Category: Future of Work

Swapping Hard and Soft

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Leadership

Image

Management likes to talk about the hard skills and the soft skills of managers. These terms are usually applied backwards.

Hard skills are the decision-making, analytical, performance oriented skills of traditional management. Hard skills are a matter of education, experience and practice. The hard skills are mostly transactional, process-driven and mechanistic. Done right there is little variation in the outcome of the hard skills. If you are a manager for long enough, you can do the hard skills. They are just a ticket to the game.

Soft skills are the people & stakeholder skills, like building trust, fostering motivation, developing people, managing conflict and team building. In most cases, it is a challenge to know whether you have done these skills well and the results of actions in any scenario can vary widely.  These are the skills essential to realising the potential of people in any context but particularly in a world of networked knowledge work. This is the work of leadership and it must be learned the hard way.

Time to Swap

The terms hard and soft are backwards. In a culture of hierarchy, command and control andengineering mindsets, it suits management to think of the manager as engineer tackling the hard work of decisions, managing the machine and delivering results. Hard skills start to sound like they are most important in a culture where power really matters.

Except it is easy to make a decision. It is far harder to have that decision stick and be embraced by other people. Try to coach another person and you soon realise that developing their potential and helping them is not easy.

The soft stuff is what unravels the hard stuff. You need both people and power in management. The soft stuff is far harder than setting the levers on a machine.

Leadership is work.  Hard work.  Importantly, it is the hard work that matters most to realise the potential of your people and to benefit from the future of work in a networked knowledge economy.

Swap your view of what is hard and what is soft.  Better yet leave them both behind as terms that belong to the last age of management.

Image source: Swan feather – http://pixabay.com/en/swan-feather-spring-swan-slightly-16313/

The Network Navigator

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Innovation, Leadership, Learning

image

The power of a networked world is shifting the emphasis of work from expertise to navigation. Are you ready to move from expert to network navigator?

From Expert to Navigator – a financial services example

Research into perceptions of an advice relationships in financial services consistently often comes up with a common theme. Usually, the financial services organisation is keen to build a trusted relationship with the client as an advisor and to demonstrate its depth of expertise in the advice process. 

However, these goals are rarely what the client is looking to achieve. The client is often more interested in building a relationship with someone who is responsive to their needs and who can to help them navigate the complexity to find their own answers. The complexity the client needs to navigate is not just the financial decisions; it includes the organisations own advice and service processes. In times of complexity, uncertainty & change, clients are reluctant to be dependant on someone else’s expertise. They want control. They want to be guided across the map of choices and find an easier way through the process.

The Network Navigator

Networks and the increasing pace of change that they bring about are having a similar disruption for the traditional model of expertise-based advice.

Relying on a proprietary stock of knowledge is no longer enough to justify an advice proposition. Knowledge is increasingly a flow. Stocks of knowledge are out of date too quickly as the network learns more faster by sharing.  If clients want access to stocks of knowledge, they can find the information themselves (& access a greater diversity of insight and experience) if they are prepared to put in the time and effort.  Doing that work for them on an outsourcing basis is a low value task.

The challenge of a networked era is no longer gathering a stock of knowledge. The challenge is leverage rapid flights of knowledge and guiding others through networked knowledge creation. The skills that rise to the fore are no those of hoarding a stock of knowledge. The skills are those of being able to connect people, share capability and create new knowledge together.

The 8 Skills of a Network Navigator

A network navigator does not need to know the answer. They do not even need to know the whole way to the solution. They need to be able to lead others, to leverage the knowledge of the network and to find a way forward in collaboration to create new value: 

  • Setting a course: In a complex world often the purposes, goals and questions are as unclear as the answers. Helping people clarify their objectives and questions before and during their engagement with the network is a critical role that the network navigator can play.
  • Seeing the big picture map: Navigators are people who can hold the network system in view and manage the micro detail to guide people forward.  A navigator creates new value with an understanding the broader map and new & better paths that others may not have considered.
  • Make new connections: Increasing the density of networks can be critical to creating new knowledge and value from network interactions.  Bridging weakly connected groups is another role that navigators can play to realise new insights and value.
  • Recruiting a crew and local pilots:  Building community matters in new network ways of working.  Community takes connection to a deeper and more trusted level and begins to accelerate learning and change.  Network navigators know how to recruit crew to their travelling community and add local pilots as they need to learn faster in new parts of the network.
  • Translating strange cultures: Connecting diverse groups often means that there are differences of context, language and culture to be bridged before conversations can create new knowledge. Network navigators have the skills to understand and share diverse inputs.
  • Logging the journey: A network navigator works out loud to record their journey and let others contribute and benefit from the record.  A network navigator nows there are many others seeking the same answers or looking for better paths forward and makes that possible by sharing their work and inviting others to contribute.
  • Weathering storms & avoid shoals: Journeys through networks are not linear and often unpredictable.  The navigator has the experience and the confidence to see others through the storms and to sustain others in their journeys. Most importantly, when the storm is darkest, they have the passion to keep pushing and keep experimenting.
  • Navigating where there is no map: Network navigators need to be able to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity.  They need to be able to lead others forward to learning even if it is dark and there be monsters.

