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The Time To Manage

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Still the biggest barrier I find to helping clients to implement best practice approaches to people management is that ‘we do not have the time’.

‘But Mike I have 4 people in my team – are you really saying that I need to find 2 hours a week to invest in their 121s?  Don’t you understand how busy I am?’

It is a bit like a motorist saying ‘I haven’t got time to check the oil and the water and to fill up the petrol tank – because my car keeps breaking down’.

Except that the latter is statement is clearly ridiculous – while the former often passes for management wisdom!

When we choose not to invest time in managing staff what are we really saying?

‘I can create more value by spending my time elsewhere’ – this may be true but managers are paid to create a return on investment by managing people;

‘If I invest time in my people I may not get a good enough return on that investment’– this may be true but then you are not a competent manager;

‘if I spend time on managing people I will be operating outside the cultural norms of my organisation’ – this may be true but then I question the long term future of your organisation.  Unless we can harness the intelligence, passion, creativity, drive and energy of all our employees then we are, AT BEST, likely to achieve mediocrity.

Often what managers are really saying is that they actually quite like the adrenaline, energy and status that they get as a mole whacker, a problem solver, a crisis crusader.

Economic Gardening or Economic Hunting?

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Economic Gardening and Economic Hunting are two very different approaches to developing an enterprise culture.

An economic gardening approach sets out to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by investing in local people and their talents, cultures, passions and skills.  It is an endogenous “arising from within” approach to community and economic development.  The starting point for economic gardening says that ‘in this community we have all that we need to build a vibrant and sustainable future’.  It may need careful nurturing to help it thrive but the seeds of our future success are already sown.

The key tools of economic gardening include:

  • building open and accessible networks for potential and current entrepreneurs that foster the exchange of ides and collaboration
  • signposting to existing and continually improving support  services that help local people on their enterprise journey
  • locally available, convivial and very low (preferably no) cost coaching support to help local people to nurture their dreams and aspirations and to believe in their ability to develop them
  • access to commercial finance for local people with investment ready business ideas
  • support services that recognise that everyone has the potential to become more enterprising and don’t just work with those that are already entrepreneurial.

This contrasts with economic hunting which sets to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by attracting investment and employment into a community from outside.  The starting point here is one that says ‘our community is deficient.  We lack the entrepreneurs to create employment so we have to attract them from elsewhere.  Then perhaps some of the entrepreneurial pixie dust will rub of onto local people.  And if it doesn’t, well at least we will have attracted entrepreneurs who will provide them with jobs.’  This is an exogeneous approach to community and economic development.

The key tools of economic hunting include:

  • the creation of facilities and resources to attract companies or ‘creative class’ members to set up their homes and businesses in our community (NB usually these resources are beyond the means of many local people to access).  If you are in a facility that serves a ‘much better cup of coffee at a higher price’ than anywhere else in the neighbourhood, or if many local people are priced out of your facility, then there is a strong chance that it is the product of economic hunting rather than gardening.
  • the development of inward investment teams and budgets to enable local authorities and regional development agencies to negotiate ‘sweetened’ deals for employers to locate in their communities
  • support services that focus almost exclusively on the ‘already entrepreneurial’ as those who have the potential to create wealth and employment for the rest of us.

Historically most of the investment has gone into economic hunting strategies.

There has been a rise in interest (if not yet investment) in economic gardening.  I see no fundamental reason why the two can’t co-exist in the same community, but they are not always comfortable bed fellows.  Economic hunting usually means changing things to make them convivial to outsiders (better coffee, better carpets and sexy furniture).  Economic gardening means making things really convivial to local people, affordable, local and accessible.

Often community based enterprise development programmes struggle to help local people to access the business support infrastructure that was designed as an economic hunting tool.  It is not designed to be convivial to local people, but to that special breed of entrepreneur from out of town who will pay £3.40 for a posh coffee and £20 an hour to hire a meeting room.  More often than not such facilities fail to win in either of these two market places.

So which tribe do you belong to?  The hunters or the gardeners?