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Ep 22. Sharath Jeevan OBE, Founder & Chair, Intrinsic Labs: Leaders as nurturers of purpose and impact
256 Plays3 years ago
“(For leaders) it’s about being able to ask the right question at the right time… that’s classic talent nurturing behaviour… trying to help everyone on your team become the best versions of themselves. The trick is to help create the space for us all to reflect on what really motivates each one of us in our unique context, giving us all the courage and the tools to make small, incremental but powerful changes towards it.”
Sharath Jeevan is one of the world’s leading experts on ‘intrinsic motivation’ and author of the book, Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive.
Having recently founded the social purpose business, Intrinsic Labs, Sharath is on a mission to help leaders solve deep motivational challenges. In his book, Sharath lays out a framework and strategies for leaders to align their organisations and their teams around purpose, thereby tapping into that inner or intrinsic motivation that drives us all.
We explore the role of leaders in creating space for their teams to co-create solutions and to serve as nurturers of talent and impact. And we discuss the power of creating a Personal Mission Statement.
Recorded Aug 2021.
Guest Biography
Sharath Jeevan is one of the world’s leading experts on ‘intrinsic motivation’ and is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Intrinsic Labs, which supports organisations to embed motivation principles in their work. He has previously held senior roles in companies such as eBay and Booz & Co, as well as in government and the social sector.
Sharath was the Founder and CEO of STiR Education, an international education NGO, established in 2012. STiR scaled from 12 schools in 2012, to 35,000 schools across India, Uganda and Indonesia in 2021, impacting over 200,000 teachers and 7 million children. Sharath also founded Teaching Leaders, a leadership programme for inner-city schools in the UK, which was expanded to all eligible schools by the UK government and replicated in 8 US cities with the support of the Obama Administration. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, CNBC, The Hindustan Times and The Times of India. An accomplished speaker, Sharath has addressed large audiences at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Lego Ideas Festival in Denmark, TEDx Shiv Nadar Conference in Delhi and WISE Summit in Qatar.
Sharath holds degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities and from INSEAD. He was awarded an honorary doctorate for his contributions to the field, and served on the steering group of the Education Commission, the pre-eminent global body founded by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Sharath’s first book “Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive” was published in multiple countries in September 2021.
Sharath was awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Year's Honours for services to education.
Links
https://www.intrinsic-labs.com/sharathjeevan
Book: Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive: UK: https://amzn.to/3kib5wJ
Global audience: https://linktr.ee/intrinsicamazon
This episode was sponsored by EdenTree Investment Management.
https://www.edentreeim.com/insights/edentree-sponsor-the-charity-ceo-podcast-season-3
Sharath Jeevan is one of the world’s leading experts on ‘intrinsic motivation’ and author of the book, Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive.
Having recently founded the social purpose business, Intrinsic Labs, Sharath is on a mission to help leaders solve deep motivational challenges. In his book, Sharath lays out a framework and strategies for leaders to align their organisations and their teams around purpose, thereby tapping into that inner or intrinsic motivation that drives us all.
We explore the role of leaders in creating space for their teams to co-create solutions and to serve as nurturers of talent and impact. And we discuss the power of creating a Personal Mission Statement.
Recorded Aug 2021.
Guest Biography
Sharath Jeevan is one of the world’s leading experts on ‘intrinsic motivation’ and is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Intrinsic Labs, which supports organisations to embed motivation principles in their work. He has previously held senior roles in companies such as eBay and Booz & Co, as well as in government and the social sector.
Sharath was the Founder and CEO of STiR Education, an international education NGO, established in 2012. STiR scaled from 12 schools in 2012, to 35,000 schools across India, Uganda and Indonesia in 2021, impacting over 200,000 teachers and 7 million children. Sharath also founded Teaching Leaders, a leadership programme for inner-city schools in the UK, which was expanded to all eligible schools by the UK government and replicated in 8 US cities with the support of the Obama Administration. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, CNBC, The Hindustan Times and The Times of India. An accomplished speaker, Sharath has addressed large audiences at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Lego Ideas Festival in Denmark, TEDx Shiv Nadar Conference in Delhi and WISE Summit in Qatar.
Sharath holds degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities and from INSEAD. He was awarded an honorary doctorate for his contributions to the field, and served on the steering group of the Education Commission, the pre-eminent global body founded by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Sharath’s first book “Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive” was published in multiple countries in September 2021.
Sharath was awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Year's Honours for services to education.
Links
https://www.intrinsic-labs.com/sharathjeevan
Book: Intrinsic: A Manifesto to Reignite Our Inner Drive: UK: https://amzn.to/3kib5wJ
Global audience: https://linktr.ee/intrinsicamazon
This episode was sponsored by EdenTree Investment Management.
https://www.edentreeim.com/insights/edentree-sponsor-the-charity-ceo-podcast-season-3
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Transcript
Importance of Strategic Leadership Questions
00:00:00
Speaker
What i'm seeing in the leaders that i work with sector it's about being able to ask the right question at the right time.
00:00:07
Speaker
And that's classic talent nurturing behavior, that you're not trying to dictate something necessarily, but you're trying to help everyone on your team become the best versions of themselves. The trick, I think, is to help create the space for us all to reflect on what really motivates each one of us in our unique context, giving us all the courage and the tools to make small, incremental, but powerful changes towards it.
