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Big Questions for Enterprise Coaching?

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Is enterprise to be interpreted narrowly or broadly?

  • A narrow interpretation would equate enterprise with movement towards self employment or entrepreneurship.
  • A broad interpretation would equate enterprise with efficacy, agency and an increased sense of influence and power in shaping one’s own future.  With the pursuit of wellbeing and happiness through the exercise of personal responsibility and the skills of association, collaboration and mutuality.

Is the role of the coach to be limited or expansive?

  • The limited role of the enterprise coach is as an outreach enterprise evangelist selling the enterprise fairytale and encouraging people into workshops and mainstream services….
  • The expansive role of the coach is as a provider of person centred transformational relationships, harnessing the potential of people and the community to encourage personal and community development

We seem to be heading towards a position which takes a narrow definition of enterprise and limited role for the coach.  I believe this will result in communities that are actually much less enterprising  and entrepreneurial.

If we were to have the courage and ambition to shift to a broad definition of enterprise and an expansive role for the coach then I think we may actually have a foundation for the development of Big Society.  And funnily enough it wouldn’t cost very much….

The Enterprise Fairytale – InBiz Style

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If you’d like to manage your work around your life, self-employment may be the answer for you. All it takes is a bright idea and the determination to succeed.

InBiz – advert in RAW Magazine and TMP Website (emphases are mine)

This is another one for the Advertising Standards Authority in my opinion.  The implication that all you need is a bright idea and some determination and “hey presto!”.  Anyone can surely muster these resources?  The implications of such a message are both absurd, hurtful and unhelpful.

  • No hint of risk or downsides to self employment
  • No hint of the challenges involved in succeeding at self employment in an increasingly competitive environment.
  • No mention of the tensions and strains that a decision to go self employed might put on relationships with families and friends – or how it could end up in increased debt.

A naive and incredible appeal to the hopeless, the gullible and the many who are referred by the Job Centre at pain of losing their benefits entitlement if they don’t give it a go.  After all it only needs a bright idea and the determination to succeed (subtext “What IS wrong with you people?).

Of course I understand why we do it.

It works in the short term to get people through the door and onto our programmes so that we can trigger payments from funders.  Until of course the truth about this brand becomes widely understood.  It might work for a minority but for most it will be yet another false dawn – simply adding to feelings of learned helplessness.  But then we just repackage and rebrand the offer and it is BIG Business as usual.  If these services are so very good, and all it requires is a bright idea and some determination then how come the worklessness problem is so persistent?

We must start to be much more honest with people.  A bright idea helps.  Determination is good too.  But it might also take months or years of skill development.  Hours and hours of hard graft pushing for business and dealing with customers.  A credit history that allows you to borrow and invest at the right time.  A degree of financial literacy to ensure that you are not ripped of by lenders. Family and friends who are supportive and understanding.  A resourcefulness and resilience to get through some really tough times. And in my experience a lot of luck too.

Self employment is a double edged sword.  For some it transforms their lives for the better.  Much better.  For some it becomes just another attempt to get off benefits.  For some it results in serious indebtedness, misery and worse.

Until we start to build an honest dialogue with people that we purport to help about the nature of our products and services and provide long term, skilled, person centred support that mobilises the resources of the community to help people to make progress then I am afraid we are likely to make little impact on JSA figures.

(With thanks to Charlotte for pointing out this line.)

B2B Business Support – Harvey Nichols Style

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I spent a great 90 minutes with Brian Handley, General Manager of Harvey Nichols in Leeds, and Lee Hicken from online marketing outfit Hebemedia to find out  a little more about their work in supporting enterprise across Yorkshire and to explore the possibility of helping to develop their role in supporting emerging artists and crafts people.

Now I am no ‘fashion and retail’ guru and struggle to understand why anyone would want to pay £3000 or more for an Italian Leather handbag, but apparently they do, and Harvey Nichols helps to serve that want.  (Not everything in Harvey Nichols has such a price tag.  Apparently a coffee in their restaurant costs the same as in Starbucks, some items in the Food Hall match Morrison for price and some of their makeup too matches the High  St retailers on price.)

But why are those expensive handbags Italian?  Why not British? Or Yorkshire?

  • Are we lacking the skills and talent required to craft leather to this standard?
  • Are we poor at the marketing and brand building work required to compliment fine craft skills to command this top end of the market?  We are simply unable to break the consumers taste for ‘Italian Leather’. Perhaps the Italian High Streets are full of top quality British Leather handbags – I suspect not….
  • Does the Italian craft leather industry receive support from its own Government that allows it to perform at this level?
  • Perhaps the Harvey Nichols buyers have not found the great British products that are out there, preferring instead to go with established Italian brands that they know will sell?

