Your organisation has amazing talent. They want to grow, develop and make a big impact on the world. So why risk losing them over the constraints of a job.
Little boxes
You want digital talent but your employment agreement prevents their involvement in any other business activities or any forms of collaboration externally. You want thought leaders but your media policy prevents people from speaking externally. Your top talent wants development but it’s hard to find an internal program to meet their needs but you can’t pay for an external one. You ask your talent to report to people they don’t respect and wonder why they leave.
Your little boxes are killing your talent.
Flexibility
On the street today I ran into a former colleague who works full time and consults on days of unpaid leave. Another friend is a global thought leader who speaks on days he’s not being paid by his global organisation. The list of people who dabble in businesses on the side is huge.
When innovation is at the edge and learning happens mostly by experience, these are the opportunities that your talent craves. Release the shackles. Let them after it.
Set some ground rules. In each case above the successful examples involve simple ground rules against double dipping, conflicts and confidentiality. These rules are so obvious your talent will sort it out anyway.
None of these people worry about delivering their performance expectations because they are managed to outcomes. They have the autonomy, the coaching and trust to get the job done (& do more).
Remove the boxes and you will be thrilled with what your employees bring back to the organisation. Most importantly, create a flexible mix that is unique to the pair of you and they will stay.
‘My interest in hacks come from my keener interest in the future of work, and its unremitting demand on the common worker to adapt, learn continually, and upskill. The future worker needs to test themselves, to build resilience, to become antifragile.
Fundamentally, we can do this through experimentation, a willingness to try things and (hopefully) safe-fail.’ -Jonathan Anthony
Cancer begins when a cell abandons it purpose in the body and begins to replicate. Because cancer cells look like healthy cells, they defeat the body’s defences. Cancer kills because invasive cells strangle the healthy ones.
‘Strong Leadership’ is a cancer. With three word slogans, assertiveness and decisiveness, strong leadership tricks people into comfort, rather than defence. By refusing to admit error or debate, strong leadership rapidly becomes dangerously comfortable. Suddenly strong leadership replicates rapidly squeezing out real leadership.
‘Strong leadership’ is direction. As a style, direction works in a limited range of leadership scenarios where actions are predictable and little flexibility is required. Direction requires little or no trust. Direction doesn’t allow for the system to learn or even admit mistakes. The more complicated and complex the scenarios the more unhealthy direction is.
We are in a highly complex and interdependent world. Simple direction won’t cut it any more. We need to engage the learning and human potential of everyone. To do that we need to influence and we need to inspire. We will need to collaborate and consult the ideas of others. We will need to learn adaptive as we take the opportunities around us to make change. The work of making the future will belong to everyone, not just ‘leaders’.
The danger we face is that strong leadership strangles the debate and engagement required. Taking the high ground of comfort, strong leadership replicates at the expense of the leadership practices required.
The future of leadership won’t seem as clear cut and may even feel risky. We won’t be as certain as what we are doing. We will be more certain as to where we are going and why. We can have confidence in our own abilities. Let us put our faith in our own potential and the potential of others.
On the weekend, I made english muffins. I have now made four of my big five baking goals. After sourdough bread, bagels, pretzels, crumpets and now english muffins, I only have croissants to go.
Hang on a minute. Big five baking goals? That sounds like a bucket list.
What’s wrong with a bucket list?
Even if I put aside the morbid nature of a death checklist, the problem with bucket lists is that they have become part of our consumer society. Bucket list moments are experiences that you are meant to have. They are not who you are.
Because bucket lists are consumption driven, they always grow and there is no pressure to have a consistent logic for inclusion. (For example, croissants is the 6th member of my big five baking goals). Your bucket list can never be complete. More unique experiences are always being created. Bucket lists creep into every aspect of life. Bucket lists run on ‘keeping up with the Jones’ logic. If everyone else is running with the Bulls at Pamplona, then we should too. (Why didn’t I include doughnuts?)
All these experiences are an effort to fill a life that lacks the satisfaction of purpose. Bucket lists leak through the lack of purpose.
Plug the Purposeful Hole in the Bucket
A life lived with purpose is not about what you have. A life lived with purpose is about who you are. Purpose defines the reason you do what you do. Purpose is our chosen effect on others and the world.
Don’t chase a random list of experiences. There’s no chance it will make your life complete. Start by doing one purposeful act instead. One purposeful act might be all it takes.
