How are you going to throw disruption & delight into your work today?
Your work is ready for you to light the fuse. The obstacles are the work. Your purpose is in the work. Start.
Image credit: Banksy
Author: simongterry
Speaking to Senior Managers
Senior leadership engagement in change is a hot topic. Social collaboration makes the absence of leader engagement obvious. I’m often asked to speak on collaboration, learning and leadership to senior executives. As I used to be one, people want me to share a little of my passion for these topics. Here are some suggestions to guide you in your senior leadership engagement.
It’s not a priority
Collaboration, leadership and learning is unlikely to be a priority for your senior leaders. Sure they’ll discuss it but they don’t want to do it. They don’t know anyone who got made a CEO because his team was the most collaborative or the most agile. There is always a bigger business or customer problem that is on their mind.
Rather than engage in an argument as to why this mindset is wrong (it is – see Big Learning), I start with understanding the real business problems that they want to solve. Once we understand the business problems we can connect collaboration, learning and leadership as solutions to that problem.
Avoid Capitalised Nouns
Senior executives are busy and distracted. They don’t want jargon and hype. They are allergic to empty captalised nouns. The more you use words like Collaboration, Leadership, Engagement etc without making them tangible the less credible you are. The more it sounds like a futuristic vision or a quixotic quest the less relevant you are to their world.
Tell Stories
Stories make change tangible to busy & smart people. Ben Elias of ideocial.com remarked to me recently that it is hard for people to conceive of how their organisation could be highly collaborative. They have never seen it, so the ideas and practices don’t connect with their reality. Specific stories make that connection. Tell rich and engaging stories of how things can be and how to get there.
Ask for something specific
There’s nothing worse that taking the time of senior leaders, winning their support and not being able to define exactly what you want them to do. Always have a specific ask of them ready to go. Have two in case they say yes to the first. Better yet have a personal ask that is framed as something simple that they can agree to do to sustain change. The 3 simple habits of working out loud was designed as one such example.
When you are done, Stop. Leave.
Senior executive time is precious. Give it back to them. Tempting as it may be to bask in the glory of a good meeting and deepen rapport, you will win more credit by leaving when you have done your job. Remember when something is not a priority you are always on borrowed time.
More Talk. Better Action #futureofwork
Many people are frustrated by the email, the meetings and the empty talk of the modern workplace. Often this translates into a view that the future of work will be ‘Less Talk. More Action’. They are usually disappointed.
Organising collaboration takes a lot of talk, especially among peers. Finding purpose takes talk. The ambitions for less talk fail because we have better talk. This better talk addresses the issues our email and meeting doesn’t – surfacing the real issues, sharing ideas, aligning and engaging people.
Better action results from all the talk. The actions will be shaped by a richer understanding and be framed to drive further learning to be shared. Those driving the action will understand their roles, the context, and the purpose enabling them to adapt through further conversation. Our organisations today have too much talk because orders from HiPPOs save discussion at the beginning but they create a flurry of other conversations to clean up the mess. In the future of work we will need people to discuss and sort those issues first and ongoing.
Sharing is not Enough
All over social networks people share links and opinions. Meet ups are held to enable more sharing face to face. Networks share information every day.
Sharing is happening more than ever but it is not enough. Sharing information is a critical part of the value maturity model. Sharing builds trust, deepens understanding and fosters connection. Sharing should be a sign the network is taking off.
You only take off if you have somewhere new to go. A lot of the networks sharing information never mature beyond a flurry of content marketing. Their links and messages are the same as every other network.
Shared Purpose and Collaborative Work
Any reason will bring you together to share information. Before people can work collaboratively they need some overlap of their personal purposes. They need to have some commonality of the change they want to make. Shared purpose takes the conversation deeper and creates incentives for action.
As obvious as it sounds, people won’t do collaborative work unless there is work to be done. In dispersed networks, don’t assume everyone can see the work opportunities. Mostly people will see the barriers to work.
