simongterry

The New to Social Executive: Actions to Get Ready

Posted on 02/02/201406/02/2017 by simongterry in Collaboration

As a senior executive starting to use social collaboration there will be a little nervousness when you engage at first, unless you are supremely confident or incredibly extroverted. You need opportunities to practice your new mindsets and learn new skills of social collaboration before you hit the main game. Even if you are confident and extroverted, you may need practice, because you may need to learn to adjust to the expectations of others.

Here are a few actions to help the new-to-social executive to get ready for the art of social collaboration:

Start by being social: The technology is just a facilitator of conversations. Do you go out of your way to have social conversations in your organisation now? Are you mentoring and helping others across the organisation now? When did you last have a coffee meeting with no agenda? It is no good running chats on twitter or posting think pieces on Linkedin, if you don’t talk to your own employees or customers in the foyer. Start using your new social mindsets and engaging a wider audience in other ways first.
Choose a purpose: When starting out in social collaboration, focus helps build reasons for connection. Choose the one topic on which you want to start to engage purposefully with others. If you can’t think of anything else, choose one of your corporate strategy, meeting talented people or better understanding customers. Add these topics to your everyday conversations and your team. Refine your purpose as you go. Eventually this purpose will flower into a personal manifesto.
Reflect & Start to share your learnings: New-to-social executives often say “But what do I have to say?”. The things that you share are going to come from the interactions in your day and responses to the activity of others. Reflect on what you experience and read each day. Start to take some notes about what these experiences mean for you and what you learn (Tools like Evernote are handy for this). Those insights are ideas that you can share. Explain to others how these ideas came about. They might seem minor to you but to others without your experience your thought process can be incredibly valuable. Over time this will become a form of Personal Knowledge Management where you constantly refine what you read, capture insights, and also learn how you share your insights with others.
Test the influence of your insights: Most senior executives are used to their teams listening to their words. Social audiences are busy with many competing voices. You may need to test how influential your ideas are before you debut them to a wider and more discerning audience. You may need to adjust your style of communication. Social favours the short, sharp and punchy. Run some tests sharing your thoughts in a variety of different means through email, internal social posts, voluntary talks or blogging internally. Measure the response and seek feedback. Use that feedback to refine your style and your messaging.
Start Working Out Loud in your Enterprise Social Network: There is no better place to practice social collaboration than in your organisation’s Enterprise Social Network. You will be practising in front of an audience that is well aware of your fame, power and influence. They will be forgiving. Use your enterprise social network to start to practice Working Out Loud. Develop new habits that you can carry over to external social media. Make sure you get the network’s mobile applications so that you can easily access, share and respond to others as you go about your busy life. Most important of all, learn the lessen that the value of social collaboration grows with your consistency and your effort.

From that point on there are plenty of experts that tell you how to use Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other social tools for business.

Search, experiment and keep the practices that work for you

This is the second of two short posts on tips for the senior executive looking to move into using social collaboration tools inside and outside the enterprise. This post deals with actions to get you started. The previous post dealt with mindsets.

The Devastating Politics of Division

Posted on 02/02/2014 by simongterry in Uncategorized

A house divided against itself cannot stand – Abraham Lincoln

A leader in any organisation needs to build cohesion in a team and commitment to the team’s mission. This unity can be a challenge when the environment is highly competitive, the team itself is diverse and the differences between one team and another are arbitrary. Many leaders are tempted to resort to the politics of division. The consequences for sustainability of the organisation are devastating.

The Politics of Division

Human nature has triggers for fear of difference (the “Other”). However what we choose to treat as alien is cultural and subject to manipulation. Fear of an Other can be used to unify a group of people. Weak leaders choose to manipulate this fear by creating and deepening divisions between their team and others in the organisation. ‘Divide and conquer’ as a strategy is as well known as it is old.

The divisions that define the Other within one organisation can be remarkably arbitrary. People of a different silo, team, sub team, group or even individuals can be identified, denigrated and demonised as the Other. The divisions in some cases are legendary:

Sales vs Marketing,
The Business vs Technology,
Head Office vs The Field,
Management vs Employees,
The Business vs a Specialist (Such as HR, Risk or Compliance),
Suits vs Creatives,
Us vs Competitors, Suppliers and even Customers.

Other divisions are more subtle, such as “We have by far the best team” or “We own these customers”. More effort must be invested in exaggerating the most arbitrary divisions which can lead to even worse outcomes.

