I was recently invited to give a keynote on the theme “Five lessons for tomorrow’s leaders, today” to a room of charity and civil society leaders drawn from around the world.

It is the sort of title that sounds straightforward until you sit down to write it. Leadership is not exactly short of commentary. There are books, podcasts, frameworks, away days, competency models, governance reviews and, if you are especially lucky, a diagram with circles, arrows and three shades of blue.

Some of it is genuinely useful. Some of it is, let’s be honest, perfectly sensible common sense dressed up in consultancy trousers.

But beneath all the language, leadership in civil society is a very human business. It is about purpose. It is about trust. It is about people giving their time, money, skill, reputation and heart to something they believe matters. It is about making difficult decisions in imperfect conditions, often with rising need, stretched resources, growing scrutiny and public expectations that are both fair and demanding.

And, in a global setting, it needs a good dose of humility.

Civil society does not look the same everywhere. Volunteering, philanthropy, public trust, governance and risk all mean different things in different countries and cultures. So the last thing I wanted to do was stand up and pretend there is one tidy model of leadership that can be exported around the world in a slide deck. That would be unwise and, frankly, rather annoying.

Instead, I offered five lessons that I have seen matter across my own rather mixed-up journey through education, youth work, international development, Scouting, charity leadership and civic life.

Not rules. Rules rarely travel well. But lessons sometimes do.

1. Purpose must be lived, not laminated

Every charity has a purpose. Or at least, every charity says it does.

We put it in strategies, on banners, in induction packs and in funding bids. We repeat it at conferences. Sometimes we launch it with a video and a stirring soundtrack. But the real test of purpose is not whether we can describe it. It is whether it changes what we do.

Does it help us decide what to start, what to stop, where to put money, who to listen to, what to say no to, and how to behave when things get difficult? That last bit matters. Purpose is easy when everyone agrees. It earns its keep when the choices are awkward.

One of the risks in civil society is mission stretch. The need is great. The funding is uncertain. Opportunities appear. Donors offer money. Governments invite delivery. Communities ask for help. And because we care, we say yes. Then yes again. And then one day we realise we are busier than ever, but not necessarily clearer than before.

Purpose should not make us narrow-hearted, but it should make us disciplined.

At Cats Protection, our purpose is to make life better for cats, because life is better with cats. It is beautifully simple, but it requires choices every day about welfare, prevention, advocacy, education, volunteering, local services, national influence and financial sustainability.

Purpose must be more than laminated language. It must be lived discipline.

2. Listen beyond the centre

One of the great temptations of leadership is to listen mainly to the people nearest the centre: senior staff, trustees, major donors, government officials, international partners, national boards, established volunteers, and people who know how to write a good paper, speak confidently in meetings and navigate the machinery.

Those voices matter, of course they do, but they are not the whole story.

In almost every system I have known, some of the deepest wisdom sits closer to the edge: with young people, local volunteers, frontline workers, community organisers, people using services, and people who tried to use our services and quietly gave up.

If we only listen upwards and inwards, we make poorer decisions. We create strategies that look neat from headquarters and clumsy on the ground. We mistake silence for agreement. We mistake compliance for commitment. We mistake consultation for listening.

During my year as High Sheriff of Oxfordshire, my theme was Hearing the Young Unheard. I chose that phrase carefully. Not “giving young people a voice”. Young people already have voices. The real question is whether those of us with power are prepared to hear them, especially when what they say is inconvenient.

That lesson travels well beyond youth work. In civil society, we often use good words like co-creation, participation and community-led change. But they only really mean something if they shift power. Who defines the problem? Who designs the response? Who holds the budget? Who gets the credit? Who carries the risk? Who is allowed to challenge?

Listening beyond the centre is not about romanticising the edge. Local practice can be brilliant and it can be poor. Volunteers can be inspirational and they can resist necessary change. Leaders still have to lead.

But the centre must lead with humility. Never confuse proximity to power with proximity to truth.

3. Trust makes change possible

Everywhere I have worked, in schools, charities, youth movements, international organisations and local communities, I have seen the same pattern: where trust is strong, hard things become possible. Where trust is weak, even simple things become exhausting.

Trust is not fluffy. It is operational. It determines whether people believe the strategy, whether volunteers stay, whether staff speak honestly, whether communities engage, whether donors remain confident, and whether boards and executives can challenge one another without making the whole thing wobble.

And change is now the shared condition of our sector. Rising need. Financial pressure. Digital transformation. Political uncertainty. Climate change. Public scrutiny. Shrinking civic space in some parts of the world. Growing expectations almost everywhere.

We need to move, but we cannot simply instruct trust into being.

