Tag: leadership

The New to Social Executive: Actions to Get Ready

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration

As a senior executive starting to use social collaboration there will be a little nervousness when you engage at first, unless you are supremely confident or incredibly extroverted. You need opportunities to practice your new mindsets and learn new skills of social collaboration before you hit the main game. Even if you are confident and extroverted, you may need practice, because you may need to learn to adjust to the expectations of others.

Here are a few actions to help the new-to-social executive to get ready for the art of social collaboration: 

  1. Start by being social: The technology is just a facilitator of conversations. Do you go out of your way to have social conversations in your organisation now? Are you mentoring and helping others across the organisation now? When did you last have a coffee meeting with no agenda? It is no good running chats on twitter or posting think pieces on Linkedin, if you don’t talk to your own employees or customers in the foyer. Start using your new social mindsets and engaging a wider audience in other ways first.
  2. Choose a purpose: When starting out in social collaboration, focus helps build reasons for connection.  Choose the one topic on which you want to start to engage purposefully with others. If you can’t think of anything else, choose one of your corporate strategy, meeting talented people or better understanding customers. Add these topics to your everyday conversations and your team. Refine your purpose as you go. Eventually this purpose will flower into a personal manifesto.
  3. Reflect & Start to share your learnings: New-to-social executives often say “But what do I have to say?”. The things that you share are going to come from the interactions in your day and responses to the activity of others. Reflect on what you experience and read each day. Start to take some notes about what these experiences mean for you and what you learn (Tools like Evernote are handy for this). Those insights are ideas that you can share. Explain to others how these ideas came about. They might seem minor to you but to others without your experience your thought process can be incredibly valuable. Over time this will become a form of Personal Knowledge Management where you constantly refine what you read, capture insights, and also learn how you share your insights with others.
  4. Test the influence of your insights: Most senior executives are used to their teams listening to their words. Social audiences are busy with many competing voices. You may need to test how influential your ideas are before you debut them to a wider and more discerning audience. You may need to adjust your style of communication. Social favours the short, sharp and punchy. Run some tests sharing your thoughts in a variety of different means through email, internal social posts, voluntary talks or blogging internally. Measure the response and seek feedback. Use that feedback to refine your style and your messaging. 
  5. Start Working Out Loud in your Enterprise Social Network:  There is no better place to practice social collaboration than in your organisation’s Enterprise Social Network.  You will be practising in front of an audience that is well aware of your fame, power and influence. They will be forgiving. Use your enterprise social network to start to practice Working Out Loud. Develop new habits that you can carry over to external social media. Make sure you get the network’s mobile applications so that you can easily access, share and respond to others as you go about your busy life. Most important of all, learn the lessen that the value of social collaboration grows with your consistency and your effort.

From that point on there are plenty of experts that tell you how to use Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other social tools for business.

Search, experiment and keep the practices that work for you 

This is the second 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 actions to get you started. The previous post dealt with mindsets.

The Devastating Politics of Division

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A house divided against itself cannot stand – Abraham Lincoln

A leader in any organisation needs to build cohesion in a team and commitment to the team’s mission. This unity can be a challenge when the environment is highly competitive, the team itself is diverse and the differences between one team and another are arbitrary. Many leaders are tempted to resort to the politics of division. The consequences for sustainability of the organisation are devastating.

The Politics of Division

Human nature has triggers for fear of difference (the “Other”). However what we choose to treat as alien is cultural and subject to manipulation. Fear of an Other can be used to unify a group of people. Weak leaders choose to manipulate this fear by creating and deepening divisions between their team and others in the organisation. ‘Divide and conquer’ as a strategy is as well known as it is old.

The divisions that define the Other within one organisation can be remarkably arbitrary. People of a different silo, team, sub team, group or even individuals can be identified, denigrated and demonised as the Other. The divisions in some cases are legendary:

  • Sales vs Marketing,
  • The Business vs Technology,
  • Head Office vs The Field,
  • Management vs Employees,
  • The Business vs a Specialist (Such as HR, Risk or Compliance),
  • Suits vs Creatives,
  • Us vs Competitors, Suppliers and even Customers.

Other divisions are more subtle, such as “We have by far the best team” or “We own these customers”. More effort must be invested in exaggerating the most arbitrary divisions which can lead to even worse outcomes.

