Chair and Non-Executive Director, Advisor, and CEO helping healthcare, finance, and educational organisations drive growth, leverage technology innovation, and realise the strategic value of transformation
Connect is the first stage of the Value Maturity Model of collaboration because connection is what creates a network. Until people are connected together you don’t have any ability for someone to exceed their individual potential.
Connection only gets you a network. One of the reasons many people have been disappointed by their enterprise social network or their social media strategy is that they have not seen beyond creating the connections. A network has no vision. A network has no purpose. A network is neutral in creating value.
Community = Value
Community creates the value. Community is how people come together to share their talents and create greater value together. Communities can create visions, realise the shared purposes of individuals and work together to achieve more.
Network connection happens immediately. Community develops over time as people learn to trust others and as people learn the new interactions that create value for themselves and others. Sharing, solving problems and innovating together deepens the community and enables individuals to grow in their potential. These communities also always exist within larger communities, like companies and society, that are often more important in shaping the way people act.
People = Potential
Focus on the potential of human communities. Remember that bringing people together in a network is just the beginning of the potential that people can create. Communities will mature with common goals, leadership and action over time.
Looking up the hierarchy employees can believe that being CEO must be a game changing experience. However, the reality is that the imagined power comes with its own constraints. Here are a few words for the new CEO (or any new manager) on what matters. This is where the reality and the illusion diverge:
What You Hear Matters More Than What You Know: You have plans and agendas. You know the place & the ropes. You have great skills, knowledge and wisdom. Show it by going and listening to the people who matter most – those doing the work, your customers and your community. Ask their views and change your own. Let what you hear guide what you do.
What You Do Matters More Than What You Say: You are surrounded now by people who want to listen to you. You are supported by teams of professional communicators. You can order an expensive new brand campaign if you want. You have a soapbox but the smartest way to roll is to get down off the soapbox and go to work. Let others work out who you are by what you do.
Your Reputation Matters More Than Your Record: You must have a great record or you wouldn’t have the job. Nobody cares about what you did now. They only care about how you did it. The how determines your reputation internally and externally. Everything you do is added or subtracted from your reputation. Everybody wants to discuss your reputation because they want to predict what you will do next. Your reputation has more influence on what you will get done than you think.
Your Influence Matters More Than Your Power: Congratulations on being top of the hierarchy (excepting of course for your accountability to the board, the chair, shareholders, analysts, community activists, politicians, your family, and anyone who ever had a view about your company, etc). You have the power now, but mostly you can’t use it. You can’t sack everyone. You can’t survive a revolt. You can’t do the work yourself. You can’t answer every question. Accept that with all your power the best way to get anything done is still with influence, the same way you climbed the ladder.
Your Network Matters More Than Your Hierarchy: The hierarchy mutes your influence. A hierarchy is only one part of your network. Some of your direct reports are openly campaigning for your job. You’ve been there and you know they won’t wait long. The further down the hierarchy you go the less your voice is heard and understood. Importantly, you are now the face of the organisation to customers and the community. Looking down the hierarchy won’t help you deal with those critical stakeholders. Start leveraging the networks through and around the organisation. Those networks helped you on the way up and they will help you now. That’s where you should use your influence. The network magnifies your influence. That’s where you do your best work.
Your People Matter More Than Your Process: Nothing in the organisation gets done without people. The best processes, technology and organisations will fall apart without the right people. Start focusing on building their capabilities and changing the processes to adapt where required. Your customers and community will appreciate the immediate increase in your organisation’s responsiveness.
Your Exceptions Matter More Than Your Rules: If everything was predictable, great people wouldn’t be required. Focus on how you identify, manage and adapt for exceptions, anomalies and surprises. Don’t let your team explain them away. Many exceptions hide insights, risks, threats or breakdowns that your current processes can’t handle. Exceptions are where the disruptive innovations lurk and where reputations are won or lost. See exceptions as a chance for you to lead make changes, especially to help your people and your customers.
