As your organisation adapts to the future of work, your models of leadership need to change. Leadership needs to be as adaptive as the the organisation you are seeking to create. Otherwise the potential of your people and the business will be lost.
You can’t command experiments. You can’t control networks. You can’t command customer collaborations. You can’t command engagement or purpose. You can’t control transparency. You can’t command autonomy.
Organisations that implement new agile ways of working need new leadership models. Activity based working, digital workplace tools, collaboration solutions, innovation hubs, agile projects and product management and lean continuous improvement all require leaders to work in ways that build the capability of people, manage the whole system and value the contributions of others over a leader’s rank and expertise.
As you change to the future of work, change what leadership means in your organisation. Build the leadership capabilities in leaders and the whole team to prosper in new ways of working. Make your leadership as adaptive as your organisation.
Not everyone is allowed to work out loud. Those who can must value their opportunities and seek to help others to share.
I was reading an article in the newspaper on the weekend about a new book by Tara Moss on “Speaking Out: A 21st Century Handbook for Women and Girls”. The discussion in the book of barriers to women speaking up and the techniques that can assist caused me to reflect on the barriers many people face in sharing their work out loud.
Not everyone can work out loud. The real pressures that hold people back can be social, gender, hierarchy or the culture of their organisation. For many people, the expectation in their organisation is that someone with their position, role or work will keep silent, do what they are told and just deliver. Something as simple as talking out loud about your work with others is a privilege.
As a privilege, working out loud is something that needs to be used with respect. I have always stressed that working out loud is a choice. We cannot mandate it, because that choice will not suit many and may not be available to all.
As a privilege, working out loud should be used to benefit others. If you can work out loud, you have a contribution to make. Those who can speak out have an opportunity to help others to be heard. Those who can speak out can support others who may face barriers or abuse. Those who can speak out have an opportunity to role model better ways and to fight for changes that give voices to others in their organisation and their society.
If you can work out loud, use that privilege to help others.
I received an email today from the CEO of a large networking organisation. The well crafted message pointed out he had noticed that I hadn’t registered for their latest event and offered me a discount. At the end of the email he politely invited me to connect on LinkedIn.
One small flaw in this carefully crafted piece of relationship marketing. The event is in Chicago. I live in Melbourne, Australia. I have never heard of the CEO, his organisation and I’ve never given them my email.
A piece of lovely copywriting goes to waste because its premise defeats it. The CEO wanted to convey he had considered me specifically. He wanted to build a relationship so that he can sell me services and events. However, because they bought a dodgy email list and didn’t do any research into the list all that work is an evident waste.
You can’t fake a relationship. You can’t turn a transaction into a relationship by declaring it one or by good intentions. Relationships take work. A relationship is not about what you want. Copywriting won’t save you from your lack of interest in your customers & prospects. The transparency of the global economy makes old marketing methods more dangerous than ever.
If you want a relationship, build one for both parties. If you run a networking organisation, start with relationships, not unsubscribe marketing.
Whatever you do, if you don’t want to put in the effort in a relationship, don’t pretend.
Meetings are rarely ever doing. Constraining the daily meetings forces choice and improves effectiveness.
When I started as a consultant I carried over practices from corporate life. I wanted to fill my days with meetings. I had a need to network and to build my business. I needed to tell my story and win work. I took a lot of meetings and spent days running around town.
I was soon reminded how unproductive the meeting circuit was. Taking every meeting chewed up lots of time, created lots of activity and spent energy. The commutes between meetings alone took hours. However it delivered few results.
Reflecting on my lack of productivity I implemented a daily rule of no more than 3 meetings. Limiting meetings had an immediate benefit in creating time to think, to do work and to make choices. A limit also made me much more focused on which meetings to take. I also found that many other meetings could be swapped for a quick phone call, a video chat or an exchange of information.
Any arbitrary rule should always be honoured in the breach. I occasionally take another meeting but now I do so reflecting on the value of that meeting and its cost in my time. Overall my productivity has risen as I look for other ways to get work done.
I was turning left in my car on a rainy night in the centre of Melbourne waiting for a pedestrian. An oncoming car was turning right towards me except they seemed to be coming too fast and dangerously close. It was disconcerting to look across and see the driver turning right and looking down his face lit by the phone in his lap. We avoided a collision but I had to wonder what message could be so important it needs to be read in the middle of a right hand turn.
I once worked in an organisation with a zero inbox culture. Emails pinged around at rapid speed. Every idea was on the move somewhere else. Every email was less than three lines. Velocity mattered more than value. Everyone was overwhelmed by the flood of messages and few emails created the actions they intended as they were either in transit elsewhere or lacked the information required to move forward.
