194 | Effective Collaboration Skills for Social Entrepreneurs with Paul Zelizer
Image of Paul Zelizer, the founder of Awarepreneurs.
It's time for our monthly solo episode on the pod with Awarepreneurs podcast host Paul Zelizer. Paul is the founder and CEO of Awarepreneurs, host of this podcast and a top social entrepreneur coach. In this episode, Paul discusses and gives examples of 5 Effective Collaboration Skills for Social Entrepreneurs. They are:
Pick your key collaborators wisely.
Develop your vision & core values.
Launch test products or services.
Expand the scale and scope of your collaboration.
Create simple and robust systems.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Effective Collaboration Skills for Social Entrepreneurs Solo Episode with Paul Zelizer
00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practices. Each episode, I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection, someone who has market tested experience, and is already transforming many lives. Before I introduce today's guest, except I am today's guest, it's another solo episode where on Awarepreneurs we're doing these once a month now. And before we introduce the topic, and I tell you a little bit about myself, for those of you who don't know, please, if you could go over to iTunes or whatever app you're listening to the show on and do a rating and review, it helps tremendously.
00:46
Today, I'm really interested and excited to talk to you about effective collaboration skills for social entrepreneurs. For those of you who don't know me, I am the founder of Awarepreneurs and the host of this podcast, and I'm also a top social entrepreneur business coach at Paul Zelizer.com. Before we get into the content, let's just get the commercial done upfront.
So sometimes you just want to talk to somebody who really knows your space, you want to do it without a big huge commitment, you just want to be able to say, hey, I need to make some choices. And I'm trying to decide Should I go right? Or should I go left? Or do I want to be in another river all together? And it’d be really helpful to talk to somebody who's been in a space for a long time and has seen a lot of examples of what works and what doesn't. In my business at PaulZelizer.com, I offer a Strategy Session Package, which is a whole package that's designed to help you with one to three questions you're facing right now. Maybe it's a marketing question, maybe it's a branding question. Maybe you're trying to decide whether to collaborate like the topic of today's episode, whatever it is that you're facing, we do a process of you downloading your background information in a totally confidential way. And then we spend 90 minutes where we really get in, it's almost like a mini workshop to the exact decisions you're facing and taking a look at the context of what's working, what's not working now, not 10 years ago, or 20 years ago in the social entrepreneur space. So if you're interested, I'll put a link in the show notes below and go check out those strategy sessions. I'd love to work with you. So last week, on episode number 193, we posted an interview with Dr. Mitzi Montoya, who is the Dean of the Anderson School of Management at University of New Mexico here in Albuquerque. There's a fabulous episode, and it was a lot of interest. And it was such an honor to interview Mitzi. In that episode, we talked about an event that we're doing here, and it's a collaborative event. And I happen to be one of the collaborators here, one of the key collaborators. It's called the believe in New Mexico symposium, social entrepreneurship and impact investing in New Mexico.
