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Helping People to Exist or Become?

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I have been banging on about enterprise as being a process for the emergence of identity for a long time now.  Enterprise provides the (nearly) perfect vehicle for us to explore our talents and passions and have the results of our efforts judged in real time by real people.  When you are enterprising honest feedback is always available.

But I have been nowhere near strong enough on this.

Enterprise is a process for creating and shaping lifes – NOT for increasing the start up rate.

This was brought home to me again last night listening to Frazer Irving at the Leeds College of Art.  Frazer told us the story of his journey from schoolboy geek reading (and loving) comics to becoming a professional illustrator and artist working on some of the top comics in the world and providing artwork to support advertising campaigns for blue chips.

Key elements in his journey were:

  • lots of study – school, college – taking every opportunity to develop his talent and passion – and having the strength to survive crass and damaging teachers – “Frazer – don’t waste your time on comics – when I was editing Women’s Weekly we sold 4 million copies every week – how many copies do comics sell?”
  • lots of ‘suffering’ – crap jobs, dole, survival – but still developing the passion
  • persisting long enough to ‘get lucky’ with some breaks – (funny how years of practice and development of his craft finally got him the ‘luck’ he needed…)
  • a real and enduring passion for his work – talking about the importance of ‘the muse’

Now just imagine Frazer had come to you as a young graduate (2:2), currently holding down a string of temporary jobs (selling sex toys, security guard, office work etc) and told you that he wanted to become a freelance illustrator, not just working for top comics like 2000AD, but providing his own innovative style of illustrations.  Doing HIS stuff – that at the time no-one was publishing.

Would you have the type of service that could really help him with what is inevitably going to be a long journey?

Could you support a journey measured in years, possibly decades, rather then weeks or months?  Will your funders let you?  Do you have the ability to support that kind of relationship?

Could your service help him to persist, survive and develop as he worked his way around Europe developing his experience, style and technique?

Would your relationship have had the strength, compassion and faith in his potential to endure while he became something TRULY excellent?

While he served a REAL apprenticeship (this was no government scheme designed by employers – this was real self discovery) that gave him a platform to become excellent – could you have maintained your support?

Or, in a possibly unconscious pursuit of quick fixes dictated by funding streams and service design, would you have tried to persuade him that his passion was OK as a hobby- but never really going to turn into a lucrative career?

“Do you know how many illustrators send their portfolios to 2000AD every week?”.  “Now let’s talk about how we can increase your sales of rampant rabbits.  Have you ever thought of setting up an e-bay shop?  We have a one day workshop….”

Frazer was lucky.  He knew what he wanted to become and he held onto that dream for long enough for it to become a reality.  Many of our clients stopped dreaming a long time ago.

So my questions are:

  • Should enterprise services be designed to provide short cuts to economic survival, or, to help support the long term development of human potential?
  • Which of these will create greater value in the long term?
  • What are you trained, and your services designed, to achieve – REALLY?

Time for a policy, strategy and service redesign anyone?

People really are our greatest assets and we are often not investing in them well.

Twitter for Enterprise?

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Why should small business engage with twitter?

Well this post and video pretty quickly summed it up for me.

http://tinyurl.com/b4enb5

Early days for me using twitter – but so far it looks promising!

I am going to twittering some tips and twitter about community based enterprise and how to develop it!

Any of you twittering?  What works and what doesn’t?

If you want to you can follow my twitters at:

http://twitter.com/mikechitty

Business Advice NVQs

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I have just been reviewing the business support NVQs – which I contributed significantly to back in the late 90s I guess.  I was thrilled to see that the standards still refer to:

The principles and practice of different modes of consulting (for example, acceptant, catalytic, confrontational and prescriptive).

I am still teaching these four styles of client centred consulting – and my guess is that very few advisers, coaches or other enterprise professionals (other than those I have taught) actually know what they are!

Perhaps I am wrong….

If you wnat to learn more about these four ways of working with cleints – either get in touch or come along to An Introduction to Enterprise Coaching – held in London on March 6th or in Leeds on March 18th.

I have been using these four styles as a core part of my practice for over 20 years – and I continue to be amazed at their power to transform.

