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Enterprise as a Process of Becoming – the Emergence of Identity

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Enterprise is not about business and entrepreneurship.

It is not about premises, finances, business plans and swots.

It is a process for human development.

It is a way of exploring:

  • who I am,
  • what my potentials are/might be, and
  • the kind of future that I could create.

It is way of living – of becoming.

Enterprise can be a catalyst, a framework, for the emergence of identity.

We need to develop enterprise programmes that pay serious attention to these issues of identity development and the process of ‘becoming’.  Enterprise as the emergence of identity.  There are links here to other ways in which some people find their identity – gangs, drink, knifes, drugs, crime etc and enterprise as a ‘diversionary’ activity.  A ‘substitution’ product if you like.

The education system doesn’t take identity seriously –  so there is a really interesting vacuum that the enterprise industry could step into if it could learn to re-position itself and become experts in developing human potential rather than the mechanics of the business plan.

Conscripts, mercenaries, and volunteers

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Willing volunteers outperform conscripts and mercenaries every time. They are more innovative and creative as well more diligent and disciplined.

Volunteers have bought into a mission and a purpose rather then been bought into it.

Much of the private sector is struggling with how to turn salaried staff from conscripts and mercenaries into volunteers. Finding ways to engage them in the work of the organisation. To provide them with fulfilling and rewarding work.

Much of the public and third sector seems to be taking almost exactly the opposite path. It finds ways to turn passionate and caring volunteers (people who have bought into the mission) into conscripts and mercenaries. This is achieved by:

  • making them servants of the system rather than servants of their customers
  • imposing performance management systems that often fail to recognise quality service delivery
  • entering into inflexible and output related contracts for service delivery that shrink opportunities for innovation and improvement
  • managing them as if they are units of production rather than as caring and compassionate people full of insights into how to improve performance.

It is a strange paradox that many private sector clients are making genuine efforts at developing employee engagement in pursuit of profits while so many third sector and public sector organisations are developing processes and systems that alienate employees and volunteers in pursuit of efficiency.

What the Policy Exchange Got Wrong

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Last weeks Policy Exchange report that wrote off cities in the North failed to take account of what really makes the difference to the success of any community – social capital.

The success of any community depends more on the intelligence, passion and co-operation of its people than on the abundance of its natural resources or its geographical position.

It depends more on its civic structures, the rules, norms, co-operation and reciprocity that enable individuals to support each other socially and economically, than the fertility of its soil.

It depends more on the freedom and ability of local people to invent and create than on the beauty of its countryside.

It is applied communal and individual intelligence, not natural resources, that separate successful communities from failing ones.

Only those communities that develop social conditions favourable to enterprise can prosper no matter what other natural resources that community has.

We also forget this lesson in much of our enterprise development work – the fact that enterprise is a social activity, a team sport and not an individual one.

Building a High Performing Team – Part 2 – Anticipate Conflicts

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Organisation divides people. It sets up conflict:

  • Who does what? – task conflicts
  • How do we get this done? – process conflicts
  • Who gets what? – resource conflicts

Failure to anticipate, recognise and resolve these conflicts leads to the most dangerous conflicts of all – personal conflicts.

Two people in conflict can usually both make a plausible case for their position. You can of course handle these conflicts just by issuing a decree. However the value of a high performing team, and the measure of your ability to manage it is in getting a decision that has allowed everyone to have their say, for pros and cons to be fully explored and for commitment to making the decision work to be built.

Handled like this, conflicts become powerful team building tools as people start to recognise that the group can make better decisions than any one individual and that no one person has all the information required to make the best decision.

Boosting Productivity in Tough Economic Times

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When times get tough productivity should become an overriding priority. You have to get the most out of every resource, and find ways to deliver more value at lower cost. In my experience a relatively modest investment in management skills can produce productivity increases of 25-40% as managers really help team members contribute fully and systematically develop their potential

Knowing that you need to place greater emphasis on productivity is not the same as knowing exactly which productivity practices are most effective. The five factors that have the biggest impact on productivity according to a recent survey by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (I4CP) are:

  • corporate culture,
  • leadership,
  • compensation and benefit programs,
  • training and development, and
  • performance management.

These represent the collective and, perhaps, conventional wisdom on how best to boost productivity.

I4CP then analysed their data to discover the primary differences between average and highly productive companies. The analysis found that the most productive organisations really outstripped the average ones in several areas, including:

  • The culture of the organization
  • Leadership
  • Employee engagement practices

Seventy-nine percent of the most productive organizations say that, to a high or very high degree, the cultures of their organizations help raise employee productivity. Training managers to build a performance culture would seem to be a sensible option.

Seventy-six percent of highly productive companies said that, to a high or very high extent, leadership in their companies raises productivity. Programs that teach managers how to boost productivity among their direct reports would also seem to be an excellent tactic.

59% of highly productive organizations said they use systematic processes to engage employees. Engagement means that workers are mentally and emotionally invested in their work and in contributing to their employer’s success. Such employees are usually satisfied with their work and speak positively about their employers. Which is why cracking the whip and exhorting employees to work harder or longer is unlikely to be a good productivity strategy over the long term.

Another difference between highly productive and average organizations is in how they tend to measure productivity. The I4CP survey asked about the various ways in which they gauge productivity and found that the most widely utilized metric was:

  • output per work group, followed by
  • revenue per employee,
  • output per person,
  • output per hour and
  • profits per employee.

Highly productive organizations were not only more likely to use most productivity measures of all types, they tended to place nearly the same emphasis on output per person as they did on output per work group. Now the I4CP only surveyed for profit organisations – but my take would be that the use of similar hard performance measures in a well designed performance management system would have the same impact in the social sector.

These findings suggest two possibilities:

  1. that applying such metrics leads to higher productivity levels because what gets measured gets done, and
  2. that organizations should look at both individual and group productivity metrics if they want to have success in this area.

The I4CP study shows that organizations are placing greater emphasis on productivity in today’s challenging times.

It also suggests that organisations that want to boost productivity should consider doing more to measure and track productivity as well as focus on specific organisational factors, including culture, leadership, employee engagement and, health and wellness initiatives.

You can read the original article on the I4CP website here.