Growing Up Fast
You’ll often find Sean Moynihan drinking a coffee in Nero on Camden Street. The offices of Alone are around the corner, and the charity is growing at such a rate that meeting rooms are now at a premium. So he regularly decamps to the Italian café nearby.
Sean, CEO, is approaching 10 years at the helm of Alone. When he started, it was just him, an administrator, a bookkeeper and 43 volunteers. By the end of this year, they’ll have amassed 58 staff and over 1,500 volunteers, and together, they support older people to age at home.
Sean zigzagged his way to his present position. He dropped out of college, apprenticed in graphic design, worked for big corporate, and set up a printing business. In his early 30s, he volunteered with Dublin Simon Community, and rose through the ranks to senior management. After a short stint as a consultant, he turned up on the doorstep of Alone.
Everything’s at Hyperspeed
So Nero is where he arranged to meet me six months ago off the back of an intro from a mutual friend. Anyone who knows him will probably agree with me that Sean’s a bit of a whirlwind. He speaks a mile a minute, and his ideas come thick and fast.
After that initial meeting, I ended up doing a piece of consultancy for Alone. That’s when I realised that he works with the same speed. He embodies bold growth ambitions and a ballsy agenda that wouldn’t be out of place in a tech startup. However, he manages to fuse this neatly with a deep commitment to the cause.
Naturally, I wanted to know how he does this.
You respond to need. Need changes. So you do too.
Sean’s a straight-talking guy. Leak like a sieve, he says. Share as much information on the business as possible, frequently, across all levels. Speak to people as equals, and not just in meetings. They get used to it and learn to trust it. This helps manage change.
Next, you need to instil a sense of collective responsibility - everyone minds the whole business. It’s not ok just to guard your own turf. Sean compares this to having a dodgy bucket. If there’s a hole in the bottom, it’ll empty, irrespective of how strong it otherwise is.
He gets around siloed thinking by appointing project teams to work on new strategic initiatives. These groups of staff come from all different functions and levels across the organisation, and they work together to get a new project off the ground and over the line.
He is convinced that there are multiple benefits to this approach. It helps maintain mobility and fluidity in the organisation. Capacity is constantly routed towards what’s most strategic. And it also gives staff the widest possible scope.
To merge or not to merge.
It’s important at this point to mention Alone’s growth strategy. They are a Dublin-based organisation, but are expanding nationwide through a series of partnerships and mergers. You heard me correctly - mergers. A strategy that is so often discussed in the sector, yet so rarely pursued.
I’m keen to know why mergers aren’t more common, why he does them, and how he makes them work.
He surmises that everyone is proud of what they’ve created. As a result, there is an acute sense of what can be lost, and it can feel like a betrayal of legacy. You need to carefully manage the emotional aspect, and preserve the best bits of ethos and culture, safeguarding what is important.
Sean admits that it doesn't always add up on paper. However, community groups are often deeply embedded and provide vital interventions. The value of that embeddedness is not easily quantifiable, but should not be underestimated. And with the right back end support, these groups can thrive.
Project teams play an important role in making them work. As a leader, you need to be present, and staff from across the organisation play a hands-on role in process integration and relationship building. And you learn a lot from local staff feedback, so it's important to solicit it.
It's bigger than the brand.
My impression is that while Sean’s an ambitious leader, that ambition extends beyond the Alone brand. Yes, he wants his organisation to be in the vanguard of change, but he is adamant that it’s bigger than that. His ambitions relate to tackling the overall need.
I have a few examples of this.
Just as this interview kicks off, Sean walks into the room and mentions how he’s hatching a plan to convince all of the big age charities to work under one roof. It’d be easier to collaborate, and thus makes sense. He’s figuring out the logistics and running the numbers before he broaches the subject with them. Bold, unfazed - classic Sean.
I challenge him on how he fosters this collaboration and avoids the natural tendency to become territorial.
Move first, he says. He uses the analogy of witnessing two people fighting. As soon as one person steps in to intervene, everyone else does. Because it’s the right thing to do.
Another example is tech. Alone are developing a MIS (software) for the sector. It offers a composite of data (with all of the necessary anonymising and firewalls) upon which smart sector-wide decisions can be made. It works with apps for volunteers and assistive technology for service users. It’s real time information, and everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. Hallelujah.
There's enough work for everyone.
At this stage in the conversation, Sean’s stream of consciousness continues unabated, and I’m thinking there's enough material here for an entire blog series. Under the theme of growth, we also talk about how best to integrate volunteers, and how important it is to generate a percentage of your own income. All of it is relevant, and speaks to the wider strategic agenda.
One of the final things he says to me is that with a rapidly ageing population, there’s enough work for everyone. Take housing - there's times when the private sector is the right provider, but other times when the council or Alone is the appropriate one. The richer the diversity of options, the more that older people can decide what best suits their needs.
And, ultimately, that’s what it’s about. Support. Choice. And what’s best for all of us as we get old.
*If you want to highlight some of your own innovative business practices, or if you want help in taking a more innovative approach, contact Soli Projects.*
