisation rather than bound within a pyramidal structure of hierarchy and control.

At the company Happy Ltd - whose approaches I often cite - they encourage people to choose who manages them.

This is because they trust their people to work out their responsibilities and rely on their manager for the kind of support they need.

An environment where people have the autonomy to choose who manages them is one that has little space for bad managers.

Management is about being flexible to people’s needs

‘Management’ is an unhelpful word in its own right, as it suggests all people who are managed need managing.

Some people do. For a variety of reasons. However, it is still better to encourage someone to understand and own their role in an organisation rather than simply tell them what to do.

At Disney, employees are encouraged to “create happiness”. There will be some more specific KPIs, of course, but as a guiding principle it is one that empowers each person to make choices that will create happiness for their customers.

In a scenario like this even the most junior employee, or employees who need more day to day guidance, will understand the core purpose of their job.

How to solve the problem of bad managers?

Fundamentally, I think the biggest challenge for managing bad managers is self-awareness.

Simply adopting the approach of Happy Ltd, for example, without the prevailing culture of trust and transparency, will foster resentment.

The power dynamic between manager and direct report can make it difficult for someone to say that their manager is ‘bad’. There is also the potential scenario where a manager is ‘bad’ for one report while being ‘not bad’ for another.

Some people want to work in an environment of hierarchy and control (of which I imagine quite a few enjoy the promise of one day being at the top of said pyramid!). Some people prefer to approach their work in a purely functional way, who want a manager that tells them what to do, who trains them and makes sure the paperwork is squared away.

Therefore the self-awareness is more needed at an organisational level than from managers themselves.

Do your managers represent the core culture of your organisation?

How important is hierarchy? How crucial is control?

Do you want your people to be trusted to work out their own responsibilities, or do you prefer that they operate under the auspices of what those at the very top of the organisation determine?

There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer to these questions.

This is perhaps the main problem with values-setting initiatives: they harbour an underlying hypothesis that certain values are the right kind of ones for an organisation to have, rather than recognising the values they actually hold.

An organisation that has a rigid top-down structure, mountains of paperwork and Kafkaesque approval processes cannot authentically describe itself as ‘innovative’ or ‘open’ or ‘creative’ or ‘trusting’.

One organisation’s ‘bad’ manager is another’s paragon of successful management.

If, for example, your organisation believes that management absolutely should be tied to any opportunity for professional advancement, then it is that much more difficult to imagine any other approach.

Which brings me back to my original mistake.

On reflection, I am well within my rights to blame the organisation, indeed they thought I made the right choice. On this aspect, at least, I was a ‘good’ manager even if I might now consider it differently.

This post reflects my perspective on what the role of management involves.

It is intended not as a blueprint for others, but as a yardstick for comparison.

Authenticity in leadership benefits from deep reflection of what principles guide your decision-making.

The approach of your managers is likely to reflect the core culture of your organisation - be open to what this teaches you.

As of the time of writing, my LinkedIn post has over 1,800 reactions!

While this has blown me away, it also doesn’t surprise me in the least.

My first paid job in the charity sector in 2006 paid me £25,000. Nearly 20 years later, I regularly see full time, entry-level jobs at less than this.

• Minimum wage as a full time salary is £23,809.50 (monthly take home is c. £1,721)

• Living Wage as a full time salary is £26,227.50 (monthly take home is c. £1,866)

• London Living Wage as a full time salary is £28,860 (monthly take home is c. £2,024

With costs rising across the board, particularly rent, which can trap people in a cycle where they can’t accrue savings for a deposit, having a job that doesn’t pay enough to feel safe is damaging to wellbeing and performance.

Safety is fundamental to wellbeing

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a flawed framework, derived from a small sample size and unscientific methods.

But it retains its popularity because it makes sense!

The idea that we have “basic” needs, which need to be met before we can build on other, more sophisticated needs, feels right.

Without somewhere safe, warm and dry to sleep at night, without ways to keep clean and satisfy hunger and thirst, we’re less likely to have the capacity to also work hard let alone build our self-esteem.

As children we expect our parents or carers to meet these basic needs.

When we become adults, we discover that everything costs money: from having somewhere to live, to having something in the fridge, to a monthly Netflix subscription.

When we get a job, we expect that these basic needs can now be paid for. However, not all jobs provide the safety we crave.

Safety in this context includes: knowing that you can pay all the bills that month; knowing you can meet not only your basic needs, but those of anyone you’re responsible for as well.

