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Enterprise Coaching Award – New from SFEDI Enterprises

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OK it’s not quite like a new product launch from Apple, it won’t get people queuing outside the SFEDI stores for days in advance, but in its own way the launch of an Endorsed Award for Enterprise Coaches is a significant milestone.

This Endorsed Award is not from SFEDI, the Government recognised standards setting body for business support and advice.  It is from SFEDI Enterprises a private limited company that provides accreditation, products and services based on the SFEDI National Occupational Standards for Business Enterprise and Business Support.  There are no SFEDI National Occupational Standards for Enterprise Coaching.  Confusing isn’t it?

Enterprise Coaching is still new.  It comes in many shapes and forms and goes under different names.  For some it is a recruitment sergeant for mainstream business support – scouring the ‘hard to reach’ for people with the potential and desire to explore options around self-employment and entrepreneurship, preparing them for referral to the mainstream.  A kind of enterprise skimming activity.

For others, including yours truly, it is a more radical relationship with clients to help them explore how more enterprising attitudes and skills might help them to develop more influence over their own futures and help them to become  more active and engaged citizens.   It is as closely related to the development of the wellbeing agenda, cohesive communities and PSA 21 as to the narrow increase of Gross Domestic Product and reduction of benefit dependency.

But this Award has the hand of Government in it.  The majority of these Enterprise Coaches will be branded – ‘Solutions for Business – Funded by Government’.  They will be focused on entrepreneurship.

Solutions for Business - Funded by Goverment

The majority of providers of enterprise coaching come from a background in business support and advice.  I don’t expect many of them to see this as a problem.

SFEDI Enterprises have developed an ‘Endorsed Award’ and the role of the Enterprise Coach has now been quasi officially defined.  It IS about coaching people to ‘increase their capacity to be enterprising which might include self-employment’ (and business start-ups).  On close inspection the qualification is almost all about self employment and starting a business.

Enterprise Coaches can join the rank and file of ‘outreach workers’ foisting another policy goal of government onto unsuspecting deeply suspicious people living in areas of multiple deprivation.   Once again we are in danger of missing the chance to do something different and radical that might make a real difference.

But suppose that I am wrong and SFEDI Enterprises are right.  That the Great British Taxpayer, and service users in some of our most deprived communities, are well served by a small army of Enterprise Coaches acting as recruitment sergeants for mainstream business support.

(If you think this overstates the case let me refer you to assessment criteria 3.3 Support people to identify and overcome their own barriers to employment or self employment (be warned there are several 3.3s in the Award – this is just one of them).  The award talks of ‘overcoming clients barriers and objections’.)

There is just one criterion that I could find that hints that self employment and starting a business might not be right for everyone.  It requires that the Enterprise Coach should Explain when self employment may not be a viable option.  This puts the Enterprise Coach as judge and jury – deciding whether the client is capable of achieving their ambitions or not.  There is no such judgemental clause in relation to starting a business – just self-employment.  In my opinion this demonstrates a misunderstanding of the coaches role to say the very least.  ‘Judgemental’ is not one of the four approved intervention styles!

The whole tenor of the Award is to move clients towards self employment and start ups.  There is little explicit recognition that the role of the coach is to help clients to look at these as two options among many for making progress.  Nor is there any mention in the award of the coach helping the client to explore the potential risks associated with either self employment or starting a business.  This is part of the Enterprise Fairytale. It is ALL upside.

I know from personal experience that this Enterprise Fairytale leaves some people in debt, with visits from bailiffs, and their relationships and health under immense strain.  I get to work with them when they contact me occasionally through this blog.  Businesses that are ‘Dreams’ on paper sometimes turn into ‘Nightmares’ in reality.  The Endorsed Award, like so much publicly funded enterprise propaganda, chooses to ignore the potential downsides.  Indeed if the client should express reservations about losing money the award actively encourages the coach to ‘overcome’ them.

I spent a couple of hours getting to grips with this document and read it carefully. Structurally it is not very intuitive. However, its structure and the minor errors and typos are the least of its problems.

It is the impact it could have on ‘licensing’ sometimes poorly qualified, poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly experienced and on occasion poorly managed and supervised ‘coaches’ to go out there and encourage people to rush into risky endeavours for which they are often ill prepared that worries me.  And enabling them to do this in some of our areas of greatest multiple deprivation.  These communities deserve better.