Success of the Charity CEO Podcast
00:00:40
Speaker
This is Season 3 of the Charity CEO Podcast, the podcast for charity leaders by charity leaders. I'm Divya O'Connor, and I never imagined that this show that I started as an experiment during the pandemic would turn into a number one ranked global podcast with thousands of listeners all across the world. It is truly humbling to know that the show's content is valued by so many.
00:01:03
Speaker
And, thanks to our Season 3 sponsor, Eden Tree, I will continue to bring you inspirational and engaging conversations with a host of leaders who are all truly driving change in the non-profit space. Eden Tree themselves are owned by a charity, and have led the way in responsible and sustainable investing for over three decades. Thank you to Eden Tree. Now, on with the show.
Introducing Sharath Juvan and His Mission
00:01:26
Speaker
Today I am speaking with Sharath Juvan, author of the book Intrinsic, a manifesto to reignite our inner drive. Sharath has an impressive pedigree in the non-profit space, having founded and scaled up the international NGO STIR education, and was named as one of the UK's top 10 social entrepreneurs in 2019.
00:01:47
Speaker
Having recently founded the social purpose business Intrinsic Labs, Sharath is now on a mission to help solve deep motivational challenges for organizations and for individuals. We talk about his book in which he lays out a framework and strategies for leaders to align their organizations and their teams around purpose, thereby tapping into that inner or intrinsic motivation that drives us all.
00:02:12
Speaker
We explore the role of leaders in creating space for their teams to co-create solutions and to essentially serve as nurturers of talent and impact. I hope you enjoyed the conversation.
Icebreaker Questions with Sharath Juvan
00:02:34
Speaker
So the tradition is to start the show with an ice break around. And to that end, I have five questions for you. And if you're ready, we can get started. Good. I'm feeling a bit nervous, but let's go ahead. Sure. Well, hopefully you'd like question one being a writer yourself. Question one, can you name an author or a book that has had a profound impact on you? Haruki Murakami was a great Japanese writer and really sort of very enigmatic, twisted and very interesting and quirky stories on modern Japan. So I've always really enjoyed his work, actually.
00:03:04
Speaker
Question two, as a child, what did you dream of being when you grew up? I was pretty much told to be a doctor, I think, Divya, as well by her. I dreamed of that as a, perhaps a racing car driver before, I think, and yeah, but I think the doctor piece was quite a strong memory in that piece as well.
00:03:20
Speaker
I can totally relate. I mean, I come from a long line of doctors myself. I think my dad was sixth generation of doctors, but he very kindly projected me in a direction that I wanted to go in. So I wasn't forced to go down the doctor route. But I completely know where you're coming from there. Question three, what are three qualities or skills that you think are essential in a leader?
Leadership: Listening and Decision-Making
00:03:43
Speaker
especially now the ability to listen I think is becoming so important to I think also be able to sense patterns in the external world and understand what's changing. And then I think the third thing is probably the hardest thing, which is a balance, the need to build consensus and to try and bring people on, but ultimately make tough decisions and take a direction. Even if that's unpopular and difficult, they know it has to be done.
00:04:07
Speaker
Yes, absolutely agree with you there. And I know that the horizon scanning point is actually so vital and important, but sometimes as chief executives, it's hard to carve out the time in a busy diaries to do that, but it's so important to do that reflection. Question four, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the world right now, what would that be?
Rethinking Education Systems for Impact
00:04:27
Speaker
I guess it's been a week in the UK where we've just had our A-level and GCC results come through, and I was just reflecting, just saying that for years we've had this story about we can't change the exams because of rigor, the gold standard, all this kind of nonsense, and that rigor has been largely lost, to be honest, given the pressures of the pandemic, and it was completely fair and justifiable. I think young people have worked very hard over this period.
00:04:50
Speaker
but the world has not come falling down. I think there's a real chance now to relook at how we think about education, particularly our exam systems around that and see what needs to change. Take the bull by the horns here. Absolutely. And maybe we'll come on to talk about that a
Interviewing JFK: Leadership Insights
00:05:05
Speaker
bit more. But our final icebreaker question is, if you had the opportunity to interview anyone in the world dead or alive, who would it be? And what one question would you like to ask them?
00:05:15
Speaker
probably a leader like John F. Kennedy, the last few leaders in the world who really was able to create a sense of national purpose. I talked about it a bit in my book and I think that ability to bring a country together around a purpose we haven't had for a long time. I'd love to get his perspective on how he did it and what were some of the lessons learned in trying to create that purpose.
00:05:35
Speaker
Excellent. And indeed, that probably brings us nicely on to our main topic of
Exploring Intrinsic Motivation vs. Extrinsic Rewards
00:05:40
Speaker
discussion. And we absolutely will come on to talk about your upcoming book, Intrinsic, a manifesto to reignite our inner drive. And I hope you'll be happy to know, Sherrath, that I've pre-ordered my copy on Amazon and look forward to receiving it once it is released. And by the time this podcast comes out, the book will be available and we will include it in the show notes. But perhaps we could start talking about intrinsic motivation and what that is.
00:06:05
Speaker
Intrinsic motivation is really doing something not because there's a reward or incentive at the end. There's not a carrot at stake. It's because you genuinely find belief, pleasure, enjoyment and fulfillment from that activity. We're in a sector which in many regards you think is an intrinsically purposeful profession. We're doing it with that sense of intrinsic motivation we would hope.
