Management 2.0 developing social capital

informatology 2010

2010-02-23T22:56:00.000-08:00

On 28th April, I’ll be speaking at informatology’s 2010 "Good Practice for Great Performance" conference, which is designed to give business and talent leaders inspiration and insight to help their organisations be as successful as they can be.

The conference sounds like a lot of fun, with plenty of 2.0 and even an unconference thrown in!

Key themes include managing change, leadership, customer service, executive coaching, engaging and utilising talent, great places to work, the professional services sector, e-learning, making video, the future of workplace learning, team collaboration 2.0 (my session), sharing knowledge 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and learning & performance 2.0!

Other confirmed speakers include...

Professor Robert Winston - Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, world-famous author and TV personality delivers the inspirational opening keynote
Michael Izza - CEO, The Institute of Chartered Accountants chairs the session focusing on the Professional Services sector
Jo Causon - CEO, The Institute of Customer Service chairs the "Great Customer Service" session
Tom O'Byrne - CEO, Great Place To Work® Institute UK, chairs a session featuring winners of their award
Professor Andrew Mayo, frequent speaker, writer and facilitator in international HRM, specialising in people and organisation development, chairs the session on Great Leadership
Julie Starr, Author of the bestselling “The Coaching Manual” chairs the session on Executive Coaching
Nick Shackleton-Jones, Online & Informal Learning Manager at the BBC leads a whole-day masterclass with his BBC colleagues, on how to create video on a shoestring
Jane Hart leads a whole-day masterclass on Learning & Performance 2.0
Sudhir Giri, Global Head of Learning Technologies at Google, speaks on Sharing Knowledge 2.0
Clive Shepherd, a consultant specialising in learning and communications technologies, chairs the session on Great e-Learning.

The conference will be held at Baker Tilly’s Conference Centre in London from Wednesday 28th to Friday 30th April, 2010.

Can you attend this event? Book here.

Technorati Tags: informatology,2010,Robert Winston,Michael Izza,Jo Causon,Tom O'Byrne,Andrew Mayo,Julie Starr,Nick Shackleton-Jones,Jane Hart,Sudhir Giri,Clive Shepherd,collaboration,2.0,unconference

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Justmeans Social media and stakeholder engagement conference

2010-02-18T22:03:00.000-08:00

In a month’s time (19th March 2010), I’m going to be moderating one of the sessions at Justmeans’ Social Media and Stakeholder Engagement conference in London.

Building on the success of the inaugural event worldwide on Social Media and Sustainability, this event will bring together the top minds in sustainability, marketing, innovation, and technology.

It will focus on how social media is changing the way companies engage key stakeholders, whether employees, customers, activists, investors, or the media.

Topics covered include:

Transparency and authenticity as cornerstones of the new business reality
Stakeholder engagement as it relates to employees, customers, and activists
How to mobilize support for adaptation of new technologies to advance social and environmental initiatives
A look at various techniques on how to break through the clutter with your message.

Other speakers and moderators include:

Lee Bryant, Co-Founder and Director, Headshift
Jean-Philippe Renaut, Manager, Engaging Stakeholders Program, SustainAbility
Bjorn Edlund, Executive Vice President, Communications at Royal Dutch Shell plc
Tim Callington, Communications Consultant, Edelman
Robert Nuttall, Director, GreenMandate
Tim Johns, VP Corporate Communications, Unilever
Ed Gillespie, Co-Founder, Futerra
Marcia Stepanek, Publisher, Cause Global
Dr. Dan McQuillan, Head of Digital, Enterprise UK
Karina Brisby, Head of Digital Campaigns, Oxfam (UK)
Renate Nyborg, Director, Social Media & Engagement, IF Communications
Jo Confino, Executive Editor and Head of Sustainable Development, Guardian News and Media
Neville Hobson, Head of Social Media Europe, WeisComm Group
Tom Raftery, Social Media Consultant, GreenMonk
Antony Mayfield, Head of Social Media, iCrossing UK
James Farrar, Vice President of Corporate Citizenship, SAP
Amit Mehra, Managing Director, Reuters Market Lite.

For more information on the event, please contact Serina Mufti at smufti@justmeans.com or +44 (0) 203 238 2121.

And if you’re going to be there, do come and say hello.

Technorati Tags: Justmeans,Social Media,Stakeholder,Engagement,Future,Sustainability,Communications,Practice,conference,London

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TalentedApps continues the Carnevale di Venezia tradition

2010-02-07T15:21:00.000-08:00

The 7 February Leadership Development Carnival is being hosted by Mark Bennett at TalentedApps.

Mark notes:

“Last year about this time, our colleague Jon Ingham hosted the HR Carnival and pointed out that it was during Carnevale in Venice. We’re continuing that tradition for this month’s Leadership Development Carnival.

Carnevale is perhaps best known for the wide variety of masks that participants wear. The role of a mask in leadership has also been recognized throughout history, particularly in thecontext of politics and war. We tend to associate masks with “hiding” and “being fake”, but one can argue that even authentic leadership sometimes entails keeping a calm demeanor while chaos swirls around.”

Love it! Take a look at the great collection of posts there (including my ‘Work sucks...’ piece which deals in passing with the development of leaders through gaming experiences).

Picture credit: Dragoos

Technorati Tags: Mark Bennett,Talented Apps,Leadership Development,Carnival,Gaming,Games,Engagement

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Work sucks, play games!

2010-02-06T16:14:00.001-08:00

I‘ve recently been reading a new book, ‘Total Engagement’, by Byron Reeves and J Leighton Read and it’s one of the most interesting books I’ve read during the last year.

Despite the title, there’s not a lot of new information in here on engagement, but there is a lot on gaming (the book’s sub title is ‘Using games and virtual worlds to change the way people work and businesses compete’) and on gaining Social Advantage too.

Gaming Engagement

I should explain that I’ve never really spent any time playing computer games, never mind massive multiplayer online role-plaing games (MMPOLGs). I have experimented in Second Life but the type of environment the book describes is quite new for me. Nevertheless, I’m happy to go along with many of the authors’ conclusions. I can believe games are fun, and I completely support the ideas that people should have more fun at work.

I also believe that gaming can develop useful skills. The book Leaders make the Future, which I reviewed recently on Talking HR, suggested that game players would stand an advantage in leadership roles in the future. This book’s authors support this conclusion and also claim that every skill in the list of O*NET generalised work activities is included multiple times in gamers’ experiences.

Gamers gain other benefits as well – they are apparently physically healthier, work harder, make better grades, earn higher salaries and are more socially connected than those who play less or not at all.

So I’m quite motivated to try some games out – but probably not until I’ve finished my Social Advantage book (although I make try out 10 day free membership to World of Warcraft at some point in the next few months).

However, I also feel that the book pushes the argument for gaming a bit too far. The authors note that work is often repetitive and dull; that workplaces are legacy-bound and risk averse; and that workers are overloaded with information and worried about the future. But is bringing games into the workplace, or making work more game-like, really the solution to these problems?

This situation clearly needs to improve. Particularly since, as the authors point out, the future of work is going to be more about engaging people than commanding them.

Leighton Read writes about his experience attending Gary Hamel’s MLab meeting in Half Moon Bay in 2008 (which resulted in the Moon Shots for Management which are the focus of my ning community). He describes the group’s conclusions about the remedies for work and management as:

A sense of purpose (mojo)
Connected structures that minimise degrees of separation between workers and actual customers
The end of short-termism, micro-management and burnout from corporate initiatives.

Well OK, so games provide the same ingredients that will help solve these business problems. But suggesting that games are the definitive model of engagement is a bit far fetched.

But I am prepared to accept the points it is a model, and that some people will soon do their jobs inside a game (perhaps a ‘mixed-’ or ‘augmented-reality’ one).

Supporting this, I’ve also seen a very compelling presentation from Microsoft’s Ross Smith (who is referred to in this book) at a MLab Management 2.0 event, describing how his team test software in a game type environment in order to make this work more interesting.

Also, as the authors write,

“Games can make huge improvements in work with only small adjustments to current practice and technology. You don’t have to build an entire game to use games at work.”