The Consequences of Division

Anything worth doing in human affairs requires communication, community, context and collaboration. Attempts to divide us inevitably break down all four:

Lost Communication: Once someone is identified as an Other communication begins to break down. Communication is discouraged as consorting with the enemy. Messages from the other side are subjected to greater scrutiny, distortion and distrust rises. Measures of performance begin to differ creating challenges for feedback conversations. Driven far enough, the two teams will lose the ability to communicate, often developing their own jargon and own differing world views.

Lost Community: Great community is built in people sharing a common purpose and building deep relationships. Division makes it harder to bring people together for common purpose. Relationships across the boundaries will weaken. Talent will no longer cross the boundaries weakening all teams. Goals begin to diverge from a collective purpose to individual or team goals.

Lost Context: When we demonise any Other, we are distorting reality. We no longer are prepared to see people as they are. We no longer share a common context. This unwillingness to confront reality is as devasting in business as it is in any other sphere. Once you try to sustain a path of distortion, more distortion is required to maintain the illusion as life continues to present the contrary facts.

Lost Collaboration: Without trust and effective communication, collaboration begins to break down. “Collaboration” itself becomes a negative word, a sign of weakness and is seen as the dangerous way to get work done. It is not uncommon to find teams with divisive leaders to be blocking other team’s work and be duplicating knowingly the work of others rather than collaborate. At the same time there is a reluctance to share the learnings and the benefits of their work with other teams.

In a world in which context, communication, collaboration and building community are critical to an organisations ability to change and respond to its environment, the politics of division becomes a major barrier to effectiveness.

Unite the Divisions

Bringing people together is not easy. Great leaders recognise that bring people together to collaborate, create change and solve challenges is the heart of great and sustainable performance. The more networked, complex and fast changing the environment, the more this holds. These leaders tackle the challenging road of seeking unity:

New Common Reality: Bring people together across the boundaries to confront the facts. Involve all the stakeholders, including those previously excluded as alien. Address the myths and different world views that have arisen. Seek a common understanding of the world and its impacts.

New Common Purpose: Bring forth from all the people the purpose that brought them together in one organisation. Remind people that their connection to the greater purpose must be a part of individual and team goals.

New Common Action: Trust builds when people work together. There is no better way to build connection than facing a common challenge together. Help people to work in collaboration across the boundaries.

Taking these steps will begin to rebuild the communication, community and collaboration damaged by the politics of division.

Teamed and United

We can be connected closely to our teams and still be an active part of a wider community. Teams can have great differences but work together to leverage their different strengths and views. Collaboration is not about playing nice or papering over difference. Great collaboration demands the most honest assessments, fiercest frankness and hardest calls to be made fairly and transparently. Engaging others to deliver the best outcome for the organisation and the team is the challenge for all leaders. Leading that way builds communities.

Success should never be at the expense of denigrating others or building walls. The politics of division may tempt leaders looking for a quick lift within a team but the longer term consequences are devastating for the organisation and its community.

The New-to-Social Executive: 5 Mindsets

Posted on 30/01/201406/02/2017 by simongterry in Collaboration, future of work, Leadership, Uncategorized

Your mindset matters to how you are perceived and connect in social media. Whether internal or external to your organisations, the way you think and the way you lead play a critical role in your ability to influence others. As a senior leader atop the hierarchy, you have power and influence in your organisation (Admittedly that’s rarely quite as much as you would like). When you take your leadership position into the realm of social collaboration whether internal to your organisation or externally, there are a few key shifts in mindset from traditional models of leadership.

Keep these in mind these five key phrases:

“Be the real human (& sometimes flawed) you”: Nobody is looking to get to know your communication manager’s idea of you. People don’t need you to be the perfect model executive. You can’t have a conversation with a corporate cardboard facade or get help from a PR bot. This is an opportunity to be more human and to use deeper connection and communication. It will demand that you share more of you. If there is more than one of you, one for work and others, then social collaboration will test your ability to maintain the curtain of separation. Using social media works best when you bring your whole self to the activity. You will learn new ways to demonstrate your strengths and authenticity in the process.
“Think networks”: Social media flattens out the playing ground. Your current fame, power and fortune won’t deliver worthwhile connections or influence immediately. In this environment, your voice competes with many others and those that are better connected and more trusted will have greater influence than you regardless of their status. Your voice & authority is much more easily challenged and even mocked. Influence works along networks of trust and connections. Valuable business traction comes from deepening connections to stakeholders and influencers in your own world. Start there and build your influence over time as new connections join in to the valuable interactions that you help create.
“Listen & Engage others”: Listen first. The network doesn’t need to hear you. Mostly it won’t. The network doesn’t need another opinion; it needs your response to and your engagement in the conversations already going on. If you want to deliver on your strategy, the path is through helping others to better align, understand and deliver that strategy with you. How you engage with others is more important in building influence in your network than who you are or what you have to say.
“Be helpful”: Make connections & help others find those who can help them. Set context. Guide others. Enable others. Share stuff to help others solve problems for themselves. Ask great, thoughtful & challenging questions. Work aloud and let others prove their value by helping you. Connect with people to deliver them value. People are looking to learn more and help themselves. As a senior leader you can play a critical role
“Experiment, learn & change stuff”: The value of human networking is to learn, connect with others and change things. Embrace difference & the chaos that many opinions and desire for change creates. After a while you will recognise the appeal of ‘being permanently beta’, always evolving to better value as you experiment test and learn. If you want to hear your own views, build your personal brand, increase your control or resist change, don’t start in any form of social collaboration. That attitude doesn’t show much respect for the efforts of the others in the network.