It can also include knowing that you’re able to build up a savings buffer, that you have protection from life shocks when you may not be able to work.

If you’re employing people who don’t feel safe, then you are at risk of harming their wellbeing.

There is a proportional value to paying a few £1,000s more to those at the start of their journey with you, which pays dividends over the long term - not just in terms of health and wellbeing but in job satisfaction and retention of great people.

Unaffordable salaries advantage some over others

One of the people commented that perhaps paying poorly meant you recruited incompetent people.

I don’t agree with this because we work in a sector that is vocational and speaks to a ‘calling’.

There was some fascinating research by Bunderson & Thompson (2009) among zookeepers, who tend to be paid poorly. They were so passionate about their job that they were willing to take a lower pay in order to do it. Quite a few of them could only do so because their partner or family had wealth, which mitigated the challenges of low pay.

I believe we have some incredibly talented and skilled people working in our sector for far less than they are worth, but they’re either able to do so because of family wealth, or they’re making sacrifices they shouldn’t have to.

Consider the safety aspect again.

People who can live with their parents as adults come from a certain kind of privilege that isn’t accessible to many.

Or there are those who are able to offload the responsibilities of safety to someone else, who earns considerably more than them.

The people in organisations who consider a minimum wage salary to be sufficient may have a certain kind of candidate in their mind who benefits from privilege.

You cannot be an organisation committed to diversity while also paying salaries that are unaffordable to swathes of the population.

An obsession with hierarchy

The issue of low pay is related to so-called ‘entry-level’ or ‘junior’ jobs.

In reality many of these ‘starter’ jobs - and not just in the social sector - demand previous skills and experience. Or if they don’t demand it explicitly, they reward it through the recruitment process.

Someone who is completely new to work will not have previous experience. And expecting people to have volunteering experience again advantages a certain kind of person.

Hierarchies within organisation can foster a culture of entitlement.

Those in ‘junior’ roles are not as important, they’re not as valuable, that is why they are not paid as much.

But there are plenty of ‘junior’ roles whose responsibilities form the backbone of an effective organisation. From necessary admin, to positive customer contact, to frontline delivery… if these are done badly, the whole organisation suffers.

Those in ‘senior’ roles have done their time, they’ve demonstrated their value, they’re doing the crucial work of being strategic.

When someone who is more senior signs off on a job being paid less than living wage, is this potentially a case of pulling the ladder up behind them?

Offering ‘starter’ jobs that don’t pay well can have knock-on effects that mean people in them are not able to thrive as well as they might.

I think one of the reasons this post struck a chord is because people recognise not just the challenge of affording a job that’s poorly paid, but being made to tangibly feel less valued as a result.

Trustees should set ‘starter’ salaries

Here’s my recommendation: Trustees should set the lowest paid salaries at an organisation, not just the highest paid.

They should be encouraged to state in the minutes their rationale, and have it in the annual report alongside the top salary in the organisation.

As a sector we don’t have shareholders to satisfy, so we are in a position to invest in our people rather than exploit the lowest paid for profit.

Let the private sector pay peanuts so the richest can reap more.

We don’t have to do things the same way.

What does ‘autonomy’ feel like?

It’s a word people tend to use with an assumption that others know what they mean. But in the workplace, autonomy manifests in a variety of ways.

From feeling fully confident that you can:

• leave the office before 5pm or

• sign off a £100k invoice or

• invite several senior people to your meeting without running it past anyone first or

• reject a donation from a support

…without negative consequences.

In fact, autonomy as a concept is less about whether the structures of your organisation ‘allow’ you to do something, and more about whether you are in a position to allow your principles to guide your actions.

In Self-determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), Autonomy is one of three core psychological needs that foster intrinsic motivation and well-being, leading to greater satisfaction with your work.

Ryan & Deci in their 2020 paper describe autonomy this way:

Autonomy concerns a sense of initiative and ownership in one’s actions. It is supported by experiences of interest and value and undermined by experiences of being externally controlled, whether by rewards or punishments.

What does this mean in practice?

Let’s take the example of leaving the office before everyone else.

Someone who feels they have the autonomy to do this feels trusted by their employer to make that decision. This trust could be further defined in a variety of ways: that they have done their work for the day; that they are not taking advantage; that their employer respects their need to balance work responsibilities with those outside of work.

Someone who does not feel they have autonomy to do this - and does it anyway - will perhaps feel like they’ve ‘earned’ it, or that they’re expected to be in early the next day, or may simply feel guilty and slink out, worried about what other people might be thinking.