00:06:26
Speaker
actually I think both you and I know that often our organizations are not intrinsically motivated. It's interesting how the way that's become corrupted in many of our organizations today. But yeah, so I think I've distinguished intrinsic motivation from extrinsic or external motivation where you're doing something because of that reward. You're achieving outcomes because a funder has told you so, or because you know your board is going to be breathing down your neck
00:06:52
Speaker
Those things, they can work for a while, that's certainly what the evidence shows, but they rarely sustain. I think one of the people I interviewed for the book described carrots and sticks a bit like paracetamol. They can dull some short-term pain, but they're rarely a long-term palliative option to become better, to use that medical example that we both seem to have had from our childhood.
00:07:11
Speaker
It's a bit like the good cholesterol bad cholesterol distinction you can live your life extrinsically and be driven by status money rewards. Incentives that many people do that it's really a very pleasant ride i think what we're learning is the more we can live our lives on it's always a mix but the more interesting motivation to be part of our motivational.
00:07:31
Speaker
mindset and approach will likely to be more fulfilled happier and also ironically more successful in the long term because we'll put that extra effort in that extra perseverance that resilience that is likely to lead to better long term outcomes and career progression by ourselves but we're not targeting that as the outcome that's the difference.
00:07:52
Speaker
So I know you've really taken this concept of intrinsic motivation to the next level, and you have set up a social purpose business called Intrinsic Labs, and I believe you're the executive chairman of the organization. I'd really like to understand a bit more about what the organization does. I mean, what's the mission of Intrinsic Labs?
Intrinsic Labs' Mission and Motivational Challenges
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, the mission very simply is to really help organizations and their leaders reignite in a drive.
00:08:17
Speaker
and solve deep motivational challenges. And that can be at a number of levels. It could be a CEO thinking about how to engage and re-motivate their board or their employees, for example. It might be around how can we reignite the motivation of our beneficiaries and our communities that we actually serve. It could also be looking at how do we try to influence government for system change and
00:08:40
Speaker
re-motivate government officials to really engage with our work and create that platform for scale. So all of that work is very bespoke. I do it through consulting and coaching, worked with about 12 charity CEOs over the last eight months. So it's a young organization. It's been an incredible privilege to work with such amazing leaders. They range from
00:08:59
Speaker
education CEOs in the global south all the way through to The Economist, for example, and its foundation. But I think what's been so interesting is seeing the convergence of patterns emerging and some really common themes coming through from all of that work. So can you elaborate a bit more on the theme that you refer to there?
Aligning Leadership with Intrinsic Motivation
00:09:18
Speaker
The hardest dilemma, I think, for a leader in our sector is
00:09:22
Speaker
around this question of what really drives them. I think going back to that core to think of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. And almost every leader, and I know Daveo, you've led some amazing organizations that are about to lead, and a fantastic one in your next chapter as well. We're all driven by that sense of intrinsic motivation to begin with in our careers. Very few of us go in the sector rather than be a doctor or a banker. It's not because of the money. And the challenge is as we get into the sector,
00:09:47
Speaker
There are a lot of extrinsic pressures that come up, I think. A lot of it has to do with fundraising, the realities of that. I know that's when you're currently focusing on your role. I think because what happens is we set up an organization or we run an organization, we've suddenly got employees that we need to take care of. That's a serious responsibility. Let's still wake up. The previous organization I ran in the charitable sector
00:10:09
Speaker
I wake up knowing I've got about 80 staff I need to make sure I paid and many of them were in India or Africa or Southeast Asia. They all had dependents who were dependent on them. There's a huge sense of responsibility on our shoulders and it's a very important one. What can happen I think though as a result is we end up focusing on feeding that machine rather than really taking our organization
00:10:30
Speaker
direction we believe is right. I think we settle a little bit too easily in our roles, especially a few years in. And I think a lot of my work is helping leaders and CEOs really see where do they really want to go? If funding wasn't a constraint, what would their dream be of really taking their organizations to a place that they wouldn't have got to otherwise? That's, to me, the real definition of leadership.
00:10:55
Speaker
And how can we create a motivational framework that gets the key actors around them, whether it's their board, their donors, their stakeholders, to buy into that vision and work together to co-create it? And what that often means, I think, is thinking about fundraising and scale a bit differently. Rather than thinking mechanically about, you know, going from three to four to five, maybe you stay a little bit smaller, but you really influence others and bigger actors through thought leadership or influencing.
00:11:24
Speaker
think about more unusual paths to reach large numbers of people through your work, for example. So this is some of the themes that I found is a really common convergence between the very diverse groups I've been working with over these months. I think it's a really important point you make there, which is around thinking about scale differently. And I think there's a bit of a tendency in the charity sector to fall into the trap of
00:11:48
Speaker
thinking sort of bigger is better and more income is equated with an organization being more successful and actually it's more
00:11:55
Speaker
or it should be more focused on impact and not just how many people we are reaching, but to what level we are actually transforming the lives of the people we are touching and reaching.
Fostering Cooperation in Fundraising
00:12:06
Speaker
And I'd like to come back, actually, Sharath, to the book and how you have laid out some of these strategies, if you like, for leaders in terms of reframing or realigning purpose for themselves and their organizations.
00:12:21
Speaker
And can you talk a little bit about why you really wrote the book and what would a charity CEO who is looking to pick up your book, what can they look to gain from that?
00:12:31
Speaker
So we're trying to look at the world quite holistically, because if we're a CEO, we're not just a senior manager. We're also a nurture of other people through our role. We might be in a relationship. We might be a parent. We're certainly a citizen of whatever country we live in. So the book is broad advancements. It looks at life quite holistically and tries to draw the parallels in each of these areas and really asks the question, what will we need to do to deeply motivate us in each of these key aspects of our lives? Using that dimension of intrinsic motivation,
00:13:01
Speaker
These elements of purpose, you know, knowing how what we do helps and serves others. The sense of autonomy that we're at the wheel of our own lives, driving in the way we want.
