When stuck- encourage employees to confront three honest questions, on their own.

Talent management can be lot more directive and instructive in scenarios where we know what motorized or memorized skills we want our talent to posses and what predefined behaviors we want them to exhibit. Such scenarios assume managers know better! And future scenario will be some combination of historic scenarios. Increasingly both the above assumptions are questionable.

It’s about developing from within, at attitude and values level that seems to be the best chest for the talent in these uncertain and volatile times. As leaders of such talent, how do you enable your team to grow from within? Preaching, selling or telling wont work. Has it ever? Experience sharing may help and provoke them to reflect.

Accordingly, recently I shared with leaders, three questions that often help me gauge how well aligned my internal compass is with objective at hand (and that often predicts my probability of success):

Am I Genuinely Curious to know? If so, there could be no reason for not being able to find out the real issues, expectations, apprehensions, or stakes in the situation? Lack of information sources, limited time availability and inaccessibility to stakeholders are excuses to mask the lack of curiosity.

Am I Authentic in Connecting/ Reaching out? Communication gaps, in the era of multiple channels promising anytime anywhere connectivity, can only be explained as lack of intent to connect. Have I shrugged responsibility by supplying information or reached out to ensure that information is rightly received and understood? Has reaching out effort being backed by values of sharing, learning and caring for the stakeholders?

Am I Passionate enough to Contribute to making change happen? How glued I am with the big picture change that current set of activities, projects, programs intend to achieve? Do I care enough for the cause and its psychological pay-off to me not to bother about credit sharing and value apportionment, but focus on the actual value being created?

Whenever I have seen myself complaining about fidgety clients, unclear expectations, lack of resources, limited time, or team conflicts, at-least one of the above three elements is missing. At the same time, in events when all three elements are present, I am amazed at my own potential to be creative, engaging, relentless, energetic, focused and Impactful.

Reflect on situations where you (or your employees) are stuck, and see if any of the above is missing?

Five Physical World beliefs that fail in the Digital World

Transitioning effectiveness from physical to digital world often requires revisiting cherished beliefs and accepting the limitations of these beliefs as action gets transported to digital world.  Unless consciously called to note, these beliefs stay hidden and affect the overall results.  Top five such beliefs are:

1. Keep only the most useful- throw the waste:  Anything that has not been used for last three months has very limited probability of being used ever again.  Dispose that and free up some space- so goes the logic in the physical world.  This is clearly not true in digital world.  Check files in your desktops that have not been used for over six months, and note that you are actually keeping multiple versions of these documents with no intent to delete.  In physical world, carrying things costs and hence exclude/expunge those that you don’t need while in digital world loosing things that you may require (in case) is more painful than carrying additional inventory.  As David Weinberger says- In digital world, it costs more to exclude then include, and inclusion is lot easier. 
2. Social loafing is not acceptable and is to be exposed:  We all resist social loafing in group work and expect social loafer to buy permission by compensating elsewhere (either in financial or social form) or risk being socially exposed.  In social media, social loafers- those set of passive consumers who only read and download your stuff and occasionally vote in form of likes, are actually welcome.  Going by statistics, free riders are lot more than content creators and contributors.  They tend to provide psychological returns for the investments creators make in developing the content.
3. Always go with the Professional advice:  Peers comments are more reliable than that of critics in deciding the best restaurant to dine at. Experience sharing at sites like patientslikeme.com, provide good reference to compare your doctor advice with.  People like me will have unstated evaluation criteria similar to mine, and will have seldom hidden motive to misguide.  Off-course, if the stakes are high, and involve specialized and contextual knowledge, professional advice prevails.  According to Clay Shirky, go for professional advice if you are taking about brain surgery, but its ok to go with peers advice while choosing restaurant.  
4. Revisions represent errors that can not be ignored:  Think deep and wide, develop opinion, publish and persist- for the reputational and financial cost of undoing or reworking is very high in the physical world.  Not so, in the digital world, where you start small, build on, refine, refute, synthesize and redefine almost continually as more information and views pour in.  Iterations represent dynamism, responsiveness and agility in the digital world! 
5. Real work requires serious money to get it done: It costs to commit dedicated resources spending physical efforts and time to execute work and needs to be paid for.  Digital world leverages collective knowledge of commons (aggregated through google) and free time of the volunteers (emotionally hooked to the cause) to create works of great social and civic importance.  Wikipedia represents one hundred million hours of volunteer cumulative work – as per Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher. 

It is the wider appreciation of the different set of beliefs ruling the two worlds that needs to be stressed upon, as we design strategies to use digital world in non-linear radical manner.

      Reflect!

RIP your Way into Collaboration

Another client, same story! “We have provided the employees with the best collaborative tools, accessible even from mobile, but not much uptake. Those people, who were collaborating previously, have migrated to new platform, but not many new collaborators have emerged. Do you think we should advertise more or conduct another training session on the tools and its functionality?” NO. RIP your way into collaboration.


Provide REASONS for employees to collaborate: Broadly, reasons have to include Work-related reasons and Self-related reasons. Which aspect of employees work gains most from collaboration? Is it in managing customer care, designing new products, or solving delivery problems? What adds value; Expertise advice in solving problems, access to reusable assets to expedite work or tacit knowledge sharing by stakeholders for developing more practical cross-functional solutions? Unless there is sustained reason for employee to engage in collaboration for performing his/her work more effectively, collaboration is unlikely to become habit.

Self related reasons provide answer to the essential “Whats in it for me?”. Is being collaborative, essentially being open and helpful, rewarding to me in some-way? What do I gain from providing expertise advice, or sharing my work-products so that someone else is able to do work better and faster? Designing right motivation strategy is the key. Do you leverage financial incentives or social recognition or both? Complexity of solution, level of effort, business benefits from collaborative behavior, are some of the parameters to be looked into.