This is the first of two short posts on tips for the senior executive looking to move into using social collaboration tools inside and outside the enterprise. This post deals with mindsets. The next post will deal with how to start engaging.

Reversing work

Posted on 28/01/2014 by simongterry in Uncategorized

What if your job was outside organisations and your work was inside? It is an increasing prospect in our networked world as organisations look to become more agile and responsive. At the same time, people are looking for more satisfying and purposeful work.

I was reading in Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser about ‘reverse commuting’ where people live in cities for the amenities and commute out to go to work. Having done the same some years ago living in the Sydney CBD, it can be a great option. The lifestyle suited me and it cut down on traffic jams to always go against the traffic.

What if we reversed the logic of work?

We are used to job and work being synonymous. They need not be. Treating them as the same closes off options for other more amenable models of work

Many traditional organisations have problems with their amenities. Poor people management practices, command and control cultures, meaningless effort and bureaucratic process with a focus on preserving the status quo can create an uncomfortable environment for employees. In such an organisation, there are few amenities for people with talent, creativity and a focus on leading change. Ideally we would fix these issues, but organisations with the worst issues often lack the collective will. Many people work in large organisation for the scale of impact that they hope to have and the security of income. Both benefits are threatened by these challenges of traditional organisations.

Competitive pressures and rapidly changing markets mean organisations already need to look outwards for more and new talent. Fluctuating demands mean organisations need workforces to flex too. Attracting this talent will require organisations to offer new more flexible work options and more porous connections to the outside world.

In an increasingly networked world of talent, more people are looking to build portfolio careers inside and outside organisations but still dealing with the capabilities and challenges that matter to them and that they specialise in. These careers still offer the choice to go back and work inside organisations but this time helping with the worker’s choice of projects, challenges and change.

Like reverse commuters, amenity and convenience will drive new and different choices as people and organisations reverse work recognising that the job need not be where the work occurs. Inside or outside of organisations and formal jobs, talented people know their power in a networked world and can afford to increasingly realise their purpose and potential as they choose.

Increase the density of your organisation

Posted on 26/01/2014 by simongterry in Uncategorized

When you increase the density, you increase the likelihood of collisions. Collisions of diverse people and ideas are a fertile source of creativity and innovation. Increasing the density of the ideas flowing in networks in your organisation will deliver a creative dividend.

Vibrant cities are rich sources of innovation because they bring together people and act as nodes in global transportation and knowledge networks. Into these cities pour people and ideas that collide to create new ideas, ventures and new activity.

The best teams that I have seen have this same dense, diverse and frenetic level of interaction. They are also equally creative. The constant collision of ideas and new interactions of people drives the growth of the organisation. These are organisations where people actually want more meetings and more talk because of the creative potential and the ability to leap forward in solving shared challenges. Creative interactions help people to do more, better or faster.

Through Change Agents Worldwide, I am currently experiencing the incredible creativity of a dense network of interactions, even though I am the most remote member of this global network of Change Agents focused on helping organisations transition to the future of work. Every day, there is a firehose worth of insight, interaction & creativity. In February we will publish an e-book of contributions of the members of the network that was only conceived in the last month. The same level of creative collaboration and inspiration powers work for clients and the creative output of the whole network. The first face to face meeting of this network has not even happened yet.

