Writing

Yammer has now released its new post on behalf of other feature (‘POBO’). This feature has been controversial. My advice to anyone is that POBO doesn’t mean the world will end. I might personally prefer it wasn’t used it but in many network use cases, the feature will have value. This post will explain why.

What is POBO?

Posting on behalf of another is a feature of many social collaboration tools, particularly those like Workplace by Facebook that are focused on supporting the needs of employee communication professionals. As the phrase explains it enables someone, usually an communications profession or an assistant, to post on behalf of another person on the network, usually a senior executive.

The logic of the feature is that many senior executives are busy and reluctant to post. However, they can be influential in sharing messages and fostering engagement. Delegating their network activity to a team member is a way for those messages to be shared and engagement to happen.

The critics of POBO rightly point out that employees value genuine leadership engagement. The uplift in adoption from leaders’ participation in networks is a reflection of their genuine commitment to the network, its conversations and actions. People want to see leaders connecting, sharing, solving and innovating with them. POBO risks undermining that for not just the leaders who use it, but potentially creates suspicion on all interactions.

Using POBO is a decision on a spectrum for any community. There are risks and rewards. Undoubtedly, genuine leadership engagement is better. If leaders only delegate through POBO, the community will be weaker.

The Two Yammer Networks

Much of the energy around POBO is that it separates the difference between two ways Yammer Networks are used. Some Yammer networks are employee communication tools. Other networks are platforms for employee collaboration and leveraging the talents of the organisation to support strategy.

I have previously described the difference between a Yammer network run for communication and Yammer networks run for collaboration. The value of the latter is much greater and it is the basis of the work I do using the Value Maturity Model of Collaboration. With the exponential value potential of collaboration, I struggle to see why organisations do not work to make that happen, but I understand that may traditional organisational cultures do not support employees and leaders to have the freedom and safety to connect, share, solve and innovate. If the culture of the organisation is hostile to collaboration, you have a much greater challenge than launching a Yammer network to achieve collaboration.

Each organisations understands just how deeply they can commit to Yammer as a platform for collaboration. The more you have done so, the less value POBO offers. If your Yammer network is purely for communication, then the risks of POBO are much less and its use cases more evident.

Two Yammer Users

The average low engagement user of Yammer will never turn their mind to who posts a post. The feature is largely irrelevant to their experience of Yammer. To them, Yammer is another organisational communication tool, a place to go to get information on the organisation or the work of their colleagues who choose to work out loud.

Much of the energy around POBO comes from the most passionate users who are committed to personal engagement in Yammer networks. This group of passionate champions power community in your Yammer network to the ends of connecting, sharing, solving and innovating. This small group in your network are the employees who will help you realise the value of collaboration across your organisation.

Yammer is platform for organisations to leverage their talents to deliver their strategy. One thing it does incredibly well is help you filter the whole organisation to find those who have the capabilities and talents to drive collaboration in the organisation. Yammer acts a filter for yammer champions. These individuals tend to be passionate, committed members of the wider organisational community. These individuals bring critical network skills that can benefit your organisation well beyond Yammer and often outside of the organisation into stakeholders and the wider community.

Having worked with Yammer networks and in the global Yammer community for a dozen years, I can testify that these champions are diverse and talented bunch. There are few patterns to determine who gets the bug of helping their colleagues to connect, share, solve and innovate. The power of Yammer networks is to help you find these people and more importantly to help them find each other. I get extraordinary support, learning and capability from the global Yammer family that I have met through advocating for and working on adoption of this product.

You want to find these people in your organisation.

Make your intent obvious. The world aligns around those who show intent. You never know who can help you realise your goals.

For many years, I have passionately advocated for working out loud and open ways of working. My logic is simple, they work better and I have had personal experience of the differences sharing your work can make. Today, I wanted to focus in on the power of sharing your intent.

Expose Your Intent

Somewhere through late childhood and early years of work, as our lives become more competitive and demanding, we develop a sense that our intent should be hidden for our best effectives. Some time people will outright advise us to keep our goals secret. Other times we learn from the behaviour of others. We start to fear that others want to frustrate our efforts. We start to believe that we can better achieve our goals through secrecy and manipulation.

The easiest way to achieve your goals is to align other people around that goal. Rarely, is that changing other people’s intent. Mostly, it is finding people who share the same intent. Finding the aligned is like looking for a needle in a haystack, unless you share your intent publicly.