00:13:11
Speaker
and master become the best versions of ourselves we can be and always improving. Those are the really three core deep motivators behind each of these areas. And what I talk in the book is how can we try to reignite, first of all, I think the purpose of motivation in our work and careers and finding for the research was that any job can become intrinsically motivating and purposeful.
00:13:34
Speaker
Almost any job helps and serves others. Obviously, if you're a charity CEO, you're intrinsically doing a purposeful job to begin with. But that can get lost, as we've discussed. How do you reframe and reignite that job to bring out its core purpose? And what I find typically within the charity world, and I certainly say this as a former charity CEO myself, what happens is we lose connection with the ultimate
00:13:58
Speaker
people were trying to serve, right? I would spend a lot of time in very fancy offices around the world raising money or at some policy podium or at the back of a plane. Usually that's there was other place I spent a lot of time one of the last 10 years. But I became increasingly disconnected from the people I was really trying to serve. And I think those are two really key groups. One is obviously the beneficiaries directly and the communities directly we work for ultimately. But the second area is also our frontline staff.
00:14:27
Speaker
I could do all the talking in the world, but ultimately with where the rubber hits the road in terms of impact that you mentioned and really making a difference, it's those people on the front lines. I increasingly learned to see myself as a nurturer of those two groups. If I did that well as a CEO, I would be really successful in my role. That realization means a very different way of being as a CEO. It's really thinking about almost serving these two groups really powerfully.
00:14:54
Speaker
and being that servant leader to those two deconstituencies. I'm thinking, how can every hour I spend, is it making their lives better and more effective and more efficient? And so a lot of the book talks about strategies, very practical strategies about how to try to be pretty centered around those two groups and breaking down some of the silos we've created in certain larger charities, but also even in small ones, it's amazing how
00:15:19
Speaker
You have a program director then you have a comms director and the two will never know it's difficult to make them talk or finance person it's crazy rolling the same thing out of the world here for the same goal. But how to really align around that and align the whole organization around those two groups i think if you do that. We can reframe what we much more motivating day in day out you can wake up every morning feeling that everything you do is making a difference. To those two groups and it feels much more inspiring motivating.
00:15:49
Speaker
I like how you laid it out there, Sharath, in terms of the three pillars of motivation, if you like, being purpose, autonomy, and mastery, and the real importance of that connection with your frontline staff, if you're a leader of an organization, and indeed the people you are ultimately looking to serve. And I think this brings us back to what you referred to earlier in terms of
00:16:12
Speaker
sustaining the motivation of teams. And I'm delighted that you are actually speaking at the Chartered Institute of Fundraising's convention in September. As listeners may know in my day job, I'm currently the interim CEO of the Institute. And so Sharatha, thank you very much for hosting that session for our fundraising community. And I know your workshop session is titled Sustaining Motivation in Fundraising During Challenging Times. And
00:16:41
Speaker
without, of course, giving away the sort of secret source of what you're going to be sharing at that convention session. Can you tell us a bit more about what that workshop is looking to achieve and what somebody attending it can actually gain from it?
00:16:55
Speaker
Thanks, David. I have huge empathy for fundraisers. I spent a lot of my role in some form fundraising myself. I just know how tough it is. One of the things I would say for the audience, anyone listening, it's one of the toughest jobs in the world, but my God, the skills you learn about how to influence others, how to stay positive despite
00:17:13
Speaker
daily rejections, let's be honest, how to persevere and follow through, but without being sort of pushy. These things are probably the most transferable skills I took away in this new chapter as well. So I think it's an amazing skill set to learn. I'd almost recommend now almost everyone does fundraising as a right to passage in the sector because you learn so much about the world and our sector. I think it is also obviously can be a very difficult role, often a very demotivating one.
00:17:40
Speaker
I think where I've seen this go wrong and really want to try and help with the book and the talk I'll be giving is, how do we reframe fundraising? That's whether you're a fundraising director, officer, or the CEO, which is, you know, most CEOs have to spend a good amount of their time. I spent about probably 40, 50% of my time in some form fundraising. How do we make that more motivating? And I think it's shifting fundraising from
00:18:01
Speaker
seeing it as kind of trying to sell something or bring money in it has to do that but it's really about setting that very clear direction of vision we talked about that very distinct sense of purpose what i think has happened in the fundraising game is because it's a very competitive sort of sector in any domain you got hundreds of organizations competing for funds.
00:18:23
Speaker
What that's created is this sort of mentality of survival the fittest. And I went back to the book to look at Darwin again and just look at what he actually meant. I think what many charity leaders have assumed is it means, you know, let's be 5% cheaper, 5% faster, 5% more impactful. That's not what Darwin was talking about at all. He was, I think, actually an early advocate for this idea, the current idea of diversity.
