Author: simongterry

To Shape Change, Start Leading Change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” (spoken by Tancredi) from ‘The Leopard’ by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Times of disruptive change are difficult for those in power and those who benefit most from the current way of things. Many of these people prefer to ignore the rising changes in society. In effect, they abandon their leadership role in shaping change in the system.

Enduring disruptive change demands an engaged form of leadership. The future in disruption is not written. Leaders should seek to engage, lead and shape change to the benefit of their organisations. 

The Networked Economy is Here to Stay.

Many leaders of organisations have a lot of power, status and wealth tied up in the way things are now.  They are the masters of the current system, adept in its ways and confident in managing the current model of work and the organisation.  They have both personal and professional reasons for hoping that nothing changes.

Change doesn’t work that way. We are now part of a global ecosystem of actors connected in digital networks.  Access, visibility and transparency have increased driven by the new connectivity.  Change that enters this new system is magnified, spread and developed by the action of agents all around the world.

Lead or Let others Decide The Future

The connected digital networks of global actors means the future of work won’t be ignored, stopped or reversed. Others will go on to develop better ways of working whether you and your organisation participate or not. The less you participate, the more you appear a candidate for disruption by one of these actors.

Organisations face a leadership challenge in this environment.  Effective leadership, continuous learning and a vibrant culture is required to take effect of the advantages of the new approaches.  Senior managers need to play a critical role helping organisations adjust and maximise the benefits from these changes.

However, managers face changes in the future of work that change their power, status and potentially their financial position.  Networks can operate with less layers of management and roles that were once managements prerogative are being delegated to frontline employees or automated in systems. New two-way conversations with engaged and enabled employees, customers and other staked holders can require leaders to deal with new complexity. In this case, it can be tempting for a senior leader to sit on the sidelines hoping the changes are a fad or that they might pass over the organisation.

You Can’t Lead a Community if You are Not Engaged

A simple case study of this mindset comes when you consider the level of management attention to stakeholder activism in social and digital media. Because this activism is now more visible and empowered by digital and social networks, management can see resentment that once was hidden. Bear in mind the resentment is not new.  It just has a bigger audience and influence than before.

Many of these social activist activities have large impacts on organisations because the activist have a community and the organisation has only a network.  

The critical difference between a network and a community is how engaged the participants are. That engagement arises as a result of acts of leadership to create common purpose, to shape an agenda of action and to influence others to act. Leaders who ignore the burgeoning networks around the organisation allow others to shape the communities, their purposes and their influence.

Senior leaders of organisations need to engage with the networks around their organisation.  The opportunity to create productive communities far exceeds the risks. Listening and acting on feedback of networks of stakeholders is one of the better mitigants of risk. Failure to engage and to understand the needs of the networks creates an opportunity for others to lead. 

Leaders Can Authorise Debate by Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

A key role for leaders is to authorise discussion in organisations. Leaders need to foster frank and authentic discussions by all employees. The best way to signal willingness to discuss the real issues is to start that conversation yourself and to show you will take action on the outcomes.

How do you invite questions?

I was recently asked what was my favourite aspect of a YamJam was. A YamJam is a Q&A session in Yammer usually by a leader or other authority figure. My answer was that my favourite element is that a YamJam authorises employees to question leaders and role models. This starts to create the kind of leadership that employees want: open, authentic and responsive.

Working out loud by leaders has the same positive impact. By openly sharing the work in progress with all its doubts, flaws and uncertainties, leaders invite others to engage them on that work. They make transparent their personal work processes for the benefit of others. The sharing authorises others to engage and respond to the leader’s work. This is a powerful tool to cut through hierarchy and change leadership interactions in an organisation.  Change the interactions and you change the culture.

Authorise the debate

The greatest barriers to human potential are the things we think we cannot do. Too often we look for others to authorise us to act. For many people and organisations, questioning leaders falls into the category of some we can’t do without permission. The role of leaders in realising potential is to release this constraint and authorise the kinds of generative conversations that enable organisations to be responsive.

You Can’t Predict the Value of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Working Out Loud is a key practice for learning in networks.  Working Out loud creates value by surfacing opportunities to collaborate and to exchange information around work. Sharing work creates value for both the person sharing their work and others who observe. However, it can be a challenge to convince someone upfront that the value exists.

What is Working Out Loud?

Bryce Willams initially proposed the concept of Working Out Loud as:   

Narrating Your Work + Observable Work

The concept has been developed by a number of others, particularly John Stepper, and there are many related concepts, such as Jane Bozarth’s Show Your Work. With the increased transparency, access and visibility of networks in the digital era, working out loud is a much easier and much more productive practice.  Working out loud enables others to see, understand and contribute to your work.  That delivers benefits for both workers and observers and can play a critical role in shortening the time cycles of feedback, learning and collaboration.

You Can’t Predict the Value of Working Out Loud

Many people are reluctant to share their work for fear of negative feedback or fear of others’ perceptions.  People look to overcome their uncertainty by clarifying the benefits.

