Author: simongterry

Accountability, Rank and Authority

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We assume people who hold rank in a hierarchy are accountable. Rank is rarely the measure of accountability. Accountability in networks is more likely to be found with social constructed authority.

Accountability in hierarchy can be attenuated by the distance of people in positions of power from customers, employees or others stakeholders. Our expectation that the buck stops with those with highest rank increasingly disappoints us. Without trust, those in hierarchical positions can continue to operate and exercise power.

Authority is earned and lost in networks

However, authority is earned in networks. Authority is not given or imposed.  The status of authority as a social construct means accountability to the network is built in.  

Importantly, in a network authority will often attach to the most authoritative figure who is a part of the conversation, whether they seek it or not.  Nilofer Merchant described this phenomenon well recently highlighting that leaders who step up to engage in social conversations will be expected to act. The reach of this expectation will run to their supposed authority, well beyond their power or their rank. In a societal conversation, leaders may be expected to act on their own power and influence their industry or society. By chosing to bring their rank to the conversation, they start with an expectation and an authority. The challenge is what they do next.

An authority who fails to exercise their status will lose it. Any authority that becomes unreliable, malicious or inauthentic will quickly lose their status. Losing the authority that is the underpinning of influence and action, is the swift form of accountability found in network relationships that depend on trust.

As we lose our trust in hierarchies, we will go looking for trusted authorities in networks. Should they fail us, we will change them rapidly.

This post is the second in a five part series on managing accountability in the network era. The posts deal with:

Responsible or Accountable

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

In a hierarchy, power moves down from their top. The focus of power is the allocation of responsibility to act to individuals and the management of their performance. Holding people accountable is a conversation driven by top down over those responsible. 

Hierarchies retain decision making continues at the top, so in theory that should be where the buck stops. However, the nature of the power relationship internally creates weak accountability for higher level decisions. Traditionally the only accountability for these decisions is through signals from shareholders or some times customers. 

The signals from the stock market and shareholders on management decisions are often weak. We accept high turnover in shareholders, customers and employees and explain away discontent.  Dealing with exit of frustrated shareholders, employees and customers is often as easy as adopting a growth orientation. Management need not consider the voices of those leaving as a source of accountability or a source of performance improvement. 

In an increasingly complex network world, this approach to accountability is no longer sustainable. While you retain a hierarchy for the allocation of responsibility, internally and externally your organisation needs to leverage networks to manage the complex relationships and challenges it faces. Suddenly we need to consider the shifting flow of authority and power in a wirearchy.

Traditional decision making (& the associated accountability) is also backward looking.  We examine history to determine what to do and what should have been done. As Harold Jarche points out we can’t look back to the past to predict the next decision or even who to hold responsible for action. Increasingly the question around accountability is ‘how will this decision be viewed at some point in the future by our stakeholders?’

New Network Accountability

With the increasingly networked world comes new sources of accountability. Employees, customers, shareholders and the community now have voice and the ability to organise.  They can leverage their relationships with the organisation and others to express their concerns. Organisations must increasingly enable all their employees to respond to these situations when and where they arise. That demands a more responsive organisation. 

These new internal and external accountabilities can’t be ignored or managed away without jeopardising business relationships. A decision not to participate in social interactions or the network won’t stop the conversation. It simply means your voice goes unheard In the conversation and might harm your business. Those who better respond to the needs and concerns of your employees, customers and community in the network will see their influence grow as those who ignore the accountability to the network will see influence fade.

The opportunity for responsive organisations is to embrace the new accountabilities in the pursuit of more effective performance.  With these accountabilities comes:

  • new information on the performance of your products, services, opportunities with your customers and your impact in the community
  • new relationships with influencers in the networks within and around your organisation
  • opportunities to leverage the talent and potential of people internally and externally who may not be within the consideration of the current hierarchy.

