Craig Humphrey, CEO of CW Growth Hub, looks ahead to Autumn in his latest blog and outlines the importance of working with businesses to gain their trust before offering advice.
“I always like the beginning of September. The summer sees lots of people away taking a well-earned rest but then it feels like everyone returns this month to focus on delivering for the final stretch of the year feeling reinvigorated.
“Following Covid, we need to begin to settle back into a more stable pattern for our economy and it is important that we do so because we are in a competitive global race.
“We need to maintain inward investment – an area in which Coventry and Warwickshire is particularly strong – and focus on productivity if we’re going to remain competitive.
“The UK is often labelled as having a lack of productivity, particularly when it comes to our leadership and management capabilities and while support has been available to help with this in the past, it hasn’t always been deployed in the right way for the market place.
“I have often said that in order for you to work with a business and then be constructively critical of their management and leadership capabilities, you need to build trust.
“Those kinds of relationships need to develop over a long period of time which is one of the strengths of our account managers at the Growth Hub. You can’t go into a business on day one and assume their management and leadership capability is not very good and begin to recommend changes without getting to know them first.
“It is your role as an adviser to businesses to talk to them and get to know them over a period of 12 months, two years or even longer. It builds trust and then, with an understanding of what they need as a company, you can recommend initiatives that they will benefit from. You are much more likely to get take-up if you adopt that approach.
“We have not done enough of that in this country. We have not invested in support over a long period of time which is when you build trust and empathy and then you get the results.
“I have never believed in time-restricting interventions in being the way forward for business support.
“Sometimes we can have a conversation with a business and within an hour we have resolved what their barrier to growth is but on other occasions that might take a lot longer and it is that flexibility that I have always emphasised here at the Growth Hub.
“Our account managers know they are not restricted by an allocated length of time to spend with businesses and that is one of the reasons why we have built up such great rapport with firms of all sizes in Coventry and Warwickshire and provided the help that they need.
“That is why taking the time to build trust is so important in supporting businesses to grow.”
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