Writing

Learn these skills

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Follow an unusual career paths and you will pick up a diverse set of skills. Later in life it will be that unusual skillset that enables you to make a mark when others get stuck in the pack.

In a rapidly changing world, diversity of personal skills is as important as the diversity of the teams that you join. Nobody is tied to a job. Everyone can learn something new. Make it your challenge to learn another skill every year at a minimum. Pursue opportunities that broaden your skills, knowledge and experience. We are all increasingly working in portfolio careers. The challenge is to be prepared.

Here are some skills & capabilities that I’ve found critical:

  • Persist: life throws challenges. The obstacles are the work and the reward. Learn how to push on to your goals and sustain the journey. Knowing why and understanding your own needs is critical here.
  • Listen: a completely underrated skill. Learn to listen between the lines. Learn to listen to what is not said. Listen actively questioning for understanding and learning. Don’t compose your reply. Listen deeply for insight.
  • Learn a new language: Jargon is everywhere. Learn the new language quickly. The faster you speak the lingo the better you build rapport. Plus understanding the grammar of the new business language tells you what matters in a business.
  • Tell a story: a story is not a list of events. A story engages with challenges, conflict and drama. You need to be able to share your passion for the story. The ability to tell a genuinely engaging story with passion is an art. Practice it every day.
  • Influence: before you can lead, you must influence others. Study and practice the art. Understand how to find the alignment of others’ agendas and your own. Learn how to hustle and to sell. Remember listening is more important than talking in influence.
  • Construct an argument: understanding how to communicate an argument quickly and effectively to an audience is key. Whether you are writing an email, preparing a PowerPoint or having a debate in a meeting know how to argue to influence. That’s different to arguing to win.
  • Negotiate: everything is negotiable. Learn how to negotiate effectively.
  • Learn to say no: Often and early. Priorities and values are a key to success. You will need a polite no to preserve them.
  • Use visual images: visuals work. The better your visual grammar the better you will understand how to engage others.
  • Run a project: the basics of project management help get stuff done. Most failed projects break simple rules. Learn how to manage simple project to delivery.
  • Risk everything (aka swim in the deep end): you are not learning if you are doing something you can already do. Risk=Reward.
  • Patience: no matter how young and brilliant you are you will have to wait at some point. Timing is everything in life and a career. Some times things just need to line up first. Make sure you have patience for when it is needed.

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.

You Can’t Predict the Value of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Working Out Loud is a key practice for learning in networks.  Working Out loud creates value by surfacing opportunities to collaborate and to exchange information around work. Sharing work creates value for both the person sharing their work and others who observe. However, it can be a challenge to convince someone upfront that the value exists.

What is Working Out Loud?

Bryce Willams initially proposed the concept of Working Out Loud as:   

Narrating Your Work + Observable Work

The concept has been developed by a number of others, particularly John Stepper, and there are many related concepts, such as Jane Bozarth’s Show Your Work. With the increased transparency, access and visibility of networks in the digital era, working out loud is a much easier and much more productive practice.  Working out loud enables others to see, understand and contribute to your work.  That delivers benefits for both workers and observers and can play a critical role in shortening the time cycles of feedback, learning and collaboration.

You Can’t Predict the Value of Working Out Loud

Many people are reluctant to share their work for fear of negative feedback or fear of others’ perceptions.  People look to overcome their uncertainty by clarifying the benefits.

However the benefits of working out loud are as unique as the approaches of each individual and the diversity of their networks. Like many forms of social collaboration, there aren’t guaranteed outcomes in terms of benefits and the benefits are tailored to an individual’s situation and needs. Importantly benefits can flow far from the individual who is working out loud.  This latter point is important in corporate context’s where working out loud can play a key role in improving alignment, reducing duplication and facilitating learning on the job.

I have learned to work out loud in a number of ways.  My blog is an ongoing meditation on lessons from my work. I leverage twitter, public and private groups and social streams to share work in progress with others and get feedback. As someone who is relatively new to working out loud I have found that the benefits of working out loud are always a surprise and exceedingly diverse:

  • Making new connections with people doing similar or potentially related work around the world
  • Developing new knowledge using lean start up approaches to the demand and with the input of clients
  • Receiving feedback, ideas and other input into my work from many diverse sources that helps me better understand how it needs to develop and where it will have best impact.
  • Drawing of innovative connections between streams of work that I had not yet seen
  • Feedback from others on their leverage of my work in their own learning and the value that they create.
  • An enhanced understanding of my own strengths and the potential of my networks
  • Business & collaboration opportunities driven from people coming to understand and value my work.

Working Out Loud Requires Experimentation

The form of working out loud will differ for each individual depending on their work, their comfort in sharing, their expertise in social tools and their network. There are few formulas that can be prescribed that are generally applicable.

The best advice for an individual seeking to benefit from working out loud is to experiment with what works for them. A process of adaptation and experimentation will help each individual to develop a set of practices which enables them to be most productive.

If you are looking for a place to start, start by trying to form a new habit and adapt your practice to what suits you and delivers you & your network the best benefits. Consider forming a working out loud circle to help accelerate & share your learning with others. Look out for the next International Working Out Loud Week, a great opportunity to develop your practice of working out loud in the company of a network of global peers.