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What do feminist leadership, circus skills and the future of charity leadership have in common?

In the second episode of series two of The Leader to Leader Podcast, Irene Sobowale, former chief executive of Brainkind, passes the baton from her conversation with ACEVO chief executive Jane Ide to interview Lee Webster, deputy chief executive of Respect, the national organisation working to stop perpetrators of domestic abuse.

Drawing on more than two decades of experience across charities of different sizes, Lee reflects on how leadership has become increasingly complex. From funding pressures and rising demand to the interconnected challenges facing communities, she argues that leaders need to look beyond organisational boundaries, remain curious and recognise that the solutions to society's biggest problems rarely fit into neat boxes.

But what does good leadership look like in practice?

For Lee, leadership shouldn't start at the top. She talks about the importance of creating organisational cultures where people at every level have the confidence and authority to make decisions, learn from mistakes and contribute to a shared purpose. She also reflects on her relationship with Respect's CEO and how trust, honesty and shared responsibility can help prevent the isolation often associated with senior leadership.

A committed feminist throughout her career, Lee explores what feminist leadership means to her and why it remains so relevant. From challenging traditional hierarchies and using power responsibly to prioritising equality, care and accountability, she makes the case for a more human-centred approach to leading organisations.

And then there's the circus.

Lee offers a memorable analogy for the realities of charity leadership: juggling competing demands while hoping none of the glass balls fall, walking the tightrope between scarce funding and growing need, and occasionally becoming a trapeze artist, achieving things that once seemed impossible. It's a reminder that, despite the pressures, charity leaders can bring hope, joy and meaningful change to people's lives.

The conversation also explores the future of leadership, including how remote working might affect the development of tomorrow's charity CEOs, the importance of building diverse leadership teams, and the need for greater collaboration and innovation across the sector.

Lee shares her thoughts on the challenges facing infrastructure organisations, the search for more sustainable funding models and why resilience depends on people, purpose and money. She also offers a more personal perspective on what helps her stay grounded when the pressures of leadership become overwhelming.

Throughout, Irene and Lee return to the importance of working together, staying connected to the people around us and keeping sight of why we do this work in the first place.

And as the baton passes once again, Lee introduces her next guest, Danielle Bridge, chief executive of Black Minds Matter, and the question she hopes to explore with her about strategy and keeping it alive within organisations.

Listen for an honest, thoughtful and hopeful conversation about feminist leadership, navigating complexity and finding new ways to lead in a changing world.

In this opening episode of the second series, Jane Ide, chief executive of ACEVO, sits down with Irene Sobowale, former chief executive of Brainkind, for a conversation about what leadership looks like when you have the chance to step away from the day job and look back in.

After 13 years at Brainkind, first as finance director and then as chief executive, Irene is taking a sabbatical year and considering what might come next: a return to executive leadership or a move towards a non-executive portfolio. Six months into that break, she reflects on what it means to give yourself permission to step away, and on the different perspective that comes from no longer being immersed in the immediate pressures of running an organisation.

Looking back over her years as a chief executive, Irene describes how the leadership landscape has changed. When she first took on the role, much of her focus was on the organisation itself: its services, the people it supported, compliance and modernisation. Leaders still have all of that to contend with, she argues, but external pressures now occupy far more space. Climate change, political change, shifting demographics, technology and AI are all shaping organisations and the communities they serve. Irene describes this as a period of transition: the “messy bit in the middle” between the world we knew and whatever comes next.

The conversation turns to whether leaders and organisations are equipped for that environment. Irene talks candidly about trying to keep pace with rapid technological change and why leaders need to recognise the expertise they do not have. Leadership, she argues, cannot simply reside in the senior levels of an organisation: people with the right knowledge and skills need to be given a voice, wherever they sit.

That leads Jane and Irene into a wider discussion about collaboration. The sector has talked about working collaboratively for years, but Irene questions whether organisations create enough time for genuine collective strategic thinking. Leaders can easily be pulled back towards operational pressures and the needs of their own organisations. She argues for more opportunities to think and learn together, including across the charity and commercial sectors, rather than every organisation going through the same processes and pain points alone.

Boards are part of that conversation too. Irene reflects on the relationship between boards, chief executives and organisations, and asks whether a focus on organisational priorities can sometimes make it harder for CEOs to create the bandwidth for wider collaboration and systemic thinking. As the environment changes, she argues, boards also need to think about the mix of skills and experience they need and how they can help organisations look beyond what is immediately in front of them.

Looking ahead, Irene sees agility, collaboration, connection and a willingness to experiment as increasingly important. Leaders will need to accept that they will not always get things right first time and be prepared to innovate and work differently. One thought in particular stays with Jane: Irene’s observation that we may no longer have the past to fall back on when deciding how to do things in the future.