03:06
That got a lot of conversation going both the episode and also those in the community who you know, have been hearing me talk a little bit about it and dropping hints. It's been in the works for more than a year. And the collaborators include everybody from University of New Mexico, the Business School, which is known as the Anderson School of Management, which is the largest business school in New Mexico, and community organizations like cable women united, a group that works with Indigenous women from the pablos. Here in New Mexico, Yelp, Albuquerque community groups co working space has the CFA Society of New Mexico, the Chartered Financial Accounting, we really brought in an incredible group of folks who are collaborating and sharing and helping this topic or these topics, social entrepreneur, ship and impact investing, get out to a wider audience. And people have been asking, how do you do that? And Paul, I've tried some collaboration, you know, initiatives in the past, and they didn't go so well, and they didn't have the intended impact. So I wanted to share a couple thoughts about what I've learned. And I've been in business for 14 years now. And let me just be the first to say I've tried some collaborations that didn't go well. They really didn't go well. Now, we haven't done this event at the time of this recording. It's on March 26. I'm recording this on March 15 2021. But what I can say is we've seen dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of signups. And that's not a thing in New Mexico. You know, that weeks before an event that people would sign up and that there'd be this kind of broad spectrum from business to community groups, nonprofits and for profit education, government entities. I forgot to talk about some of them the Planning Commission in Albuquerque
05:00
You know, really brought together a wide spectrum of people. And people are already saying it's moved the needle. And the event hasn't even happened yet in terms of seeing these topics of social entrepreneurship and impact investing, getting the courage to say the attention and seeing people collaborate across the various sectors and across organizations. So, wanted to share with you a couple thoughts about what are some of the skills that can help us happen? The first one I want to suggest is to pick your key collaborators wisely. In this the very first collaboration discussion this happened with was with my friend and colleague and a person that in the spirit of john lewis here in Albuquerque, we work to make good trouble. That's john lewis's, you know, he has a quote about make good trouble, right. So Genevieve Chavez Mitchell is a friend and somebody I've known for about seven years now maybe a little longer from Albuquerque, and is an impact investor. So you have a social entrepreneur, Paul Zelizer, and a social entrepreneur, coach and a social entrepreneur podcast earning social entrepreneur, community founder in the aware printers community, and an impact investor, Genevieve and her husband, Dave told the story on we did an episode, I will put a link in the show notes. They invest their retirement funds in community focused ways, lots with social entrepreneur, and other initiatives that make new mexico a better place. So we've been talking for quite a few years, and especially when I moved to Albuquerque about two years ago, we've gotten closer, and that includes a personal friendship and playing guitar and you know, having dinner at agentive, even Paul's house to walk, but also intentionally leaning in and sharing on a work basis. So a little more than a year ago, for instance, in January of 2020, I got invited up to Boulder for an event. That was Greg Berry, I will put the episode with Greg where we talk about that event.
07:22
Greg works for an organization called conscious capital wealth management. And their founder, Lawrence Ford, who's been working at the United Nations level, bringing together impact investors, people who want to make the world a better place through their investing, and social entrepreneurs, particularly those that the United Nations case, the folks who are doing on the ground work that's really moving the needle in terms of the SDGs, the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. So we went up to Boulder, I got invited, I turned to Genevieve and said, Hey, I think you might be interested in the two of us went up and went to Boulder and have fabulous 48 hours, where we get to hear what they were doing and meet Lawrence and talk to the team there. And it was a fabulous experience and really opened some possibilities. And on the car ride back down from Boulder. It's about I don't know, six and a half, seven hours down to Albuquerque.
08:22
Genevieve and I were talking and we said let's get something going and see if we can bring at least the flavor of this back to New Mexico in some way that makes sense for who we are and the issues that New Mexico is facing. So Genevieve is somebody I know, I trust her. She's very grounded, she has been doing her own personal growth work and spiritual work for many, many, many decades. And also has thought a lot about impact investing, she knows, you know, so both on the human emotional intelligence and personal growth, and just this relational skill set of what it's like to do an initiative together. And also her content area of impact investing and she's been researching and is literally writing a book on this that's incredibly knowledgeable. So both on the personal and professional perspective. Genevieve is somebody I trust and thought wisely about after some painful experiences in the past of not having collaborations go well, this first suggestion pick your key collaborators wisely. So Genevieve is an example for me if somebody who I trust and just wanted to share a little thought process, we then grew it a little bit where we started talking to people about wanting to do something and I'll talk to you in a little bit, you know,
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one of the other points one of the other skills about you know, doing tests wisely and and coming up with small tests where you can pilot things. So we started having conversations and our various network put us in touch with a number
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Other people, and eventually we wound up with a six or seven member group called financing change. All incredibly knowledgeable people, long term professionals, lots of emotional intelligence. So went from one to six or seven, didn't go huge. But each person was selected with that, you know, how skilled are they in the communication and emotional intelligence realm? And how much do they know about the content area and the kind of network they have in that content area. So that's what I will say about picking your collaborators wisely. The second one is develop your vision and your core values. So Genevieve, and I had quite a bit of conversation starting in the car ride home, while while we were in Boulder and on the ride home, and we said, we want to do something to you know, see about how we can enhance this conversation about in our case, bringing together impact investors and social entrepreneurs, and learn from what was happening, the momentum that they're getting at the United Nations. So we talked a little bit about our vision and the two of us, and what were some of the core values for this initiative. For instance, we're both really busy, and we didn't want to turn it into a full time job, we wanted it to be thoughtful, and respectful, and not turn into this, you know, overwhelming initiative that took tremendous amount of hours, both of us have had experiences of collaborations where that had happened before. So we talked about in the kind of impact we want to have. And the balance of listening to the community and bringing in some ideas like this core idea that impact investors and social entrepreneurs in New Mexico, he felt like there's some siloing happening. And those two groups don't know each other as well as we think would be ideal for the communities benefits. So that's an example of what I mean, like the vision was bringing people together to share and what could this look like, and we know what they're doing at the United Nations is of a scale and there's a scope of investment available, that the UN can leverage that we might not be able to leverage in a rural state like New Mexico. So you know, we had a, we had some conversation about scale and scope, but the core idea really fit for us. And then you know, how do we make it something that New Mexico could use and make our own and not just try to do at the United Nations day, because they have so many more resources than what we do. So this is the kind of conversations we had, in the second skill set, develop your vision, and your core values.
