Collaborative Leadership in Asia

 

   I’ve been attending the Singapore Human Capital Summit and it’s been remarkable how clearly increased collaboration has come through as a core theme.

We started off with Lynda Gratton’s description of the changing nature of work, which includes a big focus on collaboration.

But I thought the best explanation of the shift came from one of Gratton’s research participants, Pradeep Pant, President of Kraft Foods for Asia Pacific. Pant explained that the command and control organisation has had to go, since that as business has become more complex, it’s no longer possible to be hands on.

Advantage through product features lasts just a few months – sometimes weeks. So real advantage today comes from:

• A relentless focus on who we want to be, and what we want to do (and not do)
• A higher purpose – older people are concerned about job descriptions and salaries (my notes also say potatoes, but I’m sure that can’t be right!), but those at the other end of the age spectrum are most concerned about what does the company stand for, other than market share, profits and cash (actually I don’t think that’s right either – I think all generations, East and West, are increasingly focused on this).
• Looking at communities, and understanding what to do with hierarchies and organisation
• Organisational flexibility and adaptiveness to change – ensuring that true innovation, rather than simply product development, is deeply embedded. So the job of the leader is encouraging risk taking and experimentation, taking away fear of failure.

 

Pant says he’s had to stop wearing a tie – people knew he was informal but were worried other people saw him as too formal, and that they wouldn’t talk to him,

A lot of the speakers seemed to understand the shift Gratton had been describing – but there were a few other comments that made me less sure about this.

 

So, for example, one of the CEO speakers claimed that her employees put leaders (including her, presumably) on a pedestal. Um, I wonder… And yes, I know that there’s a high power distance trait in much of South East Asia, but even so, I’m not sure this will be right. I suspect the speaker’s comment has got more to do with many Executives’ lack of understanding about their organisations (but I could be wrong on this)..

Anyway, I was cheered later when Jen-Luc Betel from Medtronic (I think it was) noted that whilst respect for hierarchy may be comfortable for leaders, it’s not good for their organisations, as it saps creativity and energy.  Companies need to unleash people at the bottom of their organisations by creating a respectful environment and ensuring that people are empowered – if they’re watched, they won’t innovate.

 

The value of collaboration also came in several other sessions, for example Vineet Nayar talked about HCL becoming a ‘Facebook organisation’, based upon community rather than control. He wants HCL’s internal relationships to be spherical, rather than hierarchical, in nature. People need to come together for purposes that are good for the company, collaborate over something, and then disband (then go and collaborate somewhere else).

See also this earlier post on Vineet’s organisational model (including his original drawing of it).

And also Vineet’s  presentation on the perfect storm:

 

Technorati Tags: Singapore,Human Capital,Summit,Vineet Nayar,perfect storm,Asia,HR,awards,collaboration,Facebookl,organisation

 

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The Chief Social Officer

 

 

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The Social CEO

 

   I’m presenting at this session on Social Media for CEOs on Tuesday 20th September.

The half-day strategic briefing session is being organised by Luke Brinkley-Jones at Our Social Times and is for senior executives of large organizations.

“This unique event – the first of its kind in the UK – offers an end-to-end view of the benefits, and risks, of adopting social media across multiple departments within large organizations.

During this intensive morning session, we will cover topics such as:

• Social media business strategy
• Leadership and innovation: “The Social CEO”
• Enterprise social networking (internal communities)
• Customer engagement and advocacy (external communities)
• Brand and reputation management
• Talent retention and recruitment.”

 

You can follow the conversation at #socialceo.

 

Technorati Tags: Events,social,media,CEO,business,executive,leader,Luke Brinkley-Jones,Our Social Times

 

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Social leadership at Cisco

 

  Ealier on, Phil Smith, CEO, Cisco UK & Ireland has talked about leadership and social networking at Cisco.

Globalisation, technology and the next generation workforce and changing the way that people work in organisations.  It’s a big social change, although technology has made the change much easier.

Cisco use social networking tools for communications within the company also also externally, eg in graduate recruitment for building relationships with the best students and creaming off the best before the milk round.  These relationships are sustained through onboarding etc.