NB I can find no expectation that Enterprise Coaches should seek effective supervision for their work – which is I believe a requirement of most of the major professional coaching accreditation bodies.

Not only will we weaken our enterprise culture (as more people experience the unanticipated downsides of enterprise) we may also significantly decrease the quality of our small business stock as people rush to enterprise without the skills and experience that they require to serve their customers well and profitably.  Yes I have seen this happen too, on several occasions. It leads to more debt, desperation and poverty.

The fact that Enterprise Coaches will have an Endorsed Award may promote a sense of comfort and wellbeing in funders and service users that may be misplaced, unless the award provides reasonable guarantees that coaches will do no harm and may do good for the majority of service users. I am not sure that this one does.  But these are just my opinions.

Some criteria from the award that are, in my opinion, too ‘open to interpretation’ include:

  • Analyse the reach that centres of community activity have in engaging traditionally difficult to reach individuals
  • Evaluate the stage that individuals have reached
  • Analyse the change an individual may go through when undergoing enterprise coaching
  • Carry out awareness raising activities that manage the diversity of people, ideas, interests and motivations

Personally I am very comfortable at this stage in its development for the enterprise coaching role to be interpreted in many different ways. Enterprise Coaching on a University Campus will differ from Enterprise Coaching in a super output area. Rural models will differ from urban. We should let differences flourish and seriously look to share ‘interesting practice’ across the sector. Unfortunately at the moment I can find little serious reflection on ‘what is working’ as most programmes paint an extremely positive picture to support applications for further extensions to their funding. High failure rates, and high rates of loan defaults are ignored as we announce how many hundreds of businesses have been created.

If Enterprise Coaching is to have a respected future then it needs a standard setting body that does not just reflect current practice in order to turn the handle on the qualifications and funding machine, but challenges the sector to raise its game. I have watched SFEDI engage with business advisers and enterprise professionals ‘where they are at’ for over a decade now. Suffice to say progress has been slow.

The new award has some technical holes, but politically too it is ‘interesting’.  It is not a full qualification – but an Endorsed Award.  With a light touch on assessment and verification, it is designed to be accessible to those who may aspire to this role but do not have sufficient or the appropriate experience to begin to practice or apply for posts of this nature. The National Award is not an assessment of competence.  It is not a measure of a person’s ability to do the job to the standard sets by the industry.  I am not really sure what it is a measure of.  Potential perhaps?

Part of the assessment requires observation of the coach working with a ‘real’ client, which is a concern if you are one of those without sufficient or the appropriate experience.  SFEDI recommend ‘volunteering’ for such people ‘where learning support is available’.

To be an effective enterprise coach, to establish transformational relationships and maintain them over a period of time to help service users make a real difference in their lives is a demanding job, both emotionally and technically.  The fact that we are unwilling to pay the people who do this work what it is worth is not an excuse to water down the standards and allow those without sufficient or the appropriate experience to gain the award.  But politics being politics I fully expect that when the enterprise coaching award becomes a qualification and gets slotted into the national framework it will be at Level 3.  Business adviser qualifications are at Level 4.

All in all I think this is an inadequate, if well intended, attempt to provide professional development opportunities and ‘recognition’  for people (who may not have the required experience) to work with others on developing their capacity for enterprise, considering self employment or starting a business.  I refuse to believe that is is designed to sell watered down business adviser training and ‘quality assurance’ through SFEDI endorsed ‘Centres of Excellence’, which I believe will be the only routes to access the Endorsed Award.

Either way the Endorsed Award frames the role of the enterprise coach in a  narrow and limiting way and will, in my opinion, do little to help us develop the ‘enterprise culture’ that we aspire to.

The job of engaging people in some of our most deprived communities on the journey towards living more enterprising lives, offering them a relationship that they can use to transform their own futures, and helping them to adopt sometimes radically different behaviours and choices deserves better.  These are not second class business advisers.

They need to be first class enterprise coaches.

Details on the SFEDI Enterprises Endorsed Award for Enterprise Coaching can be requested here: http://www.sfedienterprises.co.uk/contact

But perhaps I have got it wrong.  It would not be the first time.

Perhaps the awards will provide us with a solid platform from which excellent Enterprise Coaching services can flourish. I have my doubts but I sincerely hope they are proven to be misplaced.

