Writing

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.

The Continuous Partial Attention of Management

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The story is too common in the modern organisation: a team has a member who is not contributing but they go on being a part of the team for months or even years. Waste, frustration and disengagement mount in the team. Despite the negative impacts and length of time the manager responsible does nothing to rectify the underperformance.

We have more performance data than ever. We have more sources of information than ever. We interact in more ways than ever. We live in an age of increased performance transparency.

How Can Sustained Underperformance Be Common?

All that data, information, interaction and transparency brings more for managers to do. Complexity is the fundamental challenge of the modern manager and without careful husbanding of their attention the time of the manager can be subsumed into busy work.

Continuous partial attention has crept into management practice. Challenged to keep up managers are constantly skimming across the top of the work. Interactions with employees are staccato bursts. Busy managers spend less time understanding what is actually going on. Flitting in and out of observation of their employees, managers can be lulled into a false sense of confidence if the numbers look good. 

For an under-performing employee that means the ability to escape action continues as long as the deadline has not yet arrived, the numbers look acceptable and underperfomer has an answer for the first quick query from a manager. The commonest trick is for the under performing employee to send their busy manager an email asking for a complex decision. Likely overlooked or deferred, it becomes an instant performance excuse. Instead of asking for help the employee uses the pressures on their manager as a chance to hide their performance issues. Time, pressure and waste mount up.

In rare cases, managers may see the problem situation but the pressure of other demands means that they do not prioritise action. They trust in the systems, the employee’s peers or the reporting to correct the underperformance or hope that the employee’s lack of action is temporary. These managers prioritise the work and the system over their people to the detriment of everyone.

Refocus the Attention of Management on the Process of Work

Psychological studies show that multitasking & continuous partial attention don’t work. People who practice these approaches feel that they are more effective but aren’t. We need managers to get off the treadmill and reconsider their approaches to performance:

  • Shared Purpose & Goals: In many of these situations the underperformance is simply because the busy manager has not set, clear goals for the employee and the employee has no rationale for their work. Engage employees upfront on the purpose and goals of their work.
  • Enable and Empower: If managers don’t have the bandwidth to guide and manage, organisations must ensure that employees have the ability to manage themselves and their work. That takes an investment in skills and the freedom to make decisions without waiting for a busy manager to respond.
  • Targeted Fast Agile Delivery: Ask an employee to work on a lots of  things for months and they will be as bamboozled by the status & priorities of the project as their manager. Instead ask an employee to deliver a few focused things in a short cycle of delivery. The need for reporting, status updates & chatter goes down as observable delivery increases.
  • Real conversations: Any genuine one-on-one conversations with an employee & their peers of more than 10 minutes will begin to surface the real issues in a team. Asking good questions and listening to hear between the lines of the answers is critical in management. Managers must prioritise this to enable their teams to succeed.
  • Act now: The busy nature of work is not an excuse to defer needed actions or to defer complex decisions. If something triggers a suspicion, then dive in.

Great managers shape the process and performance of the team. Great managers enable every member of their team to realise their potential and contribute to creating a more responsive organisation. They are not slaves to the reporting, information and decisions that flow through them. Managers must step out of continuous partial attention to the ongoing work process and get involved in the design of the work.

The work of leadership is to realise the potential of people. Leaving someone stuck in a rut of continued underperformance is failing that individual’s potential.

Who Helps Creates Value in Your Organisation?

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Leadership

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The difference between a network and community is a culture of collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t just happen. It is grown through the action of leaders.

Markets are Value Networks

The markets we use when we exchange financial value today are networks. Networks of connected agents exchange value in our stock exchanges, banks and risk markets. These networks did not arise simply because people connected. Financial markets are facilitated by practices that help transform connection into valuable interactions.

When the networks of merchants in coffee houses became stock exchanges, they relied on the role of brokers and market makers to help build a valuable marketplace. These roles helped people:

  • to build trust in the new market,
  • to create liquidity that enabled activity when demand and supply from participants was not perfectly matched,
  • to share information,
  • to develop new ways of working
  • to help the new markets to enforce the rules and standards of the exchange.

The same leadership work to build value, trust and new ways of working is found in the history of banking, insurance or other exchanges.  