Increasing Density

Teams with dense idea networks and great creativity have a few things in common that can guide anyone seeking to increase the creative density of their organisation. Here are a few steps you can take:

Strengthen common purpose: purpose pulls people together and gives them reasons to connect and engage more. Purpose underpins the creation and sharing of ideas.
Increase connections: the more connected the organisation the more chance of a creative exchange. Knit your organisation together and ensure everyone is well connected.
Increase energy: the more energy, the more ideas move; the more ideas move, the more collisions will occur. The energy of meeting a challenge together will create dense connections. Don’t go for energy for its own sake. Create purposeful intent, energy in collaboration and willingness to collide in pursuit of a goal.
Be open: if you want interactions of people and ideas then the default should be open and transparent work. Put more ideas in flight and tear down barriers to the flow of knowledge. Openness also helps everyone to contribute and the group to pick up connections that might otherwise be missed.
Be diverse: more experiences and background means more inputs more ideas in flight, more conflict and less groupthink.
Orient outwards: there will be far more ideas in your conversations if you are drawing them in from outside. Let ideas out to return redoubled. New external provocations can help fire the creativity in a team.
Value learning if you know everything, you are an endpoint. You are choosing to sit outside others’ efforts to learn and grow. You are no longer connecting and building on others’ ideas.
Embrace chaos: a dense network of people connecting over ideas and action is never going to be neat and orderly. Bring order to the outputs if you need but don’t constrain the inputs or process in flight.

You can achieve these effects face to face in your organisation or you can use a tool like an enterprise social network to help your organisation increase creative density. Whatever you do, increase the flight of knowledge in the organisation and the creative collisions will follow.

Reputation: The Horse & the Tortoise

Posted on 23/01/2014 by simongterry in Uncategorized

Reputation arrives on a tortoise and leaves on a horse. – traditional maxim

When it comes to social media, many organisations focus on the second half of this maxim. They stress about the damage that might be done by their people in social networks. That becomes an excuse for the organisation to play safe and stop both it and its employees from engaging.

Employees should be your best advocates. If not, then that’s an issue you need to fix ASAP.

Employees face a major constraint in influencing reputation. Too many organisations constrain employees by giving reputation little consideration. The bigger damage is when organisations don’t listen, don’t understand their current reputation and don’t think about social accountabilities. These organisation leave employees little positive to say in any medium.

The horse has bolted

You have a reputation. It is likely accurate to the experiences you deliver and well deserved. You will have a reputation whether you engage or not. The conversation goes on without you. The network is pretty good at sharing its information about your organisation.

Don’t worry so much about shutting the stable door. Make sure you have real substance to your reputation.

Don’t forget about the tortoise

Stop for a minute and think about the first half of the maxim:

A tortoise.

Slow. Very slow. Too slow for today’s networked world of business.

How important is reputation to the strategy of your organisation? Do you know your current reputation? When are you going to start building the reputation you need? How can you use everyone on the network around your organisation to help?

If you ignore reputation in the networks around your organisation until you need it, good luck moving the tortoise.

Bad Bosses are Survived or Escaped

Posted on 22/01/2014 by simongterry in Uncategorized

Nobody leaves a company. They leave a bad boss when there’s no other reason to stay. Great bosses who understand the value of networks, offer support, development and challenge are a critical part of your talent network. Are you addressing the core of what attracts the network of talent to your organisation?

Bad bosses are diminishers of the talent of their people. They destroy what value their people create.

I worked for a diminisher once. After a year in which my business exceeded its goals, with help from a great team, favourable circumstances and my colleagues in the business, I was told in my annual performance appraisal that “a drover’s dog could have achieved that result”. (Drover’s dog is one of the more flexible bits of Australian idiom, but the phrase’s most recent meaning which comes from politics is that a drover’s dog is a non-entity). I would have been happy to discuss the many contributions to my team’s success, but that phrase left me with nothing more to say. I thought it unkind when my boss repeated the phrase to my leadership team colleagues a week or so later in a meeting, but if you can’t take unkind words, then corporate life is not for you. However, the moment that hurt most was when it was used again to describe my and my team’s performance at the end of year dinner in a speech to the leadership team and spouses.

Who did it hurt? My boss, not me. By that point, I was used to the comment. Remember the actions of a diminisher says more about them than their team. The dinner guests were disturbed by the comment, especially the spouses who knew how hard their partners worked. While the comment was directed at me, it was a signal of what everyone could expect from such a boss.

Because the issues with bad bosses are usually their own concerns, it is rare that a bad boss will change without a major personal catharsis. Few employees have coached a bad boss to better performance. Sadly that means that employees of bad bosses need focus on survival or escape. Survival will require employees to leverage their reputations, their networks & their mentors. They need to work more transparently and deliver stellar performance. These actions can help replace missing leadership and build support to survive the assaults. Survival is hard work because a bad boss will focus their attentions on survivors as a point of resistance. Escape is by far the easier and better option. The organisation is the loser.

Do you know the diminishers in your organisation? They are easy enough to find as your networks will tell you all you need to know. If your organisation has bad bosses, change them, remove them or avoid them.

Remember it takes great talent to survive a bad boss, but most won’t. Great talent has better things to do than play defence. The networks of great talent offer too much opportunity. Even a drover’s dog knows when it is time to run away.