Meez at Work

Examples of these small adjustments include using three-dimensional environments allowing you to do things otherwise impossible in the real world. But more than anything else, the authors focus on the use of avatars (see their blog / recent HBR post too), providing people the opportunity to try out new styles, new behaviours and so on:

Customised avatars increase engagement and affiliation compared to impersonalised activities (a personalised avatar provides ownership and arousal leading to engagement, commitment and learning in a similar way to taking an action in the real world)
The use of avatars can create emotional and social connectlons
I also like the authors’ comment that social trumps efficiency (“‘efficiency isn’t the sale criteria by which virtual [I’d suggest any] interactions should be evaluated’).

The authors expect use of avatars to further increase with growing expressiveness as facial features become more distinct, movements more lifelike and user control more richly intuitive (they become ‘mini-me’s’):

“It’s the equivalent of looking in the mirror, only the character in the mirror has a lot more freedom to do things you can’t do yourself.”

“At IBM, thousands of employees meet weekly, using their avatars , in a virtual space to talk about business (dubbed the company ‘intraverse’.”

“A majority of the Fortune 100 companies we’ve spoken to in the last three years have at least one virtual-world prototype that makes use of avatars.”

I also think it’s interesting that I probably get more verbal comments about the Meez avatars on my blogs than anything else.

But I still don’t think that work necessarily needs to become a game in order to improve…

Taking Lessons

The authors note that “gamers don’t discuss hypotheticals or simulate play when the real thing is readily available”. So why simulate business as a game when the real thing (ie work) is readily available too?

So I’m probably more interested in the use of gaming to support work, than to replace it, for example in development:

“We also believe that companies could explicitly include multiplayer entertainment games as part of their leadership development programs. These would be like' ‘management flight simulators’ for softer aspects of leadership, as opposed to the more analytical aspects for which simulators and spreadsheets are available.”

And for me, the even bigger opportunity to those I’ve described above, which seem to assume that work can’t be improved other than through gaming, is to use the lessons from gaming, rather than gaming itself, to make work in the real world more engaging.

I’ll be coming back to write more about this soon.

Technorati Tags: Byron Reeves,Leighton Read,Total Engagement,Games,MMPOLGs

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Lynda Gratton on Nokia and the future of work

2010-02-04T05:15:00.000-08:00

I’ve already posted at Strategic HCM on Lynda Gratton’s Future of Work blog and her recent article at HR Magazine. But she’s also got a good article up on London Business School’s site, reviewing Nokia’s Booster Programme.

One of the things I’ve posted on quite frequently at this blog, is the need to combing real and virtual (or as Nokia say, analogue and digital) activities in order to best achieve certain outcomes.

In Gratton’s article, she explains how Nokia’s ‘Booster Programme’ used a blended approach including both sets of activities to engage with people throughout the world and to do so in fast and compelling ways:

Need: fundamental organisational change covering 5000 employees.

Analogue activities: a two-day face-to-face workshop with team leaders

Digital activities: online social network communities providing much broader involvement of the whole organisation.

“The two-day workshops were staged in locations across the world, including Beijing, White Plains (New York), Helsinki, London and Dubai. About 100 potential change leaders were part of each workshop.

When all workshops were completed, the 700 participants then returned to their teams to engage them in the ongoing process. It was at this point that the online community came to the fore. Working with specialist partners, the design team created an intranet site accessible to workshop participants and all employees of the Markets business. The online community was designed to host conversations and communications with senior managers as well as to provide information and ideas from content experts and community members.”

Result: daunting organisational change made fully effective within one week!

Gratton notes that:

“The capacity of social networks to create engagement and innovation is seen to be crucial to the long-term success of Nokia.”

But importantly, social networks didn’t achieve this on their own! It was down to both real and virtual communication, and importantly, to Nokia’s collaborative organisation structure and culture:

“Only about 100 people assuming new jobs. For the rest of Nokia’s employees, there was no need to change jobs; the modular teams of which they were members were simply reconfigured. The discipline, philosophy and mindset of reconfiguration through standardisation and shared platforms ensured that Nokia is able to skilfully and rapidly reconfigure its human resources to meet changing customer needs.”

So that’s change management sorted then!

Photo credit: boostedfc3s

Technorati Tags: Lynda Gratton,Joel Casse,Nokia,social networking,communities,change management,Booster,programme

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Enterprise 2.0 conference: why Collaboration & ‘being’ social ARE outcomes

2010-02-02T15:43:00.000-08:00

This evening, I attended a couple of sessions at a virtual event linked to this Summer’s Enterprise 2.0 conference (where I’m still hoping to present).

I really enjoyed the presentations, particularly Morten Hansen’s session on Collaboration. And I agreed with most of the points made. However, I do disagree, quite strongly, with a point made by Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel in their session, that the objectives for E2.0 projects should always be financial ie increasing revenues or reducing costs.

I seem to have a minority viewpoint here – certainly Marks’ and Patel’s point rippled through the Twitter stream at #e2conf (“Collaboration & ‘being’ social are not outcomes. business objectives are outcomes”) for a quite a while afterwards.

So why do I consider the point to be wrong (and substantially limiting):

Firstly, another good point on the Twitter stream was that we shouldn’t start with Enterprise 2.0 at all (a potential solution in search of a problem). We should start with the business, and look at how its objectives can be realised, which may include Enterprise 2.0. These objectives don’t always have to be financial.
In fact, surely one major learning over the last decade and beyond, through inputs like the balanced business scorecard, is that focusing purely on financial objectives limits what’s possible.
The main reason for this is that capabilities like collaboration, especially those which are vitally important, and under-developed, like ‘being’ social, can have a dramatic and transformational impact on end business results further down the value chain (they can create as well as add value).

It’s by focusing on the social aspect of organisations that we stand the best chance of enabling the deepest change. I don’t think focusing on the technology, or non-technological activities, is going to do it on their own, as unless there’s a desire and an understanding of what social is, the full benefit of a more social approach isn’t going to be gained. But focusing on business results isn’t going to achieve much more.

‘Being’ social is an outcome, and it’s the key leverage point to change this system too.

For a deeper explanation, see my recent post, 3 modes of web 2.0 implementation.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0,web 2.0,Oliver Marks,Samer Patel,businss,results,objectives,social capital,capability,#e2conf

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Looking back to February 2009

2010-02-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

You may also be interested in these posts from February last year:

Or even from the year before?

British Library on the Google Generation

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Technorati Tags: Social capital,competitive advantage,business

The Social Revolution – processes to networks

2010-01-27T03:47:00.001-08:00

I posted a couple of times fairly recently (1, 2) on the social revolution discussed by Andrew McAfee in one of his Enterprise 2.0 posts.

In my last post, I probably went a bit too far, arguing that there doesn’t need to be a move from hierarchical organisational structures to networks. But in some ways, there does.

Hierarchies and structures in general receive too much attention. As I wrote in my last post, leaders and managers tend to think about hierarchies when they’re redesigning organisations and teams, but it really isn’t the most important aspect of an organisation, and certainly isn’t the only one.

So structures do deserve less attention, and networks don’t receive enough.

As I also noted in my last post, I didn’t use to think about the network aspect of organisation design at all, but I certainly wasn’t the only one – and I suspect most people designing organisations today still don’t.

We do need to put more emphasis on networks and I’ll describe why shortly.

First though, to perhaps explain the point from my last post a little bit differently, I accept, and reinforce, that the social revolution requires more focus on networks. I just don’t believe it’s about replacement of one with the other. They both have their place within organisation design.

See also this recent post from CV Harquail on Authentic Organisations. I’ve not read Barley & Kunda, so I’ve no idea whether I’m interpreting their remarks correctly, and whether their views support or conflict with mine, but I do like the quote:

“Hierarchy is a property of a network’s structure, not something that a network replaces.”

Anne Marie McEwan’s comments on the same blog post resonate with me as well.

Anyway, on with the post:

3. If networks are replacing anything (and they aren’t), it isn’t corporate hierarchies, it’s business processes

I’d argue that the real change we need to make in organisation design (rather than how well organisation design is done) is a move from processes to networks.

Processes

Processes are traditionally the building blocks of organisations. They specify how work needs to get done and accountabilities for doing this.