Trusted employee

While the concept of trust isn’t mentioned alongside self-determination theory, it is my belief that this is the feeling people are most likely to describe rather than “autonomy” i.e. that they feel “trusted” to make decisions or take initiative.

This issue of creating a feeling of trust is a thorny one for organisations.

Hands up if you’ve ever had a manager say “I trust you, but…”

Or if someone has told you that, “trust has to be earned.”

Trust should not be transactional, in the same way that autonomy is not transactional. However, it is much easier to set up processes of control, punishment and reward than it is to create a culture of trust and autonomy.

Hierarchy is not our friend, but values are

Many many many organisations have a hierarchical structure. The pyramid ensures that people know their place.

Suggestions are moved up the chain for others to approve and edicts are sent down the chain for people to deliver.

While it is possible to create a culture of trust and autonomy in a hierarchical organisation, it is harder because the structure puts guardrails in place for independent behaviour.

The best way to counter this is with coherent and deeply embedded values for the organisation, which shape the culture and encourage individuals to exercise autonomy within a framework of accepted behaviour.

However, there is often a disconnect between values and culture. I was chatting with someone the other day who said: “But organisational values have nothing to do with culture!”

This suggests her organisation has articulated values without embedding them, which leaves people to discover the true culture of the organisation through - sometimes bitter - experience, rather than being informed through their statement of values.

In an organisation like this, where the hierarchy enforces control and the culture creates confusion, people are far less likely to feel like they have true autonomy.

Values should not pay lip-service to culture.

Either they encompass and articulate the culture you have - warts and all!

Or they provide a guiding light for the culture to which you aspire.

The added bonus is that when someone considers working for you, they can identify whether their own values align with yours. This alignment is part of how people can feel like they have autonomy: because the choices they make are ones anyone else might also make without requiring coercion to do so.

Creating a culture of autonomy

The 2020 Ryan & Deci paper focuses on how to facilitate experiences of autonomy in the classroom, which is described in this way:

Teachers who support students’ autonomy begin by attempting to understand, acknowledge, and where possible, be responsive to students’ perspectives.

They also try to provide opportunities for students to take ownership and initiative of their schoolwork, providing them with meaningful choices and tasks that can engage their interests. When they require something to be done, they provide a meaningful rationale.

In contrast, controlling teachers are more oriented to pressure students to think, feel, or behave in particular ways without responsiveness to student perspectives.

This approach can be adapted for a workplace if we break down what the authors are proposing.

1. Be responsive to employees’ perspectives

This is inclusivity 101. Being responsive means being open to other ways of thinking, other ideologies.

I remember working with someone who took great pride in being the only Conservative in an organisation of left-leaning colleagues. He was assertive enough to put his ideas forward, but as a collective we weren’t as responsive as we could have been. I think we would have been far more effective if we’d listened more and considered how his alternative perspective could inform our work.

Let’s take the example of someone feeling they have the autonomy to reject a donation from a donor.

While an organisation might have an ethical fundraising policy, the ethical decision-making in that moment is with the fundraiser. Rather than being told what to do (control, punishment and reward), they are empowered to make an informed, ethical decision as a professional. This is something Rogare has explored in their Rethinking Fundraising paper.

This is what being responsive to someone’s perspective could look like in practice, and it can be scary as hell to people who might prefer institutionalism to pluralism or even self-management.

2. Provide opportunities to take ownership and initiative

Being a “self-starter” is a common requirement in job descriptions. However, organisations don’t always want a self-starter, they just think they do because it sounds good.

Giving genuine ownership to someone means letting them “own” it: the credit and the failure.

It is setting outcomes rather than tasks; waiting for updates on progress, rather than demanding oversight of actions: “This is what needs to be achieved, it’s up to you how we get there.”

Strong values and culture would guide someone in this context to make decisions that are in line with what the organisation might expect.

Because their judgement is respected, they can experiment. They feel like an expert in their field rather than an implementer of someone else’s ideas, which also ties into one of the other psychological needs in self-determination theory: competence.

3. Provide a meaningful rationale

In my experience this is something organisations find really difficult.

I am pretty sure that at least once in almost every job I’ve done, I have been told to "JFDI” (Just Fucking Do It).

I think at some point in every person’s career, they come across an experience where they need a meaningful rationale. From why they have to attend a staff away day, to why they’re expected to be in the office 5 days a week, to why the CEO is paid tens of millions each year when they’re on less than minimum wage.

