Category: Uncategorized

End Collaboration Silos

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

 

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Help the Future of Work break out of its silo. The social collaboration & leadership required for the future of work is central to how we organise for human potential & productivity, not a bolt on. We can’t create great Responsive Organisations playing around the edges.

Why bother with the Social Collaboration? Isn’t that an HR issue?

Ask most CEOs and they will tell you they wish their people could better leverage what they collectively know. Look closely at the broken processes in your organisation and you will find consistent issues of poor engagement, knowledge management or collaboration. Senior managers want to be more ‘digital and more agile’ but they are frustrated they can’t generate more innovation and change in their organisations. The poor customer outcomes, broken processes and the purposeless work that results are at the heart of the issues impacting productivity, employee engagement and the customer experience. 

Each of these issues are a sign that traditional management mindsets and approaches are failing to deliver what our organisations need. Importantly they are also failing to realise the potential of people at work. Yet most organisations respond to these issues with more of same structures and systems along with more technology and more management effort. We need an alternative that better leverages human potential, networks and social collaboration. The people who work in the organisation need to be a part of building that alternative. Building that alternative is the Future of Work and it will take leadership and collaboration.

Get Human Potential out of a Silo and into Work

Transformation requires a new conversation about how we work leveraging new organisational structures, new approaches and technologies. The fact that many organisations can’t decide who owns enterprise collaboration technology is a terrible start. We need to shift from questions of who owns collaboration. Traditional thinking leaves ideas like leadership, collaboration, organisational design and the future of work to soft functions and lets hard managers deal with organisational processes and performance.

The future of work offers an exponential opportunity to realise the potential of people. Realising this opportunity will take enterprise-wide leadership & change. You can’t realise people’s full potential without offering them the opportunity to change the core structures, systems and processes of the organisation. Until leaders use enterprise collaboration to create systemic change, it can’t generate the kinds of benefits management wants. If new ways of work stay on the periphery, at best they work only as an employee engagement bandaid.  At worst, they are just technologies organisations have to be trendy.

Collaboration silos and layers lose momentum and fail eventually because collaboration is human and purposeful people need to be empowered to create real change in their day-to-day work. Customers & employees want whole systems of work to improve, not just parts or peripheral tasks.  Without the pressure of demonstrating impact for people to improve their day-to-day work, competing collaboration solutions flourish to the frustration of employees, generating new silos that undermine the benefits for all. Positive impact on the value of work for an employee is a critical test of the value of any collaboration solution.

Moving Collaboration out of the Silo and to Value

Here are a few first steps to help your organisation leverage the potential of its employees and embrace the Future of Work:

  • Embrace the development of human potential: Make the measure of leadership in the organisation the delivery of results through the development of people’s potential.  Anything less is just management and wastes the potential of your people to help.
  • Explore transparency: Ask leaders to role model working out loud. Help them understand the new mindsets. Encourage employees across the organisation to work out loud too. Shift the default disclosure model to open sharing of information in a culture of trust.
  • Empower people to improve their work: Start a leadership conversation at all levels in your organisation about how work can be improved. Define value as value to a customer or other external stakeholder. Give your people the power to make changes as a result of the conversation. Leaders will need to support, participate and facilitate. A critical role for leaders is to ensure participation of others. The conversation will fail if processes or silos are off limits to change.
  • Experiment and learn: Give your people permission and the capability to experiment with creating value in new ways of working. Embrace learning and ensure that the successful experiments are adopted as wide scale change 

With the right leadership conversation, your organisation will begin to explore new models of trust, new ways to create value and start to discover its purpose on this journey. You will know your employees are embracing this new model when they begin to question the other structures & systems in your organisation, like organisational structures, performance management processes or technology systems, that get in the way of their productivity and potential. Your next challenge will be to work with your people to change these bigger systems to realise further value from work.

That work leads directly into the future of work and to a much more responsive organisation. 

 

Image source: Grain Silo by Hakan Dahlstrom

End Collaboration Silos

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Help the Future of Work break out of its silo. The social collaboration & leadership required for the future of work is central to how we organise for human potential & productivity, not a bolt on. We can’t create great Responsive Organisations playing around the edges.

Why bother with the Social Collaboration? Isn’t that an HR issue?