When you are public about the intent of your work, you discover most people are indifferent. Very few people will go out of their way to stop you. Most people who discourage you would discourage any attempt at anything. They can see the challenge and not the opportunity. Both groups will be outweighed by the potential of finding those who can help or can help connect you to others.

The commonest reaction I get to sharing the intent of my work is for someone to say ‘I didn’t realise that’s what you wanted to achieve’. Often that is followed by ‘I can help.’ If someone declares or shows their intent to frustrate me, at least I know who to avoid in future.

Make Intent Real

A second benefit of putting your intent out into the world is that it makes it real. When we declare the goals of our work it helps make that goal tangible to us. Ideas in our head have a habit of shifting and becoming vague over time without the benefit of being shared and acted upon.

Nothing keeps me more honest to my intent than someone saying ‘Hey, Simon, you said you were writing a book. How is it going?’ Putting your intent out into the world enables others to help by holding you to account in little and big ways.

Find something you want to achieve, big or small. Share it with one or more others. Be surprised by the differences you see.

Some times the difference between success and failure is the simple act of holding on: holding on to a dream, a goal or the effort. Success is not for the easy going or fainthearted. Be determined.

As Melbourne rolls through its fifth lockdown, everywhere I turn I am reminded of the imperative to hold on. Defeating a dangerous global pandemic takes commitment, capability, effort, but most of all time. In an age of instant delivery, instant opinions and ready satisfaction, waiting out a global threat can seem too much, too hard and too slow. We have already seen many suggest that the fight is pointless and that defeat is inevitable. We are already struggling with fatigue.

Hold On

I am not one for career regrets. Life moves too fast for what might have been. The closest I come to regret in my career decisions are one or two occasions where I moved on from a problematic situation quickly and I now question whether greater persistence was required for others as much as for me. So much of success is not effort, capability or resources, it is the work of being still in the effort at the right time.

Whether you call it grit, persistence or endurance, whether you see the rewards of being a completer-finisher, whether you have resilience, stubbornness or an ornery sense of determination, there are times when it matters to be in the effort longer. You have to be in it to win it. Holding on to the next right time is an important component of success.

How on Earth?

In all this chaos, stress and pressure, how on earth do we hold on to what matters most?

Let’s digress for a moment into a story. As a kid, I did a bit of rock climbing on camps and other adventures. With poor strength, no technique and too much weight, I was terrible at rockclimbing Terrible looks like climbing a few meters gasping, arms aching, nerves causing shaking through my body then losing my grip, falling and slamming into the rock on my safety rope, an experience painful and embarrassing to me and annoying to the person holding the safety rope. I couldn’t hold on enough to get very far up the steeper grades. Hardly a task to stick at. It wasn’t until I came back to rock climbing indoors as an adult that I met an instructor who supplied two key insights that would have saved a lot of falling off rocks as a kid:

• Maintain 3 points of contact with the rock always: safety and security means never put too much stress on one point of grip
• Climb with your legs: use the big muscles in your lower body to push you up the rock when you can. Save your arm strength to hold on or when absolutely necessary.

Three Points of Contact

If you want to hang on in any challenge, you need to keep your three points of contact with the rock of your challenge:

• What you will gain from the effort?
• What success delivers for others?
• What you will gain from success?

These are the reasons you do anything. These are the reasons to hold on. When the opportunity cost of any one of these three is too great, you will let go. You will also be right to do so.

These questions are easy to ask but the answers are deep and complex. The answers aren’t measured in sales, dollars or any one metric alone. They embrace all the benefits of the work – social, personal, emotional, relational and financial. Nobody else can answer these questions for you. You alone need to be able to justify to yourself why you are holding on. Until you succeed, nobody else cares why you tried.

If you want to improve your commitment and determination, don’t chant buzzwords about grit and determination. Ask yourself these questions.

Climb with Big Muscles

Two human hands are weak. There are limits to what they can hold and do. The big muscles in any human endeavour are the social networks around you. If you want to stick something out, you need to be working these muscles into the task.

Success comes from your work to engage and leverage these big muscles and to have them help you to hold on to your work. Share your work, your goals and invite others to work on them with you. Do this especially when you are struggling and times are tough. Some times the context, the answers or the assistance that others can make is the entire difference between success and failure. If you retreat into your own circumstances, you will lose more than human connection.

The capability to manage a distributed team is not in everyone’s experience. We need to support all our people with the skills to manage and be managed.

Stop worrying about whether your employees know how to work at home. The safe answer in 2021 is that they know how to work anywhere they need to work. (However, you could make sure that you better support those in need).