00:18:48
Speaker
that basically a lot of our gene pool is trying to create diverse characteristics that expand the diversity of the human race. I think there's a really interesting parallel here with fundraising and with I think the more we can be distinct in our approach, our strategy, and still education. I know you've interviewed Girish and John in a previous episode,
00:19:08
Speaker
we ended up focusing on teacher motivation. We had quite a very niche area. And a lot of people said, why are you just focusing on that? Why not try and look at the whole of teacher performance or look at the whole of the education system? And the reason I think we would always give is that there are other people better placed to do the rest. But we've got this very, very specific niche where we are the world experts in it. Let's become really, really expert and help the broader sector do that. So the more we can not see this as a competitive thing and more about
00:19:36
Speaker
What are we doing very, very distinctly? And can we tell that story well and bring in support and also help build this together? Fundraising becomes actually you can be a very pleasant and even motivating experience sometimes as well.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yes, I completely understand what you're talking about, having come into the charity sector as a fundraiser myself and then gone on to a leadership path. And what you were saying there about survival of fittest reminds me actually of Dan Pilotta's really famous TED Talk going back a number of years ago, where he was talking about lots of different nonprofits competing for
00:20:14
Speaker
the same pot of money but actually we should be looking more at how can we make the entire pie bigger in order to increase the benefit of the sector overall and I think we have seen through the pandemic that actually a lot of charities have come together to collaborate more so that they're not sort of all in competition with each other and hopefully we can see more of that continuing as well but
00:20:40
Speaker
I'd like to switch lanes slightly and talk about another area that you've already alluded to which I know is close to certainly both of our hearts and that is of course education coming from yourself as the founder and CEO of Stir Education and from my own perspective as the new incoming chief executive of United World Schools and thank you for your comment earlier.
Transforming Education with Intrinsic Motivation
00:21:01
Speaker
Yes I start as CEO with United World Schools on the 1st of November
00:21:05
Speaker
And I've heard you talk about the importance of really nurturing the fertile soil of lifelong learning for and in children. And so in that context, I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about the story of stair education, if you like, but specifically how intrinsic motivation can really be transformative in the education space. So yeah, I didn't set up stair. It was in 2012 around intrinsic motivation at all. I actually had no idea
00:21:33
Speaker
what the word even meant to be honest and maybe a vague recollection. It really started off trying to find great ideas from teachers that we've published and shared and distributed and how the story evolves by doing that. We accidentally were rekindling that motivation initially working in the slums of Delhi. And it made me realize that we had sort of almost confused the baby in the bathwater. The real baby was this motivational effect we were having. We just hadn't designed for it.
00:21:58
Speaker
I talk about in the book a moment of reckoning for me as a leader. I knew that there was a better way that was close to my passion and was very interesting, very fuzzy, very challenging. I had no idea how we'd possibly measure this. I was not a psychologist by training. I studied economics. So there was this kind of real opportunity to go down a blind alley and take the risk and jump for it.
00:22:21
Speaker
Or I could have stayed safe with our initial log frame, and we had donors like Differ to a funding our first piece of work, who it was much easier to go back and say, yes, we've ticked these boxes, and we're just going to keep going in a very linear way.
00:22:33
Speaker
But I think taking the risk and just going for that gut, we felt that there was something really deeply into this. I think it was one of the best decisions I've made in my professional career. I was studying a recipe for 10 years of real heartache and pain because it was such a difficult area. Honestly, there was a lot of academic research around this topic, but almost no guidance on how to practically apply this stuff into real organizations and certainly not into education systems at any scale.
00:22:57
Speaker
We reached about thirty five thousand schools that's there about seven million children and so was a huge learning experiment to go through but what i think it came out increasingly clear about was that. Ultimately we've got to rethink the purpose of education.
00:23:13
Speaker
I think that's a real strong parallel in most of our sectors in development. We go in, usually driven by some donor agenda, told that these two or three things are key. I'm a big fan of Arian Pan and Girindaras' work around philanthropy. His observation of so much of the narrative now in many of our sectors is about reducing everything to two or three PowerPoint slides.
00:23:35
Speaker
And actually what we're doing in most sectors is tackling very deeply wicked problems, problems that have no easy technical solution. They are multi-linked there. We'll never solve them. And also this question of how upstream do we go? Do we try and attack the root cause or address only the symptoms? These things become very important issues.
00:23:55
Speaker
So for education, what I realized and learned was that the world, we haven't really as a community defined what the purpose of education really was. And I increasingly am convinced that it must be to help children and young people navigate the zigzag of life.
Redefining Education for Lifelong Learning
00:24:09
Speaker
And this very fast changing world over the pandemic has shown us how do we help them stay resilient, stay motivated and critically to keep wanting to learn and engage through that and embrace that uncertainty, embrace the zigzag rather than try and pretend it's a straight line. That would be my summary of what we need to try and achieve. We're far away from that in most of our systems, including in which countries like the UK I'd argue as well.
00:24:35
Speaker
I really like how you've defined that there in terms of the purpose of education is to help children navigate the zigzag of life and I wonder actually just listening to you say that to what extent do the exam systems and the GCSEs and exam boards that we referred to earlier in the conversation, to what extent does that framework really enable children to be prepared for all of the challenges that they face in life and
00:25:03
Speaker
Perhaps there should be much more focus on critical thinking skills and resilience and some of those qualitative things that we're really building up as well as the lifelong curiosity and desire to keep learning.
00:25:18
Speaker
No, I really agree on that. I think if you think about it, I was using another example around the gold standard. Britain was part of the gold standard. The financial system, it had to crash out of it because of financial speculation. And there was all that worry. We'd lose the rigor of our financial system without that link to gold. The pound would go underwater. In fact, the opposite happened. It gave us freedom to tinker with interest rates, to tinker with government spending. We had flourishing economic years. And I hope what's happened with this great inflation debate we've had over the last couple of years of the pandemic
00:25:48
Speaker
It'll help us loosen our belts if you want. So look, we have a lot more freedom here to do what we want. This academic rigor nonsense has been to try and get a tiny percentage of our population to PhD programs or the civil service, which was really what the education system was being geared for for decades. 99.9% of people, that's not relevant. Let's create a system that everyone can benefit and where everyone can master that zigzag of life that we talked about.