12:47
The third skill set is to launch early test products, or services. And if your case may be so we came back and this was all in we got home in February, and we were on it, we started talking to our networks. Now obviously, we had extensive networks, Genevieve has been an impact investor for a long time, her brother was until recently the head of the largest angel investor network called New Mexico angels. And you know, so she has an hour I got this podcast and VR printers community,
13:26
in the social entrepreneurs space, you know, have network both locally and globally. So you know, we started, we certainly leverage those, but we didn't like build out this giant thing. We said, Let's get together about 50 people, this is something they had done in the United Nations, they didn't try to, you know, put together a conference with 5000 people to hand selected about 50 people to come together for a conversation that had some structure to it. But there was a lot of room for dialogue, and a lot of room for, you know, input and kind of, you know, self organize within certain parameters. And we liked the model. So from the beginning of February, we had a plan on April 19 to do an event with about that, you know, a couple dozen people, we found a nice menu, and we started putting the word out people were incredibly interested. Now, of course, COVID-19 came and disrupted that that April 19 2020 event, which was supposed to be in person did not happen. Thank you COVID-19. But what I'm sharing that to say, you know, for about 10 weeks from driving back, or early February of 2020, to April 19. Or maybe it's only nine weeks, you know, it was pretty quick. We didn't like we weren't gonna spend years and years and years we're like, let's get the right people right in quotes in the room talking to each other. Is this viable? What do y'all think? and not try to like overprescribed
15:00
But same kind of lean, but robust boundaries around what we're doing, have a vision, have some light facilitation, have a beautiful space, get together for half a day and see what happens. So sometimes with collaborations, what I see is people build and build and build that is huge expectations, they invest a lot financially, they expect, you know, giant returns. I'm a big fan of the lean startup and creating effective collaboration outcomes, in my opinion, are much more likely if we can iterate our way and learn from the different iterations along the path, as opposed to, you know, yeah, just betting the farm, putting a tremendous amount of resources into something that is as yet unproven and as new and has lots of players in it.