Acknowledgements:  This post is in large part inspired by conversations with a wide range of participants that occurred during John Hagel’s recent visit to Melbourne for the Doing Something Good dinner and Centre for the Edge workshops that I attended.  It is also informed by ongoing conversations about new networked ways of working among all members of Change Agents Worldwide.  

The New-to-Social Executive: 5 Mindsets

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work, Leadership, Uncategorized

Your mindset matters to how you are perceived and connect in social media. Whether internal or external to your organisations, the way you think and the way you lead play a critical role in your ability to influence others.  As a senior leader atop the hierarchy, you have power and influence in your organisation (Admittedly that’s rarely quite as much as you would like). When you take your leadership position into the realm of social collaboration whether internal to your organisation or externally, there are a few key shifts in mindset from traditional models of leadership.

Keep these in mind these five key phrases:

  1. “Be the real human (& sometimes flawed) you”: Nobody is looking to get to know your communication manager’s idea of you. People don’t need you to be the perfect model executive. You can’t have a conversation with a corporate cardboard facade or get help from a PR bot. This is an opportunity to be more human and to use deeper connection and communication. It will demand that you share more of you. If there is more than one of you, one for work and others, then social collaboration will test your ability to maintain the curtain of separation. Using social media works best when you bring your whole self to the activity. You will learn new ways to demonstrate your strengths and authenticity in the process.
  2. “Think networks”: Social media flattens out the playing ground. Your current fame, power and fortune won’t deliver worthwhile connections or influence immediately. In this environment, your voice competes with many others and those that are better connected and more trusted will have greater influence than you regardless of their status. Your voice & authority is much more easily challenged and even mocked. Influence works along networks of trust and connections. Valuable business traction comes from deepening connections to stakeholders and influencers in your own world. Start there and build your influence over time as new connections join in to the valuable interactions that you help create.
  3. “Listen & Engage others”: Listen first. The network doesn’t need to hear you. Mostly it won’t. The network doesn’t need another opinion; it needs your response to and your engagement in the conversations already going on. If you want to deliver on your strategy, the path is through helping others to better align, understand and deliver that strategy with you. How you engage with others is more important in building influence in your network than who you are or what you have to say.
  4. “Be helpful”: Make connections & help others find those who can help them. Set context. Guide others. Enable others. Share stuff to help others solve problems for themselves. Ask great, thoughtful & challenging questions. Work aloud and let others prove their value by helping you. Connect with people to deliver them value. People are looking to learn more and help themselves. As a senior leader you can play a critical role
  5. “Experiment, learn & change stuff”: The value of human networking is to learn, connect with others and change things. Embrace difference & the chaos that many opinions and desire for change creates. After a while you will recognise the appeal of ‘being permanently beta’, always evolving to better value as you experiment test and learn. If you want to hear your own views, build your personal brand, increase your control or resist change, don’t start in any form of social collaboration. That attitude doesn’t show much respect for the efforts of the others in the network. 

This is the first of two short posts on tips for the senior executive looking to move into using social collaboration tools inside and outside the enterprise. This post deals with mindsets. The next post will deal with how to start engaging.

Purpose endures disruption. Discuss.

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Future of Work, Innovation

We know what we are, but not what we may be. – William Shakespeare

In a time of disruptive change, an organisation needs a strong common purpose to unite & guide its people.  

Purpose is a product of the community in your organisation.  It is the set of beliefs that keep your community together, reflecting your values, impact on others and hopes for the future.

A strong purpose is one that grows out of that community within your organisation.  We are talking about deeply personal values and beliefs.  This is the realm of pull, not push. People will have selected and remained with your organisation because of purpose.   A purpose cannot be imposed without pushing people away from your organisation.

Purpose endures.  

Your product, your business model, your competitive position and your returns may all change.  Just look at the changes you face:

  • Every organisation faces continued change in Who does things.  Tasks move.  People come and go each day.
  • How you do things changes equally fast.  That is the point of continuous improvement.  We want this continuous betterment of our work.
  • When big disruptive change occurs, organisations need to change What they do too. If you haven’t moved from buggy whip manufacturer to delivering remote mobile acceleration control services, you might just have been left behind. 

