One of the challenges of starting up more than one social enterprise was that for a while I found it hard to be anything other than a startup entrepreneur. I’m by no means the only person who has had this problem. I just don’t do corporate behaviour. If I’m not careful, I can get in the way of our colleagues who are trying to do what is necessary to scale up the enterprise.
A key element of success as a social entrepreneur is to grow with the business. I have found that the best way to do this is to empower others and get out of their way as much as possible.
Early in my career I received feedback that I was getting in the way of capable managers and interfering with their ability to do their jobs. I responded by backing off and paying little attention to what they were doing. This wasn’t a good response as some of them complained about a lack of support.
Over time, I developed the ability to grow with the enterprise. It took me a while, but I changed my approach to leadership. I was probably a bit interfering from time to time, but I learned to stay out of things that I didn’t need to get involved in.
But the main reason for growing with the business is that there are different skills required at each stage of growth. Early on I learned how to fundraise and do a great TV or radio interview. Later I needed to engage with government ministers and became an adept networker despite my inherent shyness. One of the great gifts of setting up and running a social enterprise is that you get to do new things, learn new skills, push yourself into previously uncomfortable situations and gain confidence.
Growing with the business is vital and comes with great benefits.
Over the years many people have asked me what it was like to live in a community such as Findhorn. There is no quick way to answer that question. But I do know that I learned a lot about leadership at Findhorn. Early on I struggled to listen at length to complaints and criticisms about my leadership. It was new to me to genuinely listen to and respond to these non-defensively, while at the same time holding my position. I struggled to do this without getting into an argument. And then one day I discovered how to do this.
We were at a large facilitated Community meeting. I was coming under attack in a way that I felt was unreasonable and outrageous. I was starting to respond defensively.
The facilitator said, “Stop right there, Patrick.” I stopped mid flow.
“What is the grain of truth in these criticisms of you?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I shot back at him.
“Every criticism, however outrageous you may feel it is, has a grain of truth in it. See if you can find it and acknowledge it.”
This took what felt like a long minute while I sat in silence thinking. The criticism was that I was dishonest and had deliberately lied to the Community about how many builders were required to join, and that this was changing the nature of the Community’s culture.
That was quite a few criticisms at once.
I replied as honestly as I could. “You are right that I didn’t know how many builders we would need. Can I explain why this has turned out differently?”
It worked. The tension in the room dropped immediately and I calmly explained why things had turned out differently than even I had expected. The majority of the people in the room were happy with that and we moved on.
As I did more of this, the criticisms died down. And I started to think more about how my behaviours and actions were contributing to some of the conflict in the Community.
This is probably the most useful leadership skill I have ever learned.
Slowly I started to win over the majority of Community members, who began to see that the Ecovillage was a welcome and necessary development and that the Community should welcome the fact that so many builders wanted to help make this a reality.
A few years later I was CEO of a charity called the Teachers Benevolent Fund. It was a 125-year old charity that was focussed on retired teachers, needed modernisation and part of that required closing down a number of somewhat dilapidated and loss making nursing and residential homes. I had to hold a number of meetings at each of these homes, first with the staff, then the residents and finally their families. The meetings with family members were the hardest and on this occasion I drew on learning from my time at the Findhorn Foundation.
The meeting with the residents’ families was harder. I was joined by the chair of the trustees and the treasurer, both longstanding members of the teachers union. We started the meeting with the families by explaining what we were doing and why. Some of the family members were fairly angry, and early on one of them started accusing me of all sorts of bad motives. Before I could say anything, the treasurer stood up and started to defend me in a combative manner. I immediately stood up again and walked in front of him, interrupting him.
I remembered the words from the Community meeting at Findhorn: ‘Look for the grain of truth, however outrageous the criticism or complaint.’
I dug deep and spoke to my accuser, a man upset that we were about to turn his mother’s life upside down. “Yes, sir, this will be disruptive for your mother. And I apologise for that.”