00:26:15
Speaker
I think it would look very different. I think there's a great chance to embrace this unusual period and what we've learned and just be bold and not to tinker around the edges.
00:26:25
Speaker
Be bold, be brave, I like that. So I know, Sharath, that you have had an extensive career in the charity sector, obviously founding STIR Education, but also an organization called Teaching Leaders, but that you actually started out in management consulting.
From Consulting to Non-Profit Leadership
00:26:41
Speaker
And so I'd really love to hear about your own leadership journey and how you transitioned from being a management consultant into the nonprofit space.
00:26:49
Speaker
One of the things I talk a lot to both the team as I coach and also just people in general listen, this idea of having a personal mission statement, I think it's so important. Most organizations, most charities have a mission statement.
00:27:01
Speaker
But it's very rare for us as individuals to have our own mission statement in place. So my mission statement in this phase of my life is that I reignite in a drive and help solve demotivation challenges for organizations and individuals by consulting, coaching, and writing. And so if we can express what we do in that single sentence, we have a good sense of what's in scope, what's in line, and what's not in line for us.
00:27:27
Speaker
And it really helps us anchor decisions we make so i think i always had a sense i want to do that wasn't as clear as that for sure i grew up in india i think like yourself and he is there and i saw a lot of the human development challenges out there.
00:27:42
Speaker
I felt something in me really want to make a difference in that i was also coming from a very traditional background and medical families where there's a lot of pressure on the first generation of the uk to take conventional boxes of success and show that. So i think that probably spurt some of my first choice after cambridge when i went to graduate degree but also i think there was a sense that i wanted to learn elsewhere and pick up some of the patterns that i knew might be useful later on.
00:28:11
Speaker
So I knew that probably what I will need to do is to work with corporates or with governments in the social sector. So my first few years I worked in consulting, as you mentioned, but I also took a year out to work for the CEO of ActionAid and worked with him. I did a startup in the crazy.com adays. So I think early on in our careers, I think there's a diversity of experience, networks, knowing how to almost step into a variety of different shoes. It can be such powerful leadership.
00:28:39
Speaker
grounding because it really helps us understand the world from different viewpoints. And I think as a CEO, that's so important today. So I think there was a broad north star. I think maybe I didn't have enough courage to be honest. Maybe it took me about 10 years to get onto the path I wanted to get onto. But I think all the stuff before that was really helpful formatively in building skills and understanding as well.
00:29:01
Speaker
absolutely agree with you. I myself was actually in the banking sector before I moved into the charity sector. And yes, that absolutely gave me a lot of transferable skills, but also really good grounding and training in kind of the business fundamentals, as I call them.
00:29:18
Speaker
Certainly that has stood me in good stead to the leadership position that i find myself in today and i also i love the idea of having a personal mission statement and i'm certainly gonna work on writing my own and i hope all of you listening will also do the same because that comes back to,
00:29:35
Speaker
how are you articulating and defining what is driving you and what is your own purpose and actually articulating that just for yourself but not necessarily for anybody else actually I think can really give you clarity of vision and purpose.
00:29:49
Speaker
You and I both came from the corporate sector. I think it's a good thing, but I do think that what it's probably done is taken a bit of pressure off us in the sector to say, we need to get our own nurturing sorted out. And in the book, I talk a lot about this idea of talent nurturing. And I define it as really being in an organizational environment where someone is helping take you to a place you wouldn't have got to otherwise.
00:30:13
Speaker
And I think, unfortunately, I think what happens if we tend to take people, hire people in, we don't always invest as much as we could or should on nurturing our teams to enable that. I think one of the things that that cultural change is one of the most powerful investments. It's not often about money. It's usually about focus and leadership. That's some of the work I do is about how do we create social sector organizations that have that very strong talent nurturing promise of their core for all workers, but I think especially for those in the front line where
00:30:41
Speaker
that difference is really pivotal to the lives of the communities we serve.
00:30:45
Speaker
And actually, it was something I wanted to ask you earlier. And just given that this past 18 months has been so difficult for everybody, but particularly for leaders in the charity sector, where I know a lot of organizations have been struggling to just keep their heads above water. And I suppose when you are facing sort of intense pressures like that, the time or the ability to carve out this talent-nurturing headspace is sometimes
00:31:12
Speaker
seen as perhaps less of a priority. And I'm curious to hear if you have any advice to leaders and how they can really craft the vision and strategy for the future of their organizations, keeping that talent, nurturing promise really at the heart and core of what they're doing.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, perhaps maybe not advice, but maybe a regret on my side of the picture. I wish I'd wish I was a leader myself. I'd spent less time trying to find that vision myself and more time creating the space and the trust of my team to develop that really with and for me.
00:31:45
Speaker
And so I think that a lot of times, I think as leaders, we tend to, and I certainly am talking for myself here, I would feel it was pressure to jump to the right answer, that it was my job to find the answer. Increasing what I'm seeing in the leaders that I work with in the sector, it's about being able to ask the right question at the right time.
00:32:04
Speaker
And that's classic talent nurturing behavior that you're not trying to dictate something necessarily, but you're trying to help everyone in your team become the best versions of themselves they can be. So it's a different mindset. It's almost more of a coaching mindset.
