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Never Teach a Pig to Sing

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Teaching a Pig to Sing...

Never teach a pig to sing.  It frustrates you and annoys the pig.

Mark Twain

Yet this is often what we try to do.

It is not enough that we find a wonderful artisan with a great product.

No, we also expect them to be great marketers and financial managers too.  We may as well ask them to walk on water while we are at it.

We try to teach the pig to sing.

Instead we should be helping the pig to be the very best pig it can be.

To become the very essence of pigginess.

And we should show the importance of finding someone who is able to market and sell their products and services and to make sure that their financial management and planning is robust.

The most common objections to a team based approach to enterprise?

‘I can’t afford to hire anyone’,

and

‘I must learn to do all of this if I am to be a real business person’.

One of the best things that the coach can do is to effectively confront the pig with its limitations.

Tell it to give up the vocal coaching and find someone else to sing for their supper.  And it need not cost much at all – certainly to get started.  It is nearly always possible to find someone who will work with you for nothing, or for commission, or for equity if they really see what a beautiful pig you are….

Where is Your Enterprise Service At….?

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I love 2×2 matrices.  But there are worse crimes I suppose. Of course they oversimplify things, deny shades of grey, limit ‘nuancing’ and so on.

But they work for me.

They help to clarify where we are, where we need to be and can generate ideas about how we get there.  Take this 2×2 for example which maps the credibility/utility of the service we offer versus its visibility/accessibility.

Visibility versus Credibility

High/High – ‘The Real Deal’ or ‘The Hen’s Teeth’

This is the goal.  Credible services that work and are visible and accessible to the people they are intended to serve.  Likely to have  a low marketing overhead as word of mouth and the power of attraction will keep the clients coming.  Well evidenced, high value for money services mean that funders cannot afford to withdraw from it.

High Accessibility/Visibility but Low Credibility – ‘All Mouth and No Trousers’ or ‘The Emperor…has no clothes’

This is the norm.  Sadly.  PR companies on large retainers to buy square inches in the local press.  Social media strategies, web sites, leaflets, posters and inspirational strap lines and branding guidelines abound.  Every one knows it’s there – but most of us know it doesn’t do ‘what it says on the tin’…The service relies on heavy self promotion to find a continual source of new referrals.  Word of mouth strategies including introductions and referrals don’t work.  They often have to rely on ‘inducements’ such as soft loans, grants and free lunches to get people to ‘sort of’ engage.  They can have plenty of clients on the books but few of them do anything very interesting.  Failure rates are high.  Many new entrepreneurs soon fall out of love with their ‘dream’ businesses and loan default rates are high.  Often have lots of front line staff on the ground all looking for ‘good’ clients.  Added value is low.  Management strategies involve efforts to ‘bluster our way through’ until the funding stream ends.

High Credibility/Utility but Low Visibility – ‘The Hidden Gem’

So we have a great product and service that does the job – but people don’t know we are here.  Don’t worry about it – this situation won’t last for long – perhaps 6 months?   If you have a product/service that reliably and consistently does what it says it will do – transforms lives, starts dream businesses and contributes to economic and community development the word will get out.  In fact you will soon be winning prizes and if you are smart making serious money.  Perhaps give a little thought to promoting a word of mouth strategy – learn how to ask for referrals, and introductions and you will soon have them beating a path to your door.  Make sure you can evidence your effectiveness and trademark/copyright your service.  It is worth a bomb.  This is a great place to be….

Low Credibility and Low Visibility – ‘No Style – No Substance’

Actually not as bad as it sounds.  Perhaps most new enterprise services should recognise that this is the starting point and where we might spend most of the first year or two of a new project.  Learning about what works in a particular community, about which partners are the ‘real deal’ and which are ‘all mouth but no trousers’.  Sniffing out the hidden gems to work with.  By deliberately keeping a low profile, but working on the long term impact of our products and services with a modest volume of clients we can gradually build a great service.  Once we have moved into the ‘hidden gem’ category we can then make the transition to become the ‘real deal’.