What keeps your organisation together and focused when everything might need to change really fast?  

A purpose that is shared by the community of your organisation is a centre of focus and consistency.  Importantly, the purpose is something consistently worth the investment of your people’s time, passion and effort over time.  Purpose is the core around which your organisation must build its agility to survive.  Purpose is the reason for which your organisation must survive and why it must prosper.  The more things change the more you will come back to your purpose to choose what to do next.

Discovering purpose

Start an ongoing conversation in your organisation around your purpose.   Seek to discover the beliefs that are shared and guide your organisation into the future.   Build a consensus and educate those who are new.  Social tools are fantastic ways to share and deepen this conversation.  

Ask purposeful questions of each other.  What is the purpose of strategies, changes and major initiatives? When is your organisation at its best?  What beliefs and ideas bring out the best in your people?  

The conversations are more powerful when they are not be dictated from the top of the organisation.  The best conversations on purpose will be those that surface the beliefs of those who deliver impact to customers every day, who make decisions in the middle of the organisation or potentially by asking your customers to reflect on your purpose. Discuss these points of view.  You will find that these conversations contribute to trust by building common ground.

Be prepared to be surprised, but most of all be prepared to find a new focus to the why at the heart of your organisation. Clarity of shared purpose will speed the agility of your people.  After all, your purpose is why you are and the best guide to what you may be next.

Shorten the long run

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Innovation, Learning

In the long run we are all dead – John Maynard Keynes 
  
The economic concept of the long run is the period that it takes to be able to change every variable in a system.  It is the time it takes a system to adapt fully.  
  
The long run defined this way is a handy concept for an organisation to use when thinking about change.  Your most disruptive threats will pick the variables that you find hardest to change.  Because you cannot or will not change these variables quickly then you will be in danger of losing value to the disruption.  For example: 
 

  • newspapers: struggled to change an economic model where advertising in the paper funded content to attract an audience when internet businesses offered alternatives for both advertisers and audiences
  • music industry: struggled to change their ways of identifying and managing talent and the economics of distribution models tied to physical distribution when digital music distribution disrupted both
  • premium airlines: struggled to change high costs of labour, fixed cost infrastructure and the value perceptions of their other premium offerings when low cost competition attacked

  
If you want to improve your organisation’s ability to respond to disruption, you need to shorten the long run, your adaption time, by speeding up your slowest areas of change.  In most cases these will not be simple decisions.  The slowest areas of change are often those deep in the hidden infrastructure of the organisation.  

One thing you can do is invest in capabilities to help you change all areas of your business more rapidly:

  • people capabilities:  change leadership, talent, agility of structure and performance measurement
  • system capabilities: flexibility of systems, agile development, standardised integration and ability to leverage new technologies in experiments.
  • process capabilities:  continuous improvement, process measurement, agility of change, etc.

The long run is also the end of the period when the ugly impacts of disruption are felt.  We would all like to move faster through the periods of confusion, pain, adjustment & loss and get back to competing aggressively to win. 

Ultimately, it comes down to the culture in the organisation.  Can you build an organisation that has a long run that suits your business and its environment, where you can change the way you think and work fast enough to survive?

If you can’t shorten the long run, then you can guarantee in an era of disruptive innovation, your organisation will be dead.

Trust is a design choice

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Leadership

A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts – Harold Macmillan

At the beginning of any organisation, whether you realise it or not, you are faced with a design choice:

Do I trust my people?

The answer to that question and the culture that grows around that answer determines how so many processes, conversations and other interactions will occur across the organisation.

If you don’t trust your people

Should you be going ahead with your organisation?  Seriously.  Think about it.  They are going to have to act on their own at some point.  Nobody can or should remove every independent decision from another person.  

Can you build their capability to earn your trust?  It is worth investing some money in recruitment and development to avoid the costs ahead in an organisational design without trust.

If you still want to go ahead, prepare yourself for lots of controls, hierarchy, and monitoring processes and people.  A lot of value will be invested in controlling people, managing the lack of trust out of your business so that you can function. You will also be more likely to have silos of power and information separating haves and have nots.  These processes will all impede the agility, engagement, flexibility & potential of your people.  Remember you don’t trust them so that’s what you chose.

Of course, trust may only extend so far. If they are not trusted in one process, do you trust them in others?  Can you explain why the processes differ.  You will need to or the lack of trust will be corrosive to an overall culture of trust.  We all have heard examples of the refrain “I can discuss a $1m deal with a client, but I can’t post a comment on the intranet without approval.”  If there is a reason then you need to be able to explain it. 