Your Effectiveness Matters More Than Your Efficiency: Your new staff are going to make your life extremely efficient. They will quickly create a schedule, cut access and manage a protective bubble of carefully selected information. That’s the best way for them to make their life easy and predictable again. However, obstacles are the work, exceptions hide insights and you will need to experiment on your personal effectiveness. Without slack, freedom to connect and thinking time you won’t be able to do this. Incidentally the need to focus on effectiveness of purpose goes for the whole organisation too (see ResponsiveOrg).
Your Purpose Matters More Than Your Pay: You’ve spent a lot of the crazy pay already and here I am saying it doesn’t matter. What matters is the impact you have on the world. The internal motivator called purpose pushed you so hard to get here. You wanted to make a mark, not cash. Delivering on purpose is what makes the role worth doing and will be how your tenure is judged. Years from now you will barely remember the money but you will see the faces of those in the network around the organisations whose lives you changed. Which way do you want to influence their lives? Let’s hope they are smiling later.
The Job Matters More Than You: Unless you are a founder or a complete failure, the role you play existed before you came along and will exist afterwards. That role means a lot to the hopes and dreams of all the employees, customers and community. Those dreams deserve your respect. The role is not yours. You are no better because you have it. You are just the current steward. Leave it better for the next person and make sure that you have the influence to choose them wisely. That may be the best legacy you can leave.
Connecting and Sharing create a reputation economy in your organisation to underpin the trust and collaboration required to Solve and Innovate.
Four topics are commonly discussed in communities around enterprise social networks:
Why would anyone go out of their way to help others?
How do we increase the value of collaboration in our organisation?
What is the role of leaders?
How do we cut down the gossip and non-work conversation in our network?
The answer to these four questions are connected to one element of successful networks: they create a reputation economy in the community that fosters collaboration.
The Value of Reputation
Humans aren’t the rational economic machines that most organisations try to manage with role descriptions, performance plans and other incentives. Humans do things outside the job description and the process every day. We work around the hierarchy. Importantly, we collaborate because we value relationships and we know that the returns from collaboration exceed the costs in our effort.
One of the challenges of collaboration is the danger that others will free ride on your efforts, improving their performance but bearing none of the costs. Mark Pagel’s Wired for Culture uses evolutionary approaches to behaviour to examine an important part of our defences against free riding, reputation. Because our relationships with our work colleagues are not transactional, over time we build a level of trust and a reputation for each colleague based on their behaviour. This reputation system influences who and how we collaborate with others.
Ever wondered why a users first ever request for help or crowd sourcing of ideas will usually struggle? They have no reputation in the community and others will hang back until someone shows they can be trusted.
Increasing the transparency and connection of reputation in your organisation will accelerate collaboration not just in a social network or other tool. Collaboration across the organisation will leverage the new transparent reputations developed.
Building Reputation
We don’t build reputation with our status in the organisation or by declaring we can be trusted. We build reputation through with who we are associated and how we act, particularly when we act against our interest.
The Connect and Share phases of the maturity of a collaboration community enable people to develop these critical stages of reputation. Working out loud for the benefit of others can accelerate that trust. As can demonstrating and encouraging a growth mindset. Sharing information, insights and solutions, particularly when there is no reason or benefit to the sharer is a powerful way to build a reputation. Others sharing without penalty and preferably receiving benefits establishes the view in the community that it is safe.
The reputations and the trust built in Connect and Share are what powers the value in the later stages of the model. People contribute later because they know that their contributions go to those who they respect and have the interests of the community at heart.
The Importance of Leaders
Leaders bring status into communities. However, as noted above, the presence of status is not enough to create or sustain trust. Actions by leaders count.
Leaders can play a critical role in showing the way to build reputation and in establishing that collaboration is safe and beneficial. Importantly, leaders can use their authority to calling out free-riding behaviour and encourage participation by others. Leaders can acknowledge the reputations built in the community giving them greater influence in the organisation.
Leaders also need to be aware that their status also brings a fragility to their own personal reputations. If they fail to act in the community to reinforce their authority, it will erode rapidly.
The Critical Role of Gossip & Non-Work Conversation
Organisations hate gossip and non-work conversation. They are seen as a threat to the singularity of corporate messaging and a waste of time.