00:32:17
Speaker
But it takes that idea of saying, I'll set the high level direction that I need to do because that's my role as the CEO. But how you almost fill in the colors and shape the contours of that strategy. There's a lot of, of involvement autonomy for the team. And I think going back to that idea of autonomy, then that means our team feels they have ownership over their roles. They're genuinely building it together and they can see how everything connects up. I think what we do is we tend to do this well in individual departments. So fundraising will have their own plan.
00:32:46
Speaker
Communications my finance but joining all together and saying where are we trying to go ultimately and what does it mean for the ultimate beneficiary trying to serve i haven't seen us in the sector generally and i said he didn't do it well enough create that narrative and enable people to feed on part of that journey.
00:33:04
Speaker
Yes, I agree with you there. I think as leaders we put a lot of pressure on ourselves trying to find the answers and I love how you described it there in terms of actually our roles as leaders is to create the space for the teams to be able to co-create the solutions and indeed taking your colouring in analogy a little bit further perhaps as leaders we need to be providing the crayons but essentially allowing the team to colour in the overall picture.
Partnership Model Between Donors and Organizations
00:33:29
Speaker
One thing that also needs to change, I think, in this division, I talk about this in the book, is the relationship between donors and doers needs to change quite fundamentally. Because right now, the mindset very much for most donors, not all, but the donors have already provided most of the painting.
00:33:44
Speaker
They literally want a little bit of filling in by the doers. I think there's almost a sense of an instrumental view of this, right? That you want a service paid for and out paid, whichever group or charity can do it at the lowest cost usually. I think that mentality is a deeply destructive one because it destroys the motivation of the people doing the work. Funders, ultimately, they're important people, but they're ultimately enablers of work actually happening. They're not doers. They are themselves talent nurturers to the people they fund.
00:34:14
Speaker
That mindset shift is one we need to make in the foundation. I'm doing some fascinating work with the Jakobs Foundation, Switzerland, a really amazing private foundation and helping them think about that when it comes to their own portfolio partners they work with and what would it mean to adopt that kind of more nurturing mindset to their collection of partners. And there's no right answer. I think what I've been helping them do is for sort of a journey where they figure out for themselves what that sweet spot is.
00:34:40
Speaker
How receptive have you found various donors that you've been engaging with to this concept or this idea that essentially they need to be funding to provide the canvas, but then allow the charities or the organizations courses that they are funding to lead the way in painting that together? There's some fantastic examples out there. I've had many donors actually who played that role for me. What's been interesting is they almost always played it at an individual level. They were just great people.
00:35:07
Speaker
Many of them had run organizations before and understood and could see step into my shoes if you like. They often did an interesting, almost not against the will is strong, but it certainly wasn't always encouraged by the overall foundation or donor they worked for. It was more an individual thing. That's great. I was very lucky to have some amazing people, but I think we need a much more systematic approach now.
00:35:29
Speaker
And I talked about in the book, the example of Ford Foundation, they invested $2 billion into an initiative called BUILD. They haven't used that language, but this approach of talent nurturing is really deeply widened the DNA. So this can happen at scale. This is not some small scale thing. I do think it's a new concept, so I really hope it'll gain traction. But I think there has been this reverse trend where many foundations now have got their own theory of change. They've become more and more mechanistic.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I think this idea that really their job is to motivate and nurture the people actually do the work. It's very simple, but also see themselves as contributing to the impact chain. All I've done is now see their role as a group. I'll find the best aka cheapest or most impactful organization, get on with it, report back to my board.
00:36:16
Speaker
And I'm here to provide the accountability. I call that the talent management mindset. The talent nurture mindset says, we're in this together. Okay, yes, you're providing impact. My impact is in the nurturing of you. How am I going to help you get to a place that you didn't get to, but you couldn't have got to otherwise? How will I measure my own impact as a donor of foundation? That's what we need to get to in terms of the frontier.
00:36:41
Speaker
And how can organizations essentially steward their donors on that journey towards that mindset of being talent nurturing or impact nurturing versus management? So let's be honest there is a power dynamic in the sector. These are tough conversations to have as we both know. But I think what is interesting is that I was looking at the world of work for the book intrinsic and I was looking at the role of millennials, for example.
00:37:10
Speaker
So I looked at the world of, I don't know if you've heard of this story at GE, General Electric, where Jack Welsh, who would have this, honestly, in my view, crazy system where 10% of the staff would be fired automatically each year. That got changed because millennials said, this is nonsense. We don't agree with this. And this 10%, many of them are women, many of them are minorities.
00:37:30
Speaker
didn't have the patronage, the networks. It had nothing to do with, or little to do with objective measures. It was more about how close were you to managers. We know much of this is objective. So they push and they said, we need a different way. And GE has now scrapped that whole crazy system.
00:37:44
Speaker
I think we need something similar in philanthropy, where if a lot of us start having these conversations with our donors and starting to say, look, we want a higher standard here of the nurturing we receive, and let's do it collectively and have that discussion. There are some amazing leaders and foundations, and many of them actually have had a chance to read the book now and so on. And I think there is a real openness about it, but I think we have to be a little bit brave and see our role as CEOs of challenging a bit and really asking for a better way of doing this.
00:38:13
Speaker
And if any of you listeners are engaged with providing advice to philanthropists or foundations, I would really encourage you to start having some of these conversations or even give them a copy of Charlotte's book in order to open the door to that conversation. And looking back at your own leadership journey then to Charlotte, what advice would you give to yourself on day one of becoming a CEO?