And although I’m saying we need to move towards networks, I don’t think we should move away from processes. I think this is an area of organisation design that HR, and organisations in general, could be a lot more skilled in than they are.

See this piece from my book:

“One of the other examples of creating value HCM approaches I quite often use, particularly where I’m developing HR teams, is creating organisation capital through business process design. It’s a good example for a number of reasons: it’s a key area of organization design that many companies forget about; often no other functions have responsibility for it; and it calls on many of the skills that HR professionals already have.

However, it’s also an area that provides HR with a wonderful opportunity to mark out their new role. Often the first time an HR business partner offers to support a business client to redesign their business processes, they get told to go away and come back once the manager has done the redesign, and they know how many redundancies they need. It gives HR a great opportunity to respond back that no, this is not what they mean.

They have a methodology and particular skills to help facilitate the development of better processes. It gives them an opportunity to point out that there is a separate administration
centre that handles the redundancies – this is not their job.’”

(Also see this post on process design.)

However, processes only work well for repetitive and especially production oriented work. They apply less well to work that is complex, changeable, knowledge based, creative, people focused and so on – ie to a rapidly increasing proportion of the work that people do today.

Networks

What governs this type of work is the network. It’s who people talk to in order to get input, support or get things done. And it’s messy – it can’t be laid out in process terms.

This is the main reason that networks are becoming a more, if not the most, important element of organisation design.

So the shift isn’t from structures (hierarchies) to networks, it’s from processes to networks. Hierarchies can carry on pretty much as they have done before. But networks are different to processes – they can be designed in the same sort of logical way (see slide).

I’m going to come back to post more about the analysis and design of networks shortly. Stay tuned for more….

Technorati Tags: Organisation design,process design,organisation strructure,structure design,social network,network design

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Social capital and Organisational capabilities

2010-01-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday I had the opportunity to talk with Thomas Stewart, author of ‘Intellectual Capital’ and ‘The Wealth of Knowledge’, about a presentation on ‘Capabilities’ – sources of essential – as opposed to transient – advantage that shape the right to win.

I explained my current interest in social capital and asked Stewart which organisations he thought had strong capabilities that resulted mainly from the relationships between their people, ie capabilities built on social capital, rather than the people themselves, ie human capital, or processes, technologies etc.

Stewart' suggested GE as probably the best example of this (and one that he knows well), and we also talked about his current firm, Booz & Company:

GE’s capability is leveraging its huge workforce. And you can’t do this unless people know each other.

So GE creates communities to help mitigate the fact that it’s generally a fairly aggressive sort of place. So if you’re a management person, you’ll be a member of several different groups. For example, as an HR person you might be in the European HR community, the worldwide HR Reward community, and the HR community for the lighting business. These communities help people understand who they need to leverage to get things done.

GE also moves people around a lot, and actively manages this process.

The result of both of these activities is that you’ll know lots of people across the company.

It’s a bit like a honeycomb – people get to know each other.

Booz

Booz’ capability is providing complex solutions to diverse problems, and a strong client service ethic. People work hard but have fun because people look after each other. “We understand business logic very well. We provide strategic foresight and combine this with deep functional expertise. We have the size we need to be able to do – a big critical mass – we can scale around opportunities.”

To do this effectively, Booz needs to be able to get teams forming quickly and working seamlessly, getting people on the same page very fast.

Booz pioneered knowledge management but it fell into disrepair and they got into bad technologies - their knowledge system was email sharing stuff on peoples’ hard drives. They’re now getting into 2.0 technologies.

The firm’s new head of knowledge is called Director of Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration. And they’ve got a new site, including wikis and micro-blogging. These are used instinctively and naturally in their younger group who use them to build links and enjoy their activities, and it improves the ability of their projects teams. Some of the older Partners find it more difficult though.

I asked about whether this approach focuses on sharing explicit knowledge, or whether the intent is to exchange tacit knowledge as well (as I wasn’t too sure whether Booz’ approach to sharing knowledge and collaboration was about social capital or just organisational capital – ie just the explicit stuff).

So Stewart described how Booz are encouraging people to make their profiles deeper and richer, describing their other interests for example. They’re building ‘fuzzy information’ into their formal systems (given that they run what’s basically an apprenticeship system, it’s already all over the informal systems).

And they need to build it into the culture harder. For example, there’s still very much a core group or inner sanctum which makes decisions for the company, and they need more transparency around this core group.

In addition, the firm recognises that people can’t deliver if reward systems aren't set up to support delivery across practices and geographies. So you have to remove barriers and incentivise usage.

Technorati Tags: Organisational,intellectual,capabilities,social capital,knowledge,Thomas Stewart,GE,Booz,HR Directors Business summit

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Social media at conferences

2010-01-17T21:47:00.000-08:00

I’m doing more conference blogging this week (from the European HR Directors Business Summit at Strategic HCM).

And I’ve just been thinking about Liene Stevens’ question in the recent Carnival of Trust: is ethical to publicly post content - that people are charging money for - to an audience that is not paying for it?

Well, certainly in one way it is – in that I’ve been invited to the conference to blog. But I still think there’s a question over how much it’s OK to include, and I’m not sure what the answer to this is.

Part of the issue is that we’re at a point in a process, where many people are now comfortable with social media usage at conferences, and others probably don’t understand what’s going on.

So part of the what we need to do to answer the question is to educate conference presenters and attendees. We all need to understand the way things are now going to be (I don’t think there’s any way of stopping this unless conference organisers ask for mobile devices, cameras and computers to be handed in at the door!).

I think the list of changes which have recently been published at Event Coup is quite useful. But this is for conference organisers, so I’ve done my own list for presenters:

Attendees will be exchanging thoughts about your presentation while you’re presenting and afterwards as well.
These exchanges may be supported by pictures and videos of you presenting, and which you don’t know are being taken.
These exchanges will be going outside of the conference room, and will remain in the internet after you’ve finished presenting too.
If your slides are being distributed to attendees, these may end up in the public area too.
People from outside the conference room will be providing their own thoughts on what you’re presenting.
You may be able to get some input from these exchanges – either live or moderated / summarised. If you can get it, use it.
At the very least, ensure there is time for Q&A and discussion. Audiences want to have their voice heard.

This still doesn’t deal with the ethics point, but I think it reinforces the need for presenters to add value, beyond what’s contained in their slides or the text of their presentation.

Of course, the biggest change may be whether presenters get to present at all.

As I’ve blogged quite recently, I’m one of a large number of people proposing to present at this Summer’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.

These proposals have been collected on Spigit and are being voted on right now (you can vote for me here).

I’ve expressed concern about the value of this process, as, the way it’s being run, it comes down eventually to whose got the most friends, rather than what sessions actual attendees want to see.

But I think doing something similar within a closed group of attendees, or within a closed population (inside an organisation for example), would be a really useful thing to do.

Picture: Cliff Atkinson - Backchannel, The: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever

Technorati Tags: Conferences,presentation,social media in Business,twitter,backchannel,spigit

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The Social Revolution - isn’t hierarchy to networks

2010-01-16T08:55:00.001-08:00

The second point (see my first point) I want to make about the social revolution is that:

2. It’s possible to have self-organizing and -governing networks AND strong corporate hierarchies

Organisation Design

When I used to do more work in organisation design, I’d focus on the following elements of an organisation:

strategy
structure
processes
people
culture.

Each of these different elements need to support each other, but if I had the choice, the first aspect I would want to work on would be the business processes. Why? because it’s the process that describes the work that needs to be done. Structure is simply the way this work is organised, through reporting relationships, once the business processes are clear. And the rest follows out of this.

Of course, reflecting Josh’s second comment in my first post, there is then, typically, an ongoing battle against business leaders’ and managers’ tendency to forget about processes, and to think straight away in structural terms.

Also, reflecting on my previous experience now, if I was still doing much organisation design work, I’d also want to think about the opportunities to put people first – and to design business processes that enable people to do work well (an HCM perspective on organisation design), but that’s another story (or blog post…).

The point I want to make here is that what was missing from this list of elements organisation design was networks. I just didn’t see them as that important. Or perhaps that they couldn’t be identified or controlled.

