Author: simongterry

The transactional focus of recent business history has trained us to focus on clearly asking for what we want. Networks challenge us to create a mutually rewarding relationships.

“I tried to use the social network to solve my problem but it didn’t work”

I hear this comment often from people who are reluctant to use an enterprise social network, social media, community or other networked method of communication. My next step is to ask them to tell me the scenario. More often than not the individual who has a limited profile and limited following in a network has begun their relationship with a complex ask of others. Often they don’t participate often enough to reciprocate and help others with similar requests. That does’t work in personal relationships.  The only magic of networks that changes is scale.  Scale can make it harder to receive a response if you have no connections, voice or influence.

A network involves human relationships. People need to connect and share information to build a relationship with you. The reciprocity and trust that builds through this activity is the foundation of finding volunteers to solve a problem for you. The best requests for help are shared in deep relationships and with an understanding and respect for the benefits to the network of participation.

“I’d like to add you to my Linkedin network to use your networks for my issue”

A too small proportion of the Linkedin connection requests that I receive even acknowledge that the relationship might need to have value for me. If they are more than the automatic message, these requests are always crystal clear on how I can help them. I’ve even had requests from people saying that they want to connect because they do the work that I do and they want to build deeper relationships with potential clients in my city, i.e. my clients.

I’m not perfect on this one. There are times when I have been lazy and just hit the button to send the request, but that’s usually when the context of the request in a relationship is clear. However, I know that in those lazy cases I am running a risk of confusion (Apologies to all those that I confused.)

Relationships are reciprocal. We all want to know how we benefit too. The more remote in time, distance and shared interests the request the more I need an explanation. If you put the work on me to decide why we should be connected, then you are putting yourself at a disadvantage in building the relationship. If your request is potentially detrimental to me, then I can’t see why you thought I would help. If I ask for clarification of the benefit to me and I never hear from you again then it is a terrible signal. I once had someone who got angry at me for asking for the benefits of making a connection. Their position was that the point of Linkedin was all about improving their networking. Not surprisingly we didn’t connect.

“Can you introduce me to your hard to reach contact”

Introductions are an art form. That means that they are also a risky proposition in the hands of those who don’t respect that they exist in webs of relationships. In a world of transparent networks, it can be an easy thing to ask for an introduction to a high profile and hard to reach contact. However, ease does not always translate into respect for the process or the elements that create success.

The best introductions take time. I need to understand your needs properly. I have been burned by people who didn’t know what they wanted from an introduction or had an ill-considered request. I need to confirm that the other person wants to receive the introduction which includes explaining why it benefits them. Some times I will have to wait to ask this request at the right time or in the right way. This deepens our relationship and sets up an effective relationship from the start of the introduction. Most importantly, I want to receive confirmation that the introduction is proceeding and feedback on the process. There is nothing more embarrassing than to follow up with a busy relationship and be told “That person you introduced never contacted me” and then ask the requestor and be told “Oh I changed my mind and don’t need them anymore”.

“Dear [Firstname], please help grow our business”

Just because you can reach me through modern communication networks doesn’t guarantee that I will value your communication. The more it is transparently generic marketing the message is the less effective it will be. Many electronic direct marketing messages are very poorly written with little regard for the audience. I am often surprised that people will send requests to promote their business without considering the rationale in a relationship. These requests are even more disconcerting when they are a generic form message.

Also respect the nature of contact details. A connection on Linkedin is not a subscription to your email list (It achieves nothing. I will unsubscribe immediately). My mobile phone number is not an invitation to send marketing SMS messages, which are more likely to cause damage because of the interruption.  Add my phone number to a calling program and you are in deep trouble. Permission marketing works better because it is founded on two-way relationships.

“Thanks for the follow. Please connect on Linkedin & Facebook as well. Download this free white paper too.”

Ask your friends and partners how much they would value automated messages in your relationship. You don’t automate messages in real life. Don’t do it in social networks.

“I’d like to get your thoughts over coffee on how I can do this”

The coffee coaching or consulting session is much discussed and there is little to add to the extensive discussion on the topic. I am always interested to catch up with people over coffee to learn about their lives and work and to build new relationships. I will be creative in looking for ways that our relationship will benefit us both. Please don’t ask to “pick my brain”. Take the time to consider my needs, convenience and time in your request. If I have to travel to your office, you offer a small inconvenient window of time, you don’t consider global timezones or you reschedule often, you are signalling your needs are more important than mine. That’s never good for a relationship.

I don’t give free consulting advice, mostly because it will be off the cuff and I will misunderstand your circumstances without investing more than 30 minutes. I have coaching and advisory services for short or recurrent advice situations. Personal advice depends on the depth of the relationship we have. So respect and seek to build our relationship. Frame the request with references to the benefits for both of us. We both know that a detailed plan or hours of follow-up will require the investment of proper budget to pay. If you do get advice that is valuable, take the time to give feedback on how the implementation of that advice worked. If I take the time to give advice, I would like to find out that it was a success and wasn’t ignored.