I’m not looking to bake my way up culinary peaks. I’m just aiming for one joyous family meal at a time. Now about those croissants…
Senior leadership engagement in change is a hot topic. Social collaboration makes the absence of leader engagement obvious. I’m often asked to speak on collaboration, learning and leadership to senior executives. As I used to be one, people want me to share a little of my passion for these topics. Here are some suggestions to guide you in your senior leadership engagement.
It’s not a priority
Collaboration, leadership and learning is unlikely to be a priority for your senior leaders. Sure they’ll discuss it but they don’t want to do it. They don’t know anyone who got made a CEO because his team was the most collaborative or the most agile. There is always a bigger business or customer problem that is on their mind.
Rather than engage in an argument as to why this mindset is wrong (it is – see Big Learning), I start with understanding the real business problems that they want to solve. Once we understand the business problems we can connect collaboration, learning and leadership as solutions to that problem.
Avoid Capitalised Nouns
Senior executives are busy and distracted. They don’t want jargon and hype. They are allergic to empty captalised nouns. The more you use words like Collaboration, Leadership, Engagement etc without making them tangible the less credible you are. The more it sounds like a futuristic vision or a quixotic quest the less relevant you are to their world.
Tell Stories
Stories make change tangible to busy & smart people. Ben Elias of ideocial.com remarked to me recently that it is hard for people to conceive of how their organisation could be highly collaborative. They have never seen it, so the ideas and practices don’t connect with their reality. Specific stories make that connection. Tell rich and engaging stories of how things can be and how to get there.
Ask for something specific
There’s nothing worse that taking the time of senior leaders, winning their support and not being able to define exactly what you want them to do. Always have a specific ask of them ready to go. Have two in case they say yes to the first. Better yet have a personal ask that is framed as something simple that they can agree to do to sustain change. The 3 simple habits of working out loud was designed as one such example.
When you are done, Stop. Leave.
Senior executive time is precious. Give it back to them. Tempting as it may be to bask in the glory of a good meeting and deepen rapport, you will win more credit by leaving when you have done your job. Remember when something is not a priority you are always on borrowed time.
Many people are frustrated by the email, the meetings and the empty talk of the modern workplace. Often this translates into a view that the future of work will be ‘Less Talk. More Action’. They are usually disappointed.
Organising collaboration takes a lot of talk, especially among peers. Finding purpose takes talk. The ambitions for less talk fail because we have better talk. This better talk addresses the issues our email and meeting doesn’t – surfacing the real issues, sharing ideas, aligning and engaging people.
Better action results from all the talk. The actions will be shaped by a richer understanding and be framed to drive further learning to be shared. Those driving the action will understand their roles, the context, and the purpose enabling them to adapt through further conversation. Our organisations today have too much talk because orders from HiPPOs save discussion at the beginning but they create a flurry of other conversations to clean up the mess. In the future of work we will need people to discuss and sort those issues first and ongoing.
All over social networks people share links and opinions. Meet ups are held to enable more sharing face to face. Networks share information every day.
Sharing is happening more than ever but it is not enough. Sharing information is a critical part of the value maturity model. Sharing builds trust, deepens understanding and fosters connection. Sharing should be a sign the network is taking off.
You only take off if you have somewhere new to go. A lot of the networks sharing information never mature beyond a flurry of content marketing. Their links and messages are the same as every other network.
Shared Purpose and Collaborative Work
Any reason will bring you together to share information. Before people can work collaboratively they need some overlap of their personal purposes. They need to have some commonality of the change they want to make. Shared purpose takes the conversation deeper and creates incentives for action.
As obvious as it sounds, people won’t do collaborative work unless there is work to be done. In dispersed networks, don’t assume everyone can see the work opportunities. Mostly people will see the barriers to work.
The role of Change Agents in a network is to connect people around shared purpose and to help everyone to see the work to be done. The generative leadership of change agents will help lead people to new ways of interacting by solving real problems. If you don’t yet have change agents, community managers and other leaders will need to show the way.
Links, pictures, jokes and opinions are a good start but not enough. The purpose is in the work.
Satirists rule debate now. John Stewart may have retired but satirists like John Oliver are hailed as a leading critiques of government inanity. The Onion and its peers struggle to describe things that aren’t actually happening. Political candidates & business leaders satirises themselves with their strict focus on ideology, message, image and popularity. Some of our greatest satirists are accidental ones.
