Assignee - Case Studies
News of a Pulse assignment at Dream a Dream
by Ed Williams
Introduction by Sandra Marshall
Ed Williams, formerly part of the senior management team at Mark & Spencer and now business consultant and coach, recently spent two weeks in India with AAB partner Dream a Dream.
Set up by young social entrepreneur Vishal Talraja, Dream a Dream (previously featured in our Summer 2008 newsletter) provide life skills to over 700 children from vulnerable backgrounds in Bangalore. Running a range of programmes encompassing sports, art, computing, civil society, self-esteem and confidence workshops they provide opportunities for children to meet, interact, develop life skills, build confidence and ultimately get a better chance at life. Their vision is to scale up the services they offer, develop more programmes, take their work to more cities and ultimately reach more children. Ed’s visit, which uses AAB’s Pulse assignment approach, was intended to help them look at how they might do this.
As you may recall from the last newsletter, Pulse assignments have been developed as a way for senior executives who might otherwise find it challenging to be away from work for a four week stretch to undertake an assignment. They comprise two, 2-week visits to a partner organisation supplemented by ongoing remote support via email and phone calls during the period between the visits.
With his first visit complete and the second one taking place in March, Dream a Dream are thus far delighted with Ed’s contribution. They told us “There are no words really to express the impact Ed has had on Dream a Dream. He has been phenomenal and left a deep, positive impact on each one of us. His down-to-earth attitude, his flexibility and adaptability and his sensitivity to our work and struggles has made the entire experience very memorable”.
From Ed
It had been eight years since I had last visited India so arriving at Bangalore airport in the early hours of Sunday 16th November last year was a reminder of the sights and sounds that bombard the senses in this wonderfully complex country that is full of contrasts and contradictions.
My last visit to India was a holiday in Rajasthan. But this time I was about to embark upon an Adopt a Business “pulse” assignment with Dream a Dream – a small but high impact charity that works with street kids to develop their life skills and through that, their life chances.
As I now run my own consultancy in London (having previously had a number of senior management roles at Marks & Spencer) I would not have been able to sustain 4 weeks away from the UK.
Since May 2008, I have been a member of the Adopt a Business advisory board so when Matthew suggested that I might like to undertake my own assignment, I jumped at the chance. As well as an opportunity for me to try out the new assignment model it was a chance to test myself and my skills in an unfamiliar environment whilst delivering a challenging set of objectives for Dream a Dream.
As you would expect from Adopt a Business, a rigorous set of benefits for all parties are set out as a result of completing a Pulse assignment. The partner organisations gain access to the skills, experiences and personal networks of senior people within large organisations, thus better enabling them to build capacity, scale-up and meet the challenges they are facing. The client companies are able to offer innovative, impactful and highly engaging bespoke development opportunities to their senior leaders.
And for participants like myself, the benefits include:
• testing self-sufficiency, resilience and creativity away from the corporate environment
• honing interpersonal skills such as listening and coaching;
• developing perspective, authenticity and integrity with respect to issues affecting global society;
• building experience of dealing with alternative value sets and inter-cultural differences, and
• making a distinctive personal contribution to the developing world
For my part, whilst all the above applied, one of the most valuable lessons I learned is to value the skills I already have. And the assignment is, so far, proving to be a powerful affirmation of my skills and abilities at a time in my career when it is not often that I am given feedback. (I say “so far” because I am half-way through the assignment period. I have completed my first 2 weeks at Dream a Dream and will be returning at the beginning of March for my final 2 weeks – so watch this space).
One of the other skills that I developed whilst in Bangalore was the ability to deal with ambiguity – such an important skill in today’s fast-changing world when nothing is certain and boundaries constantly change.
In my case, I arrived at an unfamiliar environment, expecting to deliver a particular set of objectives, only to discover pretty quickly that the objectives originally discussed with me prior to leaving the UK were not relevant to Dream a Dream’s immediate needs. I had to call upon all my skills of influence and persuasion to suggest that delivering on more pressing issues would actually add greater value to the organisation in the long-term. So instead of immediately homing in on their growth strategy, as was the original intention, my time was spent working on the need of the hour which included work with the leadership team on their values, reviewing the organisational structure, delivering 1-to-1 coaching to senior management and developing clarity on impact assessment.
Re-configuring my terms of reference and delivering on a broad set of objectives within a very short time period also tested my resolve to get the job done and my ability to “sell” my recommendations to the director and his leadership team. I am naturally delighted (and somewhat relieved) that these have been embraced and are being implemented.
On a final note, I joined the ranks of the world’s bloggers with my very first blog, detailing my assignment to Dream a Dream, enabling friends and colleagues to keep up to date with what I was doing. Should you be interested, it is still available for viewing (including photos and video) at www.edinindia.blogspot.com
Ed Williams
January 2009
www.edwilliams.biz