I suspect that it is some combination of the first three that leads to the failure of British manufacturers to compete at the top end of the  luxury leather handbag market.  A conversation with Brian convinces me that they do all they can to source locally wherever possible without compromising on quality.

And I suspect that the absence of high quality business support to help with the development of craft and marketing skills is a large part of the problem.  I can’t recall seeing a single UK regional economic strategy that emphasises the importance of the craft sector.  They tend to focus on ‘high-tech, bio-tech, creative and digital’ but hardly mention the support of traditional craft skills which tend to live of the crumbs from the ‘high growth’ table.

Which is perhaps why Harvey Nichols in Leeds have been able to do so much work with 11 textile mills across Yorkshire, helping to raise their profile.  Absolutely nothing wrong with their product.  They provide felts and baize for Steinway pianos and the worlds best snooker tables.  They provide the fabric for Barack Obama’s curtains in the Oval Office of the White House, and the world’s most expensive suit.  Each of the mills was characterised with an obsessive passion for the quality of the product which had allowed them to move up market and hang on as most textile manufacturing headed east.  But their marketing and branding was weak, and when they came together at Harvey Nichols to see how an association with the store might raise awareness of their product, Brian said it was the first time that all of them had shared a room to explore the way forward.   They had learned a little about how to compete with each other – but very little about how to collaborate.  (Perhaps there is a clue here to the prominence of Italian artisan on British High Streets?).

Why does Harvey Nichols get involved in this kind of work?

Well I don’t think it is pure altruism.  It is self interest properly understood – a thriving local economic ecosystem  is essential for the maintenance and development of the customer base.   A good story is essential for brand building and getting people through the doors.  This is good business combined with a genuine passion for, and commitment to, high quality manufacturing in the region.

This kind of ‘business to business’ business support was once widespread.  In some parts of the world it still is.  But in the UK business support has turned into a government funded industry not primarily focussed on responding to local indigenous businesses but on focussing support on strategic priorities (high tech/biotech/creative and digital).

Perhaps in these straitened times we could afford to let this government backed Business Support industry to just fade away and encourage more employers like Harvey Nichols to play a full part in supporting local enterprise.  The engagement of businesses in this sort of civic society, using their expertise to develop a viable and sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem will surely create much more value for society than so many corporate social responsibility projects that end up with Lawyers painting community centres….

…and if you are looking to spend £300 rather than £3000 pounds on a Leather Handbag that is ‘Made in England’ you might try Liz Cox.

Working on the Press Gang..?

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The work of the enterprise coach is, for me, about providing a relationship that people can use to explore how they might transform their lives and whether or not this is a journey they want to undertake.   It is a relationship characterised by trust, confidentiality, skill and often the long-term. It is not directive; the coach has no ulterior goal that they are steering the person towards.   The only goal of the coach is to help their client to become the kind of person that they really want to be.

The relationship provides a chance for them to really transform their life. Of course this doesn’t always happen – but there is a chance. The transformation may come about through starting a business. Or through getting better housing, becoming a better parent, tackling an addiction or pursuing an ambition. The job of the enterprise coach is to enable people to take more control of their futures. To find their power in shaping their own lives. It is a truly valuable, challenging and privileged role.

It seems to me that much of the Enterprise Coaching world sees things a little differently. For them the enterprise coach is part of a smiling press-gang, working ‘in the community’, promoting the benefits of enterprise (narrowly defined around self employment, employment, business start-up or expansion) and encouraging people to grow their ‘dream business’. Clients are usually recruited to workshops after a limited amount of 121 work, given a crash course in business literacy and referred to the mainstream – where they take their chances. It is a directive process where the only positive outcome is a referral into the business support industry. It is about skimming talent and potential rather than a longer term engagement to change attitudes, habits, beliefs and decisions.  The whole process is lubricated with the judicious use of free lunches, celebrity speakers, community transport and the potential of getting some cash.   This is traditional pre-start up business support.  We have been doing it for a long time in various communities.  It feels safe, and it does produce start ups.  But I have yet to see it transform communities.

Sometimes  it even damages the very communities that it is intended to help.  I would suggest three mechanisms by which this unfortunate and unintended consequence sometimes occurs.

  • Firstly the service helps to skim off the most able and talented in the community: those that already have the confidence and self belief to start a business and helps them up and sometimes out of the community.  Those that succeed do so, not because of the support of their community, but often in spite of it.  Enterprise is seen primarily as a process for personal progress rather than community building.
  • Secondly we engage large numbers of people on the enterprise journey that we are unable to work with in sufficient depth or for sufficient time before they are referred into a mainstream that is not resourced to work with them.  Failure, disappointment and frustration are commonplace.  Word spreads and the reputation of the service provider drops.  Numbers engaging with the project fall away and the community becomes even more suspicious of the enterprise agenda.
  • Thirdly is the mechanism of reactance.  The more we persuade people to look at enterprise as something that is potentially good for them the more likely they are to resist our persuasion.   Flood a community with pro-enterprise messages and perversely you may decrease enthusiasm for it.