The practice of providing meaningful - coherent, sensible, understanding - reasons for organisations (and more specifically senior leaders) is a good one to get into, even if it can feel awkward to be so accountable.

Let’s take the example of having the autonomy to invite several senior people to your meeting without running it past anyone first.

Why might this be a problem?

It can be difficult for someone to give an authentic answer if the answer is something along the lines of: “I’m too important to be treated this way”!

This is one of the challenges fundraisers are experiencing: being given targets that they don’t feel able to meet. And therefore one of the challenges to fundraisers’ sense of autonomy.

Where is the meaningful rationale for unachievable targets?

Ideally the experience of articulating the actual rationale should raise a legitimate challenge to whether it is meaningful. And if it’s not, then don’t be surprised if your people leave.

Accountability supports autonomy

An organisation that is accountable to its people can expect accountability in return. An organisation that encourages autonomy can expect more engaged people in return.

The opposite is also true.

The three suggestions above are more cultural than they are practical. But they are also practical!

It is worth exploring the extent to which they are already happening, and what might need to happen if they are not.

How do you know if you’re any good at your job?

It may be because you:

• met your targets

• received positive feedback from a colleague or a client

• have a gut instinct that you’re doing it well.

Any and all of these are contributing metrics, which should be considered holistically. Unfortunately too many organisations focus on just the top one.

Exam results do not tell us whether someone is a good teacher. Income raised does not prove whether someone is a good fundraiser. How many paintings they sell does not affirm the value of an artist.

These are indicators, certainly, but as standalone metrics they tell us little about a professional’s competence. Van Gogh, for example, is believed to have sold only one painting in his lifetime. Recognition after death is scant validation for the individual.

How often has someone left an organisation only for people to realise they were better at their job than they had been given credit for when doing it?

Consider probation objectives

In every single paid job I have ever done, my probation objectives have all been about whether I met my end of the bargain.

I don’t ever remember a probation objective that outlined the organisation’s responsibility to me.

Rarely will someone be hired into a job where they already have every single skill, knowledge and experience outlined in the job description.

A probation period is a chance for both employer and employee to consider whether they’ve made the right call.

So yes, whether the employee can meet a set of objectives is crucial. But so is whether the employer provides an environment that will get the best out of this person.

Are probation objectives providing a chance to reflect on the performance of the organisation, not just the individual?

Feedback as a function

Imagine someone who works at a blood donation centre. When they insert the needle, it will be abundantly clear from the reaction of their patient, and any mess, whether they’ve done it well.

Or to go back to the teaching example, there is the relationship with the students: levels of engagement, interest in the subject, willingness to focus in the room – and say hello outside it – as well as their ability to demonstrate learning in the classroom (especially when not all students thrive in exam conditions).

These feedback loops are built into the person’s understanding of their job, and most importantly how they can monitor their own performance over time.

The Job Characteristics Model (JCM) is a framework for identifying how different intrinsic factors in the design of a job affect your experience in that job. One of the factors is called “Feedback”.

This doesn’t mean external feedback from others, but rather whether the act of doing your job provides you with feedback of how well you are doing it

I used the JCM in research I undertook to understand why there is high staff turnover in the charity sector (Rogare, 2025). Among all participants, ‘Feedback’ was correlated with both job satisfaction and intention to leave their job, which means that the extent to which people who work in charities get a sense of how well they are doing their job affects how likely they are to stay in it.

I heard a fascinating example of a poor feedback loop from a fundraiser working in a large charity. They were given a list and told to make calls to supporters about a certain campaign. That was it, no training, no listening in. This fundraiser made the best of it, but even now, several months later, they don’t know if their calls were any good.

They weren’t quite sure what the aim of the calls was, and so they didn’t have a simple, measurable metric for success. As someone in a junior role, they didn’t feel like they could ask to have their calls monitored (you know, “for training purposes” as the recorded voice says).

The risk of this is that this fundraiser is getting lots of experience but with the wrong skill! They’re also not building confidence in their abilities, because they have no sense of whether they’re doing the job well.

How can we enable better feedback?

An effective feedback loop understands how someone experiences their job, how they’re able to recognise the quality of their own performance: not limited to whether they meet objectives, but the work done to get there.

Again it comes back to asking the question:

Is your organisation providing an environment that will get the best out of your people?

One dimension is the simple act of getting something done: drawing a line under the successful completion of a thing, such as the sending out of an email or a proposal being signed off; the feeling that it’s possible to now move on to the next thing.