I watch the politician on the television say the same vaguely reassuring phrases over and again. With masterful skill they pivot each question back to their set phrases. Challenges and doubts are dismissed or simply ignored. Short of time and well aware that the answers form a pattern the interviewer surrenders and moves on.
The legal documents were long and fell with a heavy thud on the table. The goal of the reams of paper was to cover every eventuality in a complex transaction. There were dozens of lawyers in the room and they had been negotiating for days already. Discussion fell into a quick routine as points were hammered out. I looked at the document waiting for someone to point out the small error that reversed the impact of a clause to nobody’s benefit. The conversation was moving on. Rather than paying attention everyone was relying on the amount of discussion to have caught the issues.
‘But how can our employees not know, the policy is quite clearly explained on our intranet’
‘I’m calling to follow up the text about the email on the link in the post’
As he pushed submit on his blogpost he wondered ‘Am I just adding to the excess?’
Design your organisation for the potential of its people and their capabilities, not the limits of an expertise.
I recently noticed that Capability or Competency? Mindsets matter was the second most read post on this blog. Part of the appeal of that post is that it addresses a critical shift in mindset for those grappling with the new dynamics of the future of work. We stand facing an organisational version of the personal insight Marshall Goldsmith described succinctly as “What Got Me Here Won’t Get Me There”
Competency-led Organisations
The Core Competency concept introduced by Prahalad and Hamel refined a concept that had been strong in management for decades. It is undoubtedly true that organisations compete by being better, more competent, at something than their competitors. However the mindset of being more competent differs from a competency. This subtlety was often lost as core competency flowed into the mainstream of management thinking.
The focus on core competencies created a mindset that organisation gets to choose its competencies as part of a strategic planning process and should set targets for competencies to fulfil its strategy. While Prahalad and Hamel spoke of the need for organisations to look forward to assess and build their competencies, much of the focus in organisations has been historical. The biggest outcome of the discussion of core competency has been a narrowing of organisational ambition and a focusing of activity on historical strengths. “That’s not our core competency” is more common than “We can leverage core competencies”.
Influenced by themes that go back to the beginning of scientific management, we have turned core competencies into rigid processes, standards and policies. We have judged these competencies by what sustained competitive advantage in past markets. We have spent less time on the changing customer perceptions of value and the ongoing dynamics of the future marketplace driven by new competitors. The list is long of disrupted organisations who felt safe because a new entrant lacked their core competencies. In many cases the infrastructure to reinforce and sustain these core competencies became a burden in their ability to adapt and survive.
Capability-led Organisations
The Big Learning mindset that pervades the future of work highlights that competitive advantage in the next century is based on the ability to build the capabilities required to compete in an environment of uncertainty. Rather than specifying a fixed goal of competency, we seek to build an open capability to fulfil our strategic intent and our customers’ needs as they arise.
Adapting organisations to foster autonomy, learning and change is what enables people to build the practical capabilities necessary to learn, grow and execute. The process you inherit is less important than the customer insight you gain in working to meet your customer needs. Prahalad and Hamel reinforced that in Competing for the Future their update of the core competencies discussion. The discussion on the need for organisations to build open capabilities that can help manage and drive adaptation. These capabilities include openness to their networks and environment, collaboration, ability to learn, share and drive change. Critical too is the development of purpose as the new focus for organisational activity and the inherent rationale for groups of people to come together in work to benefit others.
Design for Capabilities
Responsive Organisations need to design for a capability-led response to a uncertain future. They need to develop core Big Learning practices like working out loud, personal knowledge management, adaptive leadership and experimentation. They need to design their organisations to allow individuals and the collective to focus on the realisation of purpose.
This organisational design will leverage networks, transparency, autonomy, experimentation and the inherent motivation of employees in ways that we have not yet seen. Developing a new competency in holocracy, agile, lean product development, design thinking, big data or any other single practice is not enough. An organisation must build the capability to continuously adapt to customer needs in a changing market.
Ultimately, it will also focus organisations more strongly on realising the potential of people, customers and other stakeholders. We need to design our organisations to build the capabilities that realise human potential. That can only help make work more human.
Elite sporting teams build a development culture because they know their performance can be dramatically influenced by the bottom third of players.
Discussing the many upsets and surprises in the 2016 AFL season with friends I was reminded that the performance of an elite team can be heavily influenced by the bottom third of its players. A champion forward is of little value if the ball never gets there due to errors on the way. A champion midfielder loses value when their disposals are wasted. Even the best backs in the world can’t stop a consistent flood of attack due to the weakness of their peers.