Ask most CEOs and they will tell you they wish their people could better leverage what they collectively know. Look closely at the broken processes in your organisation and you will find consistent issues of poor engagement, knowledge management or collaboration. Senior managers want to be more ‘digital and more agile’ but they are frustrated they can’t generate more innovation and change in their organisations. The poor customer outcomes, broken processes and the purposeless work that results are at the heart of the issues impacting productivity, employee engagement and the customer experience. 

Each of these issues are a sign that traditional management mindsets and approaches are failing to deliver what our organisations need. Importantly they are also failing to realise the potential of people at work. Yet most organisations respond to these issues with more of same structures and systems along with more technology and more management effort. We need an alternative that better leverages human potential, networks and social collaboration. The people who work in the organisation need to be a part of building that alternative. Building that alternative is the Future of Work and it will take leadership and collaboration.

Get Human Potential out of a Silo and into Work

Transformation requires a new conversation about how we work leveraging new organisational structures, new approaches and technologies. The fact that many organisations can’t decide who owns enterprise collaboration technology is a terrible start. We need to shift from questions of who owns collaboration. Traditional thinking leaves ideas like leadership, collaboration, organisational design and the future of work to soft functions and lets hard managers deal with organisational processes and performance.

The future of work offers an exponential opportunity to realise the potential of people. Realising this opportunity will take enterprise-wide leadership & change. You can’t realise people’s full potential without offering them the opportunity to change the core structures, systems and processes of the organisation. Until leaders use enterprise collaboration to create systemic change, it can’t generate the kinds of benefits management wants. If new ways of work stay on the periphery, at best they work only as an employee engagement bandaid.  At worst, they are just technologies organisations have to be trendy.

Collaboration silos and layers lose momentum and fail eventually because collaboration is human and purposeful people need to be empowered to create real change in their day-to-day work. Customers & employees want whole systems of work to improve, not just parts or peripheral tasks.  Without the pressure of demonstrating impact for people to improve their day-to-day work, competing collaboration solutions flourish to the frustration of employees, generating new silos that undermine the benefits for all. Positive impact on the value of work for an employee is a critical test of the value of any collaboration solution.

Moving Collaboration out of the Silo and to Value

Here are a few first steps to help your organisation leverage the potential of its employees and embrace the Future of Work:

  • Embrace the development of human potential: Make the measure of leadership in the organisation the delivery of results through the development of people’s potential.  Anything less is just management and wastes the potential of your people to help.
  • Explore transparency: Ask leaders to role model working out loud. Help them understand the new mindsets. Encourage employees across the organisation to work out loud too. Shift the default disclosure model to open sharing of information in a culture of trust.
  • Empower people to improve their work: Start a leadership conversation at all levels in your organisation about how work can be improved. Define value as value to a customer or other external stakeholder. Give your people the power to make changes as a result of the conversation. Leaders will need to support, participate and facilitate. A critical role for leaders is to ensure participation of others. The conversation will fail if processes or silos are off limits to change.
  • Experiment and learn: Give your people permission and the capability to experiment with creating value in new ways of working. Embrace learning and ensure that the successful experiments are adopted as wide scale change 

With the right leadership conversation, your organisation will begin to explore new models of trust, new ways to create value and start to discover its purpose on this journey. You will know your employees are embracing this new model when they begin to question the other structures & systems in your organisation, like organisational structures, performance management processes or technology systems, that get in the way of their productivity and potential. Your next challenge will be to work with your people to change these bigger systems to realise further value from work.

That work leads directly into the future of work and to a much more responsive organisation. 

 

Image source: Grain Silo by Hakan Dahlstrom

Leaders help realise potential

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

An insightful quote by David Foster Wallace on leadership in which he describes leadership in terms of the development of human potential

A leader’s real “authority” is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn’t ever get to on your own.

In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own

Authority is earned. Authority comes when others judge you ready. Development of the potential of others in your networks is the work.

How are you working to earn the authority of others? How do you help them realise a potential that they couldn’t reach on their own? Show that potential and people will follow.

That is the future of leadership

Swapping Hard and Soft

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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 and engineering 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/

Human Potential is Exponential

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Managing the productivity of people is increasingly important as our economy adjusts to increasing an increasing share of knowledge work. For many organisations labour is already the most significant cost of production.

Many organisations adopt a traditional efficiency management mindset when it comes to managing people. The view that their people have a fixed potential contribution means that the organisation will miss the opportunity that flows from increasing human potential.

