Strategic leaders climb the tallest trees

“Injustices are not the exclusive preserve of the unjust; they can be presided over by people who are in all other respects well-meaning and decent.”

In her foreword to the Charity Commission’s statutory inquiry into safeguarding failings at Oxfam in the years after the 2012 earthquake in Haiti, Tina Stowell, The Rt Hon Baroness Stowell of Beeston MBE continued to say, “Being on the side of good is also no guarantee against leaders focussing on the wrong issues, prioritising the wrong things, or missing opportunities to put matters right.”

These words have stuck with me since I first read them, reminding me that while the leaders I work with usually have the right intentions and are well-meaning and decent, their strategic view doesn’t always naturally extend to safeguarding.

A truly strategic view adopts a broad, long-term perspective that encompasses all key elements of organisational practice, but also identifies and takes ownership of the risks faced by the organisation. We will never rid the world of people who want to abuse, neglect or exploit others and all our organisations carry an inherent risk of people using them to access children or adults at risk for these abhorrent purposes. Strong safeguarding arrangements are, therefore, all about risk management.

It may be, that safeguarding is a core part of the work the organisation does but, if not, leaders should still understand the risk to the organisation and to those people it works with, in order to understand and support appropriate risk mitigation. Safeguarding risk management is always evolving and developing and must be owned, resourced and appropriately delegated by organisational leaders.

In his book, Watford Forever: How Graham Taylor and Elton John Saved a Football Club, a Town and Each Other (full disclosure: I am a Hornets fan), John Preston describes a time in 1977 shortly after Graham Taylor took over as manager at Vicarage Road. The fitness of the team was not as good as it needed to be and training sessions would start with running laps around a local park. Not all the players were as committed to this as Graham would have liked, but he seemed to have an uncanny ability to know which players weren’t completing the run as required by him. After a few weeks they came to realise that he was following them to the park and climbing a tree to keep an eye on each of them, wherever they were in the park.

Organisational leaders must take ownership of all aspects of their business, including the risks faced, including safeguarding risks. The key question here is, are they viewing their organisation from a sufficiently elevated position so that they can see safeguarding alongside the rest of their responsibilities.

The word "strategic" is derived from the Greek word "στρατηγός" (strategos) which is a combination of two Greek words "στρατός" (stratos), meaning "army" or "troops" and "ἄγω" (ago) meaning "to lead" or "to guide”. A "strategos" was a military leader responsible for leading armies or managing military operations, often on multiple fronts and needing to execute effective warfare across all of them.

Our work, at Keep Governance and Safeguarding, often includes a focus on the strategic oversight of safeguarding by organisational leaders, sometimes helping them to effectively lead in other areas of responsibility as well. You can think of us as helping you to choose the right binoculars so that you can see more clearly from the higher branches you need to climb to.

< Older Post

Newer Post >

A photo of Victoria Climbie smiling at the camera which was used by Lord Laming in his inquiry

10,000 children a year! The unique identifier for every child is 25 years overdue

By Andy Churcher • January 16, 2025

The Children's Wellbeing Bill puts right a quarter of a century of delay

We hear the past screaming at us. But do we listen?

By Andy Churcher • December 17, 2024

Political ideology should never again be allowed to impact so disastrously on children

It's time to make X our ex!

By Andy Churcher • September 10, 2024

It's been a long time coming... we even took a break in 2022 after Elon Musk bought Twitter. But its increasingly clear that we’ve both grown apart from each other and we can no longer stay together. Don’t get me wrong, from a safeguarding and online safety point of view, I cannot say with confidence that X is any worse than any of the other platforms. The only way social media platforms seem to be able to make the business model work is to avoid large workforces and rely on technology to moderate content. The online safety risks from inappropriate content are now well known. They also all seem committed to having some sort of encryption on their messaging services which, while apparently protecting our privacy, creates worrying space for abusers to communicate with each other and share abusive content. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing business in the 21 st century without engaging with social media and so, at the moment at least, engaging with the market on these platforms is an uncomfortable necessity for many people working in safeguarding. However, for Keep Governance and Safeguarding, our relationship with X has moved from uncomfortable to untenable. Keep Governance and Safeguarding operates to reduce the risk of abuse, neglect and exploitation through supporting strategic leaders and safeguarding managers, driving improvement in organisational safeguarding arrangements and creating ways to empower children and adults at risk. Our work to deliver on this mission is guided by our values in which we commit to always being collaborative, knowledgeable, personable, thorough and respectful . As recent actions have shown, it doesn’t seem that Elon Musk and X are working to similar values to ours and I feel increasingly uncomfortable using the platform. Twitter had banned a number of far-right voices but these were lifted by Elon Musk after buying it. If it was just about championing free speech I am not sure I would have had a huge problem with this, but he has himself published provocative, disrespectful and ill-informed posts and commented on, and therefore promoted, some from these previously banned accounts. During the riots which for a week or so erupted in the UK following misinformation spread on social media about the awful murders of children in Stockport in August, Elon Musk shared posts which seem to have little or no basis in the truth. He also made provocative comments on other people’s posts, clearly intended to stoke fires rather than try contributing to a calming of the situation. In one such example, which he later deleted, Elon Musk shared an image on X which promoted a conspiracy theory about the UK building "detainment camps" on the Falkland Islands for rioters as if it were a headline from the Daily Telegraph. He is happy to share ill-informed, antagonistic and inaccurate views with over 197 million followers on X, and is at best agnostic about the consequences of these actions or, at worst, deliberately trying to stoke right-wing opinions to undermine otherwise stable democracies. He has reposted numerous posts which personally attack the leadership in Brazil, a country trying to ban X, demonstrating a huge lack of respect for the legal processes of another country and undermining their leaders with his written attacks. In Australia, where the government are trying to regulate content on social media platforms, their eSafety Commissioner was attacked in posts by Elon Musk which led to her receiving a huge amount of online abuse including death threats. He is also taking a group of major companies to court for boycotting X… surely it is the right of any company to decide what platforms they use to interact with the market. For me, the real problem here is the hugely amplified voice of the owner of a platform. With a large amount of money, he has bought himself the ability to speak directly to many people, and his voice unfortunately reflects values which clearly do not align to those of Keep Governance and Safeguarding. So, we will shortly stop posting our social media updates to X and will be adding Youtube to our suite of socials. I am grateful that as a company in most of our work we have the ability to choose who we work with.