April, 14, 2025 | Mike Rowlands | Leadership | Non-profit

Empowering Leadership: A Key Capability of Transformational Charities

The very word ‘leadership’ conjures images of charismatic people at the front of teams, rooms, organizations, and movements. Today’s leaders, though, don’t necessarily hold the authority of position, but of experience, expertise, and ethics.

Mike Rowlands
Partner and CEO of Junxion, Mike has spent more than 20 years working to catalyse social responsibility and sustainability.

Whereas leadership has traditionally been hierarchical in so many organizations and movements, in recent decades, management theory has come to see it as far more nuanced. Libraries of books have been written on the topic; common to many of them is the simple insight that effective leadership extends beyond traditional hierarchies.

Our recently published Transformational Charity paper sets out a range of operational structures and performance standards for contemporary charities. At the heart of the framework are five ‘Key Capabilities’ that guide the Transformational Charity to be more resilient and impactful. The first of those is Empowering Leadership.

The complex work of Transformational Charities requires leadership at all levels of the organization. Leadership is not only about position, but also about expertise, ethics, and a commitment to innovation. It is also the authority that comes with training and lived and learned experience. It lifts others up, enhancing organizational performance in pursuit of purpose, vision, and impact.

Transformational Charities require leadership at all levels of the organization

Encourage Innovation Leadership

Leadership is a team sport. So is innovation. So any great organization—and particularly the Transformational Charity—must encourage team members to generate new ideas and put them into action. At the most basic level, staff are invited to provide input into programmatic decision-making. But that’s just a baseline expectation.

Transformational Charities that truly embrace innovation leadership develop new ways of working. They create, renew, and retire projects and programs—to ensure the organization maximizes its community contributions.

We’ve seen the best and the worst of this, through our advisory work at Junxion. One social services organization we supported had over 600 staff, spread across two dozen sites, and over 80 programs. Many of those programs were overstaffed and underresourced; they were ineffective at best, but nobody had had the courage to shut them down.

On the other hand, Take A Hike Foundation has inspired us with their comfort to revisit what’s working, make quick, responsive changes, and for nearly 20 years deliver a profound and impressive social return on investment (SROI).

Organize Teams on Assets, Skills, and Strengths

Resisting the calcifying urge of fixed teams and departments, Transformational Charities liberate skills and strengths to combine and recombine in ways that accelerate performance.

Governors and managers should consistently engage people throughout their teams, seeking the input of their lived and learned experience and expertise, even on projects, programs, or initiatives on which they’re not formally involved. More to the point, the best among them rapidly form project teams that bring relevant lived or learned experience to specific projects.

It’s helpful to have a framework for team-based leadership

It’s helpful to have a shared language around team work. For over 15 years, we’ve been training charities’ staff in the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a model of team-based leadership that’s elegant in its simplicity, but robust enough to support teams that are mired in even our communities’ most entrenched industries. Add to that model a deep, shared understanding across the team of teammates strengths and talents (through tools like Myers Briggs, DISC, or StrengthsFinder), and you’ll create a shared language that supports the rapid formation of agile, responsive, high-performing teams.

Maintain Transparency to Drive Inclusive Decisions

Leading organizations are also learning organizations: they strive for continuous improvement by rigorously evaluating performance, and maintaining collective accountability to outcomes and positive impact. Successful organizations look for insights and ideas throughout their organization; the best ideas can come from anywhere a client-facing insight might emerge.

True leaders provide managers and program staff the authority to make rapid changes to programming. After all, they’re closest to the clients and therefore to the community’s needs.

Delegate authority to those closest to the community’s needs

Empower Action on Community Needs

Ultimately, this is the point, isn’t it? Act rapidly and effectively to address the needs of the community. Certainly, delegating authority to the ‘front lines’ is imperative here, but so is a commitment to using social innovation practices to develop and deliver leading products and services.

We’ve been privileged to work in recent years with the BC Cancer Foundation, the fundraising arm of British Columbia’s cancer research and treatment agency. While major research hospitals stand in the major urban centre of Vancouver, community research and treatment facilities have been developed in other communities—so BC Cancer is close to the particular needs of those communities, while also ensuring the care goes to people in those communities, rather than asking people to travel hundreds of kilometres to Vancouver for care.

Empowering Leadership is the first of five Key Capabilities we’ve identified as crucial to ensuring charities remain effective, sustainable, and impactful in a rapidly evolving world.

Interested in transforming your charity? Read our Transformational Charity Framework, an outline of the contemporary imperatives and capabilities charities need to develop to thrive for the next decade (and beyond.) We’ve also created an assessment to help your organization identify strength areas and improvement areas.