Tag: leadership

Networks Demand Leadership. Make Your Choice. Act.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Leadership in networks is less about the position you are assigned. The opportunity is the role you choose and the challenge is building authority. The job might be assigned, but the role is chosen and your authority is earned. The networks in and around your organisation are waiting for you to act. If you don’t act, they will move on without you.

Networks solve obstructions

Networks route around obstructions. One potential source of obstruction is the formal roles in an organisation, the hierarchy and the resulting silos.  What results is a wirearchy which Jon Husband has described as

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Think about your organisation. There is a formal process to get a decision made, but everyone knows that the real decisions don’t follow the process. There is informal lobbying. Often someone who is not the decision maker is hugely influential. People chat casually testing positions. Additional information is shared. Deals are done. Trust and credibility play a key role in influencing the ultimate decision, often more than the facts on the table.

These actions are all examples of a network working around the potential obstruction of a hierarchical role or process. These conversations are all examples of how ‘two-way flow of power and authority’ is shaped by people’s actions to demonstrate ‘knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results’.

You are a potential obstruction

If you aren’t results focused, aren’t performing the roles required or the network doesn’t have confidence in your actions, a network of people working together will start to route around you.  Your failure to lead others becomes an obstruction. No matter how fancy your title or your place in the hierarchy the network will start solving for the obstruction that you represent. The network in and around every hierarchy is what makes the hierarchy functional.

To avoid being an obstruction, you need to focus on your authority and fulfilling the roles that advance the needs of the organisation and its networks. Your job won’t save you.

Authority takes Action

Leadership in networks is not an abstract and exalted status. Every person in a network is connected. Leadership is demonstrated when people take on needed roles and others move to action.

Leadership is the technology of realising human potential. Leadership is the technology that inspires and enables others to action. That takes a decision to embrace a role, action, influence and authority.  In networks, including the networks wrapped around your hierarchy, that authority comes from action, not position.

The differences in influence and ability to create value come through action.  Action is what builds authority.  The best way for someone to assess your ‘knowledge, trust, credibility and focus on results is to experience it’.  Authority grows influence with other people in the network and that accelerates further action. 

Networks and Network Leadership is not Bounded

If a network needs to go around or outside the hierarchy to solve a problem it does. All it takes is a connection for your network to extend further. Network leaders need to ensure that their leadership goes outside their hierarchies as well.

Customers, community, other stakeholders all influence your knowledge, credibility, trust and focus on results. Sharing the voice of the customer or the community can be a significant part of influencing change. Try to have influence internally without influence externally and you will find over time that your credibility erodes. Celine Schillinger has described how change agents can find that they need to build credibility externally to be more influential in their internal networks.

Leadership is a Choice. A Choice to Act.

Taking on a leadership role is a choice. It is a choice to help others make something happen and enable them to realise their potential. Whether you are in a hierarchy or a network matters little. The same rules apply. The choices that you make, the knowledge that you gather, the influence you build through credibility and trust determine your authority as a leader and whether others will follow.

Nobody has to follow you. Our hierarchies are a fiction that supports our need for status, order and clarity. The networks in and around your organisation know that and work around the hierarchy every day.  

That same network is waiting for your choices and the actions that follow.

Every Conversation Counts

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leadership is how we realise human potential. Leadership is conversation. Every conversation counts. Don’t miss your chance.

Maya Angelou: …I mean, I mentor you. Everything I have learned, everything I’ve done, is at the ready when I talk to you. And in a way, you will never forget me.

Interviewer: Believe me, I won’t.

Maya Angelou: What I mean is you may forget how and where you got it, but in a few weeks, a few months, years from now, you will say something and think, Oh, I’m glad that came to me.

from a Maya Angelou interview in the Harvard Business Review

Leadership occurs or fails to occur in every interaction we have with others. Either we contribute to enabling that person to find purpose, to take action or to build capability or we miss an opportunity. Opportunities missed do not recur. The interaction that happens leaves a mark for good or leaves the other person with a query over the relationship

Realising human potential takes many conversations. You can’t impose purpose, commitment to action or learning on another. Talking at someone is the surest way to lose any opportunity to for any of these three critical elements of human potential. The fastest, simplest and most effective ways to undermine your leadership are failing to engage fully, having a surface level discussion or failing to authentically share all of your ability to assist.

In networks, where communication may be bound by looser ties of relationship and mediated by technology, mindful, purposeful and authentic conversation is an even more important practice. Leading in networks demands influential and insightful conversations to draw out and realise human potential. Human potential and the value it can create will only be realised where your conversations lead another person to learning, trust and commitment to act differently. You need to bring your whole self to have a chance of achieving that kind of change.

Follow Maya Angelou, bring everything to your next conversation and every conversation thereafter. Help another find a path to their potential. The impact of each conversation is the mark of your leadership.