This could be affirmed with a shared, public space for colleagues to celebrate these wins: both big and small. With so many of us working remotely, an approach like this can help reduce any sense of isolation people might be feeling, as well as providing a potential feedback loop for performance.

A second dimension is rooted in clear and achievable objectives and KPIs. The SMART framework is one that I think we’re so used to, we take it for granted.

Specific and Measurable are the easy ones, as is Time-Bound, at least theoretically.

Achievable can be less so - especially if your organisation has ambitions grander than its capacity to deliver.

Relevant strikes at the heart of your job description - is what you’re doing what you’re meant to be doing? Have your objectives been thrust upon you; are you comfortable with this being how your performance is assessed?

Consider what might progress look like over the next week, month, quarter. Not just what success might look like. If all objectives are about success rather than progress, you may be setting your people up to feel like failures.

You might consider actual feedback from others, but this is rarely as useful as we might hope. The power dynamics at play, the credibility of the source, the competence in giving feedback: these can all affect both the experience of receiving feedback and its value in helping a fundraiser understand whether they are in fact doing a good job.

Ask rather than assume

You should ask your people if they feel they have the tools and experiences to monitor and assess their own performance.

Ask them if the environment in which they’re working is enabling good performance or inhibiting it?

Be open to performance appraisals being a two-way street.

An effective people strategy does not get lost in process, it is emboldened by culture. A people-first culture considers how a job role is designed, how it is experienced, and is open to change.

This post has been adapted from a recent blogpost for Fundraising Everywhere.

Next time…

This is the third in a series of posts that explores what could be the cause of high voluntary turnover in the charity/non-profit sector. The next one will be on autonomy and trust.

If you have any thoughts on this then please let me know!

One of my first jobs was at a charity where, up until 6 months before I joined, everyone earned exactly the same salary. From the cleaner to the CEO, everyone was on £24,000.

For 18 years, this local charity had slowly built up experience and trust within the community, growing from volunteer-run to a staff of over 50.

It was an openly faith-based charity; I was the last member of staff recruited under the previous rules, where any role could require a commitment to a particular religion.

Up until 6 months before I joined, there was a weekly ‘Prayer and Praise’ meeting on Monday afternoons. From 2:30pm, all staff downed tools and congregated in a local church for a service.

6 months before I joined there was a new CEO. One of the first things he did was institute salary bandings. His salary bloomed to £40,000, which he mentioned on several occasions was still considerably below the ‘norm’. Another thing he did was make the weekly ‘Prayer and Praise’ meeting a monthly affair, as he felt it was affecting productivity.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a year after I joined, I was made redundant, along with 34 other members of staff.

Behaviour shapes culture

This new CEO had been hired because he was a Christian and he came from the corporate world. He had ‘ambition’ for the charity, which ultimately melted our wings.

Simply being a Christian did not mean he shared the values of the charity. Indeed, the recent reporting of the culture at World Vision reminds us that faith does not always equate to inclusive and kind behaviour.

The flat salary approach of the charity, which had been in place from their first paid member of staff, was a tangible representation of the culture of the organisation.

The commitment to shared time together as a team during working hours was another.

I have worked at organisations with values words or statements printed on the walls, but where day to day behaviour and decisions by senior leadership are light years away from the stated intention.

Are our values our own?

There is a theory in organisational psychology that suggests organisations pursue legitimacy by conforming to isomorphic pressures within their sector (Ashworth, Boyne & Delbridge, 2009).

What this means in lay terms is that organisations copy each others’ approaches as a way of proving they know what they’re doing.

It’s the organisational equivalent of copying the cool kids.

There are 3 different types of isomorphic pressure:

• Coercive - which is where organisations external to the sector and/or societal pressure force organisations to conform, for example GDPR encouraging charities to split out different types of communications as different options for consent.

• Mimetic - which is where organisations that feel vulnerable or have an ambition to grow copy the approach of more successful organisations, for example a small local charity trying to do things like one of the super-major charities.

• Normative - which is where the norms of particular professions standardise approaches across organisations, for example the Charity Commission’s reporting structure encouraging charities to think of ‘fundraising’ spend as separate from all other spend.

This is why there’s not more innovation within the charity/non-profit sector.

I would argue that approaches by funders represents coercive pressure. Charities are responding in similar ways, rather than breaking out of the mould of conformity.

While isomorphic pressures tend to be more visible in structures and processes, over the longer term it can influence culture as well.

