Tag: leadership

What are the Ethics of Work?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A great discussion on the ethics of working out loud broke out yesterday across my social streams prompted by a thoughtful blog post by Kandy Woodfield. The post and the many discussions it prompted have been insightful and a few key points have arisen for clarification in my strong advocacy of the benefits of working out loud:

  • While I have not been explicit on this, like other forms of social collaboration, working out loud is in my view a voluntary practice. It is not meaningful to describe an activity that involves forcing someone to work out loud as a learning experience or as social collaboration.  
  • Kandy’s call for support for learners through the vulnerability of the learning experience is critical. The objective is to better realise people’s potential and that takes a supportive culture, the right systems and the focus of leadership.

This last point for me was the clue to a broader issue that began to be discussed with many colleagues: 

What are the ethics of work?

If we are right to subject working out loud to an ethical investigation, then perhaps we should extend the same challenge to work. Many of the risks and vulnerabilities that occur in learning experiences are magnified in daily work, but occur with little consideration of the impact on the individual. Worse still work experiences are often designed by managers to exaggerate these vulnerabilities in the name of motivation or performance.

Culture creates an Environment of Support or of Risk

As young children we learn and we make mistakes freely and publicly. It is our approach to the world. As children, we mostly laugh as we learn. At times this process may be frustrating for child and parent.  Either might experience the odd temper tantrum but this learning process is expected of children. As a result, they are supported and encouraged in learning by a family and social environment. Their pace of learning is phenomenal becuse they are free to make sense, to experiment, to observe, to ask questions, to get into new environments and to try.

By the time we reach the workplace, things are not always as supportive. Mistakes are frowned on. Questions can be discouraged. Experimentation is dangerous. People have a status, a job and a place. Failure to learn adequately fast and accurately is treated a performance issue. Public sharing of shortcomings is common with leader boards, rankings, status and accreditation levels, gamification, etc. None of this has anything to do with working out loud or even learning. These practices are widely adopted as best practices from our traditional industrial management model. It is how we work.

Many of the dangers that Kandy raises for working out loud arise not because of the work is out loud, but because it is work. Traditional workplaces using industrial management thinking are often unsupportive of learning and the learner. 

To extend the argument of the blogpost, the way we work presents ethical issues. The danger comes not because of the visibility of working out loud. Mistakes will always happen. People will always be vulnerable if they are doing. The danger comes from the lack of a supportive work environment that encourages learning.

When the majority of learning is unstructured and on the job, this is a much more dangerous situation.  Everyday on the job individuals are trying to improve their performance by learning to work better.  The organisation must be hoping to see the growing benefits of an employee’s work. If we don’t support learning, all of this is at risk.  

Professional learning managers are ensuring that the 10% and the 20% of learning is managed ethically. Who is responsible for the 70% on-the-job learning? 

Leadership is the Technology of Human Potential

We need to ensure our approaches to learning and the development of the potential of people are effective and ethical wherever they occur.  Leaders at all levels in organisations need to work to create an environment that supports learning and supports learners.

We don’t need more of empty platitudes of declaring a learning organisation. The leadership hard work is considering how all the systems in the organisation support or encourage learners, learning, the sharing of knowledge and the development of personal & community potential. That is a great and highly rewarding ethical challenge for leaders in organisations everywhere.

We can start simply:

  • we can support people to learn and discuss the value of learning
  • we can coach people through the challenges of learning
  • we can encourage people to experiment with new and better ways of working
  • we create a voluntary community that shares the vulnerability of the learning experience and supports the learner with peers
  • we can support all of this with fun

A key to the rapidly changing environment of our networked economy is that organisations need to get better at learning and leveraging the potential of our people.  If we take Kandy’s query to heart in respect of on-the-job learning & the very nature of our work, organisations will be better at managing this challenge.

Our organisations will be more responsive.

To Shape Change, Start Leading Change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” (spoken by Tancredi) from ‘The Leopard’ by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Times of disruptive change are difficult for those in power and those who benefit most from the current way of things. Many of these people prefer to ignore the rising changes in society. In effect, they abandon their leadership role in shaping change in the system.

Enduring disruptive change demands an engaged form of leadership. The future in disruption is not written. Leaders should seek to engage, lead and shape change to the benefit of their organisations. 

The Networked Economy is Here to Stay.