Leverage the Growing Potential of People

People are the most unique input to your production process. Their contributions offer the potential for exponential increases in value. The potential of people is not fixed. You will struggle to make steel exponentially more useful in your process but you can quickly help your people to create exponential increases in value in their work.

We know people’s skill can increase over time as the learn and gain experience in their roles.  Most organisations work to foster the learning of its people to better leverage their growing productivity from new skills. Growth in skills delivers significant improvements in the potential of your people.

As benefit of the leadership conversations to develop people you also discover that your people have capabilities to contribute to your organisation in ways far beyond their current role & performance. Leveraging this potential through new assignments, new challenges and new roles is essential to development of talent and better performance.

Networks Accelerate Potential

However, people have one other critical capability over most factors of production. People can also network to accelerate their learning and productivity. Metcalfe’s law tells us that in a network the value increases exponentially with the number of people connected. People working, learning and sharing in a network experience this exponential impact on their potential.

How can networking with others, through working out loud deliver exponential increases in value to people working in your organisation?

Networks enables your people to realise greater potential through:

  • greater access to knowledge, a faster pace of knowledge flow and most importantly accelerated opportunities for people to share and to learn from each other
  • access to consult perspectives, skills and experience that they have not yet acquired through conversations with peers and others.
  • the ability to accelerate the growth of their own personal connections by leveraging networks to find additional friends, colleagues, stakeholders, experts or others who can help add value to their work
  • building purpose, trust & engagement within and outside your organisation. Lack of trust is a major barrier to productivity in organisations. A sense of purpose and engagement have major influences on people’s contributions at work, particularly discretionary efforts.

Most importantly of all, people aren’t just an input to your work. People organised and empowered by networks can work together on improving your system & processes of work. All of a sudden you have the potential for major leaps in the value of your work as collaboration drives innovation. 

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If you are wondering how to get started to leverage the exponential potential of your people in networks, then Harold Jarche just described the way to get going with working out loud, personal knowledge management, distributing authority and building a common vision.

Killing the Golden Goose: From Waste to Potential

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The origins of management have embedded a fixed mindset of human potential in management practice. The resulting efficiency narrative leaves us fearing volatility and battling the threat of waste. We need to embrace the opportunity of a growth mindset and lead the development of human potential.   

Golden Goose Co Limited

Imagine you were entrusted management of 12 golden geese. Because the eggs they produce are all golden they won’t breed. As the manager of the golden geese all you can manage is their efficiency of production. Achieving the daily maximum of eggs is all that is possible.  

The manager of Golden Goose Co Limited lives in fear of any volatility in performance, any change in circumstances or any threat to the geese.  The most likely outcome from that change is a drop in production. The golden goose manager’s job in life is fight the geese’s inevitable extinction and deliver maximum efficiency of production in the meantime.

Which Management Narrative: Waste or Potential?

Human potential is not a golden goose. We are intelligent & creative, we can improve, learn, innovate, collaborate and grow. However, early management thinkers like Frederick Winslow Taylor viewed the challenge of management of maximising the efficiency of the labour resource, treating employees as a golden goose with a maximum limit of contribution. Time and motion, performance management and other tools were developed to maximise the fixed contribution from a resource that wasn’t expected to develop beyond a limited skill set of contributions.

The idea that management faces a threat of lost employee productivity and must do battle to maximise efficiency of production is a major narrative of management. As John Hagel has outlined, threat based narratives can build a strong unity of culture, but at the cost of conservatism and a focus on preservation.

Tim Kastelle recently highlighted that management is often deeply concerned at any sign of volatility of performance.  As the manager of Golden Goose Co Limited, volatility would get you fired. We go to enormous lengths to embed our desire to eradicate volatility from management, even to the extent where often the implicit purpose of our organisational structures and practices is to embed execution of only the current business model.

The management mindset of efficiency with an implicit fixed mindset of human productivity is akin to Carol Dweck’s Fixed mindset of intelligence.  The consequences for management behaviour are similar avoiding challenges, ignoring valuable feedback and feeling threatened by competitive success.

United in their battle against waste, managers with this traditional mindset are battling the extinction of the golden goose under the forces of disruption. Nothing more.

Growing Potential is the Work of Leaders

The rapidly changing and disruptive environment in which we work means we need to start managing the ability of human potential to grow.  We need a new growth mindset and to develop a new opportunity narrative for management that embraces human potential.