You may not change your strategy, your products and services or your organisation as a result of this additional network insight.  However, if you will have done much to better understand the true performance opportunities in your business and to remove risks that the weak accountability and weak information flows of a hierarchical approach may miss.

We encourage accountability in business as a driver of performance and an opportunity to improve.  Shift your accountability from the hierarchy to the network. You will discover new opportunities for your organisation.
 

This post is the first in a five part series on managing accountability in the network era. The posts deal with:

Enough and more

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Everything In moderation, including moderation. – Oscar Wilde

Enough of what you need to do and more of what you want to do.
Enough reward and more impact
Enough efficiency and more effectiveness
Enough performance and more potential
Enough expertise and more mastery
Enough experience and more learning
Enough saving and more sharing
Enough capability and more challenge
Enough things and more information
Enough decisions and more experiments
Enough transactions and more relationships
Enough symptoms and more cause
Enough measurement and more coaching
Enough management and more leadership
Enough vision and more purpose
Enough hierarchy and more networks
Enough talking and more doing
Enough how and more who
Enough what and more why
There’s never enough time.

Lonely ideas have hidden friends

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Lonely ideas have hidden friends. Working out loud and sharing the ideas draws out the hidden friends.

Draw Out The Hidden Friends

An example of discovering hidden friends came after yesterday’s post on the power of sharing lonely ideas.

Anne Marie McEwan saw my post through a share by Richard Martin (@indalogenesis) on twitter and responded sharing her lonely idea.

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In one of life’s moments of serendipity, I had just been advised through twitter of the launch of peeracademy.org so I knew the hidden friend for Anne Marie’s idea:

All of sudden an idea isn’t so lonely anymore.

Every Idea has Friends Somewhere

If you have an idea, there is a good chance someone else has had the same idea, a similar idea or an aligned idea. If you let your idea be lonely, you will never know how their thoughts and actions might help your agenda.

We manufacture serendipity when we put ideas out in networks to be found, engaged and used. The networks supply the capability but sharing our idea creates the moment of opportunity. Knowledge in flight has somewhere to go.

Working out loud let’s others connect the dots between our ideas and others. Share an idea and it is rarely lonely any more.

See if you can’t draw out a few friends for your lonely idea.

International Working Out Loud Week is from 17-24 November and is an opportunity to experiment for a week with sharing of your work. Join in the movement of people working out loud.

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Share the Lonely Ideas

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Put your ideas in circulation. Ideas don’t deserve to be lonely. Share them in conversation. Watch them grow. Discover you do more.

Ideas start in conversation

We are surrounded by wonderful ideas. We have many every day. Too many are born and die lonely and unloved.

Almost all the ideas explored in this blog come from conversations. These posts are the insights and reflections on a flow of daily interactions. Many come from working out loud and the comments others make in reply to my work. 

Over time, I have learned to watch for those wonderful ideas that pop up in conversation. Teasing them out in conversation enriches them. Noting them down supplies a ready source of inspiration for future posts (Evernote is a blessing). Without others to share those conversations, there would be far fewer quality ideas.  

Ideas are better in action.

All of the ideas that become posts are further improved by being shared further, refined, tested, challenged and built upon. The really good ideas grow most through use by others.

Ideas get lonely if they have only one brain to occupy. Lonely ideas wither, lose their power and are forgotten. Sharing an idea increases its value. You still have the idea but now it has been shared elsewhere. Not only do you still have it but the process of sharing enables others to help you improve your once lonely idea.

Even better, a lonely idea shared is a call for collaboration. So many of the best projects I have been involved in arise when an idea shared becomes a common cause.

Share your lonely ideas. Connect with others to create, share and improve your ideas.

You will discover you do more by working out loud.

International Working Out Loud Week is from 17-24 November and is an opportunity to experiment for a week with sharing of your work. Join in the movement of people working out loud.