But back to the two visions of Enterprise Coaching that I opened with.  At the moment we are losing the chance of realising the first because of the funding that is being pumped into the second.  I meet and often work with great coaches who are trying to deliver the first vision for enterprise coaching, while being performance managed by a system that is demanding the second.  The consequences are inevitable.  As I have written before, enterprise coaching is being broken.

The question is – what are we going to do about it?  Join our LinkedIn group to find out…

Helping that Helps…

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I have been thinking some more about ‘helping styles that help’.  Many services that purport to ‘help’ appear to be helpful on the surface, but often leave clients more dependent on experts to help them with decision-making in the future, rather than less. We achieve a net loss in ‘enterprise’ rather than a net gain. Or we deliver the bureaucratic requirements of our service while leaving things substantially unchanged.

Every interaction offers us possibilities to help or hinder the development of clients (and ourselves). For some years now I have trained a person centred approach based on 4 styles of intervention intended to help advisers/coaches to think about how they can use every interaction to both strengthen their relationship with the client and to move the change process along:

  1. acceptant (getting them the client talk and to acknowledge feelings and emotions as well as facts)
  2. catalytic (introducing models, theories and concepts that help the client to see the wood for the trees, to recognise patterns and ‘make their own sense’ of the information they have available to them
  3. confrontational (challenging the client when words and actions seem to lack coherence – when they appear to be acting against their own self interest)
  4. prescriptive (telling clients what they should or should not do – a very common subset of this is called ‘veiled prescription’ for example ‘Have you thought about calling Business Link?’ which is really a prescription disguised as a question.

These four styles are then used in conjunction with what I call the enterprise coaching cycle. This starts with initial contact/gaining entry (winning the permission of the client to help; crossing the threshold at which the client ‘invites’ us to work with them on exploring options and plans). It then goes through contracting, data collection and option generation phases (all led by the client with the coach in the role of facilitator in nearly all occasions), option selection, planning, implementation and then either exiting or re-contracting for a further cycle of support.

In practice many of the people I train recognise that their ability to help is limited by the extent to which they can effectively ‘gain entry’. They are often not trusted as being ‘on the side of the client’. Gaining entry is a challenge because as it cannot be done on the basis of expertise and power (the usual starting point?) but on the basis of trustworthiness and intent.  Without gaining entry we can go through the motions of a helping relationship and tick most of the right boxes but nothing substantially shifts.

When working with coaches and advisers I have had to do quite a lot of work to decrease the amount of prescription that goes on and to increase the amount of acceptant work. This is usually resisted until advisers experience the style helping them with one of their own real life challenges. Even then they will habitually revert back to advising each other – even when they know from personal experience that ‘prescription’ is often almost useless as a helping style! There is a challenge of learning new techniques and skills, but the main challenge is unlearning old habits!

There is also often a resistance in case what the client really wants to work on reflects neither the coaches’ expertise nor the remit of their project.

I have also done quite a lot of work with advisers and coaches on ‘self directed learning’ which draws heavily on reflective practice techniques and helps them to build personalised learning support mechanisms. One of the unintended consequences of the standards based approach to professional development has been emphasis on the collection and collation of evidence that criteria are met rather than genuine reflection and the creative development of professional practice.

Another challenge has been to get advisers/coaches to be genuinely client centred, rather than centred on either the solutions that they have up their sleeves (workshops that have been commissioned and need filling, managed workspaces that need the same, existing services provided by ‘partners’) or the outcomes that draw down their funding (steering people towards business start ups, VAT registrations or training places – because they count as ‘success’ in the terms of the funder).

Working on the front-line of service delivery leads to challenges further up the supply chain. This includes helping service managers/designers to balance the tensions between client centredness and outcomes that funders demand. In my experience this balance is nearly ALWAYS struck on the side of the funder rather than the client which often dilutes the potential of the service as we cannot gain entry if we are more concerned in gaining outcomes for the funder than helping the client on their agenda. There is also the challenge of helping funders to recognise that they are much more likely to achieve their outcomes if they fund person centred support rather than policy centred ‘advice and guidance’. Work is required in all these areas if we are to make a real shift in the system and its efficacy.

I am not sure if this stream of consciousness will add anything to the analysis of the challenges in developing enterprise coaching as an impactful and cost-effective practice, but I hope it shows that I have perhaps some of the pieces of the puzzle that may help to shift things a little at both theoretical and practical levels, both at the front-line of service delivery and the design and management of services.

If any of this may be relevant to your work then please do give me a shout.