Finally, they return to the importance of creating space. Irene encourages leaders to find the bandwidth to think beyond the immediate here and now, and to have those conversations collectively rather than trying to work everything out alone. She also reflects on the need to look after ourselves and each other when so many people are navigating significant change and pressure.

And, as the baton passes on, Irene introduces the leader she’ll be interviewing next: Lee Webster, deputy chief executive at Respect.

In this episode (the final of this first series), Kiran Kaur, CEO of Girl Dreamer, sits down with Jane Ide, chief executive of ACEVO, for a rich and wide-ranging conversation about leadership, change, and what it means to stay grounded when the ground keeps shifting.

Jane opens by sharing something she hears consistently from leaders across the sector: exhaustion. Not universal burnout, she is careful to say — there are plenty of leaders who are energised and making progress — but a pervasive tiredness, and a difficulty finding the oomph that leadership demands. She locates much of this in the emotional labour of the current moment: the redundancies, the restructures, the budget-setting in conditions of deep uncertainty. She describes it, for some, as a kind of grief — particularly for newer chief executives who are discovering, for the first time, just how differently that weight lands when you are the one carrying it.

The conversation moves into geography and what it means to lead from outside London. Jane has spent her entire adult life in the north of England, and came into the sector not through the usual routes but through a membership role in Sheffield that introduced her first to NAVCA and eventually to ACEVO. She is candid about the practical realities: some things — Westminster meetings, events that members can actually get to — still pull towards London. But she argues that ACEVO's decision to become a fully distributed organisation has been one of its most important, giving the team genuine connection to the communities and regions where most of the sector's work actually happens. And on a personal level, she is clear: she could not do this job without being able to walk out of her front door and see the hills.

Jane and Kiran then turn to what has most changed about leadership since the pandemic. Jane identifies a significant cultural shift in what staff expect and demand — an expectation of inclusion, of voice, of being treated well — which she largely welcomes, even as she acknowledges that some leaders are finding it genuinely difficult to navigate. She also names something harder: the increasing polarisation of society, the fault lines that have opened up within teams, the difficulty of assuming that everyone in your organisation will simply go with you on mission and values. Brexit, she suggests, was perhaps the first moment many of us experienced communities and families on opposite sides of a fence — and that something has not fully settled since.

On the future of leadership, Jane is honest that she cannot predict it, but she is certain that the pace of change is accelerating in ways that make the old models feel inadequate. She raises the question of what a non-Western, non-capitalist model of leadership might look like — and notes, with some frustration, that when she has tried to explore this, she is usually told that most of the world simply follows the UK model. She finds more hope in the new generation of leaders who are not waiting for permission, who are starting their own things and bringing with them a different instinct around joy, creativity, rest, and collective ways of working. The north star, she argues, has to remain values and mission — those cannot be sacrificed to the pressures of the moment — but everything else may need to be rethought.

The episode closes on the question of what keeps Jane anchored when the pressure is high. Professionally, she returns always to the mission: does this decision serve the purpose? Personally, she is grateful to have come into a chief executive role later in her career, when she already knew that work was not all of her. Her family, her dogs, her allotment, her walks — these are not indulgences, she says, but necessities. She describes what she calls the CEO's dilemma: how do you look after yourself in order to protect your organisation? Her answer is straightforward — if you don't, you simply cannot lead well. It is not a sacrifice. It is essential.

In this episode, Janet Thorne, chief executive of Reach Volunteering, sits down with Kiran Kaur, CEO of Girl Dreamer, for a wide-ranging conversation about leadership, power, and what the next generation is bringing to the social impact sector.

Kiran opens by drawing on her dual vantage point: running Girl Dreamer while simultaneously conducting research with the University of Birmingham into young women of colour in social impact leadership. From that position, she identifies something that still holds the sector back: a fundamental misunderstanding of what shared power actually means. There remains, she argues, a stubborn hierarchy between who is seen as a leader and who is seen as a beneficiary — and until that shifts, the sector will keep missing the expertise that comes from lived experience combined with professional knowledge.

The conversation moves into community-centred design, and the distinction between designing for people versus designing with them. Kiran explores how leaders with lived experience tend to start from a different premise — one where power has to be distributed for the mission to work — and how that contrasts with structures where hierarchy is still quietly embedded. She references the idea, drawn from American activists, that even human-centred design can carry colonial assumptions, and that true change happens when communities can self-organise and move forward without needing the same structures to rely on.

Janet and Kiran then turn to what has shifted over the past five years. The momentum that followed 2020 — the funding, the recognition, the sense that things were finally moving — has, in Kiran's view, started to regress. The rawness of that moment has faded, and many of the injustices it surfaced remain unresolved. And yet she finds hope, specifically in the wave of Gen Z leaders she is watching step forward. They are, she says, action-oriented in a way previous generations weren't — moving first, questioning the rules rather than following them, and bringing a deep instinct for collectivism that she believes will change the shape of leadership itself.