The Consequences of Division

Anything worth doing in human affairs requires communication, community, context and collaboration. Attempts to divide us inevitably break down all four:

Lost Communication: Once someone is identified as an Other communication begins to break down. Communication is discouraged as consorting with the enemy. Messages from the other side are subjected to greater scrutiny, distortion and distrust rises. Measures of performance begin to differ creating challenges for feedback conversations. Driven far enough, the two teams will lose the ability to communicate, often developing their own jargon and own differing world views.

Lost Community: Great community is built in people sharing a common purpose and building deep relationships. Division makes it harder to bring people together for common purpose. Relationships across the boundaries will weaken. Talent will no longer cross the boundaries weakening all teams. Goals begin to diverge from a collective purpose to individual or team goals.

Lost Context: When we demonise any Other, we are distorting reality. We no longer are prepared to see people as they are. We no longer share a common context. This unwillingness to confront reality is as devasting in business as it is in any other sphere. Once you try to sustain a path of distortion, more distortion is required to maintain the illusion as life continues to present the contrary facts.

Lost Collaboration: Without trust and effective communication, collaboration begins to break down. “Collaboration” itself becomes a negative word, a sign of weakness and is seen as the dangerous way to get work done. It is not uncommon to find teams with divisive leaders to be blocking other team’s work and be duplicating knowingly the work of others rather than collaborate. At the same time there is a reluctance to share the learnings and the benefits of their work with other teams.

In a world in which context, communication, collaboration and building community are critical to an organisations ability to change and respond to its environment, the politics of division becomes a major barrier to effectiveness. 

Unite the Divisions

Bringing people together is not easy. Great leaders recognise that bring people together to collaborate, create change and solve challenges is the heart of great and sustainable performance. The more networked, complex and fast changing the environment, the more this holds. These leaders tackle the challenging road of seeking unity:

New Common Reality: Bring people together across the boundaries to confront the facts. Involve all the stakeholders, including those previously excluded as alien. Address the myths and different world views that have arisen.  Seek a common understanding of the world and its impacts.

New Common Purpose: Bring forth from all the people the purpose that brought them together in one organisation. Remind people that their connection to the greater purpose must be a part of individual and team goals.

New Common Action: Trust builds when people work together. There is no better way to build connection than facing a common challenge together. Help people to work in collaboration across the boundaries.

Taking these steps will begin to rebuild the communication, community and collaboration damaged by the politics of division.

Teamed and United

We can be connected closely to our teams and still be an active part of a wider community. Teams can have great differences but work together to leverage their different strengths and views. Collaboration is not about playing nice or papering over difference. Great collaboration demands the most honest assessments, fiercest frankness and hardest calls to be made fairly and transparently. Engaging others to deliver the best outcome  for the organisation and the team is the challenge for all leaders. Leading that way builds communities.

Success should never be at the expense of denigrating others or building walls. The politics of division may tempt leaders looking for a quick lift within a team but the longer term consequences are devastating for the organisation and its community.

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.

Bad Bosses are Survived or Escaped

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Nobody leaves a company. They leave a bad boss when there’s no other reason to stay. Great bosses who understand the value of networks, offer support, development and challenge are a critical part of your talent network. Are you addressing the core of what attracts the network of talent to your organisation?

Bad bosses are diminishers of the talent of their people.  They destroy what value their people create.

I worked for a diminisher once. After a year in which my business exceeded its goals, with help from a great team, favourable circumstances and my colleagues in the business, I was told in my annual performance appraisal that “a drover’s dog could have achieved that result”. (Drover’s dog is one of the more flexible bits of Australian idiom, but the phrase’s most recent meaning which comes from politics is that a drover’s dog is a non-entity).  I would have been happy to discuss the many contributions to my team’s success, but that phrase left me with nothing more to say. I thought it unkind when my boss repeated the phrase to my leadership team colleagues a week or so later in a meeting, but if you can’t take unkind words, then corporate life is not for you. However, the moment that hurt most was when it was used again to describe my and my team’s performance at the end of year dinner in a speech to the leadership team and spouses. 

Who did it hurt? My boss, not me. By that point, I was used to the comment. Remember the actions of a diminisher says more about them than their team. The dinner guests were disturbed by the comment, especially the spouses who knew how hard their partners worked. While the comment was directed at me, it was a signal of what everyone could expect from such a boss.