Salaries as a representation of values

The way that an organisation sets out its salary structure is far more influential on culture than I think people realise.

Many charities/non-profits, particularly in the UK, use salary bands. Many also don’t publish their salaries internally, except when advertising a new job.

How many organisations state they have a value of ‘openness’ while at the same time not being open about what everyone is earning?

Perhaps we should consider the value of openness on a spectrum.

It takes effort and intention to escape the cage of isomorphic pressure.

Living out stated values in observable behaviours is one.

Here are a few approaches to salaries that do not conform to the current norm in our sector.

1. Everyone earns the same

A flat salary structure sends a powerful message about an organisation’s culture.

The Museum of Homelessness pays every single member of their staff £34,800, which is the national average wage for museums and has done since 2021.

Their reasoning for this is best expressed in their own words:

We know that sharpening inequality is a driving factor for today’s homelessness crisis. We can challenge this in many ways. We challenge inequality through campaigning and our creative work, by providing opportunities and by platforming less heard stories. We believe we must also challenge it in the way we structure and operate our organisation and in the way that we build community. It is not enough to demand a better, more equal world, we must also make one.

I love that last line.

I also love that the Museum of Homelessness doesn’t have a list of ‘Values’ published on their website.

Perhaps the clearer you are on your values, the less performative your communications are?

2. No one earns more than X times another

This is something that quite a few organisations say they do, but my sense is that the maths becomes more important than the meaning.

Pay ratios have become more prominent in recent years, particularly in the private sector, where a CEO can be compensated to the tune of several 1,000 times more than their lowest paid employee.

At its essence, a pay ratio sets out the maximum difference between the highest paid member of staff and the lowest. Salary bands do this, although the banding in and of itself tends to reflect benchmarks in the sector rather than a values-based judgement by the individual organisation.

A flat salary structure has a pay ratio of 1:1.

If this is too extreme, you can start from there and decide as an organisation who is worth double, triple, four times more than someone else, and why.

Here’s an example of how this might look in practice, and what the effect is on the total wage bill:

The CEO at my old charity made the executive decision that his worth was more to the organisation than anyone else’s.

This is not a position that is right or wrong, it is simply a position. There are CEOs at small charities who are single-handedly keeping the lights on and the Trustees happy. They certainly have worth!

The question for any organisation to ask itself - to properly ask itself, rather than simply bowing to the mimetic pressure of sector salary bands - is how much more worthy are the different people within our organisation, and are we comfortable with our answer?

3. Opening salaries up to collective discussion

This is another fantastic example of progressive leadership from Henry Stewart, who was the CEO at Happy Ltd up until a few months ago.

Every year he would open up the question of how much he should earn to his team, for a discussion. In fact, the staff team collectively discussed what they should earn for the coming year, with an elected salary panel.

One of the ways this is able to work is that all salaries are already transparent across the organisation. This means that the X% pay rise is being applied to a real number rather than a mystical set of salaries within published bands.

It pays to be honest

While there are outliers regularly reported on, the vast majority of salaries in the sector are not overly generous.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this is very low entry-level and non-managerial pay, likely to find savings that pay for higher salaries in more senior roles.

I have seen jobs advertised recently that are remunerated at exactly the same level I was being paid 20 years ago, when starting out in the sector. This is both exploitative and exclusive, since it limits the number of people able to take on a role for what equates to minimum wage.

While salary is not always a major factor in people’s job satisfaction (Shaker et al., 2022), it is a motivator for moving to a new job (Sargeant and Edworthy, 2022). I think that people make peace with what they’re earning until they see what looks like a similar job being paid considerably more.

If you have been toiling away on significantly less than your peers for many years, of course you will want to get paid more when you take on a more senior role. Of course you do!

But it’s also worth considering whether you want to be a leader who follows the herd. Whether the values you espouse publicly are reflected in how you pay your team.

Next time…

This is the second in a series of posts that explores what could be the cause of high voluntary turnover in the charity/non-profit sector. The next one will be on performance reviews & feedback.

If you have any thoughts on this then please let me know!

They had been on holiday and when they got back two more members of their team had left the organisation.

They were shocked by how normal this was considered by their colleagues.

“If we had turnover like this at my old job there would have been a major discussion about what on earth is going on!” they said. Work would pause while management tried to understand what was causing so many people to leave.

I’m a nosey kind of person, so I asked what they thought might be the issue.

They’re in one of the larger charities, with an annual income of over £100 million. Their team is a specialised fundraising department, with regional officers as well as a head office staff.