Step lightly

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I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. – WB Yeats

Every day those around us spread out their dreams like Aedh from Yeats’ poem. Then we begin work to make the cloth of our personal purpose richer and larger. We must spread the cloth into an overlapping network because each of our purposes involves others. The realisation of our dreams and purposes are interconnected.

Many people don’t see the network spread before them. They focus only on their cloth. They don’t understand the power of interaction and the connected nature of our dreams. They shoo away others who must cross their cloth.

Others don’t see the impact of their interactions. Unaware, they tromp on the dreams of others in their self-centred focus on their own dreams. By design or by accident, they discourage others and damage their dreams. Hierarchal position doesn’t mean your dreams go on top or that you are arbiter of what will and won’t be realised.

Leaders step lightly. Knowing that all footsteps have consequences, leaders also enable others to walk with a lighter step.

Leaders work to realise the potential of others, connecting them, helping them solve challenges and extending their dreams. Leaders help people to stretch their dreams as far as they can go. The right coaching interactions help people learn how to bring dreams about and to invite others in to make more action possible.

Tread lightly. There is a dream beneath each footfall. How you walk in your daily interactions might make a critical difference to another’s dream.

Celebrate Outcomes

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Leadership

The process is just a process. Often the process is one of many competing paths. Outcomes matter more.

In a recent conversation about customer experience, we were discussing the way people fixate on processes. Processes appeal to our industrial management mindsets. Processes are an engineering challenge of neat inputs and defined steps delivering an outcome in a mechanical fashion. Processes are so easy and alluring.

As a result we see troubling signs:

  • people compete for the beauty of their customer journey map. Have a look at Pinterest there are hundreds that are so gorgeous they reflect no real customer experience ever
  • organisations obsess about adoption over value creation because adoption is far more susceptible to a process
  • change management becomes an exercise of templates and measures rather than a series of changes in human relationships and mindsets
  • leadership is discussed an exercise in steps or processes to be managed rather than work to realise of the potential people in real complex circumstances 
  • measures, averages and other abstractions of the process mindset take precedence over human considerations.

Raising process to an exalted state devalues the complexity of humanity. The computer does not need to say no. Putting process over outcome leads to the outrage economy as people try to fight their way out of a narrow industrial mindset.

We need to focus on real human relationships. We need to allow for the mess and power of human emotions. We need to consider networks with learning, change and feedback, not just linear processes. Importantly, we can allow for human scales, learning and flexibility. Most importantly, we can allow for human conversations. That is the path to achieving the real messy and complex outcomes that we need.

Our organisations, our customer experiences and our relationships will be better for a broader more human approach.

Fragments of Human Stories

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Even fragments of human stories engage us deeply. We don’t need to see the finished story. We only need to share enough to engage the imagination of others and draw the humanity out in our consideration of life.

A Fragment of a Richer Story

Browsing the poetry section of a second-hand bookstore in regional Victoria, I came across a volume of the poetry of Matthew Arnold, the 19th century poet, bound in dark green leather with gold leaf. The spine showed the volume had been well read.

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Opening the book I found a dedication which stopped me, brought a rush of emotions and made me reflect on the story of those who had handled the book before.

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Just over a century ago, as the world descended into the Great War, Ralph received this gift and the love of Doris. We don’t know their story or their relationship. The author of this dedication might well have been be a mother, a sister, a friend or a lover. What happened to Ralph and Doris is currently a mystery to us but the inscription and that date soon after the start of WWI engages our imagination, our emotions and our concern.

From the short fragment of Arnold’s poem Immortality we gain a brief insight into the mind of the author of the inscription. This fragment of a message 100 years later engages us in the rich challenges of human life.  It confronts us to reflect on a world torn with strife, obligations of honour and duty, the need for effort and for faith, the love between two people and the real fears of mortality that confronted them. This message transmitted through the inside cover of a book engages us in the turmoil of the Great War and asks us to reflect on the human fears and costs that surrounded it.

