As (social) venture capitalists, a question we ask ourselves a lot here at Acumen is how we can go about nurturing and mentoring our investees. One of the challenges we face as a socially driven venture capitalist is how to act as an incubator for our investees that are usually in their early ‘survivor’ stages. Most of our investees are in this stage – usually because they are pioneering products and services that no one has had the audacity to explore before.
A few weeks ago, Acumen Fund Pakistan held an Investee Workshop on Leadership and Talent Building in Early Stage Social Enterprises in an effort to share ideas and creative solutions on one of the most common problems our investees – and indeed most resource constrained enterprises in their survival stages – face: attracting talent. The CEOs of our investee companies attended, along with some of their HR personnel.
The workshop kicked off with self-reflective note from our CEOs. Many of the activities and group exercises in the early part of the workshop were very insightful in exemplifying the role the participants play as leaders and team players. For example, in one exercise, participants made repeated mistakes. Their desire to avoid looking foolish led them to mimic those who went before, even though the first participants had not necessarily made the right choice. Realizing that mimicry is common in social and group settings, leaders become cognizant of the rule of ‘leading by example’. Living by your philosophy is the only way to see that culture permeates throughout your organization.
In another activity – this time a timed game of strategy – many of the participants admitted afterwards that they had a hard time relinquishing control. It was apparent how the (sometimes unconscious) reluctance to empower a team undermined the team’s authority, effectiveness, and efficiency and ultimately impeded team motivation and goal achievement. Ramiz Allawala, our highly talented facilitator, also helped us recognize that there is an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ view to our companies and it is important to have a team member be able to step back and act as a ‘bird’s eye view’ when we are all too busy getting our hands dirty in order to assess the bigger picture.
Another common concern echoed by the CEOs was talent acquisition. Resource constrained social enterprises cannot compete with the compensation packages of larger for-profits, and attracting the right talent is largely a matter of finding creative ways in which to appeal to the social conscience of the talent pool while balancing their needs of professional growth. One of our CEOs added that the problem of talent acquisition is only likely to exacerbate once the economy turns around. Certainly many of us have wondered how instrumental the recession has been in helping social organizations (including Acumen) attract talent.
The ensuing discussion provided valuable insights into thinking how to creatively position the opportunities in an organization. Through shared stories, it became obvious that not only does one have to think of alternative, unorthodox channels to find the right talent, but also creative ways in which to appeal to the talent pool.
For example, Jawad Aslam (2008 Acumen Fellow and current CEO of Ansaar Management Company, a low-income housing development in Lahore) learned the necessity of networking and alternative channel hunting to find candidates that were suitably matched to his organization when he stumbled across a website called www.muppies.org for Muslim Urban Professionals living abroad. Here he had a pool of qualified individuals, who had a vested interest in giving back to their country. In order to appeal to not only their social conscience, but their self interest as well, he devised the position as a 2-year engagement with a high degree of responsibility during which they would be involved in the start-up of his company. In this way he ensured their professional interests were met, and kept it as a short term engagement to attract anyone who might be temporarily out of work due to the recession. In return, AMC will benefit from much needed expertise in its early, most crucial stage.
As the other CEOs chimed in with their experiences, we heaved a collective A-Ha! moment – one of the reasons why our investees have had trouble attracting talent is that the social entrepreneurship space in Pakistan has not found a place in the people’s consciousness yet. There is still ambiguity around it and the community here needs to understand the alternative between the NGO, traditional aid and CSR models of social development (Acumen Fund Pakistan hopes to be instrumental in perpetuating this paradigm shift).
Even as the day wound down, energies were high. We received an overwhelming positive response from the investees regarding their interaction with one another. As one of our CEO’s remarked, there is something great to be gained in hearing your concerns as a social entrepreneur echoed amongst a group of like minded people.
It is worth mentioning that the success of our workshop was largely due to the excellence of our facilitator, Ramiz Allawala of Gulfstone Training, himself an entrepreneur in his past career. Through his experience and background, he was able to relate to the discussion and offer insightful experiences and examples to draw from. A definite takeaway for us was that entrepreneurs appreciate communicating and consulting with other entrepreneurs as they have all experienced similar growing pains, and we should keep this in mind when thinking of the management assistance or mentoring we try to provide for our investees.