Often you hear the excuse “but the consequences of failure are catastrophic, we cannot afford to trust”.  If the consequences of failure are extreme, you need trust more but you might want to think about how you genuinely engage your people in mitigating the risks.  Taking the risks out of their control may be no improvement at all if the result is apathy or lack of responsibility for the risks.

If you trust your people

If you trust your people, focus on the culture of personal accountability in your organisation.  Work to build your people’s capability to that they are better able to exercise that trust.  Give people real meaty challenges to enable them to show your potential.  Ask yourself if you can have a flatter organisation, fewer approvals and put more upon your people.  They might just revel in the challenge and surprise you.

A word about ‘Trust but Verify’

‘Trust but verify’ is a commonly discussed way to enable organisations to loosen the shackles and create a higher trust environment.  In many cases, some verification will be mandated by regulatory or other requirements.  People need follow-up and follow-through to see the reinforcement of their responsibility and to understand that there are consequences of breaches of trust.

However make sure you have the order right.  If your process turns out to be ‘Verify, then Trust’, you have no trust at all.  If someone can’t act on their own and wear the consequences, then you don’t have ‘Trust but Verify’.

The Velocity of Knowledge in Flight

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

“I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.― Mark Twain

Knowledge in flight – faster flight

As you focus on knowledge in flight, you see the power of accelerating the sharing of knowledge.  You also start to be able to see where knowledge has value and is moving.  Focusing on these movements pushes us to think about how we can accelerate the systems of the flow of knowledge into and through our organisation.  Savings of time, waste and rework arise when knowledge can move quickly to where it is most needed.
 
Nobody wants to accelerate the velocity of knowledge as speed for speed’s sake.  If anything one of the challenges of the digital age is we have to much quick data and information.  Instead, we need to accelerate the effective use of knowledge to create additional value across the organisation.  To do so, we will need to accelerate the sourcing, sharing and the practical application of knowledge.
 
How to accelerate sourcing, sharing and use of knowledge?
 
  • Map expertise and tacit knowledge: Tangible knowledge is increasingly searchable.  However too many talents are hidden inside people’s heads.  Do you know all the Postgraduate degrees that your team has?  What about their blogs, conferences, memberships and followers? Networks, skills and experience may not align with roles or responsibilities
  • Reward frequent flyers: Encourage people to share all of their expertise and to explain aloud the tacit knowledge to benefit others.  Track successful contributions back to source & give credit.  Celebrate people’s talents and reward their many contributions beyond their roles.  Build this practice into your organisational culture & systems.
  • Increase flight connections:  The better connected the networks of knowledge in your organisation and your organisation to others the more ways there are for knowledge to flow.  Work to network your centres of excellence, gurus, communities of practice internally and externally. If you use an enterprise social network or external social networks focus on building following and using @mentioning to add new connections and trace paths to knowledge.  Importantly this also incease the opportunities for serendipitous meetings to add value.
  • Build flight paths & schedules:  You travel faster on paths that are mapped in advance and where your path is managed for you.   If there are common requests or known experts, make those paths easier to navigate.  An operating rhythm of sharing allows everyone to plan and participate in a consistently level of the activity.  It may also mean getting slow moving traffic or lower value out of the high traffic routes.  Regular moderated Q&A sessions or knowledge cafes can be a great way to deliver this rhythm in an easy way.
  • Manage delays:  Some times a stop-over allows the overall journey to go faster.  Include time for thought, reflection, planning, documenting, feedback, learning, sharing, collaborating and addressing issues in execution.
  • Reroute flights: Avoid single points of failure for the flow of knowledge in your organisation.  Who else knows and could help if something goes wrong?  What other ways can people access this knowledge?  How do you share jams (leave, large projects, heavy workloads, etc) publicly to let people route around the issue themselves?
  • Cancel flights quickly:   Mark Twain’s quote above is amusing but it underlies a truth.  Organisations which have a culture that allows people to admit lack of knowledge, errors and doubt can move faster and far more effectively.

Data and information is flying around faster than ever.  Even so, we would all like to accelerate the flight of knowledge that can add value to our organisations.

What are you doing to accelerate your organisation’s knowledge in flight?

Track Knowledge in Flight

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

Man’s flight through life is sustained by the power of his knowledge. – Austin ‘Dusty’ Miller

Too much knowledge dies in storage. Much is lost in people’s heads or files never again to be used. Any dead knowledge will be painstakingly and wastefully recreated, only to be lost again. Knowledge management systems that are about creating new stores of knowledge rarely realise their potential.