Structure Design

But when I got onto structure design, I’d emphasise the choice organisations have to structure themselves differently – that structures don’t have to be hierarchical (functional / divisional), but can also be based upon one of these main (or other) options:

Ie organisations can also structure themselves by process, or by a combination of hierarchy and process (matrix) – or as a network (or as a combination of this and something else). (Or as one of a variety of other forms eg modular, starburst, virtual etc.)

So I saw networks as a structural option but not a separate element of organisation design. Although I suppose if I had worked with an organisation to develop a network structure, I would then have had to go on to design the network. But this requirement never came up.

This was and is clearly wrong. Networks need to be considered alongside people, processes, structures, and cultures as different and important aspects of organisations. And it’s not just organisations that structure themselves as a network that need them – they’re an important element of design for all organisations, regardless of their structure.

The Supremacy of Hierarchy

The choice of structure depends on what’s most important for the organisation. So, for example, if they really want to emphasise the process aspect, then they can structure themselves along process lines. The fact is of course, that very few organisations do this. And so I would find that most structural designs I worked on ended up being a straight forward, or some adaptation of a, hierarchy.

I expect I’d still find the same today – that even with the addition of networks to the overall organisation design mix, it’s not going to mean that many organisations want to move away from hierarchical structures. They’re still going to want the functional clarity that hierarchy provides. And there’s no reason why they can’t manage, or at least influence their networks, and have hierarchical structures too.

Networks aren’t an alternative to hierarchies (meaning structures). They’re two different aspects of organisation design. We don’t want to move from hierarchies or other structures to networks – we need both.

The Network Matrix

I suppose what many people mean when they say that networks need to replace hierarchies is that more network structures should be used.

And to an extent I agree with this. Structure is about how work gets managed. So if you want your networks for to be self-organising and –governing (as McAfee suggests), you’ve got to include networks as a basis for your structure.

But even then, I’d suggest most most organisations are going to want to add the network as an additional element of their structure, ie as part of a matrix, rather than to introduce a network structure as a replacement to their existing hierarchy.

This would be mean splitting the management of the organisation along network and eg functional lines. One dimension would provide the strong corporate hierarchy and the other dimension allow a degree of self-organising and –governing within the network.

Networks and the Social Revolution

I’d also add that that changing structure is never enough to change the way an organisation works. And to change the way that people work with each other, and that work gets done, we need to redesign the networks, or at least the way the networks work, more than we need to redesign the structures of our organisations.

Plus remember that organisation design is only one of several different enablers to bring about the social revolution. So this revolution really has very little to do with moving from hierarchical to network structures.

I’m going to come back and post more about this later in the week.

Picture credit: Leon Benjamin (amended!)

Technorati Tags: Organisation design,structure,processes,networks,social revolution

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I need your spigs

2010-01-15T00:28:00.000-08:00

You may have read my earlier posts on HR’s role (or non-role) in Enterprise 2.0 and the Social Business (eg these posts on Next Generation HR, and my review of Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 book).

The reason for writing these posts is that I do believe HR has a useful role to play – not just in terms of organisation design (including social networks and organisational hierarchies), but in selecting the right people, developing them, creating the right environment and culture and so on. And probably even more important than this, in facilitating the right sort of strategic conversation that focuses on social outcomes / social capital (collaboration, innovation etc) rather than just social activities – which is where I think IT is getting it wrong.

I’ve proposed to take this argument to a number of HR events this year, and to some IT-led ones as well, like the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I think some HR (or at least human / social capital) input at these events would inject some much needed insight:

“Over the last couple of month’s there have been a couple of conferences on Enterprise 2.0, in US and Europe. And because IT people tend to blog and tweet more extensively than HR people do, it’s been quite easy to follow these conferences from afar. And the sense I’ve got of these conferences is of a couple of hundred IT people talking together about culture change! And there’s been little to no HR contribution to this. I’ve submitted a proposal to present at the next E2.0 conference in Boston, but as it’ll be mainly IT people voting on this, I’m not that hopeful of being chosen.”

From my post on Next Generation HR

The conference’s call for papers received 466 submissions which are now undergoing a community vote:

“We encourage all who submitted, all who plan on attending Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston, and anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0, to review the submissions, and vote for their favorites. Submissions are searchable by category, speaker or keyword, and votes received by each session will be viewable by all participants. Sessions advance to the final ‘Selected’ stage based on community votes and final approval by our Advisory Board, and will be announced upon completion of the vote.”

My proposal is languishing about half-way down the voting league, and some proposals are being heavily gamed ie are being voted for by friends and colleagues who I guess have little interest in E2.0 or attending the conference etc. So I guess if I’m going to have any chance of presenting there, I’m going to need you to help me play the game. I need your vote (which for some reason is called a spig).

If you’d like to see HR having an input to the E2.0 agenda, and have me show IT how HR can help Connect the Dots in the social business, please visit the ‘spigit’ site, register, and vote for my proposal (please!).

We’ve got till next Wednesday January 20th.

Technorati Tags: Entrerprise 2.0,conference,Boston,HR,strategy,adoption,connecting the dots,voting,spig,spigit

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Social networks and organisational hierarchies

2010-01-14T15:34:00.000-08:00

I’ve been talking to Josh Letourneau, sourcer and executive search consultant come social network analyst following his recent and insightful post ‘Social Capital… is about to change the world‘ in Ryan Leary’s equally interesting 2010 Recruiting Carnival series).

I agree with just about all of what Josh writes. I particularly like, and agree with, this:

“Ask yourself why there is so much focus on improving ‘within-employee’ factors (skills, competencies, etc.) when research is showing us that competitive advantage is more driven through the ‘patterns of connections’ (often called ‘networks’ or ‘between-employee factors’) than the mean level of organizational talent alone. According to Valdis Krebs, one of the foremost thinkers in the way of Social Network Analysis on the planet, “Teams are not made of talent alone. It is how the talents of individual players intersect and interact that distinguishes a good team from a collection of good players.”

However, another of Josh’ comments has had me thinking:

“Take a moment and ask yourself why organizations spend so much time focused on ‘maintaining the formal structure [command-and-control] Org Chart’ when they so rarely reflect how the day-to-day work gets done? Why is there such little focus on self-forming (in many cases) social networks when it is apparent ‘how much information and knowledge flows through them and how little through official hierarchical and matrix structures’?”

It’s not that I disagree with Josh – I think he’s made a very thoughtful and considered statement, that I also consider to be true.

But as social networking has been growing into a more popular theme, I’ve also seen a lot of people going a lot further than this – basically suggesting that hierarchies should be binned and that networks should be monitored / managed / influenced in their place.

Andrew McAfee has been posting on this too:

“Do we agree that a social revolution is taking place in business today? That corporate hierarchies are being replaced by self-organizing and -governing networks?

If they are, I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen plenty of examples where formal org structures have been supplemented by informal ones (whether tech-enabled or not). It’s also quite common for formal, pre-defined business processes to be supplemented by ad hoc and emergent ones, especially when the formal ones aren’t working perfectly.

Every time this happens, it’s social. But it’s not revolutionary. It’s not even new.

What would be new is a trend of companies throwing out altogether their org charts, management hierarchies, reporting relationships, job titles and descriptions, formal roles and responsibilities, review and promotion processes, and other aspects of classic, old-as-the-hills organizational structure and replacing them with an entirely new social contract. I’ve not seen or heard of a single example of this taking place.”

There are two points I want to make on this:

1. The social revolution doesn’t necessarily require flat, democratic, collaborative, self-organisation! (albeit that I think these all sound nice to have). It requires, above all, recognition that ‘social’ is important

To me, the social revolution that I believe is starting to impact organisations is about recognising the importance of – and then investing in – the relationships between people, as well as the people themselves.

It’s a revolution in the same way that HCM is a revolution (the people revolution) - they both put intangible organisational capital at the centre of business strategy, and align people and organisation management processes behind this capital, rather than to just achieve short-term business ends.

The people revolution puts human capital at the centre of business strategy, the social revolution extends this to social capital too.