The biggest worry for organisations is whether management is up to the challenge of working in 2021. Distributed team leadership has traditionally been something that people experience later in their careers, usually when people are asked to be managers of other managers. Many early career managers are used to having their teams around them in one location. Enabling them to have the skills of those who manage managers will be critical to their ongoing sense. We need to start viewing our distributed workforce as a team of managers.

Supporting the transition to a more complicated distributed form of management requires a number of new skills from managers. We have to bring these junior managers to a much higher level of capability quickly. The challenge of distributed management to support distributed work is not information technology, it is human technology:

• Dramatically Increase Deliberate Communication: A distributed team can’t watch a manager at work. They don’t get casual conversation. Managers of distributed teams need to overindex their communication and choose their messaging carefully to improve clarity and understanding. If you aren’t saying your message so often that it bores you then the messages may not have been understood.
• Moving from Delegation of Tasks to Delegation of Outcomes: A distributed workforce can’t check-in on every task throughout the day, even with chat and collaboration apps. Managers need to delegate the whole outcome along with clear measures of success and give employees the autonomy to deliver that goal. That will help those distributed employees to manage their work flexibly with a view to outcomes.
• Create a Coaching Culture: Coaching is critical to support distributed teams. Coaching is far more powerful than direction when you don’t understand the exact circumstances on the ground for a team member. The burden of coaching does not have to fall on the leader alone. Encourage peer coaching and an openness to get help and assistance with the challenges of work.
• Practice Empathy: Without your team around you, they will not derive their motivation from your energy and work ethic. With limits on your capacity to push, you will need to work with the distributed team to understand their drivers of motivation. Coaching will help but this will be multiplied by a focus on your employee, their purpose, their goals, their concerns and desires. In a distributed work environment, managers need to move from a transactional relationship with employees to a deeper relationship powered by purpose, shared goals and empathy.
• Build Capability: When it is harder to see the work, you need to spend time assessing capability and developing the skills of your team. You cannot assume that people understand how to translate outcomes into activity. Managers need to assess capability, develop skills and continue to coach the development of the necessary skills to achieve outcomes and fulfil strategy.

Work has changed irrevocably. Managers now need to practice the new skills to manage distributed teams. Far more than choice of technology, these skills will shape your team’s success in the future of work.

Welcome to 2021. This is the international year of getting excited about working outside of offices.

Some people may have noticed that working outside of offices has a long heritage, one that has been accelerating in recent years with the invention of the laptop, the mobile phone, the internet, the smart phone and cloud services. Over five decades, we have radically untethered work from the office.

Sadly, it took the public health restrictions of a global pandemic for some executives to notice the change.

For the last 50 years, where you work has been irrelevant. What has become increasingly important in that period are the work and life needs of employees and the demands of the work to be done.

Your fancy office building, whether owned or leased, is a sunk cost. Stop letting it dictate your decisions.

The shortcomings of your management team and problems in your culture have to be fixed. Demanding employees are at their desk every Monday at 9am is not an answer to your cultural issues. Again this is about your organisational shortcomings and not something you need to force on your workers to fix.

All the diverse, talented and magical employees you have been struggling to retain will thank you. All the parents, the carers, the young and the older will thank you. Actually everyone will thank you.

Offices aren’t over. They are just part of the mix. Co-working isn’t the future. It is part of the mix. Much of our work and many of our employees need an office. We can’t expect every home is suitable for the work. However, it is likely the coming round of real estate decisions and the inevitable pressure for efficiency will shape the supply of offices.

Work is not remote. It is where it needs to be. Work is not hybrid. It gets done how it needs to be done.

None of this depends on your technology partner for productivity solutions, collaboration, or video conferencing. All the basics of that technology has been in place for years. We have only just started to use all this technology and realise its potential. The future evolution of work depends on how well we leverage these tools in the mix, but they are only part of how work is changing.

Work is irrevocably flexible. It wasn’t been done exclusively in the office before the pandemic. Go ask the coffee shop owners around your office about the laptops, the phone calls and the meetings that graced their tables. Better yet go ask your clients about how good it was that your team could work flexibly with them when and where it mattered for your clients.

Work existed before offices. Work is more flexible than ever. Let the flexibility suit the work and not the office. It’s time to live in 2021.

Every business battles the danger of ‘doing business with ourselves’. Meetings, problems, strategy, administration and process can take up all our time. Focus outside the organisation to learn and adapt. Challenge the value of your internal deliberations if not supported by customer data or customer conversations.