Knowledge isn’t a stock. We need to focus on its flow. We need ways to see or track knowledge in flight so that we can better use it.

  • Movement means visibility: When knowledge is put into action, especially in collaboration we have a chance to see it. Often an organisation does not know what it knows until its people begin to discuss and answer questions
  • Movement means relevance: We are rightly more interested in the knowledge that is being used by others. The fact that someone else finds it relevant and wants to share and apply it signals that it is of value.
  • Movement means context: Documents and files can lack the context that is necessary to fully understand and use information. This is one reason that effective knowledge management systems focus on the role of people to provide context. Seeing information move provides a path of people who can share context.
  • Movement means others: Action attracts attention. That is likely to draw in others who can add or leverage the knowledge.

There are many ways we can accentuate the visible movement of knowledge. John Stepper talks about the power of ‘working out loud’, sharing work in progress to enable others to see and collaborate. Social tools provide a platform for moving and recording movement of knowledge in a public and searchable way. Communities of practice can become bazaars of knowledge movement and custodians of rich records of use.

Where is knowledge in flight in your organisation? How can you make that movement more visible?

Concentrate on the Flow of Knowledge

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge – Plato

John Stuart Mill was once described, no doubt erroneously, as someone who knew all the knowledge that it was possible for someone to know in his era.  The possibility that there is a finite stock of knowledge is one that tempts us.   Even the concept of ‘knowledge as power’ assumes a scarce stock of knowledge to be allocated out for influence.

In an era of rapid change and high levels of connectedness, what matters is not an individual’s stock of knowledge.  The value of an individual stock of knowledge is falling as new knowledge is being created fast, search costs are reduced and there is an increasing focus on collaborative knowledge work.

Individuals have greatest impact now through their ability to contribute to the flow of knowledge.

Managing the flow of knowledge in networks takes new and different skills:

  • Creators: who add new ideas to the flow of discussions to build knowledge
  • Connectors: who know where to source and distribute knowledge in and around organisations
  • Context providers: who know how to provide new knowledge with context that adds to its trust, value or meaning
  • Community managers: who build enduring communities across boundaries, aid their sharing of knowledge and building of consensus

A pile of publications, patents and Ph.Ds might offer temporary bragging rights.  However, real and enduring value of knowledge comes from its application in our everyday fast moving interactions.

Focus on the flow of knowledge in and around your organisation and you will see better the individuals who are accelerating that flow and creating new value.

Adaptability – Purpose, Context and Enablement

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Strategy

The traditional models of leadership focus on clear instructions and measurement of specific actions. Hierarchical command and control was developed in military organisations intent on bring order to the disorder of large numbers of people on complex battlefields. In a rapidly changing world, there’s a danger that this command and control model completely breaks down – too slow, too rigid and too ineffective to achieve its goals. In many cases, the first people to change their thinking have been the military

Years ago, I heard a talk by Lieutenant Colonel James McMahon who was at one time commander of the Australian SAS forces in Afghanistan. His advice to a group of aspiring business leaders was always explain what was known of the situation and be clear on the purpose, but never dictate how the mission should be achieved. Highly engaged, skillful and creative teams will find ways to deal with complexity and change that will achieve the mission and surprise you. His stories of the resourcefulness of Australian troops in a complex and changing environment were remarkable.

The role of leaders is to set a purpose and a context and to enable people to act fast and effectively on their own decisions to achieve success. US Air Force Col John Boyd described the concept of the OODA loop. The OODA loop highlights that there is strategic advantage in being faster than competitors at observing, orienting, deciding and then acting. Organisations that are quicker round this loop will be harder for their competitors to predict, have a better view of competitor’s actions & intentions and be better at execution.

Clarifying purpose and context accelerates teams through the Observe and Orient stages of the OODA loop. Activities like briefings, induction, Scenarios and role plays are great to help people to build understanding and skills in anticipating what might be encountered. They know faster where they are and where they want to go.

Building enablement will accelerate the ability to Decide and Act. However, you need to choose and skill people for their ability to decide and act to achieve success on their own. You also need to leave decision making in the hands of the individual to act and respond to the changing circumstances that they see.

There are always trade offs. Maybe the observation and orientation won’t be perfect on the ground, but it is rarely better at a distance. Maybe the decision making and action won’t be as sophisticated as it could be, but speed and adaptability is usually more important than perfection.

Give up a little command and control. Focus instead on providing purpose and context. Then enable your teams to adapt with maximum speed and effectiveness.