However, gossip and non-work conversation are critical parts of reputation systems. Gossip is how we share our views of others reputations. Non-work conversation is another way for us to share and build our reputations with others.
Create a reputation economy in your collaborative community by fostering connection and sharing.
The Value Maturity Model is an approach to enhancing the value of collaboration in your organisation. The Model is supported by a range of tools and practices to enable leaders and community managers to maximise the potential in collaboration. If you would like to learn more about the Value Maturity Model, get in touch with Simon Terry.
People can grow. Practice compassion. Help better their practice.
In my office I keep a statue of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. I found the statue in Hong Kong over 20 years ago and loved the serenity & beauty of Guanyin. I also loved the reminder of the value of focusing on compassion for others. Guanyin is connected with the Lotus Sutra which established in the Buddhist scriptures that everyone can improve with the right practice.
[The Lotus Sutra] teaches us that the inner determination of an individual can transform everything; it gives ultimate expression to the infinite potential and dignity inherent in each human life. – Daisaku Ikeda
The Compassionate Leader
Compassion is greater than empathy for the challenges of others. Compassion is when that emotion leads people to go out of their way to act to help others. Compassion is not a mindset. It is a practice.
Compassion requires a specific focus on each individual. Compassion is about helping each individual to relieve their situation. The ultimate belief of a compassionate approach is that everyone can improve, like the Lotus Sutra.
Traditional organisations with an industrial mindset encourage dispassionate leaders. With a fixed mindset of employee potential and mechanistic view of employee productivity, compassion is discouraged. Leaders need to play to the averages of teams, cut their losses on poor performers and move on. Leaders who show compassion will be seen as overly focused on soft skills or more bluntly as weak leaders.
When the future of work is becoming more human, we can no longer afford the waste in this dispassionate approach. We cannot predict the emergent practices which will define effectiveness in a new connected digital knowledge economy. Innovation, disruption and new value creation rely on leveraging diversity, new ways of working and learning. If so, how can we afford to write people off until we have tried to realise their potential contributions.
Compassion takes Practice
Much of the traditional concern in management around soft skills relates to concerns that these skills are just talk. However compassion demands more than the thoughts and talk of empathy. Compassion demands action.
Leaders can act in measurable ways to help their teams to learn, to improve and to practice new skills. The work of leaders in the future of work is to realise human potential. This will take the hard work of new practice.
Compassion begins with a focus on the individual and an acceptance of their real circumstances. Leaders need to understand an employee’s goals and build their plans around those goals and a frank dialogue about where the employee is today. Compassion does not require you to soften the blow of reality. It requires you to help change it.
Compassionate leaders must work to improve practice. Coaching will play a key role in encouraging employees to seek out, experiment with and learn from new practice. A coaching approach to performance aligned to the employee’s goals and the goals of the organisation can achieve dramatic improvement in individual performance.
Compassionate leaders do not protect their teams from change. They make them better able to benefit from change. These leaders teach new skills and perspectives, show the potential gains in new practices and find alternative ways to contribute for those who are adversely affected by change. Compassionate leaders see change as a way to better realise potential.
The future of work demands compassionate leaders. How is your leadership working to realise the potential of others?
Compassion is a necessity, not a luxury – His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama
Organisations need to recognise that the business environment is becoming less predictable. Consequently, successful leadership qualities are changing too.
I go looking for a leadership echo chamber when I hear that question asked about a decision. Inexplicably bad decisions are the product of logic of leaders disconnected from reality.
The corporate ‘yes man’ has been much derided. Leaders who surround themselves with sycophants know and deserve what they get. In exchange for ego support, they will find no challenge to their ideas, even the dangerously bad ones. However, most people are aware of the danger of ‘yes men’. The derision of the ‘yes men’ pushes sycophancy underground into a more subtle form of danger.
The echo chamber of leadership is a more subtle danger to organisations. An echo chamber may not say yes immediately. There may be extensive debate and analysis. However debate is structured within the defines of the logic and information of the leader. Those who would disagree or might introduce additional information know or learn to stay silent. Tragically many leaders hear later, ‘I knew it wouldn’t work but I didn’t say anything because you clearly wanted it’.