Drucker on Economic Development and the Value of ‘No-tech’

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Above all, to have ‘high‑tech’ entrepreneurship alone without its being embedded in a broad entrepreneurial economy of ‘no‑tech’, ‘low‑tech’, and ‘middle‑tech’, is like having a mountaintop without the mountain.

Even high-tech people in such a situation will not take jobs in new, risky, high‑tech ventures. They will prefer the security of a job in the large, established, ‘safe’ company or in a government agency.

Of course, high‑tech ventures need a great many people who are not themselves high‑tech: accountants, salespeople, managers, and so on.

In an economy that spurns entrepreneurship and innovation except for that tiny extravaganza, the ‘glamorous high tech venture’, those people will keep an looking for jobs and career opportunities where society and economy (i.e., their classmates, their parents, and their teachers) encourage them to look: in the large, ‘safe’ established institution.

Neither will distributors be willing to take on the products of the new venture, nor are investors willing to back it.

Peter Drucker – What Will Not Work

It’s not just about raising aspirations…

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This was one of the key points from the Enterprising Places Network event run by Enterprise UK in West Yorkshire yesterday:

  • It’s not just about raising aspirations but about raising realistic aspirations.
  • Projects and initiatives need to adopt a sustainable approach and offer support in long-term engagement.
  • Partnership working presents a great deal of opportunity.
  • Enterprise is often about taking risks.

And, yes, bears do sometimes go to the toilet in the woods.

Contrary to the blog and tweeting from the workshop (done in real time by a rep from the Enterprise UK PR company) for me at least the Enterprising Places Network event was ultimately a disappointment.

Our hosts at the Cottingley Cornerstone Centre were friendly and and the lunch was substantial – but the acoustics in the room were terrible.  I hate to think what it is like when the centre is full of children.

But the problems for me were the ‘case studies’.

After introductions and context setting, Wakefield District Housing kicked us off with Chief Executive Kevin Dodd talking about the importance of carrots and sticks (I think he called them incentives) to encourage people to be more enterprising.   And by more enterprising it seemed he meant mainly getting back into the labour market.  Indeed this theme about job creation and routes into employment kept recurring.  There is more to an enterprise culture than tackling worklessness.  If someone’s behaviour is motivated primarily by the way that bureaucrats arrange carrots and sticks it cannot be described as enterprising.  Compliant, yes.  Enterprising, no.   So think long and hard.  Do we want our tenants to be compliant fodder for employers or enterprising?

We then heard a little about what Wakefield District Housing is actually doing to promote enterprise.  This consisted mainly of sending young people on Outward Bound Courses and providing mentoring in Wakefield secondary schools.    I worked for Outward Bound for a couple of years and have much time for them.  They develop many things, teamwork, leadership, followership – but I am not certain about enterprise.  I would need to be convinced.

And I am not clear how mentoring programmes help individuals to become more enterprising.  Especially when mentors encourage young people to take their eye off of their dreams and start to think seriously about Plan B.  ‘I know you want to be bassist in a rock band but really, don’t you think you should apply to study plumbing at the local FE college?’   ‘We need to be realistic with our aspirations’.  I personally think this shows a weak understanding of how people hold and transform their dreams and ideals without being told what is realistic by ‘authority’ figures.  It is not our job to decide what is possible….

The main reason schools welcome Mentors is because they can provide a little bit of additional 121 support to help pupils at school.  It is not about making them more enterprising. It is about improving school performance.   Too often enterprise is snuck in on the back of ‘improving educational attainment’ or ‘improving attendance’ ie providing incremental support to the mainstream pedagogy, curriculum and assessment, when in fact it offers radically ‘different keys’ to ‘different kingdoms’ for an increasingly large group of pupils that mainstream education fails to serve well.

But what was most puzzling to me was why a social landlord in particular would engage in such activities.  In what way does this build on the relationship between landlord and tenant?    Mentoring in schools is a fine way of delivering corporate social responsibility.  Personal development too is extremely worthwhile.  But neither of these builds on the unique relationship between landlord and tenant that I had hoped the workshop might explore.

Next up it was Connaught with a re-hash of last years Strictly Come Business competition.   Now I have problems with most types of ‘Enterprise’ competition and especially with those that base themselves on the Dragon’s Den format.  Dragon’s Den is  not a competition.  If investors believe a business offers a return, they invest.  You don’t have to ‘win’.  You just have to be investment ready.    In my opinion most winners of Dragon’s Den style enteprise competitions are not yet investment ready.  The journey to investment readiness can take years.