Teams over Stars
Everyone has stars. Great stars will take you a long way. However exceptional talent is hard to come by and harder to retain. When it comes to the games that matter, great talents are also likely to be matched by great talent in the opposing teams. Everyone focuses on recruiting, rewarding and developing their stars.
When you get to the games that matter, team performance will win you the game. Team performance is about collaboration, people playing their role and outperforming the entire other team, not one or two individuals. In that scenario, where star power is usually closely matched, consistently high performance is about the performance of all players. The game can be shaped by the relative performance of the two bottom thirds in how well they execute, learn and collaborate.
Now many use this rationale to adopt ruthlessness to drive performance edge, cut poor performers and replace them with new talent. At GE, Jack Welch was famous for recommending the bottom 10% of performers be cut, a practice that is widely copied. Accountability through choice of who is on the team is required in any high performance environment.
Develop the Team
However, teams come together from groups of individuals working in concert. The stars need to work alongside everyone else. Stars need support. More importantly, better performances come when everyone lifts their performance together. The collective effort determines the outcome.
There is not always enough top talent available. The attraction of your organisation to top talent often depends on the team culture and particularly how you invest to develop everyone. Even Jack Welch and the successful GE organisation he led recognised that a development culture was important. Lifting the middle and bottom third through work on the development of people’s capabilities and by creating a great team culture is critical to sustained high performance.
Your Bottom Third
At an individual level, elite athletes recognise that there are good days and bad days of performance. Making sure that the bottom third of performance is better through mastery, practice and experience is critical to their ongoing careers. The bad moments are those where you fall back on elite disciplines and experience to see you through.
When you are good, you are good. How good are you when you are awful? How you use the least effective third of your time plays a key role in ongoing performance.
Talent matters. Investing in a team culture and the development of all individuals including the bottom third will matter to sustained performance.
Value in collaboration is created by individual actions.
In building value for organisations through social collaboration we often resort to discussing the group, the team, the community and the network. There is lots of literature that references these terms and makes recommendations at these levels. Applying traditional business thinking we can lose sight of the individual and focus only on aggregates.
Networks don’t connect. Individuals take advantage of a network to connect with other individuals. Networks don’t share. Individuals share information in networks. The further we move into working, solving and innovating in networks the clearer it is that the value is created by individual actions multiplied by the power of a network.
Focusing on these individual actions is important because it reminds us to study individual motivations, mindsets and behaviours in the creation of effective collaboration. A culture of collaboration exists only in the expectations and behaviours of individuals. More importantly it enables us to talk to individuals about the value & practices of collaboration in language they understand. Nobody says to themselves ‘I need to engage transparently and collaboratively with an enterprise community’. People are looking to advance their work and their personal goals in tangible ways. People articulate often abstract concepts like generosity, authority, reciprocity, enagagement and trust in terms of very tangible actions in everyday work.
Aggregates give us opportunities to talk in lofty terms. Abstract capitalised bound abound. Many of these nouns seduce us with appeals to ideals not everyday actions. Real value is created with change driven using the language of individual users. If you value the individual, they will return the favour.
Organisations tie themselves in knots about whether a focus on innovation will distract from execution. Innovation is the execution challenge for all organisations. The same is no longer good enough. Better takes innovation.
Innovation is not a distraction
Innovation comes in many forms in the modern organisation. Not all innovation is the hard and often uncertain work of taking novel technology and applying it in the organisation.
Innovation can and should include continuous improvements in service delivery, service redesign, new product development, expansion to adjacent markets, changing management approaches, redesign of infrastructure, support and other processes. Led by customer insight and delivering clear strategic value, this innovation is at the heart of the execution of any strategic plan. Every strategy calls for the work to improve and it will take innovations to make that happen.
Organisations need to master the execution of these forms of innovation to build the capabilities to tackle larger challenges like technology or business model innovation. The skills learned executing continuously on small daily challenges build the organisational capability for larger change.
Innovation is the challenge
We operate in an environment where your competitors are looking to be more agile, more responsive to customer need and more effective. Like it or not, their execution focus is building foundational skills for innovation. On top new competitors are eyeing your business with entirely new mindsets & capabilities.
With this competitive environment it is harder to outperform with just a few percentage points of growth and a few percentage points of cost cutting in an otherwise stable business. Organisations need to be responsive and enable all their employees to create customer led change to drive strategic value. Innovation is not an execution challenge off to the side. Innovation is the lifeblood of competitive advantage.
Innovation drives effectiveness. That makes innovation the execution challenge.