He relaxed instantly. He asked what we would do to minimise her disruption and I slowly and patiently went through what I had said earlier.
We spent the next hour with me responding similarly to a number of such criticisms. We discussed alternative options. In one case a woman threatened to remove a legacy from her mother’s will, which I encouraged her to do if that was what her mother wanted and offered to explain how to do this. At the end of the meeting, a few people came up to me and said that, although they didn’t agree with the decision, they respected me. I silently thanked Findhorn for my conflict-resolution training.
The two trustees had been largely silent. The treasurer winked at me at the end and softly said, “That’s not how we do it in the union.”
“I know,” I said. He giggled.
I went back to visit the Findhorn Community some years later and had tea with Eileen, the founder. I was well into the next phase of my social enterprise journey and I was able to say to her, “There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t realise that I’m using a skill that I learned here at Findhorn”.
Entrepreneurs typically spend a lot of their time communicating with other people. Early on I learned the art of communicating in a straightforward manner.
Being straightforward is about effectively communicating information that both you and the other person should find useful, important or worth conveying. It is polite rather than abrupt but does not avoid the point of the communication. Straightforward is not the same as blunt. It is certainly not rude, because that is likely to provoke unhelpful emotional responses. A polite yet straightforward communication is easy for other people to hear or read.
Difficult conversations are best had in a straightforward manner, such as tackling poor performance by discussing what success would look like or sharing bad news by being honest about the situation and how to turn it around.
When any of my enterprises has gone through inevitable difficult times, I have always been honest and straightforward with the staff. Even when the message has been uncomfortable, I’ve received feedback that people appreciated the manner of the communication.
I have worked with a large number of quite extraordinary people. Perhaps because I have set up and worked in so many different enterprises, I’ve had an opportunity to encounter many people with different qualities, knowledge and experience.
The benefit of having a lot of minds on a challenge is something that I have learned over the years. For me, the best innovations and enterprises are ones that have involved plenty of dialogue in their implementation.
For the most part I have been privileged to work with a fantastic group of people who were highly aligned with the work and the clients we served. At my first enterprise in my 20s we were all passionate about vegetarian food and its impact on the environment. Building an ecovillage drew architects, engineers, builders, plumbers and others who were inspired to create a new type of housing and a new way of living. At Connect Assist, my final enterprise, the people I worked with were quite outstanding, speaking on the phone all day to people facing challenging and sometimes traumatic circumstances in their lives.
And then there were those on the outside who were key advisers and supporters of these enterprises.
I’ve learned over the years to build a network of experts who I know and trust. These are people whose experience and wisdom lie in areas where my skills and experience end and who I know will be available to help at any time. Many of them were there to help at moments of risk.
They include:
An outstanding crisis communications expert who helped with reputation management when we were in the media for perhaps the wrong reasons.
Lawyers, quite a few of them, covering employment, commercial, property and other legal issues. I have worked with my employment lawyer for 20 years and made it through a few challenging situations as a result.
For the last 11 years, I had an IT infrastructure adviser and data security consultant as the enterprise managed confidential data.
I worked with two excellent corporate finance experts who helped me find investment and finance that I didn’t know existed. They both gave me confidence to take sensible risks when borrowing and raising funds.
I have always had a few trusted industry experts. I started at the Ecovillage with a corporate sponsorship adviser who knew the building trade. At Teacher Support Network I formalised this into an advisory group that meant all the key stakeholder organisations were ‘inside the tent’.
I have always had a great accountant, who has advised on a range of financial and commercial issues.
These people were happy for me to call their mobiles almost any time of day or night, and in some cases I worked with them for over 25 years and across multiple organisations.
