Author: simongterry

The New Role of Managers: Increase Variation

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Leadership

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work – Peter Drucker

For 100 years, the role of managers has been to increase consistency of performance. Executing a proven business model in times of stable growth demands a focus on consistency, simplicity and efficiency. Managers have prospered through a focus on command, process and centralized decision making.  In an era of global networks, we have entered a new domain.  The role of managers in the future of work must be to increase effectiveness through leveraging the potential of their people and the learning opportunities in complex networks & systems.

Beyond Efficient Simplicity to Effectiveness

Management has a bias to the simplicity because simple actions can be executed efficiently and consistently. From before Adam Smith described the pin factory, managers have been breaking down tasks and processes in pursuit of an ever simpler and more efficienct mode of execution. Great strides in performance and productivity have been made in the use of this model. We have extended it further through global outsourcing, global supply chains and increasing automation.

However, as we have extended this model we have encounter an increasing realization that efficiency in a process is not always correlated with effectiveness of the outcome. Customer experiences are delivered by entire business systems. Societies are complex interrelationships of many systems not just simple business processes scaled up. At a global level we can increasingly see the disconnect between the simple and the needs of the system. Personal purpose and the purpose of our organizations calls us to look to the effectiveness of the system, not the efficiency of a process.

As many innovators have demonstrated embracing the complex systemic view can achieve a step change in effectiveness for both consumers and the business.  Embracing systems thinking, complexity and variation, creates new ways to disrupt business and meet consumer needs. Variation is not a cost. It is a signal of a new potential for effectiveness.

Beyond Predictability to Experimentation

The central planning model of most organizations driven by strict budget processes placed a heavy emphasis on predictability of outcomes. Managers were valued for their ability to consistently deliver outcomes, even if that merely represented a consistent ability to game the system. A focus on predictability drove a concentration of decision making in the hands of those with the most expertise and information to make decision.

Innovation is not predictable. Innovation recognizes that there is now too much information for any one person’s knowledge or expertise. Organizations need to embrace learning through experimentation. This process of learning by experimentation in complex systems can be hypothesis driven but it is not predictable. The test is no longer how one manager decides but how the entire system of an organization experiments and learns. The pace of adaptation driven by experimentation will be what drives an organizations effectiveness and competitive position.

Beyond Automatons to Autonomy

An expert manager focused on consistency seeks to replicate best practice in simple processes to be executed with minimum variation by automatons. If they can’t be robots, then they should be people with the greatest consistency of skill and the minimum discretion. Individual talents and ideas are sacrificed to scaling consistency of performance. Command and control is a path only to scaled consistency of performance, ask any traditional military structure.

In complex networks & systems, agents need autonomy to react to the variation circumstances that confront them. For all the focus on command and control, even the military recognizes that in battle the ‘plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy’. To achieve effectiveness, our organizations need to enable employees to respond to the circumstances that face them, to experiment, to learn and to adapt.  Great managers need to become coaches of this agility. they need to foster the variation of autonomy to find new paths to effectiveness in the system.  The key role of a manager is no longer direction. The role of a manager is alignment of the autonomous agents to realize the purposes of the organization and the team.

Beyond Competency to Capability

Consistent processes demand a focus on known competency levels. In an ideal case for a manager focused on consistency, this competency was so low that people could either be recruited with the skills or they were quickly acquired. Development of people in this environment by managers involves lifting an individual to the required proficiency and reskilling where processes change.

Managers in the future of work are now leaders of a continuous process of capability development of which human capability is only one part

Beyond Assessment to Empathy

Traditional managers role was to assess performance against a predetermined standard of consistency. The tails of a bell curve of performance were either rewarded or cut. The focus of management was a continuous process of objective assessment. This experience of assessment through performance assessment processes became the most alienating experience of management. Performance was a transactional experience focused on consistency without consideration of systems, relationships, diversity or effectiveness.