The teams that have had the most turnover since this person started have very clear, monthly KPIs: number of phone calls, number of visits. The fundraising function is a well-oiled machine.

Once new starters have learned the ropes and started to build relationships, the day to day becomes routine. They’re paid well, but have little autonomy outside of the strictures of their role.

They’re probably bored!

The risk of tedium

In 2024 a longitudinal study was published that explored and compared boredom and work engagement (Kawada, Michiko, et al., 2024). Their findings suggested that boredom is actually more likely to negatively affect someone’s health than make them leave their job. A sobering thought.

Boredom isn’t as simple as not having enough to do. The Dutch Boredom Scale, or DUBS, focuses on the effects rather than the antecedents of boredom, for example: “At my job, I feel restless”. A psychometric examination of this scale identified that feeling bored in your job can result in dissatisfaction not just with the job you’re doing but your whole organisation (Reijseger, G., et al. , 2013).

Earlier research in fact found that boredom can lead to counterproductive work behaviour by employees (Bruursema, K., Kessler, S.R. and Spector, P.E., 2011). Counterproductive work behaviour has earned its own three letter acronym (CWB) and is quite an intimidating list of behaviours, including sabotage and theft! However the 2011 research proposed an additional, less aggressive, type called ‘horseplay’; this describes behaviours that waste time, such as playing games and gossiping.

Fundamentally, you don’t want bored employees. They can be restless and potentially disruptive, but they can also leave or even end up in poor health. And surely with so many people feeling busy and stretched, boredom is something we shouldn’t be experiencing?

How to prevent boredom

Not having enough to do is the most obvious contributor to boredom. But it is not the only one and thinking of ‘boredom’ in only these terms risks missing other determinants.

More freedom in work

One of the potential antecedents from the 2024 study was “poor job resources'“, which covered supervisor (or manager) support, co-worker support, job control (or autonomy) and meaningfulness of work.

These ‘resources’ are in the gift of the employer to provide and not something an individual employee can gain for themselves.

A 2022 study exploring the effects of job stressors on boredom and burnout found that red-tape positively predicted job boredom (Harju, L. K., Van Hootegem, A., & De Witte, H., 2022), where red-tape describes the experience of rules, regulations, or procedures that seem pointless yet burdensome.

Autonomy is, at its heart, the independence and freedom to decide how to do your job. It was also one of the factors in my research (Rogare, 2025) that affected the likelihood of people wanting to leave.

It walks hand in hand with red-tape, since the imposition of procedures represents the complete opposite to giving people freedom in their work.

To go back to the original example, team members are being given very specific KPIs related to outputs, rather than outcomes.

This means that trying different approaches to achieving the same aims will result in being penalised for not doing their job, since their job has been delineated by how they spend their time, rather than whether objectives are met.

Is your organisation more interested in control than results?

And if you’re balking at the question, the answer may well be yes!

More variety

Repetitive work that requires little thought or creativity can also lead to boredom.

Some people may not have the creative instinct to make their job less boring (although ‘horseplay’ is one way to do it!) and if they’re in an organisation that exerts hierarchy and control, they may have little incentive to try.

Business as usual is a necessary part of most jobs. But if it represents 100% of a job, then not only do you risk bored employees, you risk stagnating as an organisation.

Innovation should not be siloed.

One way to encourage variety in someone’s role, is to employ what is rather grandly known as Innovation Time Allocation, where people are encouraged to spend a proportion of their time on not-BAU. This was first set up by the American company 3M who, during the Second World War, had to find an alternative to natural rubber for their Scotch transparent tape. Scientists were allocated 15% of the working week to experiment, balancing the demands of today with innovations for the future.

Experimentation feels obvious within the context of scientific discovery, but in a fundraising team?

Actually there are a myriad of ways to experiment and evolve:

• using something like the Theory of Constraints to identify blockers within work and between teams

• evaluating past campaigns properly, to generate useful insights, or

• investing proper time in planning and research for new campaigns or new technologies

• speaking with completely new people outside of the traditional donor base.

The challenge for any organisation is taking the results of experimentation on board.

To go back to the original example: there doesn’t appear to be a culture of encouraging people to take time for developing ideas, for thinking beyond the scope of their role. This is both a mistake and a missed opportunity.

I will ask you again: Is your organisation more interested in control than results?

Skill development

When it comes to skills, there are different levels to achieve: from novice to master.

Progressing from novice to master requires more than simply doing the same thing over and over. Especially if you’re doing it wrong!