Creating Social Enterprise is a book and newsletter by Patrick Nash, lifelong social entrepreneur. Please sign up for the newsletter below and I’ll send you a link to your free PDF download of 12 Great Qualities of a Social Entrepreneur
In late 1989, a company called Constructive Individuals had been commissioned to run our building schools. One of their team, Melanie, had been commissioned to manage a corporate sponsorship campaign aimed at building suppliers to get donations of building products such as plasterboard, electric cable, roof tiles and copper pipe.
When I started around the same time, I expected the campaign to be in full flow; but it wasn’t. She showed me letters that had been sent to the project asking for materials with which to put together a professional fundraising ask. Nothing had been done at our end.
When Melanie realised that nothing had been done, she took it well, and she and I got to work. Over a long day we put together a brochure pack and letters to over 40 companies that she had researched as good prospects. We got a designer, who worked up a brochure cover, which was a beautiful drawing of what the development would look like, complete with wind generator, solar panels and vegetable plots. Across the top it said ‘Building an Ecological Village’. That was the first time we had used that name, and it stuck.
I knew this was the right name for what we were doing but was aware that ‘Planetary Village’ had been used by the Community since the early 1980s. But ‘Ecological Village’ would be more clearly understood, and at that stage we were focused on raising sponsorship from traditional building supply companies. The Community would have to put up with the change of name. If we had asked, it would have involved weeks of meetings and debate, as this was generally the consensus-making approach adopted for most decisions; but there was no time for that. It was not the last time in this project that we just got on and made decisions.
The good news was that no one even questioned the name decision. And the term has stuck, with a slight change. Today it is called the Findhorn Ecovillage and is part of a global network of ecovillages GEN which the Findhorn Ecovillage played a lead role in establishing.
We sent our sponsorship requests and packs to over 50 companies, requesting gifts in kind of various building materials. We prepared a rough estimate of the quantities of a range of items we would need for the four houses at the cluster we planned to build that year. We wrote to manufacturers and suppliers of plasterboard, electric cables and sockets, doors and windows, copper pipe, screws and nails, tools, tiles, hard hats and safety equipment, scaffolding and much more. I spent a lot of time calling up the people we had written to, typically to be told I needed to speak to someone else. In pre-mobile phone days, tracking people down by phone was not as easy as it is today, so this took time.
In those days the Findhorn Community has a reputation for being alternative and from time to time came under criticism for its entirely benign, but nonetheless different, way of life. For this reason, I was a little pessimistic as to the response of the traditional building industry.
I was wrong. We had a really positive response. Over half of the companies we approached came back with a yes. Letters started arriving offering us much of what we had asked for, and in some cases more. In one case very much more.
A lorry driver arrived at the office one day from a well-known manufacturer of electric cable. I came out to direct him to our modest storage area and saw he had an enormous truckload of electrical cable of all sorts and sizes.
“How much of that is for us?” I asked.
“All of it,” he replied.
I took a deep breath. It was probably enough cable to wire 50 homes. There wasn’t enough room to store it and I had to quickly commandeer additional storage space around the Community. I spent the next two days moving it off the side of the road and into various sheds and garages. Some of it lived outside for a long time.
By the time we got to April we had taken delivery of a huge quantity of materials. This made a massive difference. We charged each housing project the materials at cost, realising a surplus to cover the rising costs of our growing building operation.
Creating Social Enterprise is a book and newsletter by Patrick Nash, lifelong social entrepreneur. Please sign up for the newsletter below and I’ll send you a link to your free PDF download of 12 Great Qualities of a Social Entrepreneur
When I started out I was not great at hiring staff. I was horribly impatient and expected our newly hired employees to work as hard and be as adaptable as me. Without anyone to coach my leadership style, I was ruthless and decisive but lacking in relationship skills and sometimes basic compassion. My mindset was typically that I could do most people’s jobs better than they could – a classic entrepreneur failure for which my only excuse was that I was young and naïve.
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings in any situation from their point of view, rather than your own. It is not the same as sympathy, where we may be moved by someone’s thoughts and feelings while nonetheless maintaining emotional distance.
