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More enterprising communities are stronger, wealthier, happier and sustainable.
Aren’t they?
The advantages are obvious.
So how come, when we’ve explained the benefits of enterprise so carefully, and offered all the help and support any budding entrepreneur could possibly need, we’re still not mowed down in the rush as enthused and energised communities respond to the call?
DCLG has sparked a renewed interest in enterprise in deprived communities with its investment in Local Enterprise Growth Initiative. The focus on enterprise is in danger of being overwhelmed by the much larger and wider investments going into the worklessness agenda (with more of a focus on routes into employment rather than creating your own work). It must be quite strange from the residents point of view. One week someone from the ‘Government’ is urging them to get ‘a great business idea’ or ‘start a social enterprise’ and the next week someone else is telling them to ‘brush up their CV’, ‘join a job club’ and ‘seek work’. I suppose we should not be surprised that these appear to be competing initiatives at the neighbourhood level – fighting to engage the same people in their respective ‘customer journeys’. But I would like to think that more could be done to help individual residents to see these as two possible options on their journey.
I think it is interesting to meet the range of service providers involved in the local enterprise work. Some come from a very ‘public service/third sector’ orientation while others have a much more ‘follow the money’ mentality looking to deliver the outputs (often very poorly specified) at lowest cost. This latter group usually have more experience of the way that public money is spent and understand that at some point they will be held to account for what they done. From day one they count and record what they think will interest the funders. The worrying thing for me is that both sides of this divide need a little bit of what the other side has to offer. Both risk failure for different reasons.
It is also clear to me the LEGI investments are not an end in themselves but rather provide an opportunity to play a part in a much monger term, potentially lucrative and worthwhile game. The cities and regions that can show that they can take public sector funding and provide a return on that investment in terms of reduced benefit budgets, improved health and psychological well being, reductions in crime and grime, increased tax takes and NI contributions and a whole range of other social and economic benefits will surely position themselves well for future investment.
Those that deliver a range of occasionally interesting, but ultimately unproven projects, are unlikely to see further funding once the LEGI money runs out. My worry is that some do not seem to be aware of the possibility of this larger game and are happy to settle for the effective project management of what they already have resigned to the fact that it will all be wound up in a few short years when the money has all been spent.
So the challenge is to create significant value from the current investments and to demonstrate that value in hard cash terms to funders.
Tom Peters encourages managers to obsess on R.O.I.R – the Return on Investment in Relationships.
ROIR through 121s comes in many forms:
Most people are looking (consciously or not) for a number of things from their work. These include:
In this situation managers can use 121s to establish dynamic relationships with team members that helps them to look for and find these things in the workplace. People develop, talent flourishes, relationships improve and performance excels. This group of people usually respond very well to the introduction of 121s as they offer a vehicle for accelerating progress.
However some people are not looking for any of this. They do not want freedom, or responsibility. They want instructions, structure and clarity. They want other people to do the thinking and the creativity. They want to be the foot soldiers – doing an honest days work for an honest days pay. They do not see work as a vehicle either for their own self development or creative expression. They are not looking for self-actualisation but security and control. This group can be very resistant to 121s, seeing them as an intrusion. They are likely to resist development in their roles and accept delegation and change grudgingly, if at all.
There are several things to consider here:
Go to the people
Live with them
Learn from them
Love them
Start with what they know
Build with what they have
But with the best leaders
When the work is done
The task accomplished
The people will say
“We have done this ourselves.”
Lao Tsu (700 BC)
“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them – the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
Dostoyevsky
This is a great quote that reminds us that management, especially progressive management, is not so much about techniques and tools but about our basic stance in relation to those we manage.
Certainly in sports management the role of the manager is to help each individual to perform to the maximum of their potential. In business I think it is a minority of managers who see this as their job. Instead they see it as about keeping people working in boxes on organisation charts – sometimes supressing their development order to retain them.