Great managers in the future of work understand that effectiveness is the scaling of personal effectiveness. They begin with empathy, not objective rationality. Discovering an individual’s personal purpose and objectives, developing their individual talents where ever they may lead and staying connected to an individual’s human experience and potential are key points of effective performance. At the heart of this approach is embracing the diversity and variation inherent in any group of people.  The transformation of performance through this approach is a step change compared to the plus or minus 10% model of traditional consistency performance management.

Variation is the Key to Value Creation

Risk and return are correlated. As much as management science has pretended to break this axiom, it has largely shifted risks elsewhere in the pursuit of higher return. Value creation opportunities come from exploring the variation in human society and its networks. We need managers who can embrace and foster variation in the future of work. Too many managers can be replaced with robots because of the predictable nature of the algorithm at the heart of their work.  Worse, those who suppress variation in their teams will be left behind in the disruptive economies ahead.

If you would like help to improve the effectiveness of your managers and teams, please get in contact for a conversation about how this applies in your business.

Thanks very much to Luis Suarez, Jonathan Champ and Janet Fouts for their contributions to the Twitter conversation about yesterday’s blog post on email and meetings. This post is inspired by that chat.  We learn through debate and discussion in the future of work.

Email is A Problem, But Meetings Are the Collaboration Issue.

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

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“Has everyone got a drink, lots of paper, a pen and a device? Good, Dave is still not here, but let’s start the meeting anyway.”

Future of work experts like to focus on email as a source of ills. There are many cases where emails can be avoided by more social forms of communication. Undoubtedly, there is much information in email that would be better shared other ways. Email takes up a lot of time, but there is far greater danger to productivity and effectiveness in our organisations: meetings.

The Cost of Meeting Culture

The real challenge in organisations is the meeting culture.  Efforts to become more collaborative, inclusive, decisive and to mitigate risks have results in a marathon series of pointless meetings. There is no research suggesting that our current level of meetings are a great idea. Research from Verizon and Atlasssian suggests between 25-50% of meetings are wasted. 45% of people admit to being stressed by how many meetings that they have.  We spend hours preparing documents for meetings that don’t scratch the surface of the discussion required. In a world in which all other forms of management are subjected to performance scrutiny meetings escape attention because they are where managers try to create performance scrutiny.

Reflect on your last 24 hours of meetings. How many of those meetings were:

  • required to be held at that time, started on time and finished when the work was done?
  • had exactly the right people in the room and the right pre-work had been done?
  • effectively chaired to stay on topic, engage all participants and achieve an outcome in the minimum time required?
  • had a clear purpose, sufficient information for the conversation and a defined outcome with clear next steps?
  • kept a record for later review of the information considered, the relevant discussion and any decisions or actions required?
  • were back-to-back with another meeting that allowed no time for personal reflection or preparation?

Running great meetings is an art, but these basic needs are just the tools of a great meeting. Too many meetings are called without regard for these basic needs. Nothing in that list above is meeting rocket science. These are the fundamentals of thinking through purpose, timing, audience, pre-work, agendas and outcomes.  In most organisations you need approval to spend $500 but you can waste thousands of dollars of salary costs by calling a meeting without any of the above basic preparation even considered.

Replace Meetings

We use meetings for five main purposes:

  • Gathering Information
  • Sharing Information
  • Discussing Issues
  • Making Decisions as A Group
  • Building personal rapport

The first two purposes are almost always better done using other ways outside of meetings. How many hours would you save by removing these meeting from your diary? Move the gathering and sharing of information to tools designed for this purpose. At least this step will at least halve the length of your meetings.

There are alternative, and often better, ways of managing the next two of these purposes than a meeting. Requiring everyone to have been seen in the same room or teleconference for a decision to be made or for work to count suggests work needs to be done on an organisations culture of personal accountability and trust.

Even for building rapport, extensive experience with social tools shows rapport can be built without a meeting when people have seen each others style of interaction and understand their positions, talents and contributions.

Bad meetings are the reason most executives doubt the effectiveness of collaboration. Managers who have experienced bad meetings struggle to see how collaborative work is not time-wasting, indecisive or lacking in accountability. The way to fix the collaboration problem in organisations is not more meetings. It is to replace meetings with ways of working that are far more effective at achieving value.

