Transcript

ELLEN

Being a chief executive sounds impressive but actually it’s also quite intimidating. It’s been just a few months now since I took over at Family Time. I did have some management experience before coming here. I was the team leader of a social work team at the local authority, which was all about taking responsibility for complex cases. Towards the end of my time there though, the recession came and finances were very limited, it all seemed to happen quite quickly. The staff came under huge amounts of stress and in that sense the money situation never really got better. What we did have though, which I completely took for granted at the time, was a large specialist team providing support on HR and finance. Now that I’m at Family Time I can’t take that for granted. That’s all my responsibility now.

I actually had much less freedom in the local authority. There is a much stricter hierarchy in government and also you’re answerable to the agenda of the elected politicians, right? Whatever we did had to fit in with national policy too.

Family Time is so different. I wasn’t around at the beginning but I respected the work they did a lot. It was started about a decade ago by this group of local churches and managed by this sort of informal committee of church representatives. They were good and the organisation made an impact, it grew lots of good will and support locally. It was about four years ago that Family Time became a registered charity. They recruited a part-time manager, who was a member of the previous committee, and there were these four volunteer trustees who chipped in with the management too.

Like a lot of these great charities that start small, it was this thing where suddenly, you know, demand started to overtake what the organisation could actually deliver. They needed to find proper independent funding. They actually succeeded in getting a Lottery bid to allow them to appoint a chief executive and a part-time admin person. So that was me – the new chief executive!

But we had to get really serious at this point because for starters the Lottery bid committed us to doubling the number of volunteers we had over three years and increasing our services to 30 families. So it was an exciting time, leading growth. I did feel really welcomed – by the staff, the volunteers, the trustees – all of them were really excited actually.

But there were challenges though, right? I mean, obviously there were. I felt that all of these people I just mentioned – the staff, our trustees and our volunteers, they all had different expectations for this next phase of the organisation. I also got the feeling that in subtle but quite important ways too they saw the purpose of Family Time quite differently.

I knew right from the start that I had to work collaboratively. I am good with this – it’s my natural preference anyway. I hate the authoritarian stuff. I knew though that this would not just be a case of getting people inside the organisation working better together. If we were going to grow properly we would need close relationships and new partnerships outside as well – like with my old colleagues at the council and other organisations.

But where to begin?