With different sectors increasingly interacting and doing 'business' with one-another, Robert Ashton says it's important we all learn to speak the same language.
I went along to a breakfast networking meeting the other day. It was not one of the usual rather formulaic events, focusing on passing leads and fine-tuning your elevator pitch. This is a rather more informal group, meeting monthly at our local Waitrose for crisp bacon rolls and nice coffee. There were 25 people there, mostly business owners, plus of course the inevitable jobbing consultants and people on a mission to save you money on your utility bills!
The speaker was from the local County Council. She was there to brief the audience on the fact that young people will soon be expected to remain in some form of education until the age of 17. Quite rightly she pointed out that this was not about youngsters staying at school an extra year. But more about making sure that those who leave to get a job, continue to learn.
Having just established Swarm Apprenticeships, a social business connecting enterprising young people at aspiring small business owners, the subject was very relevant to where I am working right now. I learned that now as well as NEET, we have NET; young people who are employed but not in education or training.
The content of the presentation was excellent, relevant and timely. The problem was that the speaker and audience were speaking different languages. It was not their fault, more a reflection of the different cultures of the public and private sector. Of course there is nothing new in that. We all know that sometimes the simplest of messages from the public sector come across as incredibly convoluted, complex and confusing.
A question from the audience highlighted this cultural difference. "I was persuaded to take a young person," a business owner said, "only to find that they could not read or write." It seemed he had been encouraged over a period of time to take a particular youngster who clearly has additional needs. A compassionate and gentle man, he had probably been identified as exactly the kind of employer this youngster needed. The trouble was nobody seemed to have told him that those were the terms under which the deal was being struck!
The speaker’s response was predictable; "Surely your recruitment policy would have led you to go through the process of assessment before you took the youngster on?" she said. And there was the problem. The public sector has a policy on everything. Most private sector small businesses only have policies that they use to append to public sector tenders. Everything else is done on the fly, off-the-cuff and on the back of the proverbial fag packet. We were all left with the view that people in the public sector simply do not understand the world in which we small business owners live.
As a social entrepreneur, now managing director of Swarm Apprenticeships Ltd, one of my roles is to bridge that culture gap. Translating between public and private sector, because actually both have the same vision for the future; a workplace populated by enterprising, enthusiastic young people.
As social businesses increasingly involve, often with both public and private sector roots, I suspect the problem of language will become more of an issue. Somehow we have to learn to speak the same language. And my money is on the language of small business being the most appropriate for all. It is explicit, focused on the obvious needs to be profitable, sustainable and different from competitors.
Should we open a language school so that the public sector can learn to speak like us? Now there’s an enterprise opportunity!