Seniority in management comes with status, power and influence. Managers use that power, influence to ensure that their team gets the job done in the most efficient way. Leaders, including those without hierarchical positions of power, tackle a different job. Leaders make work more effective for their teams, their stakeholders and the organisation. They know better ways of working will produce better more purposeful outcomes.

Management is a position. Leadership is an action. That action is influencing others to create change to better the performance of the group. The purpose of leadership is not the exercise of power. The purpose of leadership is improving the potential of a group. That only comes when a leader is able to help a group to reflect on purpose, how they work and the opportunities to work more effectively to deliver their personal and group purposes.

Both Leaders and Managers endorse what they accept. They are influential role models in the culture of the organisation. What they treat as acceptable shapes the expectations of acceptable behaviours in the organisation. Those expectations are what we mean by culture. If role models are not highlighting gaps, making change and making things better, then they are endorsing the status quo with all its challenges and flaws. These signals of the need for change or endorsement of the status quo happen every day. Actions are far more powerful examples than speeches. A day without the discussion and action on the need for change to better ways of working makes the next day’s effort harder.

If you want to be a leader, start the work to make work more effective. Anyone can help.

The challenge in your organisation is not better learning, new technology, more collaboration or better use of knowledge.  The challenge that matters is more effective work. 

In our specialist tribes it can become easy for the goals of our work to shift. We define success in terms of more or better of what we do.  However, that is rarely the goal that matters to the organisation or those we work to benefit. We need to be clear on the difference between the tool and the result. 

The power of a design mindset is that it forces empathy with the user, an employee or other person doing the work. The goal of any function in an organisation should be to make their work more effective. Employee lives are tough enoug delivering to customer expectations in a complex system. Employees don’t need to hear how important your new approach is. 

Focus on making the work more effective. Connect with other disciplines to make that your organisational goal. 

Human behaviour is not mechanical. Organisations need to remember human thought shapes the response to efforts to shape behaviour. As we move into the agile small team environment of the future of work, the importance of an environment that fosters effective thinking increases.

Mechanistic Behaviour

Our mechanical model of management designed for large scale replication of activity with consistency assumes that human behaviour is another unit of the system.  Rewards and incentives, performance management, process work are all part of the toolkit of managing human behaviour to consistent outcome in this system. We have so ingrained this mechanical model of human behaviour our first reaction to disappointments in behaviour are to tweak the system with new incentives, threats, processes and policies.

However, the original intent of this approach was to rely on averages to deliver consistency of human behaviour.  Scaled up to large groups our mechanical management systems delivered consistent outcomes in the form of an average level of performance. Individual performances would vary but the average would meet the needs of the organisation. We were not eliminating variation. We were expecting variation in individual performance based on talents and mindsets. We were relying on it to deliver a consistent outcome.

The failure of this model to work on an individual is only a failure of manager’s faulty expectations. As the world of work moves closer to small agile teams working independently and collaboratively, our capacity to rely on averages becomes even more vulnerable to volatility. Increasingly, we become more dependent on capabilities, an individual’s thought and the influence of group culture on an individual’s thoughts. We can hire for or train capabilities but there are many factors that play into an individual’s thoughts.

The Power of Thought

One of the most powerful examples of the influence of thought comes from a horrifying situation of powerlessness and vulnerability. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning is an account of his experience in a concentration camp in the Holocaust. The book describes how Frankl realised that to survive the experience he needed to recognise that his response to the daily horrors was driven by both his thoughts and his experiences. He could not control the experiences but he had the power to shape his inner life. This insight described as Stimulus + Thought = Response is where mechanical efforts to manage individual human behaviour breakdown.  Individual’s retain the ability to think and their thoughts are influenced by their whole life, not just the incentives and pressures of work.

Organisational culture also plays a significant role on performance because it has the capacity to influence individual’s thoughts.  Culture is the expectation of future behaviours and interactions in the organisation.  Culture is a series of thoughts employees have about how things get done and how things should be done. Those thoughts can foster performance or they hold it back. For example, in unsafe, highly controlling or mechanical management environments, the array of extrinsic motivations can dampen an employees intrinsic motivations to do a good job, to help others or to fulfil a personal purpose. The thought that “I must follow the rules no matter what” is rarely conducive to effective collaborations or interactions.  The complexity of circumstances creates rule anxiety rather than initiative.

Organisations that want to be effective in the agile small team environment of the future of work will need to create environments and cultures that are conducive to individual performances.  Rather than seeking to control responses with an array of stimuli, they need to build cultures that foster the effective patterns of thinking that help employees to out perform in complexity.

 

Many disciplines are seeking to tackle the effectiveness of work and realising the potential of people in organisations. It is time to coordinate these efforts for the benefits of organisations and our people.