Joy comes up as an unexpected but important thread. Kiran challenges the assumption that serious, systemic work has to start from a place of deficit and problem. In many cultures and communities, joy, play and radical celebration are how change is driven — and yet funding applications still demand you lead with the problem. She introduces the idea of being healing-centred first, approaching leadership from a place of what people already have and already bring, rather than what they lack.

On the question of what CEOs don't talk about enough, Kiran is direct: their own wellbeing. The pressure to perform positivity on LinkedIn, to always be thrilled and honoured, sits uneasily alongside the reality of leading an organisation through hard times. She wants more space — real space — for leaders to share the lows, not as failure, but as part of the honest texture of the journey. She is actively trying to create that space for the young leaders coming through Girl Dreamer, and believes it would make leadership more accessible to exactly the people the sector most needs.

The episode closes with a look ahead. Kiran sees the role of the CEO changing fundamentally as Gen Z — and soon Gen Alpha — reshape expectations around power, hierarchy and collective action. Any leader who positions themselves above rather than alongside will, she thinks, find themselves quickly left behind. The task is to burn and build simultaneously: to maintain what still works while making genuine room for what's coming.

What does it mean to lead well when certainty is no longer an option? In this second episode of our series, Kye Lockwood sits down with Janet Thorne, CEO of Reach Volunteering, for a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation about leadership in a world where the rules keep changing.

Janet brings a distinctive perspective on trust, having to build it not just within her team, but across an entire two-sided platform where volunteers and organisations must learn to rely on each other, often without ever meeting face to face.

Kye and Janet explore how the pace and scale of change has transformed what leadership demands of us, drawing on frameworks like the Three Horizons model and the Bridges Transition Model to make sense of why everything feels so overwhelming right now. They discuss why clinging to five-year plans and KPIs in an unpredictable world is, as Janet puts it, "gripping onto a crumbling cliff", and why preparing for uncertainty matters more than planning for a future we can't see.

Janet speaks candidly about the leadership behaviours she models most for her team — including how to own your mistakes fearlessly and without defensiveness — and why a culture of bold experimentation is essential for any organisation trying to innovate its way through a perma-crisis.

The conversation also ventures into territory that doesn't get talked about enough: the weight of leading an organisation while also grappling with the state of the world — from the retreat of anti-racism commitments to the looming reality of the climate and nature crisis. And Janet offers a quietly hopeful counterpoint, rooted in her belief that people are hardwired to care, to collaborate, and to step up when it matters most.

Janet closes by introducing her next guest: Kiran Kaur, co-founder and CEO of Girl Dreamer, and the questions she most wants to explore about the future of leadership with a group who have long had to navigate systems that weren't designed for them.

Transcript available at https://www.acevo.org.uk/resources/podcast/

What does it really take to lead a charity through constant uncertainty? In this first episode of our new series, Jane Ide sits down with Kye Lockwood — charity chief executive of DataKind UK — to explore one of the most fundamental challenges facing sector leaders today: building and sustaining trust.

From the seismic shift brought about by the pandemic, to the ongoing cost of living crisis and what Kye calls the "perma-crisis" of modern charity leadership, this conversation gets to the heart of what it means to lead with honesty and transparency — even when the news isn't good.

Kye and Jane discuss why protecting your team by hiding difficult truths can actually undermine the psychological safety that organisations need most in tough times; how to read the culture of an organisation before trying to change it; and why making hay while the sun shines — building trust in the good times — is the single most important thing a leader can do to prepare for the hard ones.

They also reflect on the charity sector's relationship with funders and commissioners, the fleeting moment of genuine partnership that emerged during the pandemic, and what it will take to stop the sector slipping back into a supplicant role when it has so much unique expertise to offer.

Kye closes by introducing his next guest: Janet Thorne, CEO of Reach Volunteering, and the question he most wants to explore with her about trust, platforms, and people-centred leadership.

This is a conversation full of hard-won wisdom, honesty, and genuine passion for a sector that — despite everything — remains a privilege to work in.

Find out more and access resources for charity leaders at acevo.org.uk

Welcome to The Leader to Leader Podcast.

This is a podcast about what leadership in the charity sector needs next, and the future we want to build together. What makes this series different is its format – just like thevery best leadership, every conversation passes on the baton. After each interview, the guest becomes the interviewer in the next episode. It’s an ongoing chain of insight, experience, and honesty between people who truly understand the weight and the privilege of leading.

As a community of civil society leaders, we at ACEVO believe these conversations matter. Because when one leader learns from another, the whole sector moves forward.

Join us for The Leader to Leader Podcast, and be part of the conversation shaping the future of leadership.