As a collaboration expert, I say that collaboration isn’t the answer to every problem. If collaboration is not bringing something new or different to the table, it is burning through precious time and resources.

Doing Business With Yourself

Very few organisations have a rule against inviting multiple people to an internal or even external meeting. Often the expectation is that every significant discussion will have a large internal participation. You can destroy a lot of value in an organisation doing business with yourself.

Large and long meetings with multiple internal participants are a warning sign of lack of clarity of accountability. Someone in that room should own the problem. Do they really need to consult with everyone all at once? Are they actually shifting accountability for their issue to others? On what basis are decisions going to be made? Does anyone in this meeting have insights from outside the organisation in the form of customer data, conversations or research? Do you have a lack of trust such that everyone needs to watch each other work?

Steve Blank has strongly advocated that startups and organisations ‘need to get outside the building’ but for many organisations they continue to invest time and resources in doing business with themselves. This is particularly dangerous when the meetings are to discuss, decide and shape customer propositions. If you don’t have the customer actually in the room, how do you know what they want? Are you just going to take the word of the highest paid person?

Ending business with ourselves

There are some key steps to ending business with ourselves:

• Accountabilities: Make sure accountabilities are clear. Know who is accountable for the issue in question and who gets the final say. If this person isn’t running the meeting, then change the chair or shut the meeting down.
• Customers First: Use customer insights to make decisions about customer propositions. If you don’t have them, don’t holding a meeting internally, go out and make some calls, test something or do some customer research.
• Who is in the room? Challenge the need for the second and every subsequent internal person in an internal or external meeting. If you don’t know why you are invited, don’t go. If there are too many people going who don’t add value, ask the host to change approach. Be prepared to ask others what they bring to a discussion. Anyone who needs to attend a meeting for awareness or status updates can read minutes instead.
• Insights: If a meeting is going on with opinions and no insight, shut it down. Make people do the work with customers instead to enable the decision maker to reach a clear conclusion. The work won’t happen by magic if there hasn’t been preparation, even if it is a fancy workshop run by external consultants.
• Value time. If an issue takes ten minutes to discuss. Start on time and shut down the meeting after 10 minutes. The time blocked for a meeting is the maximum it should take, not a target. Overruning a meeting time is a lack of respect for others and poor management by the host.

Everyday we reinvent our story. Living is choosing in the flow of moments. The stories come later. What’s your next one?

Life tells you things in small tumbling coincidences. I stumbled across Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield this week looking for a film. I love his work and the cast led by Dev Patel was exceptional so I dove in. The film brought me great joy in particular the portrayal, by Peter Capaldi, of Mr Micawber. Why? I once played Mr Micawber in a school production foundering every performance over my efforts to repeat Micawber’s sound advice:

‘Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 [pounds] 19 [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery.

While you’d think that advice would be seared into memory, to this day I look it up. I noted it was omitted from the film. I’d have been better to remember it. I’ve risen and fallen like the tide on my ability to follow that advice throughout my life.

Flowing on from the film, I discovered a wonderful New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman about the lives we did not lead. That article includes the quote:

Part of the work of being a modern person seems to be dreaming of alternate lives in which you don’t have to dream of alternate lives.

The article does not quote David Copperfield as one of its many literary sources, but the Copperfield story draws heavily on Dicken’s reinvention of his own life. I followed that idea to the Wikipedia page for David Copperfield where I found a discussion of autobiography and this gem:

It consists of splitting one’s life into parts, choosing decisive phases, identifying an evolution and endowing them with a direction and then a meaning, whereas, from day to day, existence has been lived as a cluster of shapeless perceptions requiring an immediate adaptation

Wikipedia discussion

The greatest master of this adaptation must be Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa who constructed a great diversity of his heteronyms to expressed himself. These diverse identities had unique styles and even their own biographies enabling Pessoa to live multiple lives without leaving his desk. I keep Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet to dip into when in need of provocation.

“The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; the nostalgia for what never was”
~ Fernando Pessoa pic.twitter.com/lRlGalo4aa

— Paul Holdengraber (@holdengraber) October 11, 2019

From that insight, I flowed into Wang Wei‘s Blue Green Stream (trans. Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell)

Every time I have started for the Yellow Flower River,
I have gone down the Blue-Green Stream,
Following the hills, making ten thousand turnings,
We go along rapidly, but advance scarcely one hundred li.
We are in the midst of a noise of water,
Of the confused and mingled sounds of water broken by stones,
And in the deep darkness of pine trees.
Rocked, rocked,
Moving on and on,
We float past water-chestnuts
Into a still clearness reflecting reeds and rushes.
My heart is clean and white as silk; it has already achieved Peace;
It is smooth as the placid river.
I love to stay here, curled up on the rocks,
Dropping my fish-line forever.