Create & Share Human Stories

Perhaps another hint to us lies in the line immediately before the text chosen for inscription in Arnold’s poem:

“…the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;” 

We can start, we can take on challenges and we can share our rich human stories in our one life, but only then. We often forget to reflect on this human detail.

Abstractions like life, success, history, war and work are comprised of these individual human stories, can be aggregated to a level where the humanity is lost in numbers, events and outcomes. We must remember as we deal with the abstractions to make an effort to bring forward the fragments of human stories and consider them each in their unique light.

Our stories engage others deeply, even as uncompleted fragments. They speak to our time, our place, our relationships, our conflicts and our challenges.  As an experience that is real and tangible, stories like these help us to reflect and to learn. These are needed skills when we are learning what it is to be human struggling with the challenges of our unique moment in time.

We may never know more of the story. However encountering a fragment of a story like this makes it harder to forget the human efforts & sacrifice of others.

Lest we forget.

The Outrage Economy

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I was brought up to take the good with the bad, to be polite at all times and always see the other person’s position.

I have spent a lifetime unlearning this upbringing. I have been forced to learn the fine art of outrage.

The Outrage Economy

We now live in an outrage economy. Outrage is the only engine of action in many service organisations:

  • want escalation of a slow process? Resort to outrage
  • want a variation in narrow rules? Resort to outrage
  • want the service you paid for? Resort to outrage
  • want to be heard? Resort to outrage
  • want attention? Resort to outrage at scale

Outrage now powers basic interactions. Organisations have taken customer service flexibility away. Employees are constrained, optimised and disempowered. In many cases this means that they are unable to do their jobs. They need customer outrage to be able to escalate, to loosen processes and solve recurrent issues. The only way to get something done is to invoke the customer retention or a complaint resolution process in response to customer outrage. I have even been invited by customer service employees to express greater outrage so that they could help me better. For example “What I am hearing is that if we don’t solve this for you now, your business with us will be at risk. Is that correct?”

This pattern of interaction means organisations are training their customers to resort to outrage with ever increasing speed. You don’t want to go through the IVR again so you had better get outraged now and hope the team leader has more power. If it going to take outrage to fix a process, why not get outraged now.

If the only channel of service that works is social media, then I will rant there first. Some organisations even have pre-emptive outrage on social media with customers complaining about service processes before they start. Social media seems to be the only place many organisations care about their reputation with customers.

Stop the Escalation of Outrage

Nothing goes better because of outrage. Outrage only destroys value. Outrage weakens relationships and destroys brands.

Let’s start looking for ways to solve issues without requiring customers to rant and complain. There are a few simple steps:

  1. Understand how your processes actually work for customers in interactions: Processes that make sense around the board table often fail in human interactions. Requiring a warning that the warranty will be voided if an item has been used inappropriately might be wise when taking an item for repart but it may also sound like a criticism or a threat to a frustrated customer who just wants the item fixed. Follow issues back from the frontline to those distant places in the organisation that cause them.
  2. Give your people the power, resources and support required to do their jobs: You measure their performance. Do you spend as much time measuring how well you support their interactions with customers? In an age of global integrated logistics, does it make sense that you only move things between your locations once a week? If a morning of flights are going to be delayed by fog, advising customers is great but have you planned how you will manage the situation? If calls are unusually high, is it time to put on extra staff or suggest alternatives to resolve the issue? Enabling single point resolution is more than designing a narrow question that a customer must answers yes to confirm that you have solved their needs.
  3. Give your people the discretion to empathise and delight customers: It is really hard to be outraged at someone who is allowed to be human.  Empathy can be the second most important element to de-escalating the situation for an outraged customer. Let your people apologise for genuine errors. Move beyond the platitudes because otherwise we know your aren’t really concerned about our ‘inconvenience’. Give them the freedom to do a little more than needed to fix things pre-emptively.

An organisation that cannot respond to its customer needs fails the sole reason the organisation exists. If your customers are getting even slightly outraged it is time to learn how to become more responsive.