How are you going to bring everything to your next conversation?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A leader sees greatness in other people. You can’t be much of a leader if all you see is yourself. Only equals make friends. A man or woman who sees other people as whole and prepared and accords them respect and the same rights has arranged his or her own allies

Maya Angelou whose leadership, works and wisdom with be with us forever.
Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One minute video on How to Build a Responsive Organization

The Slides used in this video are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/simon_g_terry/building-the-responsive-organization

Credits:

Hacked from The Responsive Organization slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/responsiveorg/the-responsive-organisation-a-framework-for-changing-how-your-organisation-works

Book: http://pixabay.com/en/open-book-page-pages-books-163975/

Music: B-roll by Kevin Macleod http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A one-minute video on The Responsive Organisation. We need to lead the changes in the future of work to make our organisations more responsive to customers and community and to realise human potential.

The video is hacked from The Responsive Org slide deck. Why don’t you hack your own?  

Additional credits:

Dinosaur: http://pixabay.com/en/dinosaur-allosaurus-skeleton-bone-60588/

S&P 500 Chart: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519226/technology-is-wiping-out-companies-faster-than-ever/

Supermarket aisle: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supermercato_vuoto.jpg

No Frills Cumbia – Kevin Macleod: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

When Circumstances Change, Change Your Approach

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Uncategorized

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Changing circumstances demand changes in approach. Clinging to the old ways can be dangerous.

The Praying Mantis in the Schoolyard

When confronted with a threat, a praying mantis has a set program of responses to take advantage of the advantages of excellent camouflage: freeze & blend in, sway like a leaf, run to the nearest tree. All these strategies work well in the normal circumstances of a praying mantis, the leafy greenery of trees.

However when the wind is blowing strongly and a praying mantis finds itself blown to the unfamiliar circumstances of schoolyard asphalt, none of these strategies work. It can’t blend in. Freezing exposes it to risk of being stomped. What it runs towards is not a tree. It is the leg of a small curious boy. In the end, it need a generous young girl to carry it back to the bushes to escape the growing crowd.

Change Your Approach

A praying mantis can’t change its approach immediately. Evolution will take a while to catch up with asphalt. It will eventually adapt as a species, but that doesn’t help any individual insect.

Your organisation isn’t programmed by genetics. When circumstances change, your organisation and its people can adopt new approaches, experiment to find new ways and learn how to succeed in the new environment. If your organisation is still responding to the new network economy with the same approaches and practices that worked in the industrial era, it can be as dangerous as outdated practices were to the mantis. Nobody will be generous enough to return your organisation to its preferred environment.

There is No Formula – Just Learning

Many managers find this discussion deeply unsettling. Advocates of the future of work are calling for change, but they are often either highly conceptual or discussing concepts that seem very alien to the circumstances in an organisation.

The abstraction has a reason. The future of work is being driven by a network economy where the right strategies are often emergent and adaptive. Adopting a new fixed formula is as dangerous as the last one. While we would like a formula (and many offer to sell one), the future strategies need to be learned for each organisation in its own circumstances in the network.  Change can’t be imposed it needs to be led one conversation at a time.

Creating a responsive organisation that can leverage the human potential to learn and experiment a way forward will take new techniques and new ways of organising.  Many of these techniques that are rising to the fore in discussion of the future of work and responsive organisations are ways to foster the emergence of a new better approaches for organisation using networks, rather than fighting them.  That’s why much of the conversation comes back to enabling people to learn and act in new ways:

  • Leadership: fostering the leadership capabilities of each person to leverage their insights and their potential to lead change from their unique position
  • Experimentation: Moving from exercising the power and expertise of a few to experimenting to learn together
  • Learning: improving the ability to understand the environment by focusing on tools to better seek out, share and make sense of information.
  • Work out Loud: aligning the organisation and bringing out latent human capabilities using techniques like ‘working out loud’
  • Collaboration & Community: Networks route around barriers. Therefore you need to bring down the barriers within and around your organisation. Isolation is not a winning strategy in a period of rapid change.

Lead Culture Change From the Outside-in

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leaders need an external perspective to change culture in organisations.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” – David Foster Wallace

In a recent twitter chat, the question was asked “Why do organisations decide to change their culture?”  At first I thought that was obvious, but on deeper reflection I realised the answer wasn’t always clear cut.

Culture, which is a pattern of predictable behaviours in a group of people, can be like water to fish. The patterns are so predictable we often can’t see them. Inside a culture, all the pressures are to conform.

Leaders who see the need for change in culture in an organisation do so because they are connected to and embrace external perspectives. Through their exposure to the world around the organisation, they can see:

  • externally pressures for a change such as the feedback of competitors, analysts, customers, community, regulators, etc
  • the organisation has to respond to new norms that are being adopted in society, the industry or other organisations
  • better practices are in use by other managers externally and could be leveraged
  • the attractive aspects of other cultures to the talented people leaving to other organisations or to the disgruntled people in your own organisation; or
  • the different mindsets an externally appointed CEO or group of managers might bring.

If your small group of executives want to build a movement for change in culture, you will need to start by connecting to an external perspective that can help them and others see the need for change. You can’t change if you can’t see the behaviour or the need for it to change.