However the benefits of working out loud are as unique as the approaches of each individual and the diversity of their networks. Like many forms of social collaboration, there aren’t guaranteed outcomes in terms of benefits and the benefits are tailored to an individual’s situation and needs. Importantly benefits can flow far from the individual who is working out loud.  This latter point is important in corporate context’s where working out loud can play a key role in improving alignment, reducing duplication and facilitating learning on the job.

I have learned to work out loud in a number of ways.  My blog is an ongoing meditation on lessons from my work. I leverage twitter, public and private groups and social streams to share work in progress with others and get feedback. As someone who is relatively new to working out loud I have found that the benefits of working out loud are always a surprise and exceedingly diverse:

  • Making new connections with people doing similar or potentially related work around the world
  • Developing new knowledge using lean start up approaches to the demand and with the input of clients
  • Receiving feedback, ideas and other input into my work from many diverse sources that helps me better understand how it needs to develop and where it will have best impact.
  • Drawing of innovative connections between streams of work that I had not yet seen
  • Feedback from others on their leverage of my work in their own learning and the value that they create.
  • An enhanced understanding of my own strengths and the potential of my networks
  • Business & collaboration opportunities driven from people coming to understand and value my work.

Working Out Loud Requires Experimentation

The form of working out loud will differ for each individual depending on their work, their comfort in sharing, their expertise in social tools and their network. There are few formulas that can be prescribed that are generally applicable.

The best advice for an individual seeking to benefit from working out loud is to experiment with what works for them. A process of adaptation and experimentation will help each individual to develop a set of practices which enables them to be most productive.

If you are looking for a place to start, start by trying to form a new habit and adapt your practice to what suits you and delivers you & your network the best benefits. Consider forming a working out loud circle to help accelerate & share your learning with others. Look out for the next International Working Out Loud Week, a great opportunity to develop your practice of working out loud in the company of a network of global peers.

The Continuous Partial Attention of Management

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The story is too common in the modern organisation: a team has a member who is not contributing but they go on being a part of the team for months or even years. Waste, frustration and disengagement mount in the team. Despite the negative impacts and length of time the manager responsible does nothing to rectify the underperformance.

We have more performance data than ever. We have more sources of information than ever. We interact in more ways than ever. We live in an age of increased performance transparency.

How Can Sustained Underperformance Be Common?

All that data, information, interaction and transparency brings more for managers to do. Complexity is the fundamental challenge of the modern manager and without careful husbanding of their attention the time of the manager can be subsumed into busy work.

Continuous partial attention has crept into management practice. Challenged to keep up managers are constantly skimming across the top of the work. Interactions with employees are staccato bursts. Busy managers spend less time understanding what is actually going on. Flitting in and out of observation of their employees, managers can be lulled into a false sense of confidence if the numbers look good. 

For an under-performing employee that means the ability to escape action continues as long as the deadline has not yet arrived, the numbers look acceptable and underperfomer has an answer for the first quick query from a manager. The commonest trick is for the under performing employee to send their busy manager an email asking for a complex decision. Likely overlooked or deferred, it becomes an instant performance excuse. Instead of asking for help the employee uses the pressures on their manager as a chance to hide their performance issues. Time, pressure and waste mount up.

In rare cases, managers may see the problem situation but the pressure of other demands means that they do not prioritise action. They trust in the systems, the employee’s peers or the reporting to correct the underperformance or hope that the employee’s lack of action is temporary. These managers prioritise the work and the system over their people to the detriment of everyone.

Refocus the Attention of Management on the Process of Work

Psychological studies show that multitasking & continuous partial attention don’t work. People who practice these approaches feel that they are more effective but aren’t. We need managers to get off the treadmill and reconsider their approaches to performance:

  • Shared Purpose & Goals: In many of these situations the underperformance is simply because the busy manager has not set, clear goals for the employee and the employee has no rationale for their work. Engage employees upfront on the purpose and goals of their work.
  • Enable and Empower: If managers don’t have the bandwidth to guide and manage, organisations must ensure that employees have the ability to manage themselves and their work. That takes an investment in skills and the freedom to make decisions without waiting for a busy manager to respond.
  • Targeted Fast Agile Delivery: Ask an employee to work on a lots of  things for months and they will be as bamboozled by the status & priorities of the project as their manager. Instead ask an employee to deliver a few focused things in a short cycle of delivery. The need for reporting, status updates & chatter goes down as observable delivery increases.
  • Real conversations: Any genuine one-on-one conversations with an employee & their peers of more than 10 minutes will begin to surface the real issues in a team. Asking good questions and listening to hear between the lines of the answers is critical in management. Managers must prioritise this to enable their teams to succeed.
  • Act now: The busy nature of work is not an excuse to defer needed actions or to defer complex decisions. If something triggers a suspicion, then dive in.

Great managers shape the process and performance of the team. Great managers enable every member of their team to realise their potential and contribute to creating a more responsive organisation. They are not slaves to the reporting, information and decisions that flow through them. Managers must step out of continuous partial attention to the ongoing work process and get involved in the design of the work.

The work of leadership is to realise the potential of people. Leaving someone stuck in a rut of continued underperformance is failing that individual’s potential.