Because the issues with bad bosses are usually their own concerns, it is rare that a bad boss will change without a major personal catharsis.  Few employees have coached a bad boss to better performance. Sadly that means that employees of bad bosses need focus on survival or escape. Survival will require employees to leverage their reputations, their networks & their mentors.  They need to work more transparently and deliver stellar performance. These actions can help replace missing leadership and build support to survive the assaults. Survival is hard work because a bad boss will focus their attentions on survivors as a point of resistance. Escape is by far the easier and better option. The organisation is the loser.

Do you know the diminishers in your organisation? They are easy enough to find as your networks will tell you all you need to know. If your organisation has bad bosses, change them, remove them or avoid them.

Remember it takes great talent to survive a bad boss, but most won’t. Great talent has better things to do than play defence. The networks of great talent offer too much opportunity. Even a drover’s dog knows when it is time to run away.

Happy New Year: Do Better

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Page 1 of The Responsible Company by Yvon Choinard and Vincent Stanley.

Happy New Year: Now Let’s Do Better

The responsibility of a business to stakeholders, like its customers, people and communities, and to broader society is not managed in a department or a report. Responsible business is not the work of others. It is not a glossy wash you put over the top of the way you work to make things look better for stakeholders.

Responsibility

The key word is responsibility. Responsibility begins and ends with how you make decisions in your work. That responsibility applies to everyone. Responsibility is not a good intention, a wise donation or a clever offset. Responsibility means owning the need for better decisions and actions that maximise the value that you create and minimise the waste.

If you are not taking into account the wider implications for society and sustainability of your decisions and actions, then you can do better. You can make sure your decisions and actions add more shared value tomorrow than they did today. The decisions will be different for every organisation, but they will make both the business and the society better. That is good business.

Social Responsibility is Here

You will not escape responsibility. Our social world is making business more networked and more social. With that networking comes a great increase in transparency and accountability to your stakeholders. Every day businesses are being questioned on unthinking actions and decisions.  If you are not stepping up to better manage your responsibilities, expect someone to be helping you to change. You do not need to become an ideologue or to become a not-for-profit, you just need to believe in people and want to improve.  By looking at a broader frame, you can make smarter business decisions that create shared value in society.

Do Better

Do Better. Start with one step. It is that simple. Find ways to make decisions with better impacts and less waste. Enable your people to help you in this journey of continuous improvement.

Start making yourself aware of the options to do better. Read the Patagonia story and other resources on shared value. Measure the impacts that matter to you and your people. Ask your people to contribute on what matters to them and how you can do better. Make small improvements every day.

Your business will reward you for the new attention. Do something to get yourself started on the path to better business.

Choose Your Politics

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Embrace politics. It is human behaviour. Change the way politics operates to reinforce purpose.

CEOs are often tempted to announce that they want a ‘politics free’ organisation. The only consequence of this announcement is that politics becomes undiscussable in the organisation.  It never goes away.

Politics is the way that 3 or more people coordinate themselves to make decisions.  Politics is a critical part of human group behaviour.  Politics is not bad.  It is essential, efficient and effective.  In fact the right political behaviours, like understanding, influence, compromise and coalition building are essential to get anything done.

The CEO who wants to ban politics usually wants to address the type of politics that is played in the organisation.  We all can play a role ensuring that the politics that is played is the most beneficial to everyone in the organisation and its goals.

Which Politics Would You Choose?

The Politics of Power:  In extremely hierarchical organisations, the politics is often feudal with people jockeying to be closest to the powerful players at the top of the hierarchy. A CEO who wants to ban something human usually is under the belief that they have this kind of power. Absolute power reigns and politics is played to swing its impact. The critical element in this politics is loyalty and in reward scraps fall from the table to those most loyal.  Fights between coalitions are brutal.  These organisations are very conservative – ultimately driven by inside considerations, maintaining power and loyalty.

The Politics of Faith: At times you will meet an organisation with a strong set of core beliefs. The faith might be a set of values, practices or even a view of the world.  What matters is that belief in these things is a required part of organisational interactions and unbelievers are excluded from influence. Like most religions, these organisations are quite hierarchical with power lying with those who better understand, define or interpret the beliefs.  What matters in the politics of these organisations is doctrine and demonstrations of faith to the organisation’s view.  Whether the faith is justified or delivering outcomes is a secondary consideration.  Again the orientation of the organisation is internal and they can be quite disconnected from reality and their community.