An awful lot of the wasteful emails are setting up, sharing documents or following up on bad meetings. Let’s fix the collaboration problem at its source. Make meetings the last resort as a way of working.

If you’d like to improve the effectiveness of the meetings, collaboration and work in your organisation, get in touch with Simon Terry.

Look Beyond Yourself

Posted on by simongterry in Life & Career

Having a bad day, week or month? Look beyond yourself. The answer might just be around you. Your networks are the start of a new level of effectiveness.

Our world is so complex and connected know that nobody has all the answers themselves. You can’t expect to get from beginning to end of any meaningful challenge all on your own. Step out of seeing your challenges as a personal battle and engage with others. Work out loud and discover what your communities and networks have to offer you in your work:

  • Need to make contact with someone who can help? Ask around in your friends and colleagues and use their networks.  The right person is only a few hops away.
  • Want to learn something new? Ask others how they went about learning their way forward. Find a mentor or coach or guide.
  • Need to Solve a problem? Ask your network for help, ideas or experts
  • Want to win support for a change? Go discuss your change with those who can help you.

No challenge is too big for your network. They won’t come to you. Go take your problems out to the world and see what help you can find. At a minimum, you will find new perspectives.

In the process of finding your solutions in the networks of your life, you will discover the passion, generosity, genius and friendship that awaits.

Tool vs Result: Reflections

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

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Remember there is a difference between the tool and the result.  Keep your eyes & efforts on the outcomes that matter.

This morning, I was prompted to ask why it is that some of the worst users of Linkedin are Linkedin marketing service providers. I had to report a user yesterday who was from a Linkedin marketing organisation, had a poorly constructed profile that looked like a fake and responded to my decline of their invitation by immediately sending a second vanilla invitation. If your goal is to show people how well you use Linkedin, sending spam is hardly the best showcase of the service. Yes spam will get you a lot of hits on Linkedin, but it won’t win you the business or the reputation you need to grow.

Last week, I was discussing with friends the number of salespeople who pitch their product in the first conversation. These are specialists at building relationships who have confused the pitch with the sale and the relationship that follows. We have seen Glengarry Glen Ross and we know our ABCs. However, real relationship building is not that hard. If you want to build a relationship with someone, build a relationship first about something valuable to them. Make a contribution eg ‘I saw you asking about this topic and I thought you’d be interested in this study/post/thread. Happy to discuss’ It takes five minutes of study here to find that topic & value in our connected social world. If you have to mention your product in the first contact then, then a relationship is not going to happen unless they happen to be searching for your product at that moment (less than 0.5% of cases). Who wants to send 200 spam messages in an hour to get one reply & a lot of aggravated connections, when ten thoughtful notes in a hour will build five connections.

A week ago there were furious debates in the Microsoft Office365 Customer Community about this article from Laurence Lock Lee on the need to ensure that adoption measures aren’t distorting the outcomes of an enterprise social network community. When the confusion cleared from that debate we all saw the need to continue to remind people that adoption measures are a tool of strategic value creation. Yes adoption measures are measurable and actionable.  They may help a community manager to know that there is an issue. However, they are not the outcome that businesses seek.

In a world that values actionable data as a tool, we must remember that data at best is a clue that something is going on. Correlation is not always causation. The simple and obvious may not always be so. Some times the biggest mysteries are also the biggest gains in value. We often need to dig deeper to understand exactly what is going on and what response is required to make our businesses perform better and to realise our purpose.

Management is a tough challenge in a competitive market. Don’t make it harder by confusing the tool and the result.

Safety

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Life & Career
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere – Martin Luther King Jr

I don’t fear for safety
From the simplicity of evil
or complex works of good.

Beyond the neat edge
of my experience,
security is a privilege.

Fears that I don’t share
are still unendurable,
life-draining, life-ending.

My enclosed experience hints
at other works and wheels,
a shared system of society.

All that produces this world,
the light and dark, actors, victims
and passive accomplices.

