Profile: Marg Mayne, VSO
Leadership styles / 01 March 2010
The chief executive of the VSO, Marg Mayne, may be responsible for a £60m organisation with a close eye on the bottom line, but she is incredibly passionate about the concept of the global community as a driving force, says Jane Lewis
Everyone in Britain – bar Curly Wurly refuseniks and recovering chocoholics – will be watching closely what Kraft does with Cadbury, Marg Mayne more than most. Cadbury is a key partner of the new-look VSO – Voluntary Service Overseas – which Mayne heads up as chief executive. The joint venture in Ghana is such a win-win for both organisations that it would be a real setback if it were dismantled under the new Kraft regime. “But in a big takeover like that, you never know what the plans might be.”
Getting embroiled in the multinational mergers and acquisitions scene isn’t something you’d necessarily expect from VSO – an organisation synonymous in the public mind with graduates on gap years and the more adventurous sort of teachers and nurses. But the joint venture with Cadbury is typical of VSO’s business-like approach under Mayne.
There are lots of skills and aptitudes in developing countries that can be put to good use in other developing countries. For example, in the Philippines there’s a very strong tradition of community activism and development
Marg Mayne, CEO, Voluntary Service Overseas
Because of its Quaker heritage, Cadbury has a reputation as a good corporate citizen. “But the interesting thing about this deal is that it’s got nothing to do with their corporate social responsibility budget,” says Mayne. “It’s down to the supply chain.”
Producing cocoa isn’t particularly profitable for Ghanaian farmers and the chocolate maker is worried about where its future production is coming from.
“So they’re working with us to invest in thriving rural communities, so that there’s enough work to supplement the cocoa farming. Fantastic. A complete overlap of vision.”
An accountant by training, pragmatic, determined and completely devoted to VSO’s core mission of tackling poverty, you sense that Mayne would be a persuasive influence if she could only get to eyeball Kraft boss Irene Rosenfeld. She’s certainly determined to put VSO on the wider corporate map.
The organisation, founded in 1958 in response to the changing nature of the Commonwealth and the UK’s position in the world, has always been progressive and visionary, with the emphasis very much on development rather than charity. In fact, you might argue that the VSO anticipated the Noughties slogan ‘Trade not aid’ by decades.
Development strategy
“It was there, right from the beginning, and I think as an organisation we’ve really developed that philosophy,” says Mayne. “The founder Alec Dickson was really responding to that basic impulse that everyone has – to get up and do something to help people overseas. The very first volunteers went out to teach in Sarawak and Borneo. And that’s where the core philosophy comes from, working with people so they can fulfil their own ambitions, rather than going out there and telling them how to do things.”
Education is still a big deal. But these days VSO excels in what Mayne, with her accountant’s hat on, calls “the multiplier effect”. Rather than sending out a volunteer graduate to teach a class of children, she says they “would get an experienced primary school teacher – someone with a good five to ten years’ experience – to work with the local education district, so that one volunteer affects the teaching skills of 20-25 teachers in maybe ten schools, who in turn share them with colleagues.”
That new emphasis on experience and professionalism is echoed by the average age of VSO’s 1,600 volunteers – which is now 41 – and also by what they do. People associate VSO with pastoral professions. “In fact, there’s a much broader range – we also have lots of small business advisers, marketing professionals, HR experts, economic advisers. I met someone in Cambodia who was a strategic planner working in the fisheries there.”
Global citizens
Another myth that needs quashing, says Mayne, is the idea that “volunteering is a one-way street. You know, ‘I’m being so grand and heroic and giving you my time.’ But it’s nothing like that at all. It’s a two-way exchange and you get a lot back.” In some ways, that’s a familiar enough lesson: volunteers at Crisis’ Christmas centres for the homeless are renowned for getting as much out of the experience as those they’re formally there to help.
But the exchange at VSO goes a good deal beyond the feel-good. You might take your hard, technical skills to Rwanda but, in return, you learn an awful lot of soft ones. No wonder competition for those 1,600 places is tight, and never more so than now.
“Demand for places is pretty high; it goes with the economic cycle. But we are constrained by money.” So what sort of people are they after? Given that VSO volunteers are paid the same as their local peers and live in the same communities, self-reliance and an aptitude for resourcefulness are crucial.
“The philosophy is live locally – because if you don’t understand how long it takes to get to work, or the hassle of finding food, or what it means to get your electricity on, then you won’t understand their perspective at all.”
Languages used to be seen as the essential skill for people working abroad, she adds. “But the ability to speak the other language is less important than what I would call ‘intercultural competence’, the ability to do business across cultures, forge strong professional relationships, have influence, get people on board – all that stuff. You’ve got to be very flexible and adaptable about how you apply your skills.”
Taken as a whole, they sound remarkably like leadership skills. And there is indeed a big correlation, according to consulting group Accenture – a long-standing VSO partner, which seconds staff for volunteering on fixed projects.