Many leaders of organisations have a lot of power, status and wealth tied up in the way things are now.  They are the masters of the current system, adept in its ways and confident in managing the current model of work and the organisation.  They have both personal and professional reasons for hoping that nothing changes.

Change doesn’t work that way. We are now part of a global ecosystem of actors connected in digital networks.  Access, visibility and transparency have increased driven by the new connectivity.  Change that enters this new system is magnified, spread and developed by the action of agents all around the world.

Lead or Let others Decide The Future

The connected digital networks of global actors means the future of work won’t be ignored, stopped or reversed. Others will go on to develop better ways of working whether you and your organisation participate or not. The less you participate, the more you appear a candidate for disruption by one of these actors.

Organisations face a leadership challenge in this environment.  Effective leadership, continuous learning and a vibrant culture is required to take effect of the advantages of the new approaches.  Senior managers need to play a critical role helping organisations adjust and maximise the benefits from these changes.

However, managers face changes in the future of work that change their power, status and potentially their financial position.  Networks can operate with less layers of management and roles that were once managements prerogative are being delegated to frontline employees or automated in systems. New two-way conversations with engaged and enabled employees, customers and other staked holders can require leaders to deal with new complexity. In this case, it can be tempting for a senior leader to sit on the sidelines hoping the changes are a fad or that they might pass over the organisation.

You Can’t Lead a Community if You are Not Engaged

A simple case study of this mindset comes when you consider the level of management attention to stakeholder activism in social and digital media. Because this activism is now more visible and empowered by digital and social networks, management can see resentment that once was hidden. Bear in mind the resentment is not new.  It just has a bigger audience and influence than before.

Many of these social activist activities have large impacts on organisations because the activist have a community and the organisation has only a network.  

The critical difference between a network and a community is how engaged the participants are. That engagement arises as a result of acts of leadership to create common purpose, to shape an agenda of action and to influence others to act. Leaders who ignore the burgeoning networks around the organisation allow others to shape the communities, their purposes and their influence.

Senior leaders of organisations need to engage with the networks around their organisation.  The opportunity to create productive communities far exceeds the risks. Listening and acting on feedback of networks of stakeholders is one of the better mitigants of risk. Failure to engage and to understand the needs of the networks creates an opportunity for others to lead. 

Leaders Can Authorise Debate by Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

A key role for leaders is to authorise discussion in organisations. Leaders need to foster frank and authentic discussions by all employees. The best way to signal willingness to discuss the real issues is to start that conversation yourself and to show you will take action on the outcomes.

How do you invite questions?

I was recently asked what was my favourite aspect of a YamJam was. A YamJam is a Q&A session in Yammer usually by a leader or other authority figure. My answer was that my favourite element is that a YamJam authorises employees to question leaders and role models. This starts to create the kind of leadership that employees want: open, authentic and responsive.

Working out loud by leaders has the same positive impact. By openly sharing the work in progress with all its doubts, flaws and uncertainties, leaders invite others to engage them on that work. They make transparent their personal work processes for the benefit of others. The sharing authorises others to engage and respond to the leader’s work. This is a powerful tool to cut through hierarchy and change leadership interactions in an organisation.  Change the interactions and you change the culture.

Authorise the debate

The greatest barriers to human potential are the things we think we cannot do. Too often we look for others to authorise us to act. For many people and organisations, questioning leaders falls into the category of some we can’t do without permission. The role of leaders in realising potential is to release this constraint and authorise the kinds of generative conversations that enable organisations to be responsive.

The Continuous Partial Attention of Management

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The story is too common in the modern organisation: a team has a member who is not contributing but they go on being a part of the team for months or even years. Waste, frustration and disengagement mount in the team. Despite the negative impacts and length of time the manager responsible does nothing to rectify the underperformance.

We have more performance data than ever. We have more sources of information than ever. We interact in more ways than ever. We live in an age of increased performance transparency.

How Can Sustained Underperformance Be Common?

All that data, information, interaction and transparency brings more for managers to do. Complexity is the fundamental challenge of the modern manager and without careful husbanding of their attention the time of the manager can be subsumed into busy work.

Continuous partial attention has crept into management practice. Challenged to keep up managers are constantly skimming across the top of the work. Interactions with employees are staccato bursts. Busy managers spend less time understanding what is actually going on. Flitting in and out of observation of their employees, managers can be lulled into a false sense of confidence if the numbers look good. 