The Frustrations of Silos

This year I have been to a number of conferences across a range of different fields: employee communication, collaboration, digital workplaces, future of work, innovation, learning, intranets, knowledge management, culture, design & employee engagement. Three things were evident from all those earnest conversations:

• All these disciplines are working on a similar, if not the same, problem – how to better help people to work more effectively, to achieve strategic business goals and to realise their personal potential.
• There are insights and solutions in each field that can contribute to making better solutions for organisations.
• Everyone struggles with the conversation to win and maintain support for their field or discipline. Most of these teams don’t even have a secure home in the organisational hierarchy and are constantly bounced around between People, Communications, Technology and functional businesses.

For people who talk a lot about the need to work across silos, it is remarkable how siloed much of the conversation is within these disciplines. Connections with related disciplines are often seen as a threat rather than an opportunity. The challenges of managing large complex systems that impact the functional goal are often ignored.

The lack of senior management support may simply be an outcome of the confusion that senior managers experience when they receive requests to support similar sounding work from multiple teams in an organisation. I  have seen many versions of a CEO say something along the lines of ‘explain to me again what the community manager does? How’s that different from our collaboration manager, the knowledge manager or the learning team? Can’t someone just focus on employee effectiveness? After all we have a hiring freeze so I’m a big unsure why all these new roles need to keep appearing’

Organise Around the Problem

Changes in approach have already begun. People in the Learning function have reacted to the need to focus on on-the-job learning and already begun to describe themselves and operate as as performance consultants. At one health insurer, the knowledge management team is part of the innovation and design team to ensure effective knowledge is designed into customer and employee processes. Innovation labs are becoming the centres of collaboration and communities of practice in many organisations. Rather than targeting employee engagement as a goal, organisations are starting to see it as an outcome of a whole system of interactions. The boundaries of disciplines are blurring in the pursuit of greater effectiveness.

We need to go further in breadth of ambition and the disciplines involved. To achieve the needs of our organisations the goal cannot be we need to focus on the redesign of the employee experience for greater work effectiveness.  That redesign must include all the functions that can contribute to a better and more effective work experience. We need to move beyond delivery of programs to design of systems that deliver better learning, knowledge, collaboration, experiences and effectiveness.

Let’s put aside the jargon, the silos and the disciplines and focus instead on what employees and organisations need. Their need is people who bring a cross-disciplinary expertise to managing the complex systems in organisations that shape the effectiveness of employees in delivering to customer and organisational goals.  Driving step changes in employee effectiveness at realising business goals is the opportunity for all.

People Analytics offers real potential but it demands new rigour in data gathering and a connection by the HR function to the data in business processes.

People Analytics has its moment in the sun with most consultants and many organisations exploring the possibilities and potential of people data for organisations.  We have been led by organisations like Google that have shown the opportunity for data on human performance and relationships to be a foundation of better realising the potential of people.

Do You Really Have People Data?

One of the consequences of the historical approach to human resources is that people data is often siloed and not integrated into management processes in the organisation. The lack of integration to the every day work of the organisation means that data is not captured and checked for accuracy in the every day course of work. Data that goes through critical processes will be kept in a level of accuracy through use. Data that is viewed as separate and secondary rarely has the same attention.

In organisations, remuneration information for individuals is the most accurate. That information is managed through strict performance processes and it checked by both the employee and the organisation on a regular basis to ensure the right money is being paid for work.

As we move out from this data, the quality of our information traditionally declines. Maintaining role information is often delegated and not tied to business processes that provide checks. The business can often see people processes as a constraint on their flexibility so people operate in ways unrelated to their position or role as described in people systems. There is little or any consequence for this until a restructure or other significant change highlights the inaccuracy of people data. Personal data like employee skills, qualifications and potential is often poorly captured or rarely updated. Relationship data might exist for customer-employee relationships but it is rarely recorded anywhere else other than in dated hierarchy charts. There is a good chance your finance hierarchy is different and more accurate than the hierarchy shown in your people systems.  These types of data are no accurate because there is simply no business need to recognise this in systems in most organisations. Managers know this data and use it but don’t have an obligation to record it. We can contrast compliance learning where there usually has been historical rigour in gathering people data, again because of consistent business processes and the need for external audit by regulators.

Performance data is another source of challenge. Most people systems capture performance data as required for scorecards, but not the rich data on the actual work that individuals have done. There will be a difference and it is the first source of value of most people analytics approaches. Connecting these systems to record the richness individual performance in real time matters too.

The first challenge that organisations experience when they start to work with People analytics is that they have lots of data but none of it is accurate.  Early efforts at analysis are stuck dealing with ‘garbage in, garbage out’. There’s no surprise that many of the leaders of people analytics have been startups or other digital organisations. They have built their management processes with an integrated approach to people data and have integrity of data as a result.

A New Start

Start by gathering the rich people data that the business uses but doesn’t record in people systems. Create incentives for people to maintain their own data because it will contribute to their performance and their potential in the organisation. Connect people data into business processes that provide checks and balances to maintain accuracy and currency. Ensure that people processes are streamlining and supporting business agility not holding it back.  Capture the other forms of people data that you have been missing, especially relationship data. These foundations need to be in place before any organisation tackles the journey of leveraging people analytics.