Does this competition format provide a serious and sustained methodology for creating an enterprise culture?  Or is it an easily costed and managed process that ticks the enterprise boxes?

If we put a leaflet through a door that says ‘Do You Have A Big Community Idea?’ most people will say ‘No!’.  The leaflet goes in the bin and those that might benefit most from our help to think in  more enterprising ways are lost.  At best we find a small minority who are already thinking ‘enterprise’ and give them a leg up.  This kind of enterprise skimming provides the sweet illusion of instant results but in reality changes little.  Indeed I think this kind of approach makes many of the 10 Commonest Mistakes in Encouraging an Enterprise Culture.

Networking over lunch, provided by local social enterprise Daisies, was fine and the presentations after lunch were good.  I especially enjoyed finding out more about CREATE and how they operated.  Competing on the basis of quality products and services rather than on the moral high grounds of SE seems like a winning and novel concept!

And a final talk through the development of Cottingley Cornerstone by our hostess for the day just re-affirmed how bloody hard this social enterprise game can be.  On a shoe string and continually seeking funding – but only that which fits with their mission and objectives.  Fingers crossed it stays that way.

My only problem with the afternoon sessions was that they seemed only loosely, if at all, connected to the theme of enterprise and social landlords.

So my main take aways from the day:

  • Social Landlords are coming under pressure from policy makers in Whitehall and the Housing and Communities Agency to do more to get their tenants to be enterprising.  The interest in enterprise is primarily policy led rather than informed by any real insights into how it might help to provide a better housing service and better places to live.
  • Landlords are not well placed to respond to this pressure because of their ‘unique’ relationship with tenants and also their relative lack of knowledge and understanding about developing an enterprise culture. It is not about ‘incentives’.  It is about power and self interest.
  • Just to be clear, I don’t think being a landlord helps if you are trying to promote behavioural change.  The tenants will always be looking for the ulterior motive.  For some housing cooperatives this maybe less of an issue.  But when did you last have a landlord who you could really trust to be working in your best interest rather than theirs?
  • There is an apparent willingness to adopt what has not worked in the past rather than to explore innovative approaches to building an enterprise culture.
  • There seems to be a conflation of enterprise with entrepreneurial.  A belief that more enterprising means more business-like.

So, as I said on my evaluation, the day was good in parts – although I  think we failed as a group to really get under the skin of the role of the social landlord in supporting an enterprise culture.

Enterprise Strategy at its Worst?

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4OPFl2Kxhs]

  • Will your ‘dream business’ REALLY be your dream business?
  • IF you start to make money – will it REALLY make you happy?
  • Is starting a business in YOUR self interest or in that of a bureaucrat/government department?
  • Will managing your business REALLY improve your wellbeing and happiness?

Enterprise trumps Entrepreneurship

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I think that enterprise is much more important for our communities than entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship focuses on encouraging people to move into self-employment or to start, or grow their own business. If instead we focus on enterprise we are encouraging people to think about their current situation and how it might be improved. We are helping them to develop strategies that will move them towards their preferred future.
By promoting enterprise in this way we will of course encourage entrepreneurship. As people become more enterprising they may, on occasion, need to start a new business to get them from where they are to their preferred future.
However our default setting should be to dissuade people from starting a business. If we can easily put them off, then it is likely that they would not have the necessary perseverance to make the business work. If they are insistent that only by starting a business can they become the kind of person that they wish to be and create the kind of future that they wish to have, then, and only then, should we roll our sleeves up and do all we can to help them succeed in their entrepreneurial venture, safe in the knowledge that they have the determination and persistence that they will require to succeed.
By adopting a premise that we should persuade as many people as possible not to start a business I believe that we can significantly increase the survival rate of those businesses that do start-up. As people in the community begin to see businesses that are both well thought through and successful taking hold, more and more will begin to believe that starting a business is not almost inevitably going to end in debt and misery.
However, even in the most entrepreneurial communities it is likely that fewer than 10 in 100 people of working age are ever likely to start their own business.  I would contend that of those hundred people every one of them would benefit from learning how to become more enterprising. That is, how to identify their current situation how to recognise what an improvement might look like, and to put in place plans and actions to move in that direction.

This is why I think that enterprise is much more important, as a concept or a philosophy, for our communities than entrepreneurship. If we wish to have more entrepreneurial communities then we must start by first making them more enterprising.