Any work that can be automated will be automated, including more and more sophisticated knowledge work. The role of leaders is increasingly less about the focus on managing waste as the golden goose approach is being disrupted by the innovation of others. Increasingly Harold Jarche argues leaders should manage talent. Leadership is the technology of human potential.

Managers need to start embracing this leadership and focusing on the opportunity narrative that is embedded in human history. We have shown consistently that human creativity is the best source of productivity improvement. Focusing on improving effectiveness, defined as success in producing an outcome, allows a far greater contribution from the people involved in the work and keeps our attention focused on best ways to realise the goals, not the processes.

The productivity improvement from creativity and potential far exceeds that of human management. Ongoing experiments like scientific learning, our global networks and our start-up culture prove the human potential to improve outcomes through learning, creativity and innovation. The Toyota Management System shows that human potential can and will grow in the exact industrial manufacturing context that Ford and Taylor helped invent, when given the opportunity by the management system.

When managers focus on growing human potential to improve effectiveness, this growth mindset redefines the game and pushes changes in the other systems that define our modern organisations. Purpose and goals come first. Engagement is no longer an after thought. Experimentation is a core practice. Collaboration and cooperation are seen as human opportunities to work and not sources of waste & distraction. Volatility is embraced as a source of potential learning. Most importantly of all the new narrative respects and embraces the potential of all in organisations to lead and to contribute.

That is a future of work worth seeing. So let’s kill the golden goose mindset of management and focus instead on leading the potential of people.

 

Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/geese-birds-birds-flying-waterfoul-258749/

Governance is a Leadership Conversation

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Governance best practice requires a vibrant conversation that shares the diverse insights & experience of directors so that organisations can make better decisions. We need to focus as much on the quality of the conversations and the networks of the directors as we do their experience and expertise.

Directors are chosen for their experience, insights and expertise. The role of a director participating in a governance process is to bring their personal capabilities to bear helping the management of the organisation to make better decisions. However, experience, insights and expertise will go to waste if the directors are not part of an effective conversation and if their networks are not keeping them up to date.

Focus on the conversation at board level

A vibrant conversation is one with rich and relevant contributions from all parties. A vibrant conversation is engaging because it is an exercise in joint learning. Directors and management working together to understand how best to proceed leveraging their collective insights and experience. Both the chair and management need to help facilitate this process of learning and encourage an engaging and effective conversation.

If a board conversation is predictable, agenda driven, runs to only the papers or dominated by a few voices, particularly those of management or a chair, then there is a good chance that the governance process is failing. Disrupting a comfortable board to improve its function takes leadership, tact and courage.

Questions matter as much as expertise. Questions are also a powerful source of disruption to patterned thinking. While a director brings expertise, that capability is more engagingly used to frame provocative questions for the board and management to consider. Great questions prompt reflection, draw out new perspectives and can change the understanding of all involved in the conversation. Well framed questions respect others ability to contribute and to learn.

Questions also highlight the potential of conflict to frame and define an issue. If everyone is in agreement all the time, then nobody is required around the table. The role of a governance process is to interrupt this experience with relevant pushback. One of the benefits of a diversity in a governance process is it is more likely to surface other relevant questions and perspectives to be considered.

The learning nature of any governance conversation should extend to the effectiveness of the conversation. Double-loop learning that looks at the process as well as the content accelerates effectiveness. The best question to finish any discussion at board level should be “How can we have a better conversation next time?”

Broaden the Conversation with Networks

The second way to improve the governance process is to broaden the inputs to the conversation at board level. The networks of the directors and other stakeholders around the organisation can be a critical source of other views and considerations.

If a board is considering a highly technical issue, they may well reach out to engage experts, peers or friends who has deeper expertise in that area. Board processes should encourage this leverage of the networks around directors and the organisation as a regular exercise. In our rapidly changing networked era, the networks from which directors may gather insights can stretch globally mediated by technology. Leveraging and improving this flow of knowledge will help directors and organisations stay current on latest thinking and also diversify their thinking. Being well networked as a director is an antidote to disruption.

Stakeholders around an organisation are also an important network for directors to consider in the governance process.  How often do directors engage with customers, suppliers, communities and other key stakeholders of the organisation? Do directors have access to critical information from these conversation?  For example, reading verbatim customer complaints can be a rich source of insight for a board that is not captured in metrics of customer satisfaction. Stakeholder engagement also creates new awareness of accountabilities that can be critical to improving performance in an organisation.