Purpose is exponential

Posted on 21/01/2014 by simongterry in Uncategorized

Purpose is not who you are.
Purpose is why you are.
Better, it is why you do.
Your purpose is in your work.
Purpose begins within, but moves out through work,
Out through the impacts of your work, and
Out through the others who you touch.
Each interaction builds on those before,
Multiplying the power.
Networks carry your purpose out to the world and back,
Grown, refined and reinforced –
Strong enough to carry you away.
Out in the world, through work,
Purpose is exponential.

The Pineapple Effect: Learning to See the New World

Posted on 20/01/201417/08/2016 by simongterry in Change, Learning

Discovering the New World was a difficult enterprise, as we have all been taught. But even more difficult, once the New World was discovered, was seeing it, understanding that it was new, entirely new, different from anything one had expected to find as new…

…the Old World catch the imagery of the New most forcefully when it still does not know precisely what it is dealing with, when information is scarce and incomplete, and it is difficult to separate reality from mistakes and fantasy.

from ‘How New the World Was’ by Italo Calvino found in Collection of Sand

We see the new through our old world. The new presents us challenges and mysteries of which we need to make sense. We make mistakes, learn and in the process we experience a Pineapple Effect.

The Pineapple Effect

The original meaning of the word pineapple was the cones of conifer trees. After the new fruit was found in the Americas, it was named pineapple for a perceived resemblance to what we now call pinecones. The discoverers of this new world fruit needed to made sense of it so they explained it with the tools they had at hand from their old world. Of course, the name was grossly misleading. There’s little beyond a surface resemblance between the two. Thankfully, pinecone came into usage and the terms went separate ways to avoid further confusion.

For those advocating for changes in the world of work this Pineapple Effect presents a quandary. How do we help people make sense of the new world of work?

Do you advocate for change using old models? or

Do you engage people in the creativity of the new with some mystery, mistakes and fantasy?

Build out from the Old

We see a lot of people choose the former path. The new world of social collaboration and new forms of work organisation are promoted often in very traditional terms that reflect management’s view of where benefits may lie:

reducing email
a new kind of intranet
increasing efficiency
making communications more effective
improving business processes or technology system adoption and use with a social layer

For many organisations, there is value in these approaches, if it begins the journey of adoption and further learning. New tools and new ways of working take new practice and new skills. They must be learned the hard way, often by experimentation. Importantly, they often introduce new attitudes, thinking and elements of culture to the organisation. There is an important period of sense making that occurs as people engage. As Buckminster Fuller said:

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t teach. Give them a tool, the use of which will lead to it

However, if this new thinking and new practice is not specifically enabled by the culture of the organisation, real limits will be met. Unless the potential of the new tools and practices can be realised in change, employees & their managers will see the new approaches as Old World v2.0. That alone will limit the sense people can make of the changes, the discovery and the ultimate extent of change.

Worst of all, it may mean that the organisation may come to see change as unnecessary or faddish. With heavily technical approaches to adoption of tools, there is a similarly technical expectation of quick returns. In many cases, that shortens the timeline for people to learn new ways and to demonstrate the value of the changing practices.

Explore a little mystery

The business world is usually reticent to live long with the dangers of uncertainty. Mystery, mistakes and fantasy are seen as sources of concern in most organisations.

Occasionally we see a burst of the froth and bubble of the new in the business media, such as the recent discussion of Zappos’ decision to pursue Holacracy as a decision making process internally. While few organisations are likely to adopt the same decision as Zappos, the conversations of managers around the world about other models of work are potentially creative, if they provoke new thoughts and experiments in new models.

Embrace a little chaos. Be prepared to make new sense. Accept that these new ways of working offer the potential for entirely new models of work,sharing knowledge and decision making. Accept that the new way of work can be an agent of significant cultural change. When organisations have stepped into that potential, they can discover:

people fundamentally redesign decision making processes to leverage social’s potential to engage more people regardless of their place in a function or their expertise
new forms of trust built as people have a richer sense of other’s agendas and purposes – trust is an extraordinary enabler of so much that organisations need like collaboration, performance and creativity.
innovation arise in many new and varied places as people are enabled to experiment with new and better ways of working.

Transformative change occurs when people have the liberty & support to experiment. That means allowing the opportunity to embrace discovery of new meaning and the accompanying chaos, mistakes, & fantasy. Importantly that also means the time for new meaning to grow in a community of people. Many initiatives are cut short before they mature into new meaning and innovations.

The new world of work presents us with the Pineapple Effect. We need both smart leverage of traditional approaches to encourage adoption and a willingness to experiment for new meaning.