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Once we had our vision and our core values, once we you know, developed a way to do Lean Startup test a minimum viable product, or I like the language, minimum lovable product, then you can, you can expand your scallan scopes. Number four, though the April 19 event didn't happen, what we were able to do is we did a speaker series, and we did some small group, events in person, and outdoors distanced before COVID got quite as intense in New Mexico still okay to have small groups of 10 or last, we found a couple of different venues that allowed us to have like a table of six over here, and another table of six over there. So we and then we did some online, so we alternated in person in line. And we did a speaker series, again, it's lean, didn't take a lot of resources. And you can see, we're iterating. So we Okay, let's do this April 19, event in person. And then COVID comes, let's do a speaker series. And we got a sense of who's interested and we started to, you know, get people's emails and start a conversation. And then we can increase the scale or scope. So as we started to put this out there, some more leveraged folks like this partnership with the University of New Mexico, Anderson School of Management, that came as a direct referral from one of our financing change members, who said, Hey, you are talking about this, you and m is got a new dean, her name is Missy Montoya. I interviewed her in Episode 193, check the show notes. And y'all should talk and we started talking in a fabulous collaboration was born. We also created some systems, which I'll tell you about in the next bullet point, where we could then go get community partners who could be sponsors and media partners, and we developed panels. So we can, once we got the sense of like, okay, April 19 2020, isn't going to happen. Let's do a speaker series, we got the ball rolling, people were talking to each other events were happening, the conversation is moving. And now, as we got clear, we put a pin on the map, March 26 2021, we had about five and a half or six months to work towards this event, we continued, we did a second round of a speaker series in the fall of 2020. So we continued to build momentum, we were able to invite people in. And we put a pin in the map on the calendar on March 26 2021, which is just a couple of weeks away. And then we can increase the scale and scope.
18:47
And our final point to help us do that effectively is create simple and robust systems. Many times like collaborations, especially when we want to get more people involved, things can get a lot. There's can be a lot of demands, things can get a bit chaotic, every different group and every different person has a different agenda for why they're interested. They have a social enterprise, and they want to be a panelist or they are an educational institution. And they offer degree programs in this or they're a coach and they you know, Coach entrepreneurs in the space and there's lots of different interests. And we started pretty early on seeing some positioning and some requests for our time. Hey, can we make we talk about this? Can I do that? Can I be one of the speakers? Can I be a panelist right? All of that as we started to get the more leveraged players and as it started to get its own momentum became really important to have simple and robust systems. Let me give you an example. One of the things that we did that was been really effective is we developed a way for
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people to participate in helping to get the word out that didn't cost money. It's not a traditional sponsorship, we call it a media partnership. And the basic idea of the media partnership is
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if you'll help us get the word out, things like, put it on social media a couple of times, put it in your newsletter, ideally, you'd write a whole article on it, we'll give you some suggested copy. But at least mention it if you can
20:29
make a dedicated newsletter. And that media partnership was very effective. And people, we have several dozen of them by now. And that's part of the way people are hearing about it. And why we have signups early, right. So that media partnership is a is an easy way for people to participate. And as we're like, just last week, somebody heard about it, and I love what you're all doing, I'd like to meet and I'd like to talk about it, I might write a blog post on it. And there's a bunch of different things I can imagine, we're two weeks away from the event, you know, that it's been pretty significant the amount of time and energy that have been invested in this. I know, I personally and Genevieve personally have invested, you know, many, many dozens of hours. And we had a system in place. And I was able to say to that person, thank you so much for your interest in meeting, we're only a couple of weeks away from the event, not going to be able to meet with you before the event. We'd love to have you as a media partner, you can also be a more traditional sponsor, here's the flyers of these two programs. In other words, this is a simple but robust role that somebody who's interested in this can take part in and after the event, be happy to meet, I hope you can come, I hope you can pick one of these ways to you know, be a collaboration partner in bringing this event to fruition. And now I can't meet with you right now was basically the email that I sent. So we had as we're scaling this, just the number of requests that have come in for various meetings or exceptions, or can you do this or like I want to be a speaker, that line has happened a lot? Can I get on the stage? Even though the stage is a zoom virtual event? Well, the answer is no. Right now, our speaker slots and our panelists are full, but we'd love to have you come. And we have here's another example of a simple structure we have in place is we have like an unconference time, we're calling them table topics. So we'll have eight or 10 topics, social on, you know, getting funding for social entrepreneurship or how to help financial, you know, advise advising groups and practices be more aware of the sustainable investing, you know, world and what are the options? And what's the vocabulary? Yeah, you know, so we'll create the opportunities for people to self