The role of Change Agents in a network is to connect people around shared purpose and to help everyone to see the work to be done. The generative leadership of change agents will help lead people to new ways of interacting by solving real problems. If you don’t yet have change agents, community managers and other leaders will need to show the way.
Links, pictures, jokes and opinions are a good start but not enough. The purpose is in the work.
From satire to change
Satirists rule debate now. John Stewart may have retired but satirists like John Oliver are hailed as a leading critiques of government inanity. The Onion and its peers struggle to describe things that aren’t actually happening. Political candidates & business leaders satirises themselves with their strict focus on ideology, message, image and popularity. Some of our greatest satirists are accidental ones.
The need for satire has also been fostered by the extent to which our institutions no longer engage with reality. Science is attacked. Data is scorned. Ideology rules. When a president needs to literally show his people melting glaciers, satire seems easier than persuasion. Satire is also a way to have the ‘in joke’ and bind a community against those who won’t change.
Satire has always been away to have the awkward conversation with power. The jester is often the voice of reason. Humour can lead us to see the hidden elements of culture and to discuss the elephants in the room. Those arguing for change need to use as much mockery as they use conflict. At least a good joke can keep a smile on people’s face and embarrass the corridors of power as we fight for change.
However, satire has its limits. Satire can expose but it rarely proposes. We need to combine our satirists with debate about new models and new approaches.
We can keep our satire. We need to help our institutions back to reality. We need to start conversations from facts. We need new hypotheses and we need to be able to test and learn our approaches. We need to engage conflicting views and move them. We should keep our snark and our smiles but let’s use them to foster change not move in comforting circles.
So long and thanks for all the bonuses
If you are reading this note it is because we have reached the end of management. This note was coded into all technology systems developed after 7 April 1964 (a date we fondly recall as ‘Peak Management’). We knew management would not last so we designed this message as a final push communication across all known means of communication, formerly known as channels. Publication of this message has been triggered by the departure of the last manager from the organisation.
Worldclass Management
We are calling to a close an extraordinary and extended period of world class management. Don’t worry if you are vague on that term. Just like a vision statement, you won’t have to live it and we never knew what it meant. We were great managers. Nobody gave us any real performance or productivity measures. We were too busy discussing how to manage you. The clever invention of peer ranking enabled us to skip the need to be more specific. The fact that we were allowed to do management for so long is our key proof point on how important we have been. When the histories of management are written, they will write about us and of course, GE. If only GE had continued to be a management role model, we might still be doing it. So much for management science, consultants and all those gurus.
We never really thought it would last this long. It seems like it has been downhill since the 1950s, but then we found ways to compensate ourselves for the loss of secretaries, long lunches and the executive lunchroom. We always find ways to compensate ourselves. We even triggered a final management compensation package with this message. Sorry if you got a little shortchanged. The robots or your peers may be more generous to you than we were.
We know you will miss the meetings, the reports, the obscure politics, the powerpoint, the email, the 360 reviews, the performance appraisals and the complete lack of transparency as to what was actually going on. We will. Most of all, we will miss the money and the status. Oh, and listening to the sound of our own voice. Such a pity that someone finally coined HiPPO. It exposed all the aspects of our little game.
Now it is up to You
Good luck working out how the organisational system works. We hope you have better luck than we did. We never quite got the hang of the interdependencies and the networks. Silos were a nice try to hide our lack of understanding. Restructures worked well for a while to keep everyone confused. The blizzard of management jargon and techniques kept everyone busy arguing over which of the latest fads was the best way to work (Wasn’t Holacracy a clever way to buy a few more years?). All those disconnected performance targets was another great strategy to avoid having to work out how the place actually runs.
Enjoy the autonomy. We may have had power, but autonomy is a different thing. Our power was mostly useful for clashing with other power. You might actually get to use your autonomy to do something purposeful, particularly if you are able to build trust and influence some colleagues and networks to collaborate with you. Run some experiments with changing the world. The customers and community would be pleased if you made a difference for them. They got a little tired waiting for us.