A critical role for change leaders is to help foster an outside-in perspective in an organisation. Social collaboration is an important way to surface and share new views and create new accountability & energy for change.

Start bringing in and sharing customer views. They are usually easiest to incorporate into your company conversation and often quite disruptive. Then broaden your perspectives to competitors and other industries. Ultimately you will want to engage a diverse range of stakeholders to understand where your settled patterns of behaviour might need disruption.

Engaging critics and supporters will not tell you what you need to do. However, Each of these disruptions are an opportunity to reflect on how you want people in the organisation to behave consistently differently to build new and better patterns.

Because culture is like water to a fish, we are often unaware of its impacts unless an external perspective makes us stop and reflect. Leaders must help create the conversations with an external orientation to remind us continually that:

‘This is Water’

The One Success Secret to Social Collaboration in the Future of Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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There is a lot of advice out there for organisations trying to achieve success in social collaboration and new ways of working. The future of work is very popular now so there is a lot of effort to sell the newness, the complexity and its special nature. Much of that advice makes efforts at social collaboration sound difficult to achieve or alien, if you are working today in a traditional organisation.

Despite all that discussion, there is one practice that helps make initiatives in social collaboration successful and increases the value that is created in the future of work. That practice is simply:

Treat it as just work

We work collaboratively every day

Every day people collaborate at work. Mostly they don’t call it collaboration. Instead, it is seen as having a conversation, sending an email, persuading someone, getting advice, getting help or working together on a task or project.

Social collaboration extends the opportunities of who can engage in this collaboration. Social collaboration tools enable this kind of work to be done with more people, faster and with better ability to leverage the knowledge created. If social collaboration tools don’t make it easier or better to do this kind of work, then users won’t and shouldn’t use them.

Treating social collaboration as a special activity distinct from work confuses people. They debate when they should use this special collaboration. They question the value of collaboration. They can’t see the point. And each time they go back to their work and start collaborating with others again.

Work is why we share information

Many people can immediately see the value of social collaboration as a way to share information. Your enterprise social network looks like Facebook. Your corporate blogs look like the ones in the public domain. Your wikis and knowledge management systems may even be familiar too.

However, this familiarity makes people uncomfortable at work. Clearly we don’t usually share the same information at work as we do in Facebook.  Many people ask: What should I share? What do I have that is worthwhile to share? What will happen if I share the wrong thing?

However in any organisation the best reason to share information is to work. People share information to do work together and to create value. Connecting with work colleagues, working out loud, solving work problems collaboratively and innovating with others are the reasons we share information at work.

Work isn’t special

Treating social collaboration as work addresses other issues that organisations face as they move into the future of work.

You have the policies, processes or campaigns to do your work. You don’t need special approaches to start social collaboration. Your normal work rules and processes should cover your social collaboration too, including rules on privacy & confidentiality, behaviours and performance processes.  If these approaches break, constrain or prevent new forms of social collaboration, there is a good chance they don’t work for other forms of collaborative work and should be changed. Don’t create special rules.

Do you gamify your daily work processes? If you don’t gamify everyday work, don’t gamify engagement with a social platform. Remember it is the work that creates the value, not the adoption. Don’t confuse the tool with the result.

Don’t start with special things. Start by helping your people to do their work better. If your organisation has never ever sought any input to its product development processes, doing a special product ideation session can be valuable, but it is a terrible way to start a social collaboration journey (especially if you fail to follow through on the ideas). You don’t want people building an idea that a social collaboration tool as something for special, rare & unique events. You want people realising its potential to do work and solve work problems each day.

Treating social collaboration as work also addresses why senior executives and other leaders should participate. This is not a special domain. This is where the work gets done. If you want to lead, lead here too. 

Work Creates Value

Most importantly, considering social collaboration as work drives our attention to the question of the value that the work adds.  When we work, we know we need to work more efficiently and find ways to make our work add value. That is part of the deal with work.

Focusing on social collaboration as work also reminds us that we should work to realise our strategy as an organisation. The collaboration must realise the organisation’s goals and the goals of the individuals who need to work.  Collaboration for its own sake is a waste.

Start Working to Work Better.

Social collaboration is the same. We shouldn’t focus on the tools. We should focus on the value of the work we do and how we can do better.

If you want to create value from social collaboration and new ways of working, start by treating it as work. Then ask people to improve their work. Experiment and make changes to make work more productive and effective each day. You will need to change processes, policies and organisational structures over time, but you will be guided by the collaboration of your people. That is the way to realise the human potential in your organisation.

The journey won’t be easy. There will be setbacks and lessons to be learned. People will need to learn new ways and adapt to change but an engaged group of people working together will create greater value for your organisation over time.  

That sounds just like work too.

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The Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate maturity model assists organisations to accelerate the value of the work their people do in social collaboration tools in practical ways.  Accelerating the progress of collaborative work from Connection to Innovation significantly increases the returns to individuals and the organisation from new ways of work.  Importantly it also engages people in shaping the future of work in their organisation. If you would like to learn more, please get in touch.