The Politics of Interest:  With less hierarchy, the politics in an organisation might swing to that of self-interest or interest of a group. Like our modern democracies, interest groups lobby to further their agendas. The critical element of politics is self-interest and canny manipulation of overlaps of interest. Decisions are shaped by the shifting movement of these coalitions. This is the usual kind of politics that the CEO is trying to ban.  It is assumed that self-interest is inherently evil and will manipulate outcomes. Self-interest may not always be bad. Coalitions build cases for their own interests that may involve external stakeholders but the politics is very much about their own benefits and future.

The Politics of Purpose: Great political movements form around a purpose.  Great organisations are no different. Great leaders use political behaviours to connect coalitions more strongly to a common purpose.  That purpose must have an external orientation.  Great and inspiring purpose is about the impact organisations have on the world.

Don’t ban politics from your organisation.  You will only push it underground where it will continue but be less manageable.  Instead understand and discuss the politics at play, challenge the approach and use politics to strengthen purpose.

What Interests My Community Fascinates Me

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Leadership

Living and working in a hierarchy can shape your attention to the world. We all need to be fascinated less by power inside our organisations. We need to be fascinated more by customers and the community outside the organisation.

A common piece of advice in large organisations is expressed this way:

‘What interests my boss, fascinates me.’

The advice highlights that your boss often has a major role in perceptions of your performance and career opportunities. The suggestion is that the path of success is to be ever more conscientious on what matters to your boss. Managing their interests will deliver rewards from their greater hierarchical power.

Except that is terrible advice in almost all circumstances:

  • your boss does not determine real value: value is determined by the network of customers and the community
  • your boss does not determine change: change is driven by collaboration across silos internally and decisions of customers and community externally
  • unless you are great at working aloud, your boss rarely has your better context of what is going on in your role and lacks your networks 
  • many bosses are reactive worrying about the last big issue or the last thing their boss mentioned
  • many bosses are fickle changing their mind on what matters -some even in your performance appraisal
  • the most enduring factor in your performance and careers is the outcomes you deliver not to what or to whom you paid attention. 
  • ‘But you told us to…’ never saves anyone

Being fascinated by every whim of your boss might build a great relationship between you two. (Warning: It might be counterproductive too) However, it will not drive real business performance.

So next time someone asks you to worry about what your boss thinks, don’t. Look outside the organisation in your networks to find what matters. Make your mantra:

‘What interests my customers and community, fascinates me’

Your boss is just one voice in your network and probably the least valuable one.

Change Starts One Step Forward

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Every journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step – Lao Tsu

The vision of the future is dazzling. It arrives from on high as if delivered by parcel delivery drones, endorsed by gurus and acclaimed by cheerleaders of the future.

Everyone is captivated by the insight of the strategy, the incredible new technology, the uplifting rhetoric of the new corporate behaviours and the breathtaking audacity of the new organisational structure.

Then you stop. Reality hits. The vision needs to be executed.

You turn around. Oddly all the drones, the gurus and the cheerleaders have disappeared.  The new plan still needs to be implemented. You turn over a few rocks and it appears nobody has done what you need to do before. You need new capabilities that nobody has. A grumbling begins that people never believed in the high flown vision in the first place. Senior management are disappointed at the progress made on the ideas that they only just dreamed up.

The greatest breakdown in management is between thought and action.

You could start action for action’s sake. Announce a radical transformation, a wrenching restructure or a bold acquisition if you have that kind of power. Even if radical changes were possible, those kinds of change fail more often than not.  All that boldness might just be a distraction from real action to create change.

If you are somewhere in the middle, there is only one choice:

Take one step forward.  

Pick the step that makes most sense to move closer to the vision.  Something you can do. Something practical and possible. Something that builds capability to do more. There is always something. Do it.

After that step you do another.  You gain momentum.  Might not be exciting at first, but it is progress.  Eventually you will meet the drones, the cheerleaders and the gurus down the path.  They might just be surprised to see you because they understand the difference between thought and action.

Take the advice of an ancient Chinese master. Move forward into change one step at a time.

The best first step is the one right in front of you.

Susan Scrupski, Harold Jarche and I will be discussing the practical steps to move forward with collaboration in the first Change Agents Worldwide webinar, in partnership with Socialcast VMware

Middle Managers need to use their Networks and Authority

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Middle managers like to complain about being squeezed by pressures from above and below. Their organisations love to blame them for all the ills in the place.