This is important with work colleagues, as it builds trust. My teams looked to me for leadership and reassurance, but most of all understanding and empathy. I sought to offer that most of the time and know of no better way to build a team that people want to be part of.
The same applies across all stakeholders. The success of my most successful enterprise was down to our empathy for prospects, customers, employees, suppliers, colleagues and even departing customers. We extended that to our relationship with the environment by setting ourselves standards.
When we were meeting a prospective new customer, we didn’t pitch what we could do. Rather, we actively listened to what their challenges were, what problems they needed to solve, entering into a co-creative dialogue to find solutions. This was exactly what most of our customers were looking for.
Empathy was a core behaviour of the enterprise culture and what we looked for when recruiting. Customers, suppliers and even departing customers commented on the empathy that they felt from the business as a whole
Empathy is a leadership superpower.
Creating Social Enterprise is a book and newsletter by Patrick Nash, lifelong social entrepreneur. Please sign up for the newsletter below and I’ll send you a link to your free PDF download of 12 Great Qualities of a Social Entrepreneur
I started up Connect Assist in 2005. We located in the South Wales Valleys, at the time an area of high unemployment. But also an area with strong communities where people look out for each other. Given that the business was delivering helplines supporting people in challenging life circumstances, the location and our values were a perfect fit. Here is why it worked
In the midst of the hard work and constant demand of running a business, it was sometimes possible to forget why we were doing it. However, every new job created was a reminder. By the middle of 2011 we had created 41 jobs, which we were very excited about. This is why we had set up in the Welsh Valleys, and it was working.
And we weren’t just creating jobs. We were creating growth opportunities for the people who came to work at Connect Assist. Rusty (my leadership partner) was the driving force, seeking opportunities for professional development and promotion of our people. One of our initial staff team, Sharon, had become contact centre manager. Steve, who initially joined for the social media project, was running technology, both for the contact centre and for our rapidly growing digital service and CRM system business.
But it didn’t stop there. I have never met anyone who has such an understanding of and dedication to diversity as Rusty. She would hire advisers who lived with disabilities, life-limiting health conditions or other barriers to employment. She wanted to give everyone possible the chance to work with us, particularly those that other employers might be wary of employing.
That year we undertook a survey of our workforce. Some 45% had joined us after a period of long-term unemployment and 30% had a life-limiting health condition or disability. One of our longest-serving team members joined us after a very long period of unemployment as a result of a serious kidney condition. He was in and out of hospital for a long time, but we always kept his job open. He became one of our top performers.
Rusty was a legend in the local job centre. She hired a call adviser with Tourette’s syndrome, which surprised many, but he eventually became a team leader. At one stage we employed a woman with quadriplegia, who was not only an outstanding call adviser but was training as a counsellor, and once qualified she left us to pursue that career.
Rusty made it her business to learn about the life story of all our staff members. She discovered that a significant number of their families were financially dependent on the one salary that they were earning from us. She created a ‘friends and family’ recruitment incentive and, as soon as we could create the jobs, we had a number of families with two or three people working with us, often across more than one generation.
For us, as well as every other business, managing cashflow was absolutely vital. But the cash situation of a business is all too often a well-kept secret, known only by directors and the bank manager. We took a different approach. We were up front about our cashflow and approach to managing our finances with employees and customers, making it clear that this meant that no employee or customer would ever face a sudden financial shock (as subsequently happened with our closest competitor). Our employees really valued this as so many of them had faced multiple redundancies in former jobs, to the extent that they typically asked questions about cashflow in staff meetings. Customers valued our being open about this, evidenced by the fact that invoices were almost always paid on time.
ffWhen customers or potential customers visited the contact centre and listened in on calls, they regularly commented on the empathy of our call advisers. They were of course very well trained and supported by Rusty and Sharon, but their empathy was typically a key part of their personality before they came to work for us. Empathy was one of the core values of Connect Assist and we applied it across the entirety of the business. Despite the additional work and administration involved, we also adopted an environmental standard, displaying the ethic of least negative impact on the environment and our locality.