Working with Stakeholders

Of course when we use this in our own services we tend to have a bias towards the ‘real deal’ and ‘hidden gem’ quadrants.  But if we ask our clients, our funders, our experienced advisers, or an informed outsider to place us in the matrix then the results can be enlightening and provide powerful clues about the way forward – if we are smart enough and honest enough to listen.

  • Is this matrix useful?
  • Are you in the quadrant that you want to be in?
  • Do you have a clear strategy for getting to be the real deal?


Working on the Press Gang..?

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The work of the enterprise coach is, for me, about providing a relationship that people can use to explore how they might transform their lives and whether or not this is a journey they want to undertake.   It is a relationship characterised by trust, confidentiality, skill and often the long-term. It is not directive; the coach has no ulterior goal that they are steering the person towards.   The only goal of the coach is to help their client to become the kind of person that they really want to be.

The relationship provides a chance for them to really transform their life. Of course this doesn’t always happen – but there is a chance. The transformation may come about through starting a business. Or through getting better housing, becoming a better parent, tackling an addiction or pursuing an ambition. The job of the enterprise coach is to enable people to take more control of their futures. To find their power in shaping their own lives. It is a truly valuable, challenging and privileged role.

It seems to me that much of the Enterprise Coaching world sees things a little differently. For them the enterprise coach is part of a smiling press-gang, working ‘in the community’, promoting the benefits of enterprise (narrowly defined around self employment, employment, business start-up or expansion) and encouraging people to grow their ‘dream business’. Clients are usually recruited to workshops after a limited amount of 121 work, given a crash course in business literacy and referred to the mainstream – where they take their chances. It is a directive process where the only positive outcome is a referral into the business support industry. It is about skimming talent and potential rather than a longer term engagement to change attitudes, habits, beliefs and decisions.  The whole process is lubricated with the judicious use of free lunches, celebrity speakers, community transport and the potential of getting some cash.   This is traditional pre-start up business support.  We have been doing it for a long time in various communities.  It feels safe, and it does produce start ups.  But I have yet to see it transform communities.

Sometimes  it even damages the very communities that it is intended to help.  I would suggest three mechanisms by which this unfortunate and unintended consequence sometimes occurs.

  • Firstly the service helps to skim off the most able and talented in the community: those that already have the confidence and self belief to start a business and helps them up and sometimes out of the community.  Those that succeed do so, not because of the support of their community, but often in spite of it.  Enterprise is seen primarily as a process for personal progress rather than community building.
  • Secondly we engage large numbers of people on the enterprise journey that we are unable to work with in sufficient depth or for sufficient time before they are referred into a mainstream that is not resourced to work with them.  Failure, disappointment and frustration are commonplace.  Word spreads and the reputation of the service provider drops.  Numbers engaging with the project fall away and the community becomes even more suspicious of the enterprise agenda.
  • Thirdly is the mechanism of reactance.  The more we persuade people to look at enterprise as something that is potentially good for them the more likely they are to resist our persuasion.   Flood a community with pro-enterprise messages and perversely you may decrease enthusiasm for it.

But back to the two visions of Enterprise Coaching that I opened with.  At the moment we are losing the chance of realising the first because of the funding that is being pumped into the second.  I meet and often work with great coaches who are trying to deliver the first vision for enterprise coaching, while being performance managed by a system that is demanding the second.  The consequences are inevitable.  As I have written before, enterprise coaching is being broken.

The question is – what are we going to do about it?  Join our LinkedIn group to find out…

Complexity from Simplicity

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This video provides a useful and at times very beautiful introduction to the topics of complexity and emergence – which offer us a very different way to think about our organisations and how we manage them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdQgoNitl1g]

and this one takes the journey a little further:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5NRNG1r_jI]

If you want to see how you can use these ideas to improve your leadership and management then do get in touch.

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’.