Middle managers have two great advantages that they can use to drive change:

  • They can place themselves in the heart of the network of their organisations.
  • They have authority to make things happen.

Without use, these opportunities whither. Middle managers need to take advantage of them when they can.

Networking in the middle

Frontline employees have very full lives juggling customer expectations. In my experience, they have limited opportunities to engage in networking across the organisation. Enterprise social networks do assist to connect frontline people with the rest of the organisation but the pressures of direct customer engagement often means time is limited and is often focused on better meeting customer needs.

Senior management are often removed from the day-to-day interactions in the organisation because of the scale of their jobs and the greater exposure to external stakeholders. Nobody wants a hierarchy where messages need to go to the top to spread because it is a terribly inefficient way to share information.

If middle management is to have any meaningful role, middle managers needs to play a role networking the organisation across the middle.  Middle manager jobs should give them enough perspective and exposure to their peers to seek and share information widely across the silos and beyond. As nodes in the network of the organisation, managers can dramatically increase their influence sharing information, connecting people, reducing duplication and guiding action. Build a reputation as a generous middle manager who is happy to collaborate, share information and advise and you will find people beating a path to your door.  Your authority increases when you want to act.

Authority to act

When everyone around you assumes authority depends on hierarchical position, having any hierarchical power is an advantage to action. You don’t need to be at the top, you just need the respect of others. Yet many middle managers wait assuming further endorsement is required.

What middle managemers needs to do is leverage their network position and their hierarchical opportunity. Organisations often give way to people who have hierarchical power who are prepared to act, especially where the activity is beneficial and well aligned to strategy and purpose.

When I was a mid-level manager in NAB, a group of graduates came to me wanting to know whose authority they needed to set up a TEDX style speaking program in NAB.  I told them they needed no authority.  It was a great idea, there was a demand and there was no obvious sponsor in the organisational hierarchy.  Finding one would be more work than organising the first event.

I suggested that they could do it themselves and start straight away.  For safety’s sake, I told them that if they were challenged on their authority they should say I approved it.  When they did get a challenge, that answer was more than enough because the people who worry about permission rarely have the courage to check its source. A TEDX style event sat well with the culture that NAB was building and the strategy of being more open and aligned to customers and the community. The first TEDX event had over 200 internal attendees and the events which were run by volunteer graduates for 2 more years were huge successes.

Network and Use Authority

If you are a middle manager and want that role to continue in your organisation, don’t fall for the blame game.  Network yourself to increase your authority and use whatever authority you have to add value in line with the organisation’s purpose and strategy.

Susan Scrupski, Harold Jarche and I will be discussing the role of networks in organisations in the first Change Agents Worldwide webinar, in partnership with Socialcast VMware

Obstacles are the work

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Leadership, Learning, Life & Career

Is it really December?  Businesses and schools are winding down for the summer break. The cricket has started. Christmas is rapidly approaching.  With that comes a quick close to 2013.

2013 has been a year of adventures, obstacles and challenges. More than anything else it has been a year of new momentum. I could not be more excited by the incredible opportunities that have arisen this year:

Embrace the Chaos and all its Obstacles

I was reflecting on all that has happened this year when Dany DeGrave tweeted yesterday about the need to maintain momentum in the face of obstacles:

Obstacles are the work. They show you have chosen to have an impact. They help us see our purpose. They provide the challenge and interest.

Obstacles are proof that your work matters to others. These challenges remind us that change is human and social. They encourage us to share knowledge with our networks, to work aloud and to pay attention to the knowledge moving around us.

Obstacles help us reflect on what matters. Pushback make us ask new or obvious questions.  An orderly progression of success can be quite tedious and generate its own doubts.  If success is that easy, are we missing something?

If there weren’t obstacles, our talents would not be required, we would not learn and not grow in the work. If there weren’t obstacles, we would not get the rewards of overcoming them.  If there weren’t obstacles, we would not have the joys of collaborating with others to move forward around over, under or through.

Your Obstacles. Your Momentum. Your Year.

So next time you are considering a year of obstacles, remember the hard work proves that you are on the right track. Obstacles are proof of your momentum.

I bought this poster at the midpoint of this year. It has been a reminder ever since that every year is my year.

image

Every year is your year too. Move past challenges. Reflect on the successes.

Maintain momentum in doing whatever you need to do to make it your year. Your impact is up to you.

If you would like your own or other great posters, the source is The Poster List.