We are interconnected –
This condition, this system,
this change is mine too.

Read a Change Agent’s Biography

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

I recommend everyone reads a quality biography of a social, political of business change agent that they admire. A good biography will highlight both the achievements and the extent to which much admired figure fell short.

Getting to know our heroes and heroines as real people matters to make change more accessible. The vast majority of admirable change agents are not exceptional people for their talents or virtues. In some cases, on closer inspection they lack the talents and virtues one would think necessary for success in leading change.

Change Agents are exceptional for their actions. They acted differently when others did not or would not act. They led when it was dangerous. They spoke up when it was unappreciated. They connected others to change when change was thought pointless.

We don’t need to be personally exceptional to act to lead change. Many change agents were surprised that their small first actions made them into opponents of a system that they were trying to help with a small fix. The response of the system made them change agents and gave them a focus for further change.

The path to change begins with action. We see a need to change the world and we start to do something about it. Don’t worry about whether you are the right person to lead the change. The fact that you have seen it and are prepared to act is start enough. Don’t worry about whether you will succeed or whether others agree. Often change agents lay the ground work for others or a larger coalition. If you see the need for change, your actions are needed.

As If 

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Two powerful words of change are ‘as if’. In Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, she talks about the power in change movements of the ‘politics of prefiguration’, acting as if a desired change has happened. I’ve seen the power of ‘as if’ as a lever for change in many contexts. 

With ‘what if’ we can conceive a future different to today. With ‘as if’ we can start to bring that future into existence. We can act now ‘as if’ our desired future is here. 

As a young manager, I wanted some day to be CEO. To help me realize that ‘what if’, I started acting ‘as if’ I had a greater position in the organization. Acting as if challenged me to learn how to more senior executives acted. It taught me to seek out and practice skills that I would need in later roles. Importantly, people reacted to my acting as if by respecting my leadership, giving me greater responsibilities and helping me see what more I needed to learn (often pointedly). Acting as if I was CEO ultimately brought about the chance to become one. 

I advocate working out loud as a practice because we can’t think our way to a new way of acting. We are better to act as if our changes are here. The process of working out loud shows people they have the skills they need and that many of their fears are overrated. Acting as if everyone is working out loud surfaces the issues with working out loud that need to be solved. 

In Change Agents Worldwide we work as a network organization. We work as if one of the dominant future models of work is here now. It isn’t always easy and we make mistakes. However by working through the real issues of action together we are solving problems that others will need to solve later. Acting as if is far more valuable than debating the many scenarios that the future will hold. 

Many desired changes are changes of mindset.  Often all that is needed to bring these about is to act as if they have occurred. Being more confident is hard on its own. Acting as if you are more confident is way to learn, experience the change and reinforce the new mindset. You also discover that those who act with confidence are treated by others as confident people. Being a leader who can influence others is not a role. It is a mindset that meets influence in your relationships with others. Acting as if you are a leader will win you more influence or help you understand what you need to win more. 

Acting as if turns speculation into an experiment. Acting as if will surprise you with your readiness for change and the acceptance your changes will meet. Acting as if helps you learn what is required for successful change. Acting as if surfaces the problems and stakeholder conflicts that you will only find by doing the work of change. Any change is more robust when it has been through the process of being put into action now. 

What change do you want? How would you act if it had happened today?

The Fallacy of Outsourcing Leadership

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Imagine you go to a corporate town hall meeting in your organisation. Your CEO walks onto the stage and announces ‘I’d like my head of employee communications to speak to you on my behalf about the future of the organisation’. The head of employee communications then delivers the CEO’s talk standing behind a cardboard cutout of the CEO while the CEO watches from off stage. 

No matter how well the head of employee communications speaks that talk won’t have the same leadership impact. The audience can see the artifice and will discount the words. A room that has gathered to experience leadership has been disappointed. 

A ludicrous example? Yes. Would it ever happen? Let’s hope not. However I have seen CEOs stand on stage while videos play their corporate message with such polish that the lack of reality undercuts the authenticity and influence of the speech that follows. 