The social revolution is potentially an even bigger revolution than the people one for two reasons:

The point of performance in most organisations is the team, not the individual – so social capital has even greater value than the human sort
Most organisations manage their people very poorly. They use up human capital rather than accumulating it. But at least the management of people is something that they try to do. Managing or even just influencing relationships is something that most organisations have not even thought about as yet.

So social capital’s more important, and it’s in a much worse state.

Also see my recent post on moving from human to social capital.

But changing things to start accumulating social capital doesn’t require throwing the baby (org charts, management hierarchies, reporting relationships and the other things McAfee mentions) out with the bathwater. My next point explains why (in my next post).

Technorati Tags: Social,network,organisation,hierarchy,Josh Letoureau,Ryan Leary,Andrew McAfee

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Carnival of Trust, January 2010

2010-01-11T05:52:00.001-08:00

This blog, Social Advantage, focuses on the opportunities that developing social capital, or the connections, relationships, and conversations taking place in an organisation, has on business effectiveness and competitive advantage.

Trust is a concept at the very heart of this focus, and I’m therefore extremely pleased to host the January 2010 edition of the Carnival of Trust, managed by Charles Green of Trust Matters.

Regular readers of this blog, and my Strategic Human Capital Management one, will know about the HR and Leadership Development carnivals I already participate in. This carnival is rather different.

Firstly, although some people will have submitted their posts to the carnival, the intent is to publish the very best posts on trust within the recent period (from the perspective of the person hosting the carnival!). So a lot of these posts have been identified by the carnival’s co-ordinator, Ian Welsh, or from my own feed reader. Secondly, there is a desire to keep the number of posts down to a manageable number, ideally just 10.

So here are my top 10 recent posts on trust. I hope you’ll like them:

1. The Evolution of A New Trust Economy

Brian Solis

Trust seems to be particularly topical at the moment. Perhaps it’s because of the turn of the year and our natural tendency to review the state of our lives and our relationships. And maybe it’s because of the fall in trust over the last year as a result of the crisis and recession (more information on this to be provided in Edelman’s latest barometer in a few week’s time). But I think it’s also because we realise trust is becoming more important. In this post, Brian Solis suggests that we’re entering a new, trust economy:

“While brands weigh the scalability and ROI of investing in relationships, as a consumer, I can assure you, a reasonable attempt at fostering relations is a noble and respectable endeavor.

We’re no longer limiting relationships to friends, family and associates. As our comfort and interaction increase in social networks, the relationships we forge within each reflect our interests and aspirations.

The curated micro networks we forge within each respective social network serves as a trusted community. Those who can participate or permeate these trust communities must first earn the prominence of what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith call Trust Agents – those individuals who are deserving of your time and attention as demonstrated through their actions and words.”

2. Why do we trust the financial priests?

Robert Peston: Peston’s Picks

Perhaps another reason that trust seems so topical is that unearned trust appears to have been one of the things which led to all the problems we’ve experienced over the last year or so. In this post, the BBC’s Robert Peston discusses the misplacing of trust in those overseeing the financial services industry (there’s a UK context to the post but I think it has relevance elsewhere).

“We trusted the Treasury, the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England to make the right decisions about the structure and stewardship of our banking industry - and they got it spectacularly wrong.

That's representative democracy - but actually normal representative democracy doesn't really operate in this sphere,

How so? Well, most of our elected representatives - including ministers - understand less about banking and finance than even those who actually ran the banks.”

3. Trust

Sharlyn Lauby: HR Bartender

Peston’s post raises a number of issues including who we give our trust to. But the question that occurs to me is how then do people earn our trust? And I love this post from Sharlyn Lauby which looks at this need to earn trust rather than giving our trust to others unconditionally. This is a slightly older post but is still topical having been included in this month’s leadership development carnival which provided the best leadership posts from 2009.

“But I’ve been struggling with the concept of giving trust versus earning trust. I mean trust is a pretty big thing. Like love, respect, admiration, etc. I don’t know that we give those unconditionally. People have to earn them. By their actions and by their words. And, once you earn them…if they’re taken for granted or abused, they might be taken away. As in, losing a person’s respect.

Is it possible this is what really happens: when we meet people it’s not that we give them our unconditional trust…but we don’t distrust them. There’s a difference. Maybe there’s a ‘trust limbo’ where we all reside until a person decides they can unconditionally trust us or they need to distrust us. Just a thought I’m tossing out there.”

4. How to destroy trust in three easy steps

Dan Morrill: Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security

One of Lauby’s points is how easy it is to loose trust. This fourth post looks at how trust can be lost during organisational change processes and suggests that change needs to be planned, communicated and implemented effectively to maintain trust:

“Trust is a critical foundation for any organization; employees learn that companies and people in those companies behave in routine ways across a number of situations that they encounter. Unfortunately destroying trust can be very quickly done by suddenly changing things, or otherwise hitting a very high randomization level for employees. Here is how to destroy organizational trust with employees in three easy steps.”

5. The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing

Jim Gilbert: The Gilbert Direct Marketing Blog

The next set of posts move onto the role of social media in developing or loosing trust, starting with this one from Jim Gilbert. Explaining that ‘trust is the new black’, Gilbert suggests nine laws of social media:

“If done correctly, the aforementioned laws allow consumers to build or rebuild trust. Social media harkens back to the days of the corner store where consumers and brands had a cordial relationship. Social media builds relationships over time.”

6. Is it Okay to Twitter Workshop Content?

Liene Stevens: Splendid Communications

Staying on the social media theme, this posts asks whether it is ethical to publicly post content - that people are charging money for - to an audience that is not paying for it? – or does using Twitter break the trust and atmosphere of a group? As someone who posts regularly from conferences, it’s a question I’ve asked myself many times:

“At Engage!09 The Encore this past October, designer Todd-Avery Lenahan asked everyone to ‘use discretion’ in tweeting his talk as he wanted to be an open book, but knew that Twitter could easily present his stories out of context since many people post soundbites and not complete ideas from presentations. Many smaller events have adopted a similar idea and made their meetings Twitter and Facebook free. Is that the only solution? Will there be large events that are strictly Twitterless? Or does the increased use of these social mediums mean that we'll have to shift our views on not only privacy but on how the industry makes money from instructional events as well?”

7. Top 5 social media screwups of 2009

Bridget Carey and Niala Boodhoo: Poked, Miami Herald

I think Liene Stevens asked some important questions in the previous post, as we’re confronting new issues and sometimes individuals and organisations do get them wrong.

This next post reviews 2009’s five worst (and most frequently committed) online faux pas that lie behind some some ‘major online etiquette train wrecks’ (examples of these experiences in other posts that Ian picked out include Adrian Flux Insurance Group, Dominos Pizza [of course], Eurostar, Greyhound, Saatchi & Saatchi / Toyota and Spacelocker. Also see this post on Samboy and recovering from a social media disaster).

Stevens’ faux pas #1 is unintentionally sending spam or malicious links:

“Unintentionally sending spam or malicious links. Please, think twice before you click a strange link. You can't be so trusting on social networks these days. Facebook and Twitter accounts are being infected by malicious links through private messages. Click a strange link (usually something like: Hey you're in this video lolz!!!), and you won't be aware that you sent spam or a virus to most of your connections. And if you are a business account, you just lost the trust and respect of many of your followers.”

8. When An Apology Can Open the Door to Trust

Liz Strauss: Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

So if you’ve made a faux pas and / or experienced a train wreck, how do you recover from it? Well, one way is to make a good apology, but there’s often more to doing this than meets the eye.

This post provides five well known social media apologies and some principles of a relationships building apology.

“In relationships, things go wrong. Person to person or in business, mistakes and missteps can be life changing. A wrongly placed word or deed can bring in question what had gone without thought. Suddenly trust, integrity, honesty, sensitivity, authenticity and the core values that connect us are tested.

Mistakes. No human enterprise or individual gets by without making them. We might not mean them. No harm might have been intended. Yet, we’re not harmless — we can cause hurt or damage by the way we behave. How we respond when we do, is what makes a leader.”