An echo chamber may have debate but it will carefully reflect the pros and cons inherent in the decision already made. Without the ability to extend the discussion, a bad decision will not be challenged and may even be strengthened by this groupthink. A group with limited goals and strong focus in discussions may not see how far their actions are from common sense to their stakeholders. In many cases, busy with the challenges of achievement, the group may not even be aware of how limited their considerations were.
Silence the echo
The simplest way to change the dynamic of an echo chamber conversation is to introduce new information from outside the group into the discussion. That new information may be new language, a new point of data, a new argument, more time for reflection or the perspective of an external stakeholder. Asking the group to step outside the logic of their decision and see it from an additional perspective can help breakdown the echoes of the leader’s thinking.
Another important challenge to the echo chamber is to ask people to explain the logic for the decision in the simplest language. Strip away the internal jargon and the internal logic also is more easily exposed.
A critical role for any leader in an organisation is to bring in fresh external perspectives to decision making from the system in and around the organisation. Network connections can help offer this additional perspective. Inexplicable decisions are a symptom of this flow of information becoming a stale echo chamber. The role of leaders is to watch for these reactions, extend the networks and change the group discussion.
We are relationship busy. Life is short. Communication technologies fill our lives with more people than ever.
Weak network links enable us to do extraordinary things. Strong relationships help make us the people who do extraordinary things.
Strong relationships listen and seek to understand us. Strong relationships push, challenge and make demands of us. Strong relationships support, care and give.
Relationships become and stay strong through time and effort. In a world of buzzing connections, relationships not growing stronger are fading away.
Don’t let the demands of life or the swirl of relationships interfere in your effort to connect with those who matter to you. We cannot leave our strong relationships to circumstances or chance. Build your strongest relationships as you work to create your future.
Treasure your precious relationships. Give them a gift of your time and attention. Your strongest relationships help make you who you will be.
The industrial era left management thinking with a fervent belief in the value of transactional interventions. If a linear process needs a different outcome, make a change. The impact should be immediately visible and then you can move on to the next change.
When you start to talk about systemic change, especially involving people, matters get more complex. The future of work is one such example. Change in the future of work often involves many people and systems in organisations. Make a transactional intervention in this situation and nothing can happen or perhaps something happens for a while and then fades as the system reasserts itself. Our work systems are designed to consistently absorb transactional shocks and then stabilise. Remember the system is not broken; it is working exactly as intended.
Culture is one example of these stabilising forces in the system of organisations, particularly for future of work behaviours. Culture is an expectation of how people will behave. That expectation shapes the way we work and does not change on one transactional intervention. Culture does not change until the individuals in the organisation form a new expectation. New sense making won’t happen until there has been persistence, leadership and reinforcing changes elsewhere in the system.
Instead of a linear process where transactional change leads directly to a measurable change in work we have a situation where interventions lead to new practice and to new sense making and that sense making drives new behaviours and better mastery of the practice that sustains different ways of work. The delays, the sense making, the need to learn and master new practice and other forces in the system all make the impact of a transactional change to culture difficult to measure & unlikely to be effective. At best, the relationship is complicated. At worst, it can be hard to draw any relationship at all.
Work on the system consistently
To foster accelerated change in the kind of complex systems faced by those changing work practices, you need help the system participants to form a new sense of the way forward:
don’t be wedded to your change. Ask those in the system to define, design and do the work.
do you have enough system participants engaged in your changes? Those you leave out may hold you back or be key to wider complementary changes.
help the system participants move from changing things transactionally to working on the whole system. Help them to see a bigger picture. Ask them to own and work the bigger change themselves and to draw others in.
reinforce change and work with the participants to ensure that the work on the system ensures beyond a transaction. Find the other influences in the system that impact change and include them in the work.
be consistent and allow the time for issues to surface and communities to mature. Unrealistic expectations can lead to counterproductive perceptions of failure or at least difficulty.
Champions play a critical role in this kind of systemic change because they are inside the system. This position gives them impetus, influence and insight to help build an enduring new sense of the change. Champions can work in and on the system consistently.
In a world that is often obsessed with force, much more is accomplished every day through influence.
