How can charity leaders balance sustainable finance with an equally strong focus on culture and impact? It's tricky but not impossible, with the right support. CFG's Co-CEO Sarah Lomax shares some thoughts on the recent Services For Education report Leading Through Uncertainty.
The findings of Services For Education's recent report, Leading Through Uncertainty, will ring true for many of CFG’s members. The report finds that financial sustainability is currently the dominant pressure on charity leaders, but, as the report rightly says, it is not the whole story.
When money is tight, the effects are often felt in culture: in workload, morale, wellbeing and confidence. And if people are exhausted, impact eventually suffers. The report's core message is one we share: financial sustainability, culture and impact are not competing priorities - they are connected. Finance enables mission, culture enables people to adapt, and impact is the reason we exist.
Financial leadership: more than a foundation
Every organisation is built on compliance. Accurate accounts, sound controls and robust reporting are the foundation everything else stands on, and they are non-negotiable. But as we were recently reminded by one charity member during a facilitated workshop session - compliance is the ticket to ride, not the destination!
When we get it right, it frees an organisation to realise its potential: to grow, to be creative, to innovate and to put resources where they make the biggest difference. The risk the report identifies - of focusing too narrowly on financial resilience - is really the risk of finance that stops at compliance. The answer is not less rigour, it is finance leadership that goes further.
That is the thinking behind CFG's Finance Journey (and is at the heart of our mission). The Finance Journey is a framework for developing individuals and teams, and it describes the shift from technical, compliance-focused finance towards synthesis and strategy and, ultimately, transformation.
Towards the end of this leadership development journey, finance leaders and teams connect the numbers to people, purpose and performance. In practice, that means many things, including:
- building dashboards that show the cost of culture, not just the cost of staff: turnover, absence, vacancies and lost expertise
- writing board papers that make the trade-offs between money, people and mission visible, as the report urges
- helping colleagues understand the financial picture, so difficult decisions are shared rather than imposed
- spotting pressure early, so organisations can plan rather than react.
Many of the report's most encouraging examples are exactly this kind of work: stronger financial reporting, better budget ownership, braver use of reserves and earlier thinking about future challenges.
None of this happens through technical skill alone. As the report notes, it comes from necessity, yes, but it also depends on what are often called 'soft skills': communication, curiosity, influence, empathy and the confidence to challenge. We would argue they are not soft at all. They are what allows an organisation to perform, and what ultimately turns resources into real impact.
That is why we help our members to invest in leadership as much as technical expertise, through the Finance Journey and programmes such as Inspiring Financial Leadership, our Peer Mentoring Scheme, and our new joint Risk Leadership Programme.
It is a leader's role to create the conditions in which teams move from compliance, to supporting the organisation, to delivering impact. Done well, that journey is itself what brings the balance.
The report closes with questions for leaders and boards. Services for Education’s CEO Sharon Bell first explored some of these with finance and operations leaders at CFG’s 2025 Annual Conference, so it is especially good to see that conversation grow into sector-wide research.
Here is one more question, for us all: is your finance function simply reporting the pressure, or helping your organisation hold the balance so it can move forwards?
Our thanks to Sharon and Services For Education for adding more colour to this conversation. We look forward to continuing it.
If you would like to find out more about our leadership development opportunities, designed for both emerging and senior charity finance leaders, please email the Membership Team or complete our form to express your interest and we'll get back to you.