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‘We pass through this world but once.
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life,
Few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive,
Or even to hope,
By a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.’
Stephen Jay Gould
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Recovery, regeneration, renewal, renaissance.
What is it with the ‘Re’ prefix in the economic development business?
‘Re’ indicates a sense of reversal, going back to the original place, a sense of ‘undoing’.
Recover -“to regain health or strength” – “to get (anything) back“
Regenerate -“make over, generate again,”
Renew – “to resume, revive – to bring back vitality“
Renaissance – “to be born again“
In each case there is a sense of making good something that is now broken. Of restoring things to how they once were – of returning to better times; of making new starts as if we had somehow jumped the gun in the 100 metres.
So what about that other old chestnut in our business – ‘development’? Isn’t ‘de’ just another prefix indicating a retrograde step – meaning, as it does, ‘to undo’?
But what about the second part – ‘velop‘ as in ‘envelope‘ meaning ‘to cover‘ or ‘to veil‘.
So the root of ‘develop’ is something about ‘uncovering’, ‘unveiling’ a sense of ‘revealing’ something. Think photography in the pre-digital era.
Development is not about going back but allowing, even facilitating, movement forward. It is about removing ‘covers’ so that what is already there can flourish. It is not about putting things right, making fresh starts and ruing mistakes.
It suggests that things are just the way they have to be. The question is not about what we once were – but what we have the aspiration and potential to become.
The challenge is how best to move forward to a new future rather than how to move back to a ‘glorious’ past.
Semantics matter.
If we believe that our job is to put right something that has gone wrong; to mend what is broken, this will define our work. A belief that our job is to help good people make progress will define our work in a way that will prove much more effective.
Here are 998 business ideas – just free for the taking:
Prem Rao writes a great blog and one of his recent posts identifies 7 barriers that prevent managers from coaching their team members as much as they ought.
Now I spend a lot of my time teaching managers how to coach and while I agree with all of Prem’s 7 I would have to add a few more barriers that I regularly encounter!
One is the perception that coaching takes a along time and is expensive. While coaching can take several weeks to really improve performance it is usually used to address a problem or an opportunity that has existed for months! Taking 6 -9 weeks to make real progress on an issue that is important but not urgent has to be a great use of any manager’s time.
But this brings us to another barrier to coaching. Coaching is a classic Quadrant 2 activity in Covey terms – it is itself an important but seldom urgent part of the work of the manager – After all you can always postpone coaching for another day without the wheels falling off. Secondly the issues that require coaching tend to be Quadrant 2 in nature – they are important but seldom urgent. So we are caught in a double whammy – not only can we afford to postpone coaching we can also postpone addressing the issue that coaching would be perfect to address.
Another barrier is the perception that it will take up a lot of the managers time if they start to coach – in fact it will nearly always save time – especially if used in partnership with delegation.
Then there is the association of coaching with under-performance. The perception that coaching is something that is done (certainly at middle and lower levels in the organisation) as a last resort effort to address under performance. This makes it awkward for managers to broach the subject of coaching with high performers.
Finally I think that many managers fight shy of coaching because they are insufficiently secure in their own technical competence and believe that their own short-comings might be exposed if they start to coach.
The solution?
Set an expectation that every manager will coach every member of the team every week. Train managers how to coach. Hold them accountable for this expectation and reward those that deliver!
Not only will you see progress in terms of performance and value creation, you will also start to develop a culture where you really do ‘invest in your people’.
Business opportunities are like buses, there is always another one coming along – Richard Branson
At least that is the case if you are already ‘enterprising’. Then the main problem is to stop the flow of opportunities and ideas long enough to make disciplined progress on any one of them.
However if you have been born and brought up in a struggling community there is a fair chance that the way you see the world makes it almost impossible o recognise ‘opportunities’ other than those that everyone else in your peer group recognises – the military, shelf stacking, alcohol, benefits, crime etc.
Your own self image may mean that ‘business opportunities’ are either not identified – or are quickly dismissed (‘I wouldn’t have what it takes’, ‘I would only mess it up’.)
Engaging those who are not yet thinking of themselves as enterprising or capable of learning the skills of enterprise is a major challenge in using enterprise in community transformation.