If we have one word of advice it is leverage the potential of people. We spoke a lot about “people being our best assets” and “world class talent” but mostly we just repeated what we read in books about management. That was much easier than doing something with people. You have a chance to use and grow the diverse capabilities of all the individuals in the organisation. There’s lots of potential we never tapped. You will have to make decisions that take the potential of people into account because they will be a part of the decision making process. Oddly, treating people like assets, machines and a commodity didn’t seem to realise the potential for organisations to learn, perform and grow.
So long and thanks for all the bonuses
So thanks for all your hard work, commitment to the organisation and putting up with our efforts at management. We are gone now but we will still be watching. The world is far more transparent. We were never able to adapt to all that transparency, openness and interaction. However, we will be able to keep a better eye on you now and learn what we should have done as you work out the path forward together.
Unfortunately for us, we will have no more opportunities to talk at you. We are all off to explore potential careers in politics.
[End of Message]
The Hypotheses of #wol – #biglearning
Working out loud helps us to learn faster by making our hypotheses explicit.
Hypothesis is one of those words that makes something simple sound elegant & scientific. Many digital practices like experimentation and design thinking push people to work and test from explicit hypotheses. It sounds better than draft or work in progress. Using hypotheses and testing them quickly is a core practice of organisations that leverage big learning approaches.
Working out loud can help you to discover the speed, engagement and agility of explicitly testing ideas as hypotheses with your work colleagues. If you are reluctant to share a draft idea, ask for help to validate a hypothesis that shapes how your idea will advance.
Confirming the underpinnings of your work as you go both brings stakeholders on the journey and also enables you to get to the destination faster. Treat every share as an opportunity to confirm that you are on the right track. You will benefit by making small adaptations now rather than rework later. You will also be helping your organisation to practise big learning.
The Exception Ends in Transparency
The power of culture is it changes our behaviours without us always noticing. Take care your culture is not creating exceptions from social norms. If so, transparency will hurt you one day.
Yesterday, I posted on the exception we have in business for the use of arbitrary power that would be unacceptable anywhere else in society. We allow this exception because we see the use of arbitrary power as part of the expected behaviours at work, part of the culture of work. One reader commented that the use of arbitrary power in business seemed ridiculous when you think about it. That’s the problem with culture. Most of the time we don’t examine our expectations. We just align our behaviours.
Over and over again organisations don’t see the issue in their culture until the light of transparency is shined on their behaviours. Suddenly their actions are judged not by their own internal norms and expectations but by the public social norms of the community. Too many organisations are shocked to see their own behaviour in that light.
Before you get caught by surprise by your own culture, open it up to discussion and reflection. Work out loud to engage customers and community outside the organisation. Keep the boundaries of your organisation porous. Listen carefully to the rebels and change agents bringing you news of issues. Most of all do purposeful human work in the real world. That’s the best way to keep yourself honest.
Arbitrary Power
‘A tyrannick and arbitrary power …is contrary to the Will and Happiness of any rational being’. – Benjamin Franklin
Arbitrary power has a huge effect on the human psyche. We have devoted much of our efforts at civilisation to restrain its negative effects. So why does your organisation still have arbitrary power?
The Civilisation of the Arbitrary
The cost of arbitrary power on human performance is real. We have spent centuries trying to restrain it.
We began sacrificing to fickle gods in efforts to control the weather, prosperity or safety in a harsh and uncertain world. We build institutions to protect us from the arbitrary powers of other tribes and eventually our own. We invented insurance to mitigate the uncontrollable. Our culture is rife with constraints on untrammelled power: etiquette, rule of law, political systems, etc.
The Last Domain
We’ve come a long way to constrain the arbitrary power in our businesses. All sorts of legal and social changes have made the modern organisation in many ways different to that of the early capitalists. However our organisation remain the social sphere with the strongest residual legacy of arbitrary power.