Governance is a Leadership Conversation

Playing a governance role should not be easy or risk free. All participants in a governance process need to be helping make conversations more effective for the organisation. Governance is a leadership role and as leaders boards need to consider the effectiveness of their conversations and the value of their networks.

Change the Conversation

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A large part of the history of our technology has been the effort to use technology to control human behaviour. Technology transformation is often sold on the potential to better make humans do things that they should be doing. The failure of so many transformational technology programs is proof that human behavioural changes are a subtler and more elusive challenge. Changing the conversation is as important as changing the process.

The Business Case for Technology Transformation

Leadership mindsets from the industrial era often lead to the management question:

“What can we do to make people do the right thing?’.

Technology transformation is sold on a promise of offering the answer. Too commonly management will choose a new technology system or process as delivering a way to make people ‘do better’. For example:

  • Customer Relationship Management systems will deliver better conversations with customers and better sales force productivity
  • Human resources systems will deliver better talent, engagement and performance conversations and better compliance with required processes
  • Business Process Management systems will enable better and more granular control of the processes that people use to do the work
  • Enterprise collaboration tools will make an organisation more collaborative
  • Knowledge management tools will make organisations better informed
  • Better analytical tools using big data will deliver better decisions in organisations  

However, these technologies are usually only an infrastructure to support new behaviours and new conversations. Their capabilities underpin human behaviour. New processes will encourage change. New data capture and reporting may help measure activity. Without a willingness to change to new behaviours from users, the systems alone cannot make change without risk of major disruption or disengagement.

Technology rarely can require a new behaviour or a new conversation. Human creativity enables remarkable ways to cling to old ways in the face of new technology. Even to the extent that these technologies deliver better measurement of human activity, organisations are often frustrated to discover that the ability to measure and target activity simply generates activities to solely meet the measures, not behavioural change. Quantities are achieved as the cost of both productivity and quality. 

Change the Conversation 

Changing the leadership question can have a dramatic impact on how an organisation makes decisions. Here’s a different question for management to ask about a transformation of technology:

‘What do our people need to better deliver our goals?’

There are a number of advantages that flow from changing the conversation around change and transformation in this way:

  • Engaging your users: Instead of assuming management or a technology vendor has the answers, the question opens up a conversations for people who do the work to contribute and learn. Treat your employees as skilled knowledge workers and respect their creativity and opinions. These people will have the best context on what is causing the issues and what support they need.  Engaging their input will be the most powerful element of change in performance. At the end of the day, the behaviours that need to change are theirs.
  • Change the leadership conversation: Shifting from a control mindset to one that is about realising the potential of the team is a powerful change in an organisational conversation. A transformation can be a key way to help accelerate this change in mindset. If employees feel trusted and are free to share, many people will highlight the way that the leaders themselves may need to change as part of that transformation too.  The best change begins with those seeking to drive change.
  • You may not need new tools or a new process: How many systems have been implemented to solve issues which were simply a lack of clarity of purpose or objectives of work? Do people need new skills or capabilities instead of new systems? Do people need new freedoms, approaches & leadership support to respond in an agile way to market needs? Consider alternatives and additional elements to enable the behaviour changes that arise.
  • Inconsistent demands on people:  Engaging your people in change will highlight areas where you are being inconsistent. In a siloed organisation systems often work at cross purposes. Are you sure that all the other elements of your systems & culture reinforce the right goals? For example, it is common for people in sales and service roles to experience that their time is used up with low value compliance tasks. As a result high value customer tasks will get pushed from the system. Forcing additional compliance will only make that worse. If performance management systems and the real leadership conversations in your organisation work against your new system, it is dead before it is even deployed.
  • Engaging outside the organisation: Do your customers want to give you the data that you need for your new CRM or analytics system? Does the change in sales approach or work process improve their experience as well? Will great talent be rewarded by working in your performance management system? Are you sure you can articulate the value of these changes to external stakeholders? Your people will need to do so. Your people’s reluctance to do your view of ‘the right thing’ might be saving you from broader issues with customers or other stakeholders.
  • Pace of change: Changing systems takes time. When will the system need to change again to adapt to a rapidly changing market? Are your people holding back because they can see the next change coming? Are you better to focus on your ability to change behaviours in more agile ways than through changing technology systems?

Technology transformation can be a powerful enabler of organisational change. However, it is merely an enabler. Changing the leadership conversation is often the critical element to ensuring the success of a transformational change.

Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/ravens-black-birds-conversation-236333/