9. Practical Advice for 2010 on 2.0 Adoption

Susan Scrupski: ITSinsider

In the last post focusing on web 2.0 / social media that I’ve selected, Susan Scrupski provides some of The 2.0 Adoption Council members’ advice on web / enterprise 2.0 adoption. Trust is at the heart of this requirement too:

“E2.0 is not a new system or program you add to your old. It becomes part of your old – it is not separate, it is integrated into it. Don’t try to make a ‘another thing,’ make it part of ‘the thing.’

All objections are old ones reincarnate. How did they deal with the situation before? Deal with it the same way now.

There is nothing new about this. Take a splash of old fashioned communities, a dash of learning, a cup of trust, a spoonful of “let’s try this…” and a willing heart, and it will work.

Trust is the currency of anything social. If there isn’t trust, there isn’t E2.0. HOWEVER, find where the trust is already and build upon that. You will have the greatest success there.”

10. Musing about Trust

JP Rangaswami: Confused of Calcutta

Finally, one last post that isn’t about social media, and is rather different from the other posts I’ve assembled in another important way as well. Lessons, laws, rules and ideas all have their place but maybe we also need to approach trust and relationships in a new way?

In this post, JP Rangaswami suggests that we need to build ‘covenant relationships’ and ‘stewardship’. This certainly sounds to me like a key component for Brian Solis’ new trust economy as well as governance of financial services, effective change management, disaster recovery and enterprise 2.0 adoption!

“Everywhere around me I see more and more examples of situations where the core problem people are trying to solve is that of trust. There appears to be a lot of work being done trying to distil trust into something formulaic, data-driven.

And this is good. Data-driven is good. Feedback loops are good. Abstractions and models are good.

But.

There’s something very human about trust. Something more related to the Age of Biology rather than the Age of Physics.”

Conclusion

I hope you find reading this collection of posts helpful and enjoyable. Whether you do or your don’t, I’d value your comments on them below (on my Social Advantage blog if you’re reading this elsewhere).

For more on trust see you may want to scan through some of these posts too: http://blog.social-advantage.com/search/label/Trust.

Thanks to Charles and Ian for the opportunity to host the carnival and I look forward to reading further editions being hosted elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: Carnival of Trust,Charles Green,Trusted Advisor,January,2010,trust,blogs

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The January 3rd Leadership Development Carnival: Best of 2009 Edition

2010-01-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

The best of 2009 leadership posts carnival has been published at Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog.

The carnival includes my post on Visa Europe, but my favourite of the 50 that are included is a great collection of resources 100 Lectures Every Leader Should Listen To from Online Classes.org.

Do have a look at these and check out all the other great posts as well.

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Looking back to January 2009

2010-01-01T05:46:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year!

I’ve spent a week or so away from social media, so I’ve got a lot of posting to do over the next few days.

In the meantime, you may also be interested in these posts from January last year:

Or even the year before?

My contact details:

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Picture credit: Πrate

Technorati Tags: Social capital,competitive advantage,business

Carnival of Trust is coming to town

2009-12-16T01:37:00.001-08:00

The more work I do on social capital, social media etc, the clearer I become that trust is at the centre of much of what organisations need to do to perform in these areas.

So I’m delighted that I’ll be hosting the Carnival of Trust early next month. This is a carnival I’ve been included in before, but this is the first time I’ll be hosting.

In the words of the carnival’s originator, Charles H Green,

“I believe trust is an increasingly important element in a business world and a society that is becoming more dependent on connections, yet more and more removed from the high-touch interpersonal connections of old. A higher-trust society is a society that is personally healthier, and also economically richer. Not to mention probably more peaceful.

My hope and ambition for the carnival is to establish a home base, a center of gravity, for people who are interested in fostering greater trusted relationships in various realms of the world.

While my own material is primarily business-oriented, the Carnival of Trust will be explicitly more broad than business alone. Trust is heavily personal in nature, and I hope the submissions will reflect that—postings that deal with personal trust, business trust, and political trust are welcome, as well as pieces on the nature of trust.”

Previous carnivals this year have been:

The November 2009 Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Jordan Furlong at Law21.ca

The October 2009 Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Scot Herrick at Cube Rules

The September 2009 Carnival of Trust
Hosted by John Caddell at Customers Are Talking

The August 2009 Carnival of Trust
Hosted by David Donoghue at the Chicago IP Litigation Blog.

The July Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Adrian Dayton at Marketing Strategy and the Law.

The June Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Dave Stein at Dave Stein's Blog.

The May Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Victoria Pynchon at Settle It Now

The April Carnival of Trust
Hosted by James Irvine and Tripp Allen at The Egyii Blog

The March Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Beth Robinson at Inventing Elephants

The February Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Ian Brodie at Sales Excellence

The January Carnival of Trust
Hosted by Diane Levin at Mediation Channel

If you want to participate in the carnival being hosted by Social Advantage, send your trust related posts in sometime before Thursday 7th January. And make sure they’re good! – unlike the HR carnival, there’s a clear editing policy on this one.

The carnival will be live on Social Advantage from Monday 11th.

Technorati Tags: Carnival of Trust,Charles Green,Trusted Advisor,January,2010,trust,blogs

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Monkeys with Typewriters

2009-12-12T12:32:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday, I attended the book launch of Jemima Gibbons’ new book on social media, Monkeys with Typewriters.

The book is named after the theoretical monkeys or apes who, given long enough, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, and therefore explain the golden rules of social media:

It’s simple (because monkeys can do it)
It’s fun (why else would monkeys bother)
Its ubiquitous (everywhere you look, there’s another goddamn monkey with a typewriter).

The book is one of the best I’ve read on social media - partly because a lot of Jemima’s experiences resonate for me (I’m one of the people who have never quite managed to get to Tuttle, but I have been a Fellow of the RSA for most of the last 15 years) – but there are other reasons too.

The book is written as a narrative, describing a series of experiences which I think works well. And it also provides a lot of information, a lot of which is surprisingly current, and quite a bit of which is new for me – and I read a lot about this space. All the book’s arguments are also very well referenced and supported.

But I’m also impressed because I think the book outlines the the paradigms that come with working with social media very well.

I’m particularly pleased to find that Jemima agrees with my own perspective that we need to focus on people, and what the technology enables people to do, rather than starting from the technology itself.

So, much of the book focuses on the required changes in leadership within a social media enabled environment, ie one that is not about:

command and control
micro-managing
over-structuring.

But instead, is based upon:

co-creation
passion
learning
openness
listening
generosity.

Jemima describes her dream environment as one which looks like the world-wide web (or at least, web 2.0 – Gary Hamel’s argument too):

“Wouldn’t it be great to have a system where people worked together constructively without the need for micro-management? Where people were passionate about what they did? Where there was a common understanding of objectives and protocols? Where people knew who to ask if they wanted advice or where to go if they needed feedback on something? Where there were numerous experts on hand to give advice for free? Where people co-operated and shared stuff without arguing, and got rewarded for doing so? Where people were valued and appreciated by their peers? An overwhelmingly create environment, where ideas and materials were frequently re-used, re-purposed and mashed together in order to form new, eminently desirable products and services – desirable because it was the consumers themselves who had shaped them?”

I still think we need to take Jemima’s argument regarding people vs technology further however. For me, we need to be much clearer about what we’re trying to create. Focusing on an environment which is enabled by social technology is still inherently about technology. We need to go beyond this and think about all the different ways the desired environment can be created.

Even better we can go beyond talking about environment and focus on the outcomes this environment provides us, whether this is customer or employee engagement, knowledge, productivity or connections and relationships – or social capital (which is, in my view, the key outcome from both social technologies and the environment that Jemima describes).

Once we’re clear about the outcomes, we can look at which environments and which technologies or other enablers can best create these. My belief is that this can lead to an even more compelling case for change than the arguments Jemima uses for her very human organisational environment.

But I do think this book is a big step forward (from Andrew McAfee’s ‘not not about the technology’ for instance).

Picture credit: Chris 73

Technorati Tags: Jemima Gibbons,Monkeys with Typewriters,Triarchy Press,social media

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CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm (Part 3)

2009-12-04T06:10:00.000-08:00

I’ve already posted twice on the last keynote session from this year’s CIPD conference, ‘A New Leadership Paradigm’ (part 1 - the preview and part 2 – the live blog). I’d now like to summarise my take-aways from this and other sessions at the conference.