talk, and so and share about what they're doing and the questions and have dialogue. But we can't have every single person who wants to be a speaker at this event, get on a zoom call and spend an hour with each one who would be like I wouldn't be able to work. My paid work would suffer greatly, right? As with my mental health and well being. So creating simple and robust structures for us were things like these table topics, the media partnership sponsorships, having a clear sense of what the process is going to be Oh, another one is we created subcommittees, I'm on the marketing subcommittee, Genevieve is headed up the event committee, where she's thinking about speakers and the processes of how they get selected in a very diverse subcommittee of small groups, the marketing, same thing, small group of four people, very experienced entrepreneurs and marketers. And we pretty much have, you know, we informed the larger group that we created these lean and get things done without a whole lot of drama structures, and systems to keep things flowing as we've scaled. So the whole process, while it has been a good amount of work, has been relatively smooth and has had so far, like we said, we haven't had the event yet New Mexico is sometimes known as the land of manyana. So we don't know you know exactly how many people are sign up, because it's the kind of place that people tend to like, say, a day before the event. Oh, I'm gonna go right. So you know, but we, from people who have been doing events in New Mexico for a long, long, long time, we're way ahead of the curve of what an event like this would normally have in terms of signups and we consider that a good side, right. It has been worked, but it's been relatively steady. I've been able to plan it into my calendar. And it's just been fun because of who I'm working with and
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We have had zero drama, and not a lot of, you know, the positioning that sometimes goes for an event like this, we were able to put some things in place that made everybody's life easier. So those are five suggestions, I have skills, things you can work on to help your collaborations be more effective. As a social entrepreneur, and just as a human being, I think when we're collaborating Well, for me anyway, taking part in a collaboration that's really working well, it's on a heart level, it feels so good. And it can be so incredibly good for business. It's certainly I've historically had very few clients in New Mexico, even though I've lived here since 1993. When I started my business in 2008, I was like, a broke social worker, and I was pretty tired of the New Mexico economy in New Mexico is lagging in terms of online, so I very intentionally created an online business. And that's been my base, maybe 3%, or sometimes 5% of my clients might be new mexico based, but obviously, it's a very small proportion. This event hasn't happened yet. But already, I got a inquiry for a large
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proposal, a coaching proposal for an organization that's trying to do some things that, you know, do big things in a short timeline and needed a coach, it's already put me into a very visible role in my local community, because people are hearing about this event in the spaces that I work in, and I'm interested in. And it's opening doors for me, as a coach who works with social entrepreneurs and impact oriented businesses. So very grateful, it's been a great
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investment, of time and skills. And
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last thought is, it's not one of the skills necessarily, but I would include this before we go Be mindful, sometimes when you're, when I see people trying to collaborate, they're like, Oh, my gosh, we're gonna do this thing. And it's gonna make tons and tons and tons of money right out of the gate. It's always a red flag for me. So this
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event, on March 26, has definitely put me in the conversation with decision makers and has opened doors for me already, like I said, a proposal
27:29
got sent my way from somebody who had never, you know, put me on the radio never had me on their radar in such a way before. But when we're doing a collaboration, it puts a lot of pressure on a collaboration, especially if it's a relatively new collaboration to like, you know, expect it to bring in a ton, you know, 10s, and 10s, and 10s, or even hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of dollars with people who are just starting to get to know each other. So be mindful of that. I do think it takes time for collaborations to sink into their roots. And I do think collaboration can be a much more effective way to
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run a business and find new opportunities for revenue. But if you're doing a collaboration with the idea that it's short term, strategy for lots of money, I would encourage you to rethink that. It's a great long term, and opening up new markets for you and putting you on the radar of, you know, new referral partners, etc. But if you like, absolutely need to make
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more money in a short term kind of way, please don't look at collaboration as a way to do it, it puts a lot of pressure and it tends to lead towards all kinds of negative ripple effects. Something not to do, in addition to five things you might want to try.
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So that's what I got love to hear your thoughts on collaborations. So feel free to send an email or where printers at gmail, also want to say that we love listener supported
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topics and guests. So if you have an idea of a topic for one of these solo episodes, or you have an idea for a guest somebody really liked to hear from and you think they were printers community could really benefit from, please go to the enterpreneurs website, and go to your contact page, and you'll see our three criteria and take a look at those and if it feels like a fit, I'd love to hear your idea. For now, I just want to say thank you for listening. Please take really good care. These are intense times. And thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.