As we have said in previous posts, our mission is to build the productivity of young South Africans.
Our focus is on creating environments that motivate young people to keep improving and growing in knowledge and ability, step-by-step, increment-by-increment, inch-by-inch.
William Butler Yeats said it famously:
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
When we look at the landscape of interventions in trying to deal with youth unemployment, we see a great deal of effort in pail filling, but nowhere near enough in lighting fires.
The biggest struggle we see our makers having to overcome is not acquiring knowledge but having the confidence to try. Through encouragement, motivation and coaching, we push our makers to recognise that they can learn and improve. We use our value of "Win Together" to get members of our environments to realise their strengths and value. Simon Sinek’s video below outlines how important it is for environments to foster confidence, in order to enable development and learning.
Our program is focused on developing business operators. In order for a candidate to be successful at this, they need to have a base level of competency in a variety of different skill sets. We focus on understanding and driving profitability, managing the operations of the business, performance managing teams and mentoring the next set of leaders and coaches.
We don’t assess their capability using tests. Tests typically focus on a single knowledge competency. It is very difficult to use testing ( I would argue it is impossible) to assess competencies across a variety of skill sets, that each feed into the other. In our environment, one can’t run a profitable business, if one isn't managing operations and performance managing these team. These competencies need to aid each other, together, simultaneously.
As in any workplace, it would be unreasonable for a first-time junior employee to be expected to run the whole business, know all the systems and be able to lead all the people involved in making it successful.
From their first day of training, makers are expected to take on responsibilities in all areas of the business. They start with low levels of responsibility and low levels of complexity. But over the course of the programme, their area of responsibility increases and size and complexity. Pretty quickly, these responsibilities can only be completed by a team, not an individual. The individual has to get the team to support them if they are to be successful. This happens by design. Our view is that this approach is the best way to accelerate the development of small business owners.
Below is a note that Jessica wrote to the team about her struggles with Math and shows how important it is for learning environments to engage directly in confidence-building before dealing with content.
Thank You Very Much. This Will help me too much. Since I'm having A fear of numbers, hating them with a passion. I was afraid to do Stock count at work when I'm on my shift and to prepare other things where the is Calculations. Like Lemonade and BGR Sauce
I had a conversation with Wam and Tefetso about this. I became honest with them. The Way I hate calculations since they make my life a living hell.Not only at work even at school that I failed many times Calculation until I changed Modules. They told me I should kill that fear and believe in myself. Have Confidence that I got this. I challenge that now. I do stock count without any fear and with love.
These kinds of lessons can't be taught in a classroom via theory. They are learnt through experience and peer support and pressure. In other words, culture.
If we are serious about growing the capabilities of our front line workforce, we have to come up with innovative ways of building an environment that can address issues of confidence and self-belief. And to do that at scale, we shouldn't be looking at institutions, but to work environments. They are the best place to locate this kind of skills development because they are the ones that have teams that can create and drive a culture of learning, confidence and trust.
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