As featured in Philanthropy News – Leadership – April 2022
See yourself as a leader now. Leadership is an action. Not a position. – Cindy Page
Menzies, the non-partisan Menzies Foundation was established in 1979 to create opportunities to support the next generation of Australian leaders. In May 2018, in celebration of our 40th year anniversary, the foundation unveiled a new catalytic strategy to address pressing leadership challenges and reaffirmed our commitment to raise the profile and importance of ‘outstanding’ leadership and to encourage Australians to reflect on leadership, build their own leadership capability and contribute to the greater good.
Leadership
To develop an understanding of a contemporary view of leadership, the foundation supports leadership platforms to explore, deepen understanding and codify approaches to leadership. Our efforts to explore the dimensions of leadership from multiple perspectives support the foundation’s strong focus on identifying the leadership qualities and attributes that are key to leading in an Australian and global context. You can learn more about our work at www.menziesfoundation.org.au
The Foundation’s current areas of focus include:
Leadership Discourse
• Menzies Leadership Forum
• Systems Engineering for Next Generation Leadership.
Leadership initiatives
• Science entrepreneurship
• School leadership
• Emerging Technologies and the Law
• Indigenous Women’s Entrepreneurship
• Emerging Leaders
• Citizen Leadership and Community Resilience
Our approach
In accordance with our catalytic model of philanthropy, the Foundation aspires to build platforms that model the importance of a purpose-led orientation, are entrepreneurial and adaptive, undaunted by complexity and focused on a more thoughtful, deeper interrogation of what it means to be a leader in the world today.
To do this the Foundation leverages our expertise in partnership brokering to support multi-sector collaborations which identify leadership challenges, seek new insights, support the development of innovative solutions, pilot interventions and build collaborations for impact and scale. Modelled on a collective impact approach, these collaborations focus on systems level change with the intention that collaboration partners work collectively to:
• Identify the leadership challenge
• Develop the leadership question
• Build a collaboration of multiple expertise to explore the question
• Develop and incubate an innovative intervention
• Based on these insights, identify the levers for system change
• Develop and implement the system intervention.
This approach, focused on innovation, requires members of the collaboration to work in complexity, outside of siloed perspectives and expertise, and prioritises adaption and an openness to new ways of thinking and working. Whilst this approach holds great promise for developing systemic solutions to pressing leadership challenges, working in this way is both rewarding and challenging. The work is not linear. Collaboration members often find themselves working in uncertainty: forging innovative solutions to intractable challenges requires a tolerance for success and failure, and a readiness to tussle between what is known and emergent solutions.
Each collaboration member has an equal seat at the table and brings expertise, networks, and resources to the work. As such, the Menzies Foundation focus is not on grantmaking, but on building the collaborations which support incubation. The foundation brings its resources, networks, and expertise to the work and as such, sits as a partner in each collaboration. This is different to those philanthropic approaches which are focused on a more transactional approach to grantmaking, whereby grants are made to support not-for-profit programmes and the focus is on delivery of these programmes.
A critical issue which the foundation is particularly aware of is the power dynamic associated with the nexus between the foundation’s role as both funder and collaboration partner. The foundation recognises the tension between the responsibility of stewardship of grants made and the challenges
of the work that takes place in each incubator. Consequently, the foundation places a high priority on building strong backbone support and robust impact and evaluation frameworks to ensure that each collaboration has the insights to co-design and implement the strategy that underpins the work. In this way, resourcing, priorities, and progress are a shared responsibility of each member of the collaboration.
Leadership insight:
Pivot to purpose – Increasingly our work recognises the importance of purpose as an anchor for any leadership journey. Purpose creates meaning, offers a sense of direction, and helps identify goals and actions that encourage citizens to contribute to the ‘greater good’ for a flourishing life for all. ‘Purpose’ is the anchor from which to build 21st century leadership attributes. It is the pillar that allows leaders to become more entrepreneurial, adaptive, resilient, and empathetic as they manage the challenges of an increasingly complex, global, tribal, and digitized world. Building on Sir Robert Menzies’ legacy, and in accordance with our catalytic model of philanthropy, we aspire to contribute to a leadership movement that models the importance of a purpose-led orientation, is entrepreneurial and adaptive, undaunted by complexity and focused on a more thoughtful and deeper interrogation of what it means to be a leader in the world today.
Movement building
Our support of these challenges builds the foundation for further consideration of how the lessons we learn about leadership translate into supporting
a movement which encourages all Australians to reflect on leadership, build their leadership capability and contribute to the ‘greater good’.
Role for philanthropy?
Philanthropy sits at the nexus between where we find ourselves today and the movement to build a future focused on the ‘greater good’.
The questions we have to ask ourselves are:
• How many of us have done the work to clarify our purpose?
• How many of us are entrepreneurial?
• How many of us deeply listen?
• How many of us are adaptive?
• How many of us are comfortable in complexity?
• How committed are we to the‘greater good’?