Provide INSTRUMENTS to Collaborate: While your collaboration goals may be small in the short run, it pays to have collaboration infrastructure architecture designed to handle advanced features of collaboration. It’s the rolling out strategy that needs to be calibrated to the overall collaboration road-map. If the collaborative instruments are intuitive enough, early adopters shall be your best sales-force to get others learn how to use them.

Provide PERMISSIONS for employees to collaborate: Formal permission is easy and mainly comes from having well defined social medial policy and usage guidelines. It’s the informal permission which comes from leadership behavior and overall culture that often needs attention. Are leaders ok to respect the outcome of the community deliberations and happy to experiment or acknowledge? To what extent, project leader is ok for team member to seek help from open community in solving problem, instead of reaching out to him for advice or permission to ask? To what extent employees feel it safe to ask questions or share comments without their bosses sitting on judgment about their competence or attitude?

Providing Instrument for collaboration is often resource intensive decision and hence often takes lot of discussion time, whereas returns on the investments depend upon other two factors that need careful consideration.

Reflect!!!

Key Decisions that determine whether Social Network Enterprise Investments will deliver Value!

Too much has been written and talked around about the potential benefits of turning organization into socially networked enterprise- wherein employees and customers exchange ideas, views and information about common areas of interest- almost dynamically, collectively and in an open format supported by appropriate set of technologies. At the same-time, not all organizations have actually gained through these transformation initiatives despite investments in technology and leadership support. Here are few decisions that have to be made right, to evolve organization into socially networked enterprise- that delivers Value:


1- What are the top two most compelling features of social network enterprise that will provide immense value to business and employees- be it expertise location, customer problem solving, new product idea generation, operational best practices identification and assimilation. Agreed all of these usages will have some value to business, but prioritizing those areas where enhanced collaboration will deliver maximum business benefit makes designing, targeting, incubating and tracking adoption more effective. Besides organizational pay-off, there must be equally compelling response to “what’s in it for me?” for employees to participate.

2- Is primary purpose of social networking initiative to facilitate or to substitute the normal delivery route to goal accomplishment? It could be both or either depending upon nature of goal and delivery requirements. Expertise location or Idea generation aspects provide facilitative support, while crowd sourcing, task contracting- such as documentation, reviewing, analysis can actually enable work to be delivered through communities instead of dedicated teams. Linking communities’ outcome to mainstream work processes and formal decision making avoid potential conflicts and encourage participation.

3- Who is the right leader for the initiative?: Asking enterprise or business unit head to lead this initiative may not the right choice, as his/her presence may stifle openness or promote projectionist behaviors, besides potential time and attention challenges on his/her behalf. Choose someone that is foremost passionate about enterprise objectives and is recognized as credible boundary spanner among colleagues and not necessarily social media tools and technology expert. Those who are very active at individual level on blogging, surfing, or community activities for self pay-offs, may not be necessarily be effective in driving social business for the enterprise. Besides leader, make sure there are other suitable stakeholders engaged as part of governance and nurturing committee.

4- What is the right unit level to start with? Most value unlocking/creation comes from cross silo dialogue and marrying of conflicting perspectives tied to common objective. Hence, the initial coverage should span multiple boundaries to ensure significant diversity and inclusion of employee sets those do not otherwise mingle so often. Also it pays to limit number of communities, otherwise too many gated communities may sprout up reflecting existing organizational silos, defeating the very purpose of enhanced enterprise-vide collaboration. Further multi-community memberships may spread employees’ contribution too thin to create meaningful impact.

5- What technological choices to provide for? To begin with, simplicity should rule over extensive choice of technologically available features. Calibrated introduction of other features periodically generates excitement and also help in easy adoption. Search facility made available in the beginning especially when there is not much content looks odd! Integration with the existing software applications helps in migration, but may be achieved in phased manner.

6- How elaborate should be the usage guidelines? Not as big as operational manual but a bit more than statement of good intentions. It pays to link to existing behavioral guidelines in the enterprise. More than acceptable norms, its important to provide examples of some behaviors that are clearly not acceptable- say writing about client business or behavior.

7- How do we measure success? Tracking activity levels are easy and do give some indication of adoption levels, especially when details such as average response to discussion threads, ratio between writers, contributors and visitors etc are considered. Individual level gains from community participation come as good stories supporting the benefits case. User’satisfaction score does give pointers towards effectiveness of design and ease of usage. However, numbers of proposals/ideas generated by the community that get accepted (and eventually adopted) by Management for enterprise adoption provide real measure of business value add.

8- How to reward contributions? Shall we reward winners in the form of social recognition or money? No straight answer. Depends on the contribution and the person involved! Customer contribution that leads to direct business benefit needs to be surely paid in tangible form, while employee’s contributions of ideas or information in response to of discussion threads surely does not warrant payments, but recognition among the peer group and enhanced visibility to Management. Including community contributions into performance evaluation decisions may make sense to promote collaboration in general, then specific adoption of social media. For if collaboration is a general norm, social media platform will be lapped up anyway.

If strategy is all about making right choices, there are some key choices that need to be made right on path to becoming social business enterprise that delivers Value.

Although business context, organization culture and employees profiles will dictate most of the choices, there seems to be growing evidence of some choices being more effective than others. It pays to take cognizance of “what seems to be working more often”.

But note that Social business strategy helps design the instruments to enable collaboration, but can not by itself address intent level challenges that may be characteristics of prevailing culture.

Reflect, as always!