This approach built staff confidence. Rusty took her turn taking calls in the contact centre, which also won staff confidence. We did all business travel by train. One of the particular successes was a democratisation such that no one person in the hierarchy was so important that they couldn’t travel on a second-class train. These decisions matter.
In 2001 Save the Children reported that in Rhondda Cynon Taf, where we were located, 17% of children lived in extreme poverty. And in 2019 research conducted by the End Child Poverty Network found that Wales was the only UK nation to see a rise in child poverty over the previous year, with the worst electoral ward being in Rhondda Cynon Taf (at 47%). We had located in one of the poorest areas in the whole of Europe. One result of this was that most of our advisers had life experience of much of what they were presented with by callers to the helplines.
It took us time, but we began to talk about this. We started any presentation or proposal talking about the reasons for locating in the Welsh Valleys. We talked about the qualities of our people, their lived experiences and empathy. We gave charities and other potential customers a picture of what they would be part of by working with Connect Assist.
It was a compelling narrative, and it was a key part of our growth. I had worked my whole career in social enterprises with social and environmental values, but there had always been something missing. I never really understood what it was until then. Connect Assist was values-driven through and through, in what we did, how we did it and the difference it made to everyone involved – our staff, our charity customers, their clients and service users, and the community that we were based in.
Creating Social Enterprise is a book and newsletter by Patrick Nash, lifelong social entrepreneur. Please sign up for the newsletter below and I’ll send you a link to your free PDF download of 12 Great Qualities of a Social Entrepreneur
When I started working in the early 1980s, the ‘heroic leader’ was a dominant leadership model. Heroic leaders are charismatic, make decisions unilaterally, are courageous and challenge the status quo. Heroic leaders have a tendency to undermine employee engagement by being inspiring rather than by involving them in making decisions. And they are almost exclusively men.
The financial crisis of 2008 probably put a temporary end to the era of the heroic leader in financial services, but there is plenty of evidence that this is alive and well in certain industries today.
I’ve always rejected the heroic leader model. And I certainly don’t think it works for social enterprise. I started out by co-founding a workers’ co-operative, which is the antithesis of heroic leadership, being based on a co-ownership business model.
In all my enterprises I have had a great business partner, and the success of each enterprise has always been in direct proportion to the strength of that partnership. My most successful enterprise was due to the extraordinarily strong partnership that my colleague and I built. I have been fortunate to have great partners in the other enterprises.
Every entrepreneur is different, but I know for me that when it comes to building a successful social enterprise, two is better than one. I need a business partner to bounce ideas, to share the responsibility, to plan and dream with, to make better decisions, to challenge each other, to support each other through the tough times, to celebrate our successes and always to have each other’s back.
I reject the notion of the heroic leader. I’m a dialogic leader who needs people to discuss, co-create and work together with.
From 1989 to 1995 I worked on the early development of the Findhorn Ecovillage. In the early days we ran a series of building schools that taught groups of students building skills over a three week period while building a house largely from scratch. This is my story of the first building school in early 1990, just weeks after I started work leading on finances and operations for the emerging Ecovillage.
The building school started. There were about 20 students. The ambition was to build 90% of the first house in three weeks. A big ambition.
This ambition was inspired by a United States non-profit named Habitat for Humanity. They organise people to build a house for a member of their community, largely over a weekend, so it is both a housebuilding and community building event. Their work is very inspiring.
Those three weeks were extraordinary. They combined the best of the Findhorn Community’s approach to group work, including a short moment of ‘attunement’ at the start of the working morning and afternoon. The whole team stood in a circle by the building site holding hands and shared a moment of silence, a process of helping everyone to become ‘present’ to the tasks ahead. For some this was new and took a bit of getting used to, but within days the whole group felt the benefit of it.