Advice for New CEOs: Listening and Achieving Unique Goals
00:38:35
Speaker
I think just give yourself time to listen. So the best leadership advice I got was from my own board chair, Joe Owen, who would
00:38:43
Speaker
Talk about the role of a leader. It's a bit like a nurture definition of helping get their organization or get our organization to a place it wouldn't have got to otherwise. And I think when I think back to when I was least productive as a leader or CEO, it's when I felt the most busy in a strange way. I felt very proud. I had 300 emails to answer. I had back-to-back phone calls. That was before Zoom. Now it's Zoom calls. But actually, did I do anything that retook my organization to a place it wouldn't have got to anyway?
00:39:10
Speaker
How much of this was kind of maintenance stuff that anyone else, not anyone else, but another leader could have done? Did I really do what I was uniquely positioned to do? And I think that sense of really defining your role and something Joe and I would talk a lot about is that in a strange way as a CEO, you have the most autonomy of your own role.
00:39:30
Speaker
can almost do whatever you want to allow, because you can build around your strengths, but the strengths of your team as well. It took me far too many years to realize this and do it, but I think to really customize your role, I think we should end up almost putting to the dustbin this idea of the cookie cutter, CEO job description. If you look at so many recruitment sites, they all look the same, right? It's nonsense, because in each organization, each individual
00:39:55
Speaker
I talk in the book about one way to really reignite motivation work is this idea of job crafting. You can have a core title and role, but what that role actually means and does is very, very customized. If we can do a lot more job crafting in our sector, the CEO level, I think we'll be more fulfilled as leaders, but our organizations will be able to harness the collective and diverse strengths of our organizations so much better.
00:40:20
Speaker
Indeed, I love the idea of job crafting and I think I will have a chat with my new chair and my new organization about that concept. So coming back to the organization of intrinsic labs, what would you say has been most inspiring about that journey and about being the founder of that organization?
Impact of Intrinsic Labs on Organizational Motivation
00:40:40
Speaker
So much of what I do now is helping people go on a journey. I'd say the book is very much in that terrain. It's some really fun examples from all around the world in these areas of work or success and talent or relationships of parenting and citizenship. But there's no one answer. The trick, I think, is to help create the space for us all to reflect on
00:41:00
Speaker
what really motivates each one of us in our unique context, giving us all the courage and the tools to make small, incremental, but powerful changes towards it. Once I talk in the book about this idea that if you go too fast, that can actually be demotivating. You might hit a wall very quickly. How do you take these small steps towards finding the right job crafting and, for example, the right purpose for you as a CEO? So I think a lot of it just
00:41:26
Speaker
Being able to ask the right questions at the right time as we talked about, it's led to some really, really profound shifts in the positioning of some of the organizations I work with. One, just give me an example. It's not a charity in this case, but it's a business on very social lines called Oppa Dan Education. They do some amazing work with young people. What our dialogue and our work together revealed was really that the core of their work was on this idea of student ownership.
00:41:50
Speaker
It was really about students taking that autonomy over their lives, mastering that zigzag we talked about, and how could everything they do be geared around that goal? What's amazing now is there's such a coherence across the organization about that's what they're trying to achieve. All of their offerings, their programs, their products,
00:42:08
Speaker
are all geared in them. There's an alignment and coherence across the organization that perhaps wasn't there a few months ago. It's a very small change in one way, but it's had a profound impact on how they can scale, raise money, grow, all of these aspects. Wow, Sharath, I must say this has been such a fascinating discussion. And just before we close now, do you have any final thoughts or reflections that you would like to share? I mean, what is one thing you would like listeners to take away from this conversation?
00:42:36
Speaker
I think often as a CEO and speaking very honestly and candidly here, I felt on a treadmill. I was just going round and round and it's so difficult to get yourself off the treadmill because there's so many, there's always a donor pressure. There's a, we had frauds in countries to several of our stuff died during the time I ran the stir. There's always something blowing up every morning, maybe every week sometimes if you're lucky. And I think the challenge is to say, we've got to be in the real, but also
00:43:03
Speaker
the images of this idea of the second hand, the minute hand, and the hour hand, a lot of our roles as a leader should be at the minute and certainly hour level, where we're thinking deeply about the future of our organizations. Just giving ourselves a space to be able to do that mentally and motivationally. So we really take our organizations in a way that's motivating for us as leaders, but also genuinely inspiring for our teams and those different stakeholders we work with. I think that's the name of the game in our leadership today, perhaps.
00:43:32
Speaker
Well, thank you, Sharath. That has been so inspiring. And thank you for being a guest on the show. Thanks. They're a real pleasure. Thanks for the conversation.
00:43:43
Speaker
What a truly inspiring conversation with Sharath Jeevan, founder of Intrinsic Labs and of the charity Stair Education. I really look forward to reading his book Intrinsic, a manifesto to reignite our inner drive. As charity leaders we carry huge responsibilities, especially that of sustaining motivation for our teams as well as for ourselves.
00:44:05
Speaker
And we must remember that we don't need to have all the answers. Sometimes we just need to be able to ask the right question at the right time. And in doing so, reignite a passion for life.
00:44:19
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed this latest episode of the Charity CEO podcast. A show that, thanks to you, our listeners, has repeatedly reached the number one spot in Apple's non-profit podcast category. If you found this conversation valuable, please help spread the word. Share or tag us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram, and make sure you subscribe to the show by clicking the subscribe button on your podcast app.
00:44:41
Speaker
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