Writing

Organisations are becoming increasingly aware that traditional models of leadership need to change to adapt to the new digital and network economy.

I am excited to be joining with Euan Semple and Anne Bartlett-Bragg to present panel events in Melbourne and Sydney exploring the changing role of Digital Leadership.

Digital Leadership Panel In Sydney on 27 March

The Sydney event on 27 March is presented by the University of Sydney’s Digital Disruption Research Group and we will be joined by Sandra Peter from the University.  Booking details are here.

Digital Leadership Panel In Melbourne on 29 March

The Melbourne event on 29 March is supported by ANZ.  Book for the Melbourne event here.

Both events promise to be fantastic discussions.

I look forward to seeing you at one or other of these event and hearing your insights into how digital leadership is changing.

About Euan

Euan Semple is an early adopter of digital technologies and an innovator who has worked with major organisations like the BBC, Nokia, the World Bank, and NATO. He believes that companies that are succeeding in the marketplace today are those that are beginning to initiate a dialogue with customers and staff to improve their operations and processes.
Euan offers unique insights into how to make the latest technologies work for you and your organisation. He has helped organisations, and more importantly the people in them, to get their heads around social media, social business, and the social web both inside and outside the firewall.
In his book ‘Organizations Don’t Tweet’, Euan identifies that there are remarkable opportunities to mine the intellects of senior managers, backroom operators, frontline staff and customers to create a more responsive business model.
Euan believes those leaders and managers that stay connected to their community at work and with their customers have the best chance to survive and flourish in this new ‘Age of Disruption’.

About Anne

Anne is the Founder and Managing Director of Ripple Effect Group. She specialises in the design and implementation of innovative communication and collaboration networks with enterprise social technologies. Anne continues to extend her PhD research in this field to assist organisations develop informed approaches to using new technologies and changing traditional models of working. Her recent research into digital capabilities will provide  a framework to review leadership models for the digital workplace.

About Simon

Simon Terry provides consulting, advice, speaking and thought leadership to global clients through his own consulting practice, and as a Charter Member of Change Agents Worldwide, a network of progressive and passionate professionals, specialising in Future of Work technologies and practices.  The focus of Simon’s practice is assisting organisations to transform innovation, collaboration, learning and leadership. Digital transformation and the future of work require purposeful, agile and collaborative teams, with all members able to lead responses to customer needs and market opportunities.

“Thanks for joining us today. You bring such wisdom”

The words in a meeting this week struck me heavily. I don’t feel wise. I feel like I am doing what I do and continually learning more as I go. I feel trapped in the usual mess and complexity we all face as we go about our work. It was easy at first to attribute this “wisdom” to perceptions of my age. I had the least hair in the room and what I have is grey. I wrote the comment off, as I had done with similar comments before.

On further reflection, I realised that there is a pattern in the times that people appreciate my contributions as wisdom. Here is how you can increase your wisdom without waiting for the grey hair:

• Stay calm – we expect gurus to be able to levitate above daily frustrations. With all that is going on at work, it is easy to lose it when things get challenging or complex. Keeping calm and centred when things are challenging is the first step to wisdom. Be a reminder that panic and flurry adds nothing valuable to work. Helping others to see that the daunting complexity can be managed or at least mitigated is an important role anyone can play
• Ask good questions -the best way to be wise is to enable others to bring forth their wisdom. Great questions are the key to drawing out other’s contributions. People often know the answer they just lack the confidence to believe it. Questions can elicit new information or reframe the problem to help others forward.
• Keep the focus on the goal – in the flurry or confusion of work, it is easy to confuse the goal. Clarifying the goal of a conversation or work can make matters dramatically easier for everyone, particularly in times of stress. Break down big daunting goals into smaller steps. There’s wisdom in progress and iteration too.
• Leverage experience – Been there; done that; got the wisdom. If you have seen a challenge before, it is far less daunting. Ask what have I seen that relates to this? Collect experiences that are relevant to your work from your life, networks, media and other sources. The experience you share might be your own, or your networks, either way, it advances the conversation significantly.
• Work from principles – Being able to support your positions and recommendations with principles and logic brings strength and ease of understanding to your work. Connecting the ideas that guide you makes your case stronger. Also working from principles, helps you to be in the rare category of having some principles at work.
• Be brief – Make your point concisely. The less you say the more effective it is and the wiser you appear. Too many people think that their audience measures their contributions by duration. They don’t. They weigh their impact.

Our relationships with our parents are some of the most significant relationships in our lives, for better or for worse. We cannot and should not try to replicate those relationships at work. It is time that our workplaces adopt the policy “We are All Adults Here”.

Playing at Parents and Children

When Netflix set out to define its culture as a startup, one of the core ideas was “we are not family here”.  Netflix explicitly set out to leverage a radical idea of establishing its culture on adult-adult relationships.  They want employees to have the freedom and the responsibility that comes from interacting as adults. Too many organisations’ efforts to extend autonomy are undermined by a culture of policies and procedures that treat employees as children.  The ‘nanny state’ of political imagination is alive and well inside organisations.

Treating employees as adults is not a new idea. It is just rarely implemented. Treating employees as children started back before Frederick Winslow Taylor.  In the craftsman’s shop and in the early days of industrialisation before child labour laws, many employees were children.  Early industrialists and other Taylorist viewed the employee’s brain as the last thing you would use.  Taylor himself once reiterated his point in testimony to a Special Committee of the House of Representatives:

 I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handing pig-iron is so great that the man who is fit to handle pig-iron as his daily work cannot possibly understand the science; the man who is physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron

Taylor’s school of thought may have been dominant in industrial thinking, but it was not alone. Even back in the early 20th Century, Mary Parker Follett was researching and demonstrating the potential of reciprocal adult relationships at work. Follet who focused on the connection between leadership and followership in shared purpose said:

That is always our problem, not how to get control of people, but how all together we can get control of a situation.

Letting Go of Mom and Dad

The era of global digital networks that we now face has shifted the balance irreversibly from Taylor to Follett. An employee who sits childlike at the node of a network, waiting to be fed instructions is a blocker and will be routed around by customers, fellow employees and the community. In a network, you are judged by what you contribute, not what you consume. Waiting for a clear unambiguously attractive “what’s in it for me?” means a missed opportunity to make a personal choice.

The pace, customer centricity and competitive challenges of digital business demand organisations leverage the greatest potential of their people. An employee on the spot responding like a fully functioning human adult is the greatest competitive advantage that can be put into market, particularly if they can command the digital resources of the organisation in support of their decisions. That will never happen if they are really children playing and waiting for approval.

There are many psychological reasons why we revert to the comfort of adult and child relationships. Having an adult to ‘look after us’, whether CEO, boss or politician can be comforting in times of uncertainty and threat. However, as too many employees and citizens, have discovered that leader is only looking after themselves and leveraging the parent-child relationship to do so at their disadvantage. Unlike parents, CEOs are not in the business of sacrificing themselves to save their children.

The hard adult work of reciprocal relationships is in front of us. This is one of the critical reasons why organisations need to develop strong practices in sense-making, collaboration, adaptive leadership, and experimentation.  We can no longer rely on the one adult in the room to make all the decisions. Changing engrained habits is not easy. However, these new challenging relationships are the way to realise our human potential.