I even imagined a lazy trip by ferry across the Bosphorus crossing between East and West with apple tea and pastries. I’ve never been to Istanbul other than in the pages of Orhan Pahmuk’s novels.

But involves a marathon. I’d prefer a Bosphorus ferry, apple tea and some pastries. pic.twitter.com/4eKxDIOzkG

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) May 23, 2021

Our lives are stories constructed from fact and fiction after the fact to justify what we did last and what do next. We pick the story to suit our needs and we change it. In the rushing flow of each moment one after another we make the decisions we make and we live accordingly. The meaning arrives if we go on living perhaps inspired by Mr Micawber’s optimism that ‘something will turn up’ (even when it often doesn’t).

The experience of the weekend perhaps is best summed up by another quote from the New Yorker article:

Like facets in a jewel, such moments seem to put our lives into prismatic relief. They make us feel the precariousness and the specificity of the way things are.

Joshua Rothman

But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

-Jane Kenyon, “Otherwise”

Postscript:

Life is all about what you do next, not first. https://t.co/bgSFzSfWBn

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) May 17, 2021

Or more elegantly

This visualization (from the amazing @waitbutwhy) is perfection.

If you allow the past to consume you, you will never create the future you want and deserve.

When in doubt, focus on the future. It is so damn bright. pic.twitter.com/DDhf0JMUL5

— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) May 12, 2021

The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who can see two kinds of people and those who can’t.

Old joke

The backbone of many activities across our society and our organisations are the joiners. The people who volunteer to do the work.

In any not for profit, sporting club, school or volunteer organisation, a few people do a lot of the work. Who does the work is driven by intrinsic motivations, their willingness to give and the interest in others. Not surprisingly, it is often the same people who contribute across all these domains. There is so much social and civil activity powered by the joiners. Everyone else benefits from their work.

The narrow base of joiners makes these essential organisations more fragile. A narrow base of joiners can mean that they are spread to thin and services can be fitted in unevenly around other commitments. Those who don’t join in often have the comfortable view that ‘things could be done better’ of those who don’t offer to help.

Organisations of all types need to know, value and celebrate their joiners. The loss of one can have wide reaching implications. The gain of one can power new levels of effectiveness. Like Mr Micawber in Dicken’s David Copperfield, a lot can turn on whether you can sustain enough support from joiners:

‘Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 [pounds] 19 [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery. ‘

Memes embed quickly. Not all memes are useful. ‘Earn the commute’ is the wrong way to frame the return to the office.

‘Earning the commute’ has become a common way to describe the work employers need to do to get people to work in offices again. However, like many simple catchphrases it obscures more than it reveals:

• Yes, commute time is one of the inconveniences of office working. However, it is rarely the key one in a decision to go to the office.
• The focus on time reflects our ongoing obsession with time as the measure of work productivity. We have inherited a time focus from the days of Taylorism management science and for many employers time remains the focus for a want of any other measure of worker value. For knowledge workers, time is rarely the key issue. We’d be far better to focus on outputs and throw away the time clock.
• The time of a commute is usually wasted in an average work day because of that time obsession. Meetings that go for an integer multiple of an hour regardless of need are far more destructive of value. Employers know on a videoconference they can tune out and do other work more productively.
• A bigger inconvenience is that a fixed working hours in fixed location rarely suits the lives of employees who have family obligations and other commitments that could be more easily managed in a hybrid work model. That has nothing to do with the commute and everything to do with flexibility.
• Autonomy increased as people worked from home in 2020. With less physics connection and urgent issues to solve, people discovered the value of making decisions around their own work. Hidden behind earning the commute is employees grappling with loss of this autonomy.
• The value of a face to face interaction in a workplace has to be the reason for asking employees to come together. Whether that is simple social connection, collaboration, problem solving, building capability or more, there are reasons for people to meet in person. Earning the commute implies this value occurs across a whole work day. It does not, which is why many organisations are choosing 2-3 days as their preferred model.

Don’t seek to earn the commute. Throw away the clock as a management tool. Focus instead on the outcomes you need and how best to bring employees to achieve them. Productivity increased for many in 2020 because they worked in new and better ways. Your barrier to returning to old model of work is not the commute it is that productivity, autonomy and lifestyle flexibility.