Category: Future of Work

The challenge in life is to be the best YOU YOU can be. That’s something you should expound with ALLCAPS passion.

A trusted colleague used the phrase ‘the passionate ALLCAPS YOU’ in conversation yesterday. The moment I heard the phrase it resonated deeply with me.

We are rightly reluctant to use ALLCAPS. Our shouty outdoor voice is kept quiet to meet with social expectations of politeness and decorum. In most contexts, this makes a lot of sense. Read any political comments thread and you will realise why we prefer discussion to be conducted without ALLCAPS passion. Shouting at others is neither persuasive nor conducive to relationships.

However, external social pressures can have a terrible influence on YOU, your internal passions, purpose and identity. Lots of people from supportive bosses, to helpful peers, to well-meaning family and friends will tell YOU to tone YOU down. They prefer the quieter, safer, more socially acceptable version of YOU. This well-meaning advice can be a source of doubt, frustration and ultimately a discouragement to share your passion and your purpose in action.

If there is one part of your life where YOU are entitled to go CAPSLOCK, it is YOU. When YOU express yourself with this passion, the audience is not the world, it is a reminder to YOU to live up to your potential. The passionate ALLCAPS YOU is more persuasive, more engaging and more effective. It is the version of YOU that attracted the bosses, peers, family and friends in the first place. Passion and integrity are precious commodities in this world. Let out the loud and then chase it out into the world with passion.

YOU ARE CHANGING YOUR COMPANY & THE WORLD. There I said it aloud in a shouty voice for YOU. Maybe at this point nobody, not even YOU, realises this. However, YOU are doing what YOU do for a really good reason. YOU thought a lot about the choices you have made. Your everyday efforts to battle frustration, dullness and administrivia are signs YOU care.  YOU make a bigger impact are because it matters to YOU. YOU are in a unique position and you bring your capabilities, ideas and networks. YOU aren’t your work. YOU are your much bigger purpose and your extraordinary potential to learn, to grow and to make change. Your purpose is in the work. If YOU are not sure, go digging with passion and YOU will find it hidden there.

Maybe the rest of the world does not want it yet, but that doesn’t stop that passion being a fundamental part of the passionate ALLCAPS YOU. What the world wants really doesn’t matter when it’s WHO YOU ARE. The only way to express your purpose and potential is IN YOUR FACE ALOUD.

Be the passionate ALLCAPS YOU. It is ALL YOU CAN BE. YOU won’t be YOU otherwise

 

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.