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Jumping on the Enterprise Coaching Bandwagon

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Interesting to see how much effort is starting to go into selling qualifications and training to the enterprise coaching market.

SFEDI Enterprise are launching their Endorsed Award in Enterprise Coaching and ILM are pitching their coaching qualifications (other suppliers are available).

I am  not sure that now is the right time to be pursuing qualifications.  Of course it makes sense for the employers to have qualified staff, and it makes sense for coaches to have qualifications, but does it really serve the customer?  Will it support the reflective practice and development which our nascent profession demands?

Do we not risk converging too quickly on tried and tested methodologies?  On embedding lowest common denominator practices?  Do we not put the focus too early on ‘proving our competence’ rather than reflecting on and developing our practice?

Let’s avoid the bittersweet seduction of qualifications and instead pursue the development and recognition of methodologies that work in our communities, with our customers in our contexts.  Let’s avoid the one size fits all mentality and lets encourage innovation and creativity in pursuit of our full potential.

Reflections on the Enterprise Coaching Conference

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The Enterprise Coaching conference held in Derby yesterday got me reflecting again on what I have learned from 20 years experience in working with enterprise coaches and people looking to make progress in their lives.  It also prompted me to re-read Ernesto Sirolli’s PhD thesis – available on the web here (PDF).

He suggests that 4 key principles should underpin the work of the enterprise coach (Sirolli calls them Enterprise Facilitators™ – a term on which he claims a trademark).  These principles are:

  1. Only work with individuals or communities that invite you.
  2. Never motivate individuals to do anything they do not wish to do.
  3. Trust that they are naturally drawn towards self-improvement.
  4. Have faith in community and the higher social needs that bond it together.

Each of these principles stems from an approach to providing help that is genuinely person centred and responsive rather than interventions designed to achieve the policy objectives of the state.

Sirolli argues compellingly that any violation of these 4 principles may lead to a self satisfying and self serving illusion of help but will in practice inhibit the long term development of an enterprise culture in the community.

Each of these 4 principles is worth significant reflection and its implications for our practice as coaches, and perhaps more importantly service designers and managers should be careful considered.

Here are a few questions to prompt the process:

  • What would you and your service need to be like so that the people that you wish to support w0uld actively and willingly seek out your support? What would you have achieved?  What would your reputation be like?  Would you use offers of money or marketing campaigns to win attention in the community?  If you only worked where people really invited you, would you have any work?  What would you have to do in order to start ‘winning invitations’?
  • If we do not motivate people then how can we help them to change?  Do they need our encouragement and motivation to pursue objectives that are in their own self interest?  What are the risks of motivating and initiating?
  • What would happen if we just trusted people to move in a direction that leads to self improvement?  If we rely on the development of a natural human instinct rather than imposing an external perspective of what constitutes progress will ANY of our clients move forward?  What might happen to our performance metrics if we really worked at the natural pace of the client?  What might happen in the long term to our effectiveness and impact – if we survive the short term problems?  What is the role of the enterprise coach in working with clients whose natural  inclination to self improvement has been somehow stalled?
  • Is it sufficient to just have ‘faith’ in the ‘higher social needs’ that bind community together or does our work require a more practical approach to developing the role of the community in supporting individuals who are looking to make progress?

Our work needs to be grounded on principles if it is to be effective.  It is not just about the techniques of coaching versus advising, mentoring or counselling.  It is not just about managerial pragmatism in pursuit of the narrowly economic objectives of most funders and policy makers.

It is about our role in engaging with individuals and communities on the agendas that matter most to them.

It is about how best we can help people to engage in the rich infrastructure of services and support that is already out there if they wish to use it.

It is about how we can influence the design and delivery of these services (including mainstream business support) to ensure that they are both cost effective and relevant.

But most importantly it is about how can provide consistent and long term relationships that people can trust enough to help them as they confront the risks and challenges that come with stepping outside of the comfort zone and continuing the journey of self improvement.

Encouraging people to start on these journeys with promises of help and support, and then withdrawing that help and support when funders and policy makers shift their priorities not only destroys trust in us but also leaves our clients high and dry.  If current funders are not willing or able to honour the long term commitments that serious endeavours to change the enterprise culture in communities requires then we perhaps need to find some new investors.

As George Derbyshire said – perhaps it is time to ‘Sack the Boss’.

Anger Does Pay – Big Time

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They usually write a lot of sense over at management issues, which is why I was a little surprised to read an article called Anger Doesn’t Pay.

In my book it is perhaps the most important driver for change and innovation. Anger serves a  surprising purpose .  It gives us a clue, a sign that there is something here that we can have the energy and creativity to make better.  Anger pays much more than indifference which at time seems ubiquitous.

What does not pay of course is losing your temper.  Shouting and displaying your anger in ways that alienate people rather than recruit them to your cause.

So value your anger, cultivate it, harness it and make progress.  Just don’t let it ignite your temper!

I help accidental managers become outstanding managers – if I can help you give me a call – 0113 815 3765 (UK)

Craft, Motivation and Wasted Talent

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Richard Sennett’s ‘The Craftsman‘ is well worth the considerable effort it has taken me to read it.  Although very well written many of the ideas it tackles are not easy!