Once you have achieved mastery of a skill, then you’re likely to want to master a whole new skill.

Both of these journeys require an investment of time and intention. It also requires self-awareness and manager/co-worker support:

• Are you really as skilled as you think you are?

• Are you more skilled than you give yourself credit for?

Intention when it comes to developing skills is cheaper than investment and can therefore, in an environment where development budgets can be small, be more impactful.

Skill Variety was another factor in my research that contributed to turnover intention. Providing people with regular and ongoing opportunities to improve existing skills and develop new ones will, by its very nature, mean that their job is less boring.

Have you asked them?

Do you know if your team are bored? Have you asked them?

If you’re worried that they may not feel able to tell you honestly, then that’s a whole different challenge.

If they are bored, then hopefully some of my suggestions above could help. Or if it’s perhaps a more systemic issue, maybe I can help (i.e. get in touch!)

Next time…

This is the first in a series of posts that explores what could be the cause of high voluntary turnover in the charity/non-profit sector. The next one will be on salaries. If you have any thoughts on this then please let me know!

On 18 September I held an online session where I shared the findings from my research published by Rogare. I also put forward a few ideas for how we can meet certain endemic challenges with employing people in the charity / non-profit sector.

This is all in the recording above 👆🏻

Following the presentation, we had a brief discussion where two really important points were made:

• In some smaller organisations, the existing structure can already be very flat - with a CEO (or equivalent) and all staff reporting direct to them. This means any kind of dual track, or indeed promotion at all, can feel impossible.

While flat structures can be considered a pinnacle for more autonomous, collective organisations, in these scenarios it can lead to burnout or simply mean there’s not the funding or opportunity to consider any kind of promotion.

• It feels like there may be a latent and pervasive trauma, for fundraisers in particular, especially since Covid. Where fundraisers have played the role of enthuser-in-chief, bringing positivity to an organisation, this is less common now. And we’re not sure how to bring it back.

As one participant wrote:

Such a good point about the cumulative impact of trauma. As fundraisers we're often confronted by a lot of challenging content and in fact intentionally go looking for it. The gradual impact of this doesn't get talked about much.

Opening up the conversation

I set up a shared Google Doc for people to contribute to:

👉🏻 Motivating charity staff to stay in (and enioy) their job - Sept 2025 - which has some excellent insights and ideas in there already (feel free to add your own!)

There were also some really interesting examples people shared in response to some of my suggestions.

On salary transparency

Salaries are transparent in other countries... in Austria they have 'collective contracts' which are agreed each year relating to the specialism not the organisation.

On salary stagnation and lack of opportunities to progress

I joined 3 years ago and negotiated my salary at the top of the salary band (worked in sales previously so I am very good at negotiation!!) I am now in the strange situation where my senior colleagues get a salary increase for every year they have been with the charity but I cannot as I am already at the top of my salary band. There are some people who are getting a pay rise but haven't demonstrated the same income generation as me which is incredibly frustrating.

On potentially sharing staff across organisations

In my first role … lots of legal charities shared an office space and a few of us shared 1 finance guy because none of us needed him full time. Helped that we were physically in the same space.

…however…

I tried to facilitate inter-organisational people sharing in my last role. I wasn't very successful...mainly because everyone was already at capacity.

On organisational cultures not matching stated values

…thinking of an organisation where the SLT made up the values without consulting the rest of the staff and most of us didn't feel represented at all, it was so at odds with the reality of what it was like 🙁

…and…

my last charity was 'committed to fighting ageism' and was the most ageist place I've ever worked. Definitely not matching their values!

On management being a recognised skill in its own right (rather than a byproduct of promotion)

I've recently been managed temporarily by someone who is not a fundraiser while my fundraising manager was off, and it worked really well because they were a genuinely good manager! Happy to have my skilled sounding board back, but it does work.

While many of the things that make employment difficult are not unique to our sector, there are differences that it’s worth considering when:

• designing paid-for job roles,

• going out to recruitment,

• welcoming people,

• managing people,

• retaining great people (as well as saying goodbye constructively to people who aren’t great),

• saying goodbye to great people (and learning from it if possible)

• and generally considering how to navigate paid-for job roles in a sector that can be made to feel like paying for staff is a privilege not a professional courtesy.

Next steps

This is my first substack post as People & Purpose. I am hoping to continue exploring these things. Please join me!

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And if you have ideas, comments, examples in practice, personal experience please get in touch or comment! I’d love to hear more.

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