First of all, I thought the keynote debate was really well done. All three speakers clearly had different perspectives, with Sir Christopher Kelly providing a rather more traditional view of leadership to the others. However, it was still useful to have him included, as I think things are going to take longer to change in the public sector, and his views helped to keep discussion rooted in reality.

And it is also possible to link all three speakers’ perspectives together. In his presentation with Julie Smith from PepsiCo, Jasvier Bajer explained that the true definition of leadership is ‘the ability to create movement and deliver change’. And I think all speakers would agree with this.

But I don’t think Kelly’s views expressed the new paradigm (which is probably why he didn’t think there is one). The future of leadership isn’t just more management; and its not about command and control. As David Smith stated in his presentation of ASDA’s change story (see slide), tell & do autocracy is already dead.

The paradigm shift, like the broader shift in the organisational people management agenda is about transparency, authenticity and sustainability. It’s why I like Avolioand Gardner’s description of authentic leaders (provided by Jane Turner, Newcastle Business School in her workshop on internal coaching):

“Those who are deeply aware of how they think and behave -and are perceived by others as being aware of their own and other’s values, knowledge and strengths; confident, hopeful, optimistic, resilient and of high moral character”

This definition really is, I think, at the heart of the new paradigm of leadership.

Transparency – an alignment between real and perceived
Authenticity – based on self-awareness
Sustainability -confident, hopeful, optimistic, resilient

But I also think there’s one more piece in this – and this is connectivity which I’ve also already posted on as my additional key message from the conference.

In terms of leadership, this area was best addressed at the conference by Emmanuel Gobillot’s presentation of Leadershift:

“To stay relevant leaders will need to move towards Leadership 2.0 – a type of leadership, non-hierarchical in form, that facilitates the collaboration of a self-selected group. In this new context, the leader is an integral part in the generation of a narrative that builds and sustains this group’s valuable and co-created outcomes.”

In reflecting back on the conference, I’ve been also be drawn to Gautam Ghosh’s recent post on leadership in hyper-linked times. In his view, the behaviours of leaders must reflect the new tenets of OD:

Openness and Transparency
Conversation (MBWA)`
Content (co-creation of the brand)
Collaboration
Communities (shared interest groups or tribes connecting around various 'social objects’)
Collective Intelligence

Gautam also notes that these behaviours aren’t new. But put them all together – transparency, authenticity, sustainability and connectivity – and I think you do arrive at something like a new paradigm for leadership. And although I’ve mainly be posting here on the business use of web 2.0 tools, this new leadership paradigm is a important and integral aspect of gaining Social Advantage too.

Technorati Tags: CIPD,Manchester,New Paradign,Leadership,Leadershift,Leadership 2.0,Emmanuel Gobillot,Gautam Ghosh,hyperlinked times

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Looking back to December 2008

2009-12-01T02:46:00.001-08:00

You may also be interested in these posts from the end of last year:

Or even the year before?

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Picture credit: Matthew Jordan

Technorati Tags: Social capital,competitive advantage,business

More from the CIPD conference – developing a culture of…

2009-11-24T14:55:00.000-08:00

There were quite a few sessions at the conference about developing a culture of something, eg of:

Coaching (Jane Turner, Newcastle Business School)
High performance (David Smith, ex-ASDA)
Homogeneity in a global context (Mark Adams, Abbey / Santander)
Innovation (Jaideep Prabhu, University of Cambridge)
Integrity (Roger Steare, Cass Business School)
Leadership (Anete Jajkowska, Microsoft)
Resilience (Rebecca McIntosh and Claire Jelley, also at the University of Cambridge, but internal this time).

However, there wasn’t any linking between sessions these even thought the actions organisations need to take to develop each one of these cultures are largely the same thing!

Basically, there are two or three key steps:

1. Decide what / how you want to be

Organisations can’t do everything, so the key question is which of the capabilities from the above list are most important for you? Having a clear BHAG or mojo will make this easier for you.

Describe the required capability in detail – what behaviours and actions will you expect to see when this capability is in place? This becomes what McIntosh and Jelley referred to as their North Star.

This is, of course, where things between each of the culture types are a bit different, and where some knowledge of the particular type of culture, and what attributes / behaviours support it, is required.

For a culture of innovation for example, Jaideep Prabhu suggests that organisations need three particular attitudes:

Future market focus
Willingness to cannibalise
Tolerance for risk.

Once these three things are in place, innovation should follow.

Actually, I think there’s probably a bit more too it than this ( read my post on Hal Gregersen’s presentation, and listen to the last Talking HR show where I discussed developing innovative cultures with MOK from the Innovation Beehive).

2. Decide on the actions which are going to lead to the required attitudes (and them do them)

For innovation, Prabhu suggests the following:

Product champions
Asymmetric incentives
Internal markets.

Once again, I think it’s a little more complicated that this! In fact, it’s the actions Prabhu doesn’t mention, that are common to the development of all these different types of culture that are the most important.

So, what are these?

Hard issues

Well, there are a few ‘hard’ issues, such as getting your ducks in a row, ie linking all of your HR and management activities to the required capability, and then monitoring these activities (see Microsoft’s system model, and people scorecard):

You might even want to produce a few T-shirts?

Soft issues

But the soft areas are the harder ones (if you see what I mean).

David Smith did a good job of describing some of these in connection with ASDA’s journey:

Hire for attitude
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Listening
Engaging style of management and leadership
Remove your underperfomers, push your talent
Recognition
Fun / buzz and a sense of community.

But I think Roger Steare captured what’s at the heart of changing these soft issues even more accurately. For him, good behaviour and culture is when:

People stop and think
People talk about shared values
People unite around a common purpose
People act fairly for the common good.

Out of these, it’s talking (- particularly about what’s important - see Emmanuel Gobillot’s ‘narratives’) which is at the hear of culture change. There was a good post on this in Harvard Business / Peter Bregman’s blog How We Work, this Summer. This put culture change down to the way we tell stories:

"You change a culture with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it's the story you tell. That story conveys your culture simply and reliably. And I'm certain you're not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the stories.

I told him not to change the performance review system, the rewards packages, the training programs. Don't change anything. Not yet anyway. For now, just change the stories. For a while there will be a disconnect between the new stories and the entrenched systems promoting the old culture. And that disconnect will create tension. Tension that can be harnessed to create mechanisms to support the new stories.”

It emphasises, I think, that much of what we mean when we talk about culture change is actually social capital (which I define as the value of the connections, relationships and conversations taking place between people in an organisation).

And which brings us straight back to the importance of Connectivity again!

Technorati Tags: Culture,coaching,high performance,global,innovation,integrity,leadership,Jane Turner,Newcastle Business School,David Smith,ASDA,Mark Adams,Abbey,Santander,Jaideep Prabhu,Roger Steare,Anete Jajkowska,Microsoft,Rebecca McIntosh,Claire Jelley,Peter Bregman,CIPD,Manchester

Cross posted from Strategic HCM.

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CIPD conference summary: Connectivity

2009-11-22T15:30:00.000-08:00

Jackie Orme didn’t include this as a theme, but it was certainly one for me. And I think it builds upon the previous three: transparency, authenticity and sustainability. And behind this is the fact that we live in a social world – and this came through strongly too:

In ‘Leadershift’, Emmanuel Gobillot suggested that leadership needs to be connected
In ‘The Future of Work and Organisations’, Richard Worsley from the Tomorrow Project noted that knowledge is a social activity
In ‘Harnessing the Power of Social Media’, Nick Shackleton-Jones explained that learning is largely social too (that information comes with emotional tags)
And in ‘Coaching to build Innovative Mindsets’, Nick Jankel from wecreate positioned social collaboration as a basis for innovation.

Social connecting also came up in presentations from:

Callum Petrie from Philips Electronics, where connecting with employees is seen as a basis for performance (see slide)
Kathryn Pritchard and Judy Noonan from iris, for similar reasons
Jacky Simmons from TUI, where interrelating is positioned as the centrepiece of an approach to developing organisational resilience. Interrelating consists of:
- Connecting across the organisation through the development of strong networks
- Collaborating by developing shared plans, cooperating and sharing knowledge.