He makes the point that we have used tests of intelligence and education to smear citizens along a bell-shaped curve of distribution that is in fact very flat and very wide.  As a result we have come to believe that ‘ability’ is not anywhere near uniformly spread through society.  And this belief has been used to justify the increased public investment in the education of the most able and the relative paucity of opportunity offered to those who, in the tests, appear to be ‘less able than average’.

Sennett then argues that this is a social construction with little basis in facts, outside of educational IQ tests such as the Stanford Binet.  These tests rely on questions to which there is an answer – either right or wrong.  They cannot deal with questions where the answer is a matter of opinion or insight.  Where the answer is contestable.  This especially, argues Sennett, serves to discriminate against those whose talents might lie in developing real craft skills.  Sennet is at great pains to point out that these are not just about traditional crafts but anything where learning happens over a long period of application through experience, reflection and adjustment.   This includes many roles that are incredibly relevant in modern society.  People who are capable of this craft type learning may do poorly on the Stanford Binet and its equivalents (SATS) and from that point on they are socialised as ‘low ability’.  Or those that thrive on the assessment regime they are socialised as ‘Gifted and Talented’.  It is hard to know which is more damaging!

This socialisation has little to do with true potential or inherent capability and more to do with what we choose as a society to recognise, label and invest in.

Sennett’s argument (again assuming that yours truly has understood it) is that capability is MUCH more evenly distributed – we just might need to search for it with a much more open and creative mind.  Many more of us are capable of doing ‘good work’.  This insight would have enormous implications for how we organise education.  Sennett says;

“Motivation is a more important issue than talent in consummating craftsmanship”

Socialisation serves to disconnect many of us from our talents as they are neither recognised not valued.  The capabilities remain, but our motivation is eroded.  Re-establishing motivation then becomes more important than extant talent.  Indeed the key motivation required to renew the search for potential and to enter into a period of ‘craft type’ learning action, reflection and adjustment, often over a period of years until the capability becomes a craft.

Another leading academic Nobel prize wining Amartya Sen also talks about capability, its recognition and development as a central tool in poverty reduction.  He also recognises the structural processes that serve to justify the enormous gaps between the haves and the have nots on a global scale.

Perhaps one of the vital roles of the enterprise coach is to help people to challenge the way that society has shaped them and to renew the search for ‘capability’ – the potential of those who use our services that has often been suppressed by societies warped, distorted and narrow perceptions of ability.

This is the Craft of the Enterprise Coach.  And it may have nothing to do with starting a business.

Master Class for Creative Entrepreneurs

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Last night I found myself in the very wonderful boardroom at Broadcasting Place in Leeds running a masterclass for students on the MA in Creative Enterprise at Leeds Met.

In essence I told them not to worry about being too focussed (See Norman Perrin’s excellent post on Obliquity).  I introduced them to the ‘baited hook’ strategy, where you cast out lots of juicy baits and see which ones get a bite.  This seems perfect for ‘creatives’ who on the evidence of last night seem incapable of not innovating.  They always have new ideas, skills and visions to bring to market.  My advice….don’t fight it just find a way to get product to market quickly, and if the bites don’t come, then fail cheaply and quickly.  We explored this against a backdrop of ’10 000 hours theory’ that suggests you never have a really tasty bait until you have served your time and really mastered a craft!  You pay your money and you take your chance….

I also did some stuff with them on the importance of building balanced management teams with people who can look after great product, great marketing and sales and wonderful financial management.  A quick dissection of a few businesses in the room showed them to be packed full of creatives – but certainly short, if not completely absent, of real passion for marketing, sales and financial management.  This, to say the least, is a problem.  I hope they recognised that perhaps as well as hanging out with other creatives (who provide validation and yet more ideas) they might need to hang out with a few ‘suits’ in order to get the diversity of passion and skill that their businesses need.  The course tutor said that she could see a look of relief pass across faces when I said that they should not be expected to be great at everything themselves.  That it was OK to build teams, to ask for help.  That someone else should be doing the bits in the business that they hate.  We explored how proper mentoring and coaching could help fill this gaps and that skills could be begged, borrowed and bartered.  The inadequacies of some mentoring programmes designed to help where described by entrepreneurs who had been on the receiving end.  So much mentoring is more about CSR and professional development for the mentor than it is about really helping the entrepreneur.  We also spent much of the evening talking about the merits of ‘kissing frogs’ and seeing which ones turned into to Princes/Princesses!  Don’t just accept the mentor you have been sent.  Go and search for the right one yourself!

The 90 minute masterclass (for me at least) flew by – ending with a riff on the importance of managing your own learning, along with a few insights into how to do this, and keeping yourself on track with your own personal vision for the kind of person you need to be. Staying true to yourself.   Following your muse.

At the end, as has happened several times before when I have done this kind of gig, participants told  me that ‘I really understood the way that artists think and work’.  This reaction initially puzzled me.  I have a degree in Physics and a schooling in enterprise and entrepreneurship.  I did once read Gombrich’s History of Art and I do know what I like….but how could I have developed any real insight into the psyche of the artist?

The truth is of course that artists are people too.  The same ideals of psychology, personal growth, honesty in work, and staying true to a personal vision and values apply whether you are an artists, physicist, engineer or nurse.  The real secret of my work here is connecting with people about their personal visions – and not getting sucked into the nitty gritty of the business.

I’d love to do more of this kind of short masterclass – so if there are any opportunities out there do get in touch!