The Embo Trust: A Collective Leadership Case Study

The village has a stable population of around 300 with another 300 residing in the surrounding area. It also has a growing population of children and young people, the being around 30-40 children from babies to secondary age. In addition, there is also a rising population of older people and people with disabilities and long-term conditions.

Some of the main issues for Embo include living costs up to 40% higher than urban areas, poor public service provision, no indoor community facilities and no public transport links

In 2007, The Embo Trust was created with the aim to revitalise the local community by refurbishment of the former village school for community use. It was hoped that this in turn would help in creating: a strong, resilient village; community owned assets; income generation opportunities and significant local services. The Trust became a registered charity in 2010.

Projects

Some of the achievements of the Embo Trust to date include:

• Purchasing the former village school for community use
• Successfully applying to the National Forest Land Scheme and purchasing 18Ha of the Fourpenny Plantation to create runrigs and investigate the feasibility of a small wind turbine.
• Operating a community garden.
• Relocating and running the village shop following its closure.
• Negotiating with P.O. Ltd for them to deliver an outreach service to the village.
• Regularly managing funding including from the Landfill Tax Scheme, the Moidart Trust, The Co-operative Community Fund, The Bank of Scotland Community Fund, SSE and the local Council Ward discretionary fund.
• Building and maintaining relationships with external agencies such as Forestry Scotland, the Post Office, Highland Council and HIE.

Collective Leadership

In terms of leadership, the Embo Trust operates using a collective leadership structure. Collective Leadership typically describes the distribution of power within an organisational structure. Collective leadership usually involves:

Collective Leadership usually involves:

• Participation from all members of a team without a clear leadership structure.
• Consistent journaling and reflection.
• Focus on the behavioural and relational aspects of an organisation.
• Encouraging creativity and innovation.

Sharing Responsibility

Jim McGillivray has been a councillor for East Sutherland and Edderton since 2007. Now in his third term, he is due to retire from this position in March 2022. Over the past 15 years, Jim was heavily involved with the Embo Trust and has seen collective leadership in action.

Once of the aspects of collective leadership that Jim experienced was responsibility being shared between all members of the team. Various individuals came on board who had different skills and expertise that they could bring to each project. A local football team became involved with the Embo Trust and it was fortunate as many of them were tradesmen and had experience with housing. Because of this, they were able to provide useful insight when looking at designs for developing houses for woodland crofts.

As the Embo Trust is entirely run by volunteers it can be tricky to delegate jobs, but Jim says they can almost always come to an amicable agreement. Negotiating who took on what role was often decided around a table with the whole team in attendance. People had their say and were able to communicate whether they agreed with something or not.

When it came to the design of the old School, a lot of people had their say because they were tradesmen and could bring in trade aspect to the whole project in terms of building design. In these cases, Jim and Rhona were happy to sit back and let them make decisions.

Jim stresses the importance of sharing responsibility but says that it is inevitable that disagreements will arise. He experienced this first-hand when the Embo Trust had achieved one of their main goals as some within the project questioned what the purpose of the group now was. Looking back now, Jim says that perhaps there was a need to set new goals and move on. However, due to the village’s decreasing population, the Trust is running out of people who have the energy to take these projects forward. Jim suggests having some downtime between one project ending and another starting.

Development of the Old School Building overseen by the Embo Trust.

To learn more about the journey of the Old School Building click here.

Success Factors

In terms of success factors for this type of organisation, the Embo Trust had fairly regular, informal periods of reflection after each task to discuss what worked and what didn’t. Jim feels like this is important to the sustainability of any community-led organisation.  Jim also stresses the importance of having one coordinator who is the driving force behind big projects.

Jim experienced a few challenges to this way of working during his involvement with Embo Trust. He says that volunteer fatigue was a common thing to see and that they had to work hard to keep momentum going due to the changing population dynamic.

He also says that often certain personalities can clash and cause problems for the rest of the group. When working towards a shared goal, personalities tend to merge. But eventually you get to a point where you’ve achieved the goal and you’re looking at the long-term sustainability of what you’re doing and that is where differences of opinion creep in. At this point, Jim and Rhona decided to step back from the Trust and let the new directors do things their way. He says that at this point you need to hand the project over, say “it’s your time now” and move on.