Every year Monocle magazine publishes a soft power index chronicling the rising influence of various nations. Much of that soft power is attributable to the influence generated through tourism, aid, music, arts and other creative endeavours. These activities build connection, reciprocity and trust and importantly improve influence by making a nation a leading example or aspiration that others wish to follow.
In organisations, soft power plays a critical but often unexamined role. Role models have great influence. Invisible networks of advice, support, trust and generosity weave through organisations. With increasing options off exit, voice or passive resistance, people choose to follow much more than they are forced. I have never seen a leader survive a mutiny so force has its limits.
The article’s recommendations highlight the human side of leadership. They focus on examples of soft power like empathy, understanding, vulnerability, interpreting soft data and leveraging personal strengths and inspiration.
Everyone in an organisation has the ability to build and leverage their soft power. It comes from building strong personal networks. In an era where networks are increasingly important understanding and using levers of soft power is increasingly important.
Soft power is ultimately the way leaders address the soft issues of management. The soft issues of management are the hard ones to solve. Edicts are easy. Engagement is hard.
Take a purposeful stand that reflects who you are. Engage with others with generosity, creativity, empathy and trust. LIke Monocle’s creative nations, you will find collaboration becomes easier, others follow your lead and your influence on the rise.
‘Judgement & discretion are not features of software. They are the product of human socialization & experience’ – J Seely Brown & P Duguid
The biggest gap between strategy & execution is often found in the social relationships in an organisation. Decision making, learning, negotiating and alignment of people are rarely well done by machines. The human elements of strategy such as alignment, capabilities and the decision making of execution let us down.
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their classic The Social Life of Information discuss the challenges that this ‘social fabric’ pose for our visions of legions of autonomous bots exchanging information. They note:
‘For humans, rules and goals bear a complicated relationship to the social fabric. Both may shift dynamically in practice depending on the social conditions that prevail’
That shifting is a sophisticated form of responsiveness. Much of the lament about the failure to execute top-down strategy can be explained by the diverse actors of an organisation needing to adapt the strategy to the social fabric of the organisation and its networks. Employees need to change the goals and the rules to retain relationships in their networks.
Top down strategy is rarely iterative enough to learn from these adaptations. Much top down strategy is short term, transactional and fails to account for the social relationships. They are assumed away or assumed capable of surrender to the higher order needs of strategy.
Simply asking why employees must changing the strategy to suit their relationships can reveal significant insight and opportunities to fine tune performance or realise greater human potential. Often it brings back in more stakeholders and more systemic and longer term issues the initial strategy assumed away. We ignore the adaptability of human social relationships at our peril.
Many evangelists of big data propose it as as a solution to the challenges of strategy. They see it will allow for better data and deeper analysis to overcome the inability to execute analytical dreams. Big data analysis already brings great power and insight. Yet it cannot overcome the social fabric of an organisation executing a strategy. Big data at some point must interact with this social fabric whether it is the assumptions and hypotheses programmed into the system or the decision maker who must use the output.
Big data will often make the challenge of integration into social fabric greater as its black boxes may not account for such simple things as human needs to trust, to learn, to explain, and to understand. Knowing where you are falling short is rarely the corporate challenge in strategy. The challenge is enabling human resources to respond.
We need to stop seeing the inherent humanity of the social fabric as a barrier to the perfect execution of strategy. This idea demonstrates echoes of the industrial era thinking that dominates management. A corporation of automatons would be beaten by human ingenuity simply because our social fabric is the engine of learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and adaptation.
The social fabric of an organisation is the source of competitive advantage. Social factors distinguish responsive organisations. Culture eats strategy for breakfast because of its ability to shape learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and decision making. Organisations need to work with and on the social fabric to optimise their performance. The more human organisation will sustainably outperform.
The technology we need to engage with the social fabric is leadership. Leadership can shape learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and adaptation in an organisation. Leadership is the engine of human potential.
In 2015, organisations need their leaders to play to the role of helping work with and on the social fabric of the organisation. Social factors in strategy can no longer be ignored or assumed to be overcome. These very factors are the heart of the human potential & adaptation that will differentiate successful strategies.