“I remember talking to one of our key contacts there and he started getting very excited about statistical curves. He had found a strong link between volunteers and high performers. Now this was a hard-headed businessman, he’s nobody’s fool, but he genuinely believes in and fosters this partnership because he’s convinced it’s enhancing Accenture’s main commercial proposition: its human capital. There is something very special about gaining that intercultural confidence, and you can’t take a degree in it yet.”
Maybe not. But Mayne came about as close as it’s possible to get. Born and raised in Bangor, Northern Ireland, she was sixteen when she won a local authority scholarship to Atlantic College in South Wales, one of a network of international schools started in 1962 by Kurt Hahn, the pioneering educationalist who set up Scottish public school, Gordonstoun.
The college is based in St Donat’s Castle, a fairy tale medieval pile on the coast, and was once home to William Randolph Hearst, the US press baron. Hearst was renowned for throwing lavish parties (“This is what God would have built if he had the money,” noted George Bernard Shaw) and became the inspiration for the Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane. By the time Mayne got there in 1979, however, the emphasis was firmly on building global citizens.
“Atlantic College was all about global community, acting locally. So there was a strong element of service about it, you did two or three afternoons a week. I taught some blind children how to canoe and tidied back gardens for old ladies. There was a strong tradition of outdoors activity, so in the summer we did beach rescue.”
The college drew students from around the world, and that inculcated a respect for other cultures. “You had to listen, understand and respect real sensitivities. You absorbed things such as how humour works across cultural barriers. It was very special and I was there at a formative age.” She left a confirmed internationalist, with a strong desire to improve the world. “Ever since Atlantic College, I’ve had volunteering under my skin.”
There followed a degree in European Studies at Kent University and then, in the mid-1980s, an interesting stint in communist East Germany. “I look back at the photos now and think ‘gosh, what a piece of history’. At the time it was such a paradigm, you couldn’t imagine the world without East and West. Now it seems worlds away.” The mixed emotions of the experience were brought home recently by a spate of ‘Osti’ nostalgia films such as Goodbye Lenin, and the darker story of Stasi surveillance, The Lives of Others.
Financial acumen
Returning to London, Mayne trained as an accountant with Stoy Hayward. “But I was never going to be a City girl,” she says. So she switched to a smaller firm that specialised in the voluntary sector, and spent the next decade in housing, managing the finances of a couple of housing associations. “I learnt a lot. It was a time when the sector was really expanding and an exciting time to be in that environment. There was a big expansion in how sophisticated our financial systems had to get.”
The hard skills learnt there have stood Mayne in good stead for her current role supervising the VSO’s £60m budget. But, typically enough, it’s the human aspect of the work that she deems most significant to her development. “The right to have shelter is quite fundamental and it’s only when you don’t have it – or you see people who don’t have it – that you realise you can’t do anything with the rest of your life until you feel safe and secure.”
By 2000, the offers of really big jobs were starting to roll in. Mayne took senior roles first at the British Council, the body responsible for furthering UK cultural relations in 110 countries, and then at Volunteering England.
But in some ways these were just dress rehearsals for her dream job, combining her belief in the power of volunteering as a means of building social capital with her international outlook. In late 2008, when she saw the advertisement for the position at VSO, “it screamed my name at me”.
From her top floor office in Putney in southwest London, Mayne gets to see the big picture; and that’s key to the changes she’s making at VSO. “We’ve got 1,600 volunteers at the moment, but the ripples of what we do are much broader than that. For instance, we also support some 18 to 20 diaspora organisations in the UK, to help them send volunteers back to their country of heritage. And we also recruit volunteers from Canada, Holland, the Philippines and Kenya.
“There are lots of skills and aptitudes in developing countries that can be put to good use in other developing countries. For example, in the Philippines there’s a very strong tradition of community activism and development, so many of the volunteers we place in small, socio-economic entrepreneurial areas come from there.”
Given her own history of early engagement, perhaps the project closest to Mayne’s heart is VSO’s Global Xchange programme, designed for young people aged 18 to 25. “It’s a mutual volunteering experience. You get nine kids from one country to buddy up with nine from the UK, and then they go and volunteer in both countries.” The aim, she says, “is to challenge fundamental assumptions”.
Two-way street
Young people from “poorer” nations are frequently astonished by the gritty conditions they find in parts of the UK as are many British kids. “It’s often a light bulb moment, because they think ‘blimey, I didn’t think this happened here’. I was particularly struck by a young Nepalese woman who was shocked by what she saw in the UK – the obesity, the self-harming. She said ‘I thought they’d be so happy because they’re so rich.’”
Ultimately, believes Mayne, the wider population is beginning to buy into what VSO’s corporate partners have learnt already, that volunteering is a two-way street, “and that maintaining an unequal world is actually more risky long-term than paying for an equal one”. She believes it’s significant that both major political parties are committed to maintaining the UK’s aid budget – this probably wouldn’t have happened twenty years ago.
“You might call it enlightened self-interest. There’s a recognition, all the more pronounced with climate change, that what goes on in India absolutely affects us.” The age of the international volunteer has begun, and Mayne is leading the revolution.