Getting the right enterprise clients

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I recently received an e-mail from a friend and customer of mine who is managing a size-able enteprise project:

“Mike

I am using the training that me and the team have had from you to inform a business plan.

We are identifying an issue with people coming to us wanting funding for safety passports, fork lift truck licences etc. We are letting them apply straight away, but then they go away and we don’t hear from them again. 

To ensure we have more impact and build the relationship I’m going to look at solutions like using a minimum number of outreach sessions before unlocking other opportunities e.g. funding.  Where we have a relationship with the client we find out more about them, including often that they don’t really want what they are asking for in the first instance and rather something else, or that there are bigger issues holding them back. Also this process can weed out those people who can really afford to pay for training themselves – if we pay for them we are changing nothing about them or the world.

I don’t want to go down the Jobcentre route of the client having to be out of work and desperate for at least 6 months or 3 months to access any support but I think if word gets round you have funding then you get overrun with people, not all of whom have many barriers, which is what we’re finding.

I think this sends me back to thinking about who and how we really want to help and work with and to what end.  I think a lot of it is in the contracting that you describe in the Enterprise Coaching cycle.  Having the opportunity to build rapport with the client and really set out what you are both bringing to that relationship.

Yours…”

This outlines a number of challenges that are faced by enterprise support projects – which few have the courage to tackle head on – because it might make “the numbers” look worse.

As soon as you start to offer funding or direct opportunities to people, you start to attract a lot of the wrong kind of client.  Well, perhaps the right kind of client – but with the wrong motivation – and with a fundamental  misunderstanding of the power and potential of  your offer to them.  People motivated by a desire for handouts or quick fixes, rather than those that really want to work towards long term and sustainable progress.

You really want to ONLY attract people who come to you because you can help them by being kind, compassionate, caring, supportive and challenging.  ie the ONLY thing you offer is life changing transformational coaching. 

All the other transactional stuff (skills, money, training, premises etc) is available elsewhere in the system. Our job is to build the desire/commitment/hunger to help people to use it. 

I don’t think the answer is to delay helping people to access what they think they want.  Although we should know that most of our clients will initially present us with what I call ‘A BIG LIE’.  Very few clients will present us with their truths until we have earned their trust and repsect. 

They nearly all tell us a big, fat, safe lie to begin with. 

The answer is to help them to get some of that stuff (otherwise they will see us as useless and hard to work with) and challenge them as to what they REALLY want to do with it – and will it give them what they are looking for? 

This is all about being able to be acceptant and confrontational – which I also cover in the enterprise coaching training.

Building an Enterprise Culture – Laying the Foundations

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  1. Projects designed to develop an enterprise culture should be owned and managed by the community itself.  A community that is coerced towards enterprise by outsiders is likely to resist.
  2. Change agents, coaches, advisers and others working in the community should be recruited, managed and introduced to the community – by the community.  They should not be missionaries parachuted in to win converts.
  3. Change is best effected through a series of 121 meetings, characterised by honesty and openness, where a professional, compassionate and caring coach works to ensure that the client takes control of their own enterprise agenda.  To ensure maximum take up and productivity of the service it should be free of charge for as long as it takes for the client to complete their journey and believe that that they no longer need the service.
  4. Community based enterprise coaches should not replicate existing services.  Instead they should signpost and brokers clients to existing services and help them to use them effectively.  Where necessary the coach may need to advise existing service providers on how best to effectively serve their clients.
  5. The community based enterprise coach or business adviser helps the client to develop their commitment, passion and skill to their own enterprise agenda – using the tools and techniques of personal development.   Their focus is primarily on the development of the person and secondarily on the development of their enterprise ideas.
  6. Community based business coaches and enterprise advisers need to be at the heart of a network, of social capital, that can provide advice, guidance and support as required by the coach and their clients.
  7. Community based business coaches and enterprise advisers work in response to the wants and desires of local people – not to the delivery of strategies, plans and opportunities developed by economic planners.  They do not motivate or initiate but work in response to the passion, interests and skills of local people.
  8. The enterprise project must take a broad definition of enterprise – helping local people to use enterprise skills to tackle problems and opportunities that face them.  Entrepreneurship may be on the agenda – but it should not be THE agenda.