For an under-performing employee that means the ability to escape action continues as long as the deadline has not yet arrived, the numbers look acceptable and underperfomer has an answer for the first quick query from a manager. The commonest trick is for the under performing employee to send their busy manager an email asking for a complex decision. Likely overlooked or deferred, it becomes an instant performance excuse. Instead of asking for help the employee uses the pressures on their manager as a chance to hide their performance issues. Time, pressure and waste mount up.

In rare cases, managers may see the problem situation but the pressure of other demands means that they do not prioritise action. They trust in the systems, the employee’s peers or the reporting to correct the underperformance or hope that the employee’s lack of action is temporary. These managers prioritise the work and the system over their people to the detriment of everyone.

Refocus the Attention of Management on the Process of Work

Psychological studies show that multitasking & continuous partial attention don’t work. People who practice these approaches feel that they are more effective but aren’t. We need managers to get off the treadmill and reconsider their approaches to performance:

  • Shared Purpose & Goals: In many of these situations the underperformance is simply because the busy manager has not set, clear goals for the employee and the employee has no rationale for their work. Engage employees upfront on the purpose and goals of their work.
  • Enable and Empower: If managers don’t have the bandwidth to guide and manage, organisations must ensure that employees have the ability to manage themselves and their work. That takes an investment in skills and the freedom to make decisions without waiting for a busy manager to respond.
  • Targeted Fast Agile Delivery: Ask an employee to work on a lots of  things for months and they will be as bamboozled by the status & priorities of the project as their manager. Instead ask an employee to deliver a few focused things in a short cycle of delivery. The need for reporting, status updates & chatter goes down as observable delivery increases.
  • Real conversations: Any genuine one-on-one conversations with an employee & their peers of more than 10 minutes will begin to surface the real issues in a team. Asking good questions and listening to hear between the lines of the answers is critical in management. Managers must prioritise this to enable their teams to succeed.
  • Act now: The busy nature of work is not an excuse to defer needed actions or to defer complex decisions. If something triggers a suspicion, then dive in.

Great managers shape the process and performance of the team. Great managers enable every member of their team to realise their potential and contribute to creating a more responsive organisation. They are not slaves to the reporting, information and decisions that flow through them. Managers must step out of continuous partial attention to the ongoing work process and get involved in the design of the work.

The work of leadership is to realise the potential of people. Leaving someone stuck in a rut of continued underperformance is failing that individual’s potential.

Who Helps Creates Value in Your Organisation?

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Leadership

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The difference between a network and community is a culture of collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t just happen. It is grown through the action of leaders.

Markets are Value Networks

The markets we use when we exchange financial value today are networks. Networks of connected agents exchange value in our stock exchanges, banks and risk markets. These networks did not arise simply because people connected. Financial markets are facilitated by practices that help transform connection into valuable interactions.

When the networks of merchants in coffee houses became stock exchanges, they relied on the role of brokers and market makers to help build a valuable marketplace. These roles helped people:

  • to build trust in the new market,
  • to create liquidity that enabled activity when demand and supply from participants was not perfectly matched,
  • to share information,
  • to develop new ways of working
  • to help the new markets to enforce the rules and standards of the exchange.

The same leadership work to build value, trust and new ways of working is found in the history of banking, insurance or other exchanges.  

The value created in these networks did not occur because the network existed. It occurred because of the work of people to build a collaborative culture in the network. People need to build a sense of how to use these new exchanges and to build trust in that they would deliver more value than risk.

Your Network Needs Market Makers

Any collaborative network will need leaders to help facilitate the creation of value in the network.  This leadership will be a combination of technical support from community managers and change leadership support from change champions in the organisation and the organisation’s senior management.

The Value Maturity Model highlights the way that collaboration’s market makers need to work to facilitate the value creation in your network:

  • Connecting relevant people to the network and into groups
  • Sharing information that may not have reached its necessary audience
  • Helping to solve issues by matching needs and capabilities, finding other resources or information and even holding a problem or information until there is a match of demand or supply.
  • Providing the systems and support to enable innovation experiments to be fostered until they are proven or fail.
  • Experiment and lead adoption of new ways of working
  • Helping lead the change in the culture of the organisation to allow the development of further cultural change.

To maximise the value of the networks in your organisation, you will need to develop the leadership capabilities that can take advantage of networks.

If you would like to create greater value in your enterprise social network or discuss how the Value Maturity Model applies to assist your organisation to create strategic value, please get in contact. I am available through @simongterry or Linkedin or www.simonterry.com