This was followed by a discussion about the tasks for the morning, and then everyone got to work. As this was a building school, most of those attending had done little or no construction before. There was a lot of tuition by the Constructive Individuals team led by Simon and also by John.
Although I wasn’t part of the building school as such, I must have made the five-minute walk from our office to the building site 20 to 30 times a day to communicate or manage one of the hundreds of daily details. At this time I was the only person in the office other than John (who was largely on site) and the architect, who was absorbed with technical drawings. I was busy with deliveries to be chased, trips to a local builders’ merchants for things we had forgotten, invoices to be paid, accommodation problems from some of the students and in one case a visa issue to deal with. It was an exciting time.
Increasingly, members of the Community wanted to come and see what was going on, and in some cases to join in. This was difficult as, unlike many Community activities, a building site has significant hazards. I spent a lot of time telling the rest of the Community what was going on while trying to discourage them from joining in.
On site the first of the ‘cluster’ of eco-houses was quickly framed, in the second week the scaffolding was raised and later that week we had a roof on. Then we hit a snag. The insulation was a product made of recycled newspaper. We had purchased a special blower that was shipped from Germany. It was basically a large cylindrical drum about five feet tall with a three-foot diameter at the top which the insulation was emptied into. There was a pump and a large flexible tube with two water jets at the end. It was like a giant vacuum cleaner that blew rather than sucked.
The walls were timber framed with a barrier and then plasterboard on the inside, so the insulation was blown into the cavity of each wall and ceiling frame from the outside. The problem was that it was February and the wind was strong and gusty. A lot of the insulation went flying as it was blown out of the end of the hose, much of it ending up all over the builders themselves. What should have taken a day took nearly a week and delayed the schedule. All sorts of ideas to resolve this problem were debated, and in the end a makeshift tent was created out of timber and sheeting that was pushed up against each timber frame to protect the blower and the blowers from the wind. It helped a bit, but we lost time.
However, by the end of the three-week school the first house was weathertight, with walls, a roof, doors and windows, electric cables and plumbing pipes fitted and the walls and ceiling partly insulated. We had built the basics of a house.
The final attunement was a great moment of celebration, and on this occasion we encouraged the Community to come and join us. Over a hundred people joined the builders and our team as we stood in a circle around our first eco-house, first in silent contemplation and then to raise a loud cheer for the builders.
It was just one house, but it was pioneering. We had not just built our first eco-house, but we had created the first breathing wall eco-house of its kind in the UK, battling the authorities to get permission to build it. We had started building the Ecovillage.
This is an excerpt from Creating Social Enterprise, my new book about my social enterprise career, which includes my time in the early days of the Findhorn Ecovillage.
A social entrepreneur will be an innovator. Being innovative means doing things differently or doing things that have never been done before. There is a lot written about inspiration, enterprise and innovation. But how does innovation occur?
My experience is that the best ideas are already close by. Sometimes looking at something in an inquisitive way helps you to see the previously unseen. Sometimes successful innovations are completely original, although in my experience more often they’re not.
The best innovations I have been involved in making happen are ideas that were ‘just around the corner’. Such ideas are typically neither original nor do they stare you in the face. They are somewhere in between. They are ideas that are close by but not yet quite visible.
Often the idea is hinted at in a conversation. Or they may be an extension of what is already happening, just doing it slightly differently. They exist in a sort of mental and spiritual peripheral vision.
Three of the most successful enterprises I have grown were initially hinted at in a snippet of a conversation. All I had to do was to listen, discuss and then act.
Often the role of the innovator is less having the idea than listening for it and making it happen. It was Thomas Edison the great inventor who said, “Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.” He was right.
Creating Social Enterprise is a book and newsletter by Patrick Nash, lifelong social entrepreneur
Please sign up for the newsletter below and I’ll send you a link to your free PDF download of 12 Great Qualities of a Social Entrepreneur
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