However in too many organisations today the senior leadership’s messages on intranets and enterprise social networks are outsourced to others. Their profiles on the intranet or social network are cardboard cutouts with perfectly eloquent prose and carefully considered responses. Few people give these perfect words the attention for which they were crafted so professionally. People know these profiles avoid conflict by suppressing, not by addressing or engaging in it. 

Leadership is about influencing others to action. Influence doesn’t come from perfect prose. Influence is an outcome of relationships built in aligned purpose, shared understanding, authenticity, capability and trust. Influence comes from relationships founded on shared experiences, finding solutions to mess and building understanding of real problems. Working through conflict is part of the process of leadership. 

Leaders often express surprise at the influence community managers and champions have in social networks. They can see these individuals winning the respect of their peers because they are prepared to stay in the conversation, share and work relationships forward. These individual engage in the daily conversations and conflicts in the organisation and it builds their influence. 

Don’t outsource your leadership conversations to others. Leaders need to engage in their own relationships with the strategic advice and support of communication and community management professionals. Embrace the mess & conflict of real relationships and expand your leadership influence.  

A PostScript On Time 

If you’ve read this far and still think ‘leaders don’t have the time for this’, then remember finding time is a question of allocating priority. What is the role of leaders if not to influence teams to better action? Greater leadership effectiveness is always worth the time. 

Indecisive

Posted on by simongterry in Leadership

A complex and cluttered environment for leaders makes old hierarchical models of leadership outdated. We need to adjust our expectation of how leaders behave to meet the needs of our new complex systems. 

History is full of strong and decisive leaders. Mostly male leaders at the top of hierarchies they answer any question simply and directly based on their expertise. They issue orders at will to make our roles as followers as simple and passive as possible. Napoleon rose to the heights of power, conquered nations, dictated laws and built new institutions. He also cost millions of lives, failed to hold on to his power and died in his second exile in the care of jailers. His journey was all before global connection made a leaders challenges far more complex. 

Clarity and directness may be comforting but we are slowly learning that three word slogans aren’t the answer. In our complex era, the appeal of simple directions fades rapidly. Reality intrudes quickly. 

Followers don’t want simplicity for its own sake. They want simplicity because it used to mean effectiveness. They want progress on the issues that matter to them. Most importantly they want to be understood and have their needs at least considered and at best addressed. 

Leaders can no longer demand a following. They must earn it by their actions. The path of engaging others can look a lot like weakness and indecision: listening, engaging, considering, experimenting with approaches and admitting limits and uncertainties. Great leaders don’t have answers and orders. They engage entire communities in taking up the work of change to make things better. Great leaders are not strong, they are interconnected, build connections and know connection is the source of their enduring influence. Leaders can no longer hide out in palaces, parliaments or headquarters.  Relationships last longer than orders and get far more done. 

In a complex world a little indecision is required to find the path to greater effectiveness. 

Despair

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity-seeing the troubles in this world- and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable – Rebecca Solnit

Despair is easy because it comes to find us. We must search out and make paths to hope. 

Turn on the television, read the media or engage in social conversations and you will encounter the warm embrace of despair. Change is hard. It is easy to present the barriers to change as dangerous, arduous and insurmountable. Faced with the need to invest effort in understanding complexity, many give up before they even see or consider the paths forward. 

The problems that are easy to be solved will be fixed with technical expertise. Despair abounds at the systemic complexity of the issues that remain. No hero or heroine can single-handedly fix these issues. Systemic challenges demand a systemic response from a large measure of the community. The hard work of hope is the work of informing, engaging, enabling and leading networks in change. 

As long as the future is not fixed there is hope. New connections, lead to shared information and new solutions. Small acts of change accumulate in systems. The path to hope is to bring communities together in change and to help them better understand the reality of their system. Today, as ever, that is the work that matters. This is the work that tests our purposes and talents. Despair is easy. There are many to instruct us in despair. The ‘hopey-changey’ thing is rightfully hard. 

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed – Rebecca Solnit