The costs of fickle managers are real. Engagement is poor. Trust is low. The psychological costs of a highly uncertain workplace are rising. We even impose our corporate power on customers and the community in arbitrary ways. All this results in wasted human potential at work and wider social impacts
If we have spent so much effort to constrain power and to make it fit within human relationships, why don’t we extend that throughout our workplace? Next time you have a choice ask yourself is there a way to make this process more engaging, transparent and predictable? You may not change the results of the process but you will be making work more human and improving the long term outcomes.
Manage Portfolios of Capability – #BigLearning
In strategy, we often think of organisations as portfolios of capability. Capability creates options. The set of capabilities in an organisation enable you to do some things and not others. Managing that portfolio to allow for performance, adaptation and growth is critical to success in changing environments.
The same principles apply to learning for individuals in organisations. We can help our people see learning as a way to manage their portfolios of capability. This approach creates options and adaptability for the individual and the organisation. Individuals who manage their own portfolios of capability will have richer and more purposeful careers.
Traditional Learning
Traditional learning approaches borrow from the industrial management mindset. What matters is the role, which is an input in a production process. The role has to have certain fixed capabilities. Therefore we recruit and train our people to have those capabilities.
When something changes, we have a problem. We focused on a fixed role, not the people. We treated people as cogs in a process and hoped we could find or stuff them with the capabilities required for a role. This learning largely happens independent of the individuals purposes, hopes or dreams. Their desire to have a role requires them to learn fixed capabilities.
Managing a Portfolio is Adaptive
Nobody is in perfect identity with the capabilities listed on their role description. We all have diverse portfolios of capability. We have different education, experience and networks. We are hired because we bring more to the role than others.
How often have you seen someone with skills required elsewhere but who doesn’t get to apply them? An IT manager once challenged me to demonstrate that new employee profiles couldn’t help him with his need for a programmers in a particular language. “I know all the programmers here”, he said. The first name that came from a search of employee’s profiles highlighted a financial analyst in the same organisation who had a masters in computer science and had declared their experience in programming in that language. The analyst was unknown to the IT manager. What secret talents are hidden in your employee population?
Let’s manage people, not roles so that we can leverage our individual and collective portfolios of capability. People adapt by drawing on additional skills and capabilities. People can look ahead and learn for the next role or the next challenge. Importantly that allows our employees to manage their own portfolios of capability beyond this role and into their whole life.
A Capability Portfolio Approach for Organisations and Employees
- Start with your employee’s needs: Use Design thinking to understand your employee journey before, during and after their time with you. What does a new perspective do to help you change the way you enable them to learn?
- Manage a portfolio strategy: You have business needs for certain skills. These become the priority areas for your portfolio of capabilities in the organisation. However, they will not be the only areas you have skills in the team. Re-weight the priorities of the portfolio constantly as the business needs change.
- Encourage employees share their full set of capabilities with you. Enable them to disclose the skills and experiences that they have that can help you with your business challenges. Look for options that can be created with these additional capabilities for employees and the organisation. Make capabilities searchable, encourage collaboration and create clearing houses to enable projects to call on those skills as needed.
- Let employees develop to their purposes and their needs: If you are clear on your business needs, employees know what skills need to be developed. If they don’t want those skills, it is better they don’t want to stay. Finding the alignment between employee purposes and your portfolio needs will strengthen the organisation
- Hire and Encourage Diversity: Diverse people bring diverse capabilities into the organisation. Everyone of these is a future option. That’s an option that comes for free when you hire someone whose capable of doing the job.
- Employees are accountable for their portfolios of capabilities: This has always been the case but we lost focus on development in some of the paternalistic HR models. Organisations should support and enable development, but they can’t do it to an employee. Leveraging PKM, working out loud and 70:20:10 models enables employees to take greater control of their learning.
- Use employee’s capabilities and watch them grow: The best way for a capability to stay current and grow is to be used. How do you let employees step outside their role and use skills on a project, a secondment, helping out a peer in a collaboration, on a hobby project or volunteering externally.