The value created in these networks did not occur because the network existed. It occurred because of the work of people to build a collaborative culture in the network. People need to build a sense of how to use these new exchanges and to build trust in that they would deliver more value than risk.

Your Network Needs Market Makers

Any collaborative network will need leaders to help facilitate the creation of value in the network.  This leadership will be a combination of technical support from community managers and change leadership support from change champions in the organisation and the organisation’s senior management.

The Value Maturity Model highlights the way that collaboration’s market makers need to work to facilitate the value creation in your network:

  • Connecting relevant people to the network and into groups
  • Sharing information that may not have reached its necessary audience
  • Helping to solve issues by matching needs and capabilities, finding other resources or information and even holding a problem or information until there is a match of demand or supply.
  • Providing the systems and support to enable innovation experiments to be fostered until they are proven or fail.
  • Experiment and lead adoption of new ways of working
  • Helping lead the change in the culture of the organisation to allow the development of further cultural change.

To maximise the value of the networks in your organisation, you will need to develop the leadership capabilities that can take advantage of networks.

If you would like to create greater value in your enterprise social network or discuss how the Value Maturity Model applies to assist your organisation to create strategic value, please get in contact. I am available through @simongterry or Linkedin or www.simonterry.com

The Honest Dialogue of Leadership

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.   – Vaclav Havel, New Year’s Address to the Nation, 1 January 1990, 

The pressure to share good news and to conform within organisations can resemble that within a tyranny. Senior management in organisations is often under intense pressure to maintain a good news to customers, to shareholders and to the community. Without genuine dialogue, discussion of the present and the future in organisations can resemble a hallucination. It is not unusual that everyone knows the corporate line is spin and discusses their frustrations in private.

Vaclav Havel’s first address as President of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution is a reminder of the role each individual must play to engage with reality and to protect our humanity. Everyone can play a role to create the conversations that bring forward an honest dialogue. That will take a willingness to act to make change from everyone in an organisation.

Pretence Corrodes Reality & Humanity

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves.

Pretence is the expression of a view without regard to its reality. Pretence is what happens when you telling your boss, a customer or a shareholder what they want to hear. Pretence leads inevitably to a messy situation when you do that is you get stuck answering a question or defending a position. The next step is an out and out lie to maintain consistency or preserve what remains of your dignity.  After life rarely rewards those who share the bad news late.

Go too far down this path and organisations begin to lose their perspective on the creative potential of humanity.  Almost everything is sacrificed to maintain the illusion:

The previous regime – armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology – reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. 

We Must All Lead Conversations Grounded in Reality 

In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

It takes two people to not engage in a conversation that should be had.

Senior leaders play a role in setting realistic direction and fostering a culture that faces reality. They use power and can leverage rewards to influence the behaviours of others to be constructive or destructive.

However, culture is an expectation as to patterns of interactions.  Employees in any role can play a part to raise the facts that demand attention and to begin to change the patterns of interactions in the organisation. Authentic and public dialogue in public is highly viral and highly influential.

Cultures that cannot face the truth and seek to control individuals to prevent the shattering of the carefully constructed illusions are unhealthy and surrender the opportunity to leverage the exponential potential of human collaboration. We must all reserve ourselves the right to be a little unreasonable in defence of reality and our humanity.

On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone to do something about it.

We all can benefit from regular reflection on the lessons from Havel’s speech for leadership in our organisations.

Photo Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Václav_Havel.jpg

Don’t Put Your Hand Up

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

You know the gesture. Put your hand up in the air and wait to be called.

Keep your hand down. Don’t do it again. Even the version where only you know that your hand is raised. Nobody knows you are waiting eagerly to be called to contribute.

We learned the gesture in childhood. At school, it was the way we asked permission to speak and permission to act. It became the way we interrupted the decision making adults.

We might no longer put our hand up. However the expectation remains that we must wait for permission to speak and permission to act. We wait for the decision making adults.

A parent-child relationship belongs in a family. It doesn’t belong in the workplace or in our social relationships.

Don’t wait for others to give you permission to say what needs to be said or to do what needs to be done. We are the adults now. The decisions are ours.

Keep your hand down and act.