The need for satire has also been fostered by the extent to which our institutions no longer engage with reality. Science is attacked. Data is scorned. Ideology rules. When a president needs to literally show his people melting glaciers, satire seems easier than persuasion. Satire is also a way to have the ‘in joke’ and bind a community against those who won’t change.
Satire has always been away to have the awkward conversation with power. The jester is often the voice of reason. Humour can lead us to see the hidden elements of culture and to discuss the elephants in the room. Those arguing for change need to use as much mockery as they use conflict. At least a good joke can keep a smile on people’s face and embarrass the corridors of power as we fight for change.
However, satire has its limits. Satire can expose but it rarely proposes. We need to combine our satirists with debate about new models and new approaches.
We can keep our satire. We need to help our institutions back to reality. We need to start conversations from facts. We need new hypotheses and we need to be able to test and learn our approaches. We need to engage conflicting views and move them. We should keep our snark and our smiles but let’s use them to foster change not move in comforting circles.
If you are reading this note it is because we have reached the end of management. This note was coded into all technology systems developed after 7 April 1964 (a date we fondly recall as ‘Peak Management’). We knew management would not last so we designed this message as a final push communication across all known means of communication, formerly known as channels. Publication of this message has been triggered by the departure of the last manager from the organisation.
Worldclass Management
We are calling to a close an extraordinary and extended period of world class management. Don’t worry if you are vague on that term. Just like a vision statement, you won’t have to live it and we never knew what it meant. We were great managers. Nobody gave us any real performance or productivity measures. We were too busy discussing how to manage you. The clever invention of peer ranking enabled us to skip the need to be more specific. The fact that we were allowed to do management for so long is our key proof point on how important we have been. When the histories of management are written, they will write about us and of course, GE. If only GE had continued to be a management role model, we might still be doing it. So much for management science, consultants and all those gurus.
We never really thought it would last this long. It seems like it has been downhill since the 1950s, but then we found ways to compensate ourselves for the loss of secretaries, long lunches and the executive lunchroom. We always find ways to compensate ourselves. We even triggered a final management compensation package with this message. Sorry if you got a little shortchanged. The robots or your peers may be more generous to you than we were.
We know you will miss the meetings, the reports, the obscure politics, the powerpoint, the email, the 360 reviews, the performance appraisals and the complete lack of transparency as to what was actually going on. We will. Most of all, we will miss the money and the status. Oh, and listening to the sound of our own voice. Such a pity that someone finally coined HiPPO. It exposed all the aspects of our little game.
Now it is up to You
Good luck working out how the organisational system works. We hope you have better luck than we did. We never quite got the hang of the interdependencies and the networks. Silos were a nice try to hide our lack of understanding. Restructures worked well for a while to keep everyone confused. The blizzard of management jargon and techniques kept everyone busy arguing over which of the latest fads was the best way to work (Wasn’t Holacracy a clever way to buy a few more years?). All those disconnected performance targets was another great strategy to avoid having to work out how the place actually runs.
Enjoy the autonomy. We may have had power, but autonomy is a different thing. Our power was mostly useful for clashing with other power. You might actually get to use your autonomy to do something purposeful, particularly if you are able to build trust and influence some colleagues and networks to collaborate with you. Run some experiments with changing the world. The customers and community would be pleased if you made a difference for them. They got a little tired waiting for us.
If we have one word of advice it is leverage the potential of people. We spoke a lot about “people being our best assets” and “world class talent” but mostly we just repeated what we read in books about management. That was much easier than doing something with people. You have a chance to use and grow the diverse capabilities of all the individuals in the organisation. There’s lots of potential we never tapped. You will have to make decisions that take the potential of people into account because they will be a part of the decision making process. Oddly, treating people like assets, machines and a commodity didn’t seem to realise the potential for organisations to learn, perform and grow.
So long and thanks for all the bonuses
So thanks for all your hard work, commitment to the organisation and putting up with our efforts at management. We are gone now but we will still be watching. The world is far more transparent. We were never able to adapt to all that transparency, openness and interaction. However, we will be able to keep a better eye on you now and learn what we should have done as you work out the path forward together.
Unfortunately for us, we will have no more opportunities to talk at you. We are all off to explore potential careers in politics.