But probably the most powerful argument for improving connectivity was provided by Andrew Kakabadse from Cranfield in his presentation on the divisions between members of top teams.

Kakabadse’s research suggests that banks knew about the credit problems 15 months before the financial meltdown, but that division, denial and paralysis had become the cultural norm. More broadly, he suggests that Boards often share few penetrating insights and have little shared view of differentiation and competitive advantage.

If this is the case, how likely will it be that employees will all share one common view?

So what can organisations do to develop greater connectivity and improve collaboration? I’ve already posted on the role of social media, but there are many other opportunities too. In his session on organisation design, Andrew Campbell from Ashridge suggested that organisations need to guard against these blockages on collaboration:

Unclear objectives
Differing objectives or incentives
Competition for money, people, promotion, praise
Unclear authorities
Transfer prices
Physical or cultural distances
Interfering bosses
Control freeks or secrecy.

And in her workshop on ‘Facilitating OD Interventions’, Sylvia Baumgartner suggested that we need to influence group dynamics, particularly as work becomes increasingly situational and less routine. Appropriate OD interventions include:

Diagnostic activities
Team-building activities
Survey feedback activities
Education and training activities
Structuring activities
Process Consultation activities
Third-party mediation activities
Competency development
Coaching and counselling
Life and Career Planning activities
Planning and Goal Setting activities
Strategic Management activities
Organisational Transformation activities
Organisational Effectiveness
TQM (Total Quality Management)
Conversations…..

All of the above issues and activities are things that I deal with on this and my other blog, Strategic HCM.

It’s why I was rather critical of the session on Next Generation HR. The rise of connectivity is leading to much bigger changes that those identified there.

These include the social business (enabling organisations to connect with their people) and social HR / HR 2.0 (the move to facilitating rather than managing HR outcomes).

And it’s also why I was delighted with Shaa Wasmund’s description of me in her tweet:

(This post is cross posted from Strategic HCM.)

Technorati Tags: Emmanuel Gobillot,Richard Worsley,Nick Shackleton-Jones,Nick Jankel,Callum Petrie,Philips,Kathryn Pritchard,Judy Noonan,iris,Jacky Simmons,TUI,Andrew Kakabadse,Andrew Campbell,Sylvia Baumgartner,collaboration,social

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CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm (Part 2)

2009-11-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

Live blog from the CIPD 2009 conference final panel keynote:

CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm

And it’s a wrap!

This post has been cross-posted from Strategic HCM. Also Also see part 1 of this post there.

Technorati Tags: Christopher Kelly,Steve Easterbrook,Shaa Wasmund,John Humphrys,Leadership,CIPD,Manchester

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CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm

2009-11-19T00:37:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed day 2 of the CIPD Conference more than day 1 (I met some people who thought the reverse, so of course it’s a personal thing, partly depending upon which sessions you attend, and a whole heap of other things as well). I particularly enjoyed Nick Baylis on ‘the Rough Guide to Happiness’ and Sarah Redshaw from Unilever on ‘Building Transformation through Engagement’. I’ve not blogged on these sessions, but you can see plenty of tweets from me and others on Twitter, using the hashtag #CIPD09 (if you don’t know what this means, you really should you know).

The highlight from today should be the end of day keynote, ‘a New Leadership Paradigm’. The outline certainly looks interesting (and just seeing John Humphrys live should be good):

Public respect for leaders has hit an all time low. The exposed inadequacy of those in leadership positions has brought current thinking on leadership and the established models into question.

Today, it seems that there is a substantial lack of ‘real’ and successful leaders equipped with both the resilience and capability to deal with the complexity and pressures of the ever changing global market. So are we now at a cross roads? Is this an ideal opportunity to challenge the current view of what it takes to be a good leader and to establish what behaviours and competences will be needed to lead organisations and societies into our uncertain future?

Join us to debate:

Why and how have traditional models failed?
How can we learn from the past and build on its successes?
How can we re-establish leadership credibility?
What skills and attributes will successful leaders of the future need?

I’ll be live blogging from the session, but here are a few thoughts to warm-things up.

Firstly, I think it is a really big and important question. I do think existing leadership is failing. Look at Hay’s stats from yesterday, or simply the end results (the recession we’re now in). And we know that leadership accounts for a significant part of this (Jim Collins’ point that leaders can destroy organisations on their own).

I agree that resilience and capability are part of what needs to be fixed. But I think attitudes need changing too. We need to look again at what we mean by leadership and change the way that leaders lead.

And we’ve had a few pointers during the conference, particularly from Jim Collins on Level 5 leadership, and the need for leaders to act through others to create greatness; and Emmanuel Gobillot on the connected leader in his session on Leadershift.

Leaders may have a particular role but they achieve success through their community.

It seems to be a view that’s taking off.

I was talking about this with Jonathan Austin at the Best Companies exhibition stand yesterday too. He had just attended a session with Edgar Schein where Schein had been talking about leaders as ‘humble engineers’ who need to work through others to make their organisations work. And I’ve already posted on Social Advantage on Henry Mintzberg’s concept of Communityship.

Emphasising that companies are not collectives of human resources, but communities of human beings, Mintzberg suggests that traditional views of leadership isolate people in leadership positions, thereby undermining a sense of community in organisations. He believes leadership and communityship go hand-in-hand: "A community leader is personally engaged in order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise initiative".

And it’s by developing this sense of community that individuals become bound to each other and start to want to focus on developing the productivity of their organisation as a whole, rather than acting purely out of self-interest.

That’d be the basis of my answer if I was on the stage today. And it’s also one of the things I write about at my other blog, Social Advantage, and you might want to check over there.

Join me for the live blog if you can!

This post is cross posted from Strategic HCM.

Technorati Tags: CIPD,Manchester,New Paradigm,Leadership,John Humphrys,Jim Collins,Level 5,Emmanuel Gobillot,Leadershift,Edgar Schein,Humble Engineer,Henry Mintzberg,Communityship,Jonathan Austin,best Companies

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Using social media at CIPD09

2009-11-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

My favourite session yesterday was Nick Shackleton-Jones (@shackletonjones) on the use of social media supporting online learning at the BBC. I was going to blog on this, but Rob Moss from Personnel Today got their first, so see his summary on this.

Instead, I thought I’d write about the use of social media at the CIPD conference itself.

There have been quite a few of us blogging and tweeting, and in many ways, this has led to the development of a small community, sharing experiences and learning with everyone else through social media, but also face-to-face between ourselves. At times, it’s felt like a conference within a conference.

So, thanks for a great conference everybody!

Martin Couzins (@martincouzins) and Rob Moss (@robmoss) plus Kat Baker and Louisa Peacock from Personnel Today / XpertHR (@PersonnelToday / @XpertHR / @HRSpace), all busy in the Press Office:

Charlie Duff (@charlie_elise) from HR Zone (@HRZone) :

Adrienne Fox (@foxlondon)writing for HR Magazine (US):

Jennifer Liston-Smith (@listonsmith) writing for the BPS:

Mike Morrison from RapidBI (@rapidbi) on the right, also with Nick Spindler from Nationwide:

(Check our Mike’s notes from the conference at cipd2008.blogspot.com)

Steve Bridger (@stevebridger) from CIPD Communities (@CIPDcommunities):

Last night, we met up at the CIPD’s tweet-up.

Julia (Twitter username pending!):

Mike (@rapidbi) with Klothilde (@kganzer):

Steve and David (sharing @RightwayCWS) with Irsa (username pending)

The CIPD’s Natalia (@NAlexandrou or @CIPD_Events) with Charlie (@charlie_elise or @HRZone) and Steve (@stevebridger or @CIPDcommunities):

Well done to the CIPD for raising the role of social media this year. There’s still a way to go, but it’s been a very good start.

A few other non-Twitter peeps (I won’t say ‘muggles’ again!).

Perry Timms from the BIG Lottery Fund before his session ‘Communicating with Impact’:

Former colleague, Alison Crossley:

The Elsevier stand – my book’s just about visible on the back shelf:

Technorati Tags: Social media,social networking,web 2.0,HR,learning,CIPD,Manchester,Nick Shackleton-Jones,BBC

Cross-posted from my Strategic HCM blog.

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