Trust is built by behaviour repeated over time: keeping promises, telling the truth, explaining decisions, admitting mistakes, sharing credit, owning failure, being clear about constraints, and not pretending a consultation is a genuine choice when the decision has already been made.

Good governance is part of this. I know governance is not always the word that makes the heart sing. Few of us entered civil society thinking, “What I really want is more time with a scheme of delegation.” But good governance is an act of care. It protects purpose. It protects people. It protects public trust. It allows organisations to be brave responsibly.

Poor governance destroys trust, sometimes dramatically, but more often quietly, through confusion, blurred roles, avoidance and decisions endlessly reopened.

The same is true with volunteers. Volunteers are not free labour. They are an expression of civic commitment. They bring time, skill, relationships, identity and heart. They need clarity, respect, support and genuine partnership.

Move at the speed of trust. That does not mean moving slowly. It means building the trust that allows speed to be safe.

4. Make hope practical

Civil society is, at its best, an organised expression of hope. We believe things can be better: for children, communities, animals, people facing poverty or exclusion, the natural world, and those whose rights, safety or dignity are at risk.

But hope cannot simply be a nice feeling. It has to become practical.

Tomorrow’s leaders will inherit big, tangled challenges. If all we offer them is inspiration, we have not given them enough. They need tools. Systems. Evidence. Financial literacy. Good governance. Real safeguarding cultures. Ethical technology. Partnerships that are more than logos on a slide. Organisations that can learn.

In youth development, I saw this again and again. It is not enough to tell a young person, “You can do anything.” They need opportunity, support, challenge, networks, confidence, safety and adults who stick around.

In charity leadership, it is not enough to say we are values-led. We have to make values operational. That means budgets, policies, training, accountability, measurement and the willingness to stop some things so that others can thrive.

I know that may not sound as stirring as a campaign slogan. But implementation is a moral act. Bad implementation wastes hope. Good implementation honours it.

5. Stay human

Leadership can do odd things to people. It can make us guarded, over-certain and a little too fond of our own biography. It can make us mistake visibility for value, or decisiveness for not listening.

And in global settings, there is an added risk. We can become fluent in international vocabulary while losing touch with local reality. We can talk about beneficiaries, stakeholders, delivery partners, capacity building and systems change, and forget that behind each phrase are real people with names, families, histories, fears, hopes and agency.

So the final lesson is simple, but not always easy: stay human. Stay curious. Stay kind. Stay honest. Stay willing to learn from people who have less formal authority than you.

One of the experiences that shaped me was being a gay teacher during the Section 28 era. That was a very specific UK context, but the leadership lesson has travelled with me. It taught me that inclusion is not an abstract value. It affects whether people feel able to breathe freely in an institution.

Every country, culture and organisation has its own version of that question: who is able to breathe freely here, and who is not?

Good leaders ask it.

At Cats Protection, compassion and courage are two of our values, and I have become increasingly fond of that pairing. Compassion without courage can become avoidance. Courage without compassion can become brutality. Together, they are rather powerful.

Compassion asks us to care. Courage asks us to act. Compassion asks us to listen. Courage asks us to decide.

In every organisation, leaders face moments when they must choose between comfort and purpose: whether to speak, stop, invest, apologise, challenge a donor, change a beloved programme, protect a colleague, confront a culture, or tell the truth when a softer version would be easier.

Those moments reveal leadership. Not the title, not the speech, not the strategy document, but the moment when purpose costs us something.

The work

So, five lessons for tomorrow’s leaders, today: purpose must be lived, not laminated; listen beyond the centre; trust makes change possible; make hope practical; and stay human.

I offer them with humility, because leadership looks different across the world. But I offer them with conviction too, because I have seen their truth in very different settings, from classrooms to boardrooms, from local volunteers to global networks, from youth movements to animal welfare, from community conversations to international programmes.

Again and again, leadership comes back to the same questions. What are we here to serve? Who are we listening to? Can we be trusted? Are we turning hope into action? And are we becoming the kind of people others can safely follow?

The world tomorrow’s leaders inherit will be shaped by how we lead today. If we model defensiveness, they will learn defensiveness. If we model governance as theatre, they will learn to perform. If we model ambition without care, they will inherit damage.

But if we model purpose, stewardship, curiosity, courage, compassion and practical hope, we give them something stronger to build on. Not perfect leadership. Heaven help us. But leadership rooted in service.

Leadership that listens before it acts, and then acts with courage. Leadership that takes money, governance and delivery seriously because it takes mission seriously. Leadership that is global in outlook, local in respect and human in practice.

That feels to me like leadership worth giving ourselves to.