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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.

Choosing Enterprise or Bureacracy?

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Most of us experience ourselves reacting to both people and events that are outside of our control.  It feels to us like control lies elsewhere.

A reluctance to take full responsibility for our actions develops.  We learn to shift the blame elsewhere.  We lose sight of our responsibility for the type of life that we have helped to build.  We genuinely believe that the mediocrity that surrounds us has nothing to do with us. It is all the work of someone else, somewhere else.  We let ourselves ‘off the hook’.

Of course it is true that there is nearly always someone (many people) who has power over us.  But even in the face of this reality, we still have choices.  Choices that can lead us towards enterprise and progress – entrepreneurial choices; or choices that lead us towards safety and maintenance – bureaucratic choices.

We can choose to operate from an entrepreneurial mindset or a bureaucratic one.

We can choose between:

  • Maintenance and Greatness
  • Caution and Courage
  • Dependency and Autonomy

In my experience many potential entrepreneurs do not recognise these choices.  They wrap themselves in the  cultural cloaks of the community and the peer group – usually more about maintenance than enterprise – and lose sight of the fact that THEY can make a difference.

In the short term of course the bureaucratic choice has many advantages:

  • You blend in rather than stand out.
  • You risk little.
  • You minimise the chances of failure (and success).
  • You help to build a culture of shared contentment with mediocrity.

In the context of making the most of your life however the entrepreneurial mindset wins every time:

  • It allows you to find and develop your own unique contribution.
  • You take more risks – and develop the relationships and experience that will help you to manage them effectively.
  • You increase the chances of failure – but also give yourself a chance of great success.
  • You help to build a culture of enterprise and excellence; of enterprise

So just reflect as you go through your working day what do your actions say about the choices that you have made – entrepreneurial or bureaucratic?

What are you doing to help people in the communities that you serve recognise that they have these choices?

How are you helping them to build a more enterprising culture?

(It is ironic that most of the organisations charged with developing an enterprise culture are essentially bureaucratic in nature.  But then perhaps you have to be if you are to navigate the complexities of public sector procurement!).

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half – unless he is enterprising

Mike Chitty

The Client Decides…

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As a matter of principle I believe that the client should always decide when our job is done.

We should work with them, free of charge, for as long as it takes for the client to make the progress they desire.

No limit to the number of hours.

No limit to the length of the relationship.

But this requires real skill in portfolio management and managing client independence on behalf od the coach – if their portfolio is not to become ovrloaded with clients who are not real making progress.

The relationship has to be professional, committed, developmental, progressive and challenging.  It should be neither ‘comfortable’ nor ‘easy’.  The coach has to be able to get to the real nub of the problem – quickly.  This is rarely the problem or opportunity that the client initially presents with.  They then have to act as real catalyst for progress.

As long as this is being achieved we should be prepared to support the client for as long as it takes.

We should always remain available to clients.  Our job is not done when we hand the client over to the mainstream.

Our job is done when the client decides that it is.

Learned Helplessness

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If you keep a predatory fish, such as a pike, in an aquarium it will display normal healthy predator behaviours.  Put a prey fish in and a hungry pike will attack and swallow it in the blink of an eye.

If you use a glass wall to divide the aquarium in half, with the pike on one side and a prey fish on the other, then the pike will pursue the prey fish again.  But this time it just smacks into the glass and gets a painful bang on the head for its trouble.  No matter!  It regroups, attacks again and ‘crack’ the same result – a whole load of pain and no gain.

After a while the pike learns that going for the prey fish is not such a smart move.  Chasing what you want just ends in failure and pain.  You can even remove the glass wall from the tank, surround the starving pike with prey fish and it still will not attack.  It has learned helplessness.

There is a lot of learned helplessness out there.  A lot of people who used to have dreams and aspirations, but in pursuing them have just got pain and no gain.  Painful experiences and memories from school, parents and peers who do not believe in them and perhaps a history of redundancy and unemployment.  You can dangle ‘opportunities’ in front of them and still they will not grab them.  They have learned that this will only end in pain – and no gain.  Learned helplessness.

And ‘advice’ even well meaning, technically competent and powerful advice will not help.  In fact it will hinder – it will reinforce the idea that they are somehow deficient.  That if they were OK they would not be in this situation.  It reinforces the helplessness.

So what does work?  Knowing someone who believes in you – unconditionally.  Who encourages you to pick yourself up, learn the lesson and move on.  Someone who has faith in you and wants to see you become the wonderful person that you have the potential to become.  Someone who does not preach or advise but just helps you to grow – and to keep growing.  Someone who puts your well-being at the top of the agenda – and their contracted outputs much lower down.  A facilitator, a coach, a true friend who will help tackle the real barriers to progress – not just the technical challenges to be overcome but the personal ones too.

Reflecting for Effective Practice?

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  1. What percentage of your clients come back to you for further support?
  2. What percentage do you just see once?
  3. What percentage of your clients go on to open a business?
  4. What percentage decide that enterprise is not for them?
  5. What percentage decide that they want to run their own business – but decide that they can’t make THIS business idea work.
  6. What percentage open a business – but don’t make it through the first/second/third year?
  7. How many different clients do you meet in a month/year?
  8. How many 121 sessions do you run in a month/year with clients?
  9. What is your average percentage occupancy? ie how much of your capacity is being used (by the people that you are meant to be supporting)?
  10. Are you really contributing to the development of an enterprise culture?
  11. What is your reputation with:
  • clients and their friends and families
  • funders
  • partners
  • other regeneration and community development professionals in the community?