As for those companies that don’t allow social networking, Phil suggests using technology within a company is a management issue – you can be on the phone all day just as much as you can be on Facebook.

Next generation working also requires an inclusive culture.  People feel they want to work in Cisco because their talents will be respected and developed.

Their programme is ‘More Together’ which does focus more on inclusiveness than diversity.  The best teams focus on everyone’s contribution rather than just on minority groups.

So for example his executive team have recently participated in a goldfish bowl exercise, sitting round a group of brave women having a facilitated conversation about some of the difficulties they were experiencing.  Executives do get shielded but in this exercise they just sat and listened.

Executives area also reverse mentored.  He has a 21 / 21 year old chap who mentors him and helps him understand how others would communicate.

All of this helps Cisco to develop social communities and quickly assemble dynamic teams.

 

Also see my other posts on Cisco:

• Enterprise 2.0: Cisco and the Human Network @ Work
• Cisco’s management experiment
• Cisco’s collaboration framework
• Cisco leading from the middle.

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,talent management,summit,#ECtalent,Phil Smith,Cisco,leadership,social networks

 

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Social leadership at GE

 

   (My notes from Susan Peters, CLO, GE at the Economist Group’s Talent Management Summit)

 

GE’s talent management roots can be traced back to the 1950s, however they’ve been reviewing some of this, asking whether the company would be in a different place now if some of this had been different too.

Plus they know leadership requirements will continue to change through to 2020 and beyond. For example, organisations are needing to get much flatter. Susan wonders about middle management – and worries about it too as it’s such a big part of organisational structure. Managers need to turn into coaches but their role may disappear.

 

 

You can always find people who can aggregate, but people can get performance feedback from a wide range of sources eg anonynous twitter based coaching (gen Y are totally cool with this). It requires a different style of management – with more letting go.

GE also expect corporate social networks to be as prevalent in ten years time as the internet is today. And mobile will be to the next 10 years what laptops have been to last 10. All of this is important as social media is not about the technology – it’s about the way people work.

 

(That last one says you will be hired and promoted based on your relationship capital – see my recent post on influence.)

 

It’s all supporting a continuing and massive change in the way we lead…

GE’s review of leadership and talent management started in June 2009 when they got together with an eclectic group of thought leaders (two academics and a millennial, futurist and historian etc) to ask whether their leadership DNA was where they wanted it and what is leadership today?

This led into some research leveraging the Senior Executive Development class talking to 170 entities around the word (including the Boston Celtics, Chinese communist party etc) asking what they are thinking leadership is and what they are doing about it – a bit like drinking from a firehose.

In late 2009 they decided rather than publishing this to engage GE leaders in dialogue about it. So in 2010 they invited academics to dinners on innovation strategy, leadership etc with ten company leader and set up sessions at Crotonville asking what does it mean to you to be a 21^st Century Leader and what do you want your leader to be like? There was a Leaders in Residence programme in which leaders took a week out of their job to teach, including fireside chats, one-to-one coaching etc: where people got the chance to discuss what they saw as the gaps.

 

(Notice Susan’s yammer messages popping up at the top right of this pic.)

 

By the end of 2010, leadership had been reframed by hanging contemporary definitions on the existing values.

 

 

One thing that helped employees to get it was to talk about leadership development in same way as product developing – you wouldn’t want to use the same cell phone as five years ago because your expectations have changed – the same with leadership development. You don’t want to be the same person you were five years ago, and you wouldn’t want to work for someone whose skills and perspectives haven’t changed.

The updated values are used in GE’s differentiation matrix etc and they have a two-pronged approach. Firstly, development happens through on the job experience although it often happens in unplanned way too (eg HR will learn by planning a downsizing or a layoff, but it’s when someone breaks down in tears in your office that you get real experience). Secondly, leaders are given assignments beyond what they should be doing. They’re then held accountable and are given feedback.

GE also bring together intact leadership teams of 15-20 people for four days to teach strategy, learn and do. And a programme called Leadership Explorations is also provided as there are lots of senior executives who have not been in training programmes for some time. This consists of 2 – 3 days studying matrix management, the 2020 workforce, innovation, strategic networking etc.

 

Also see these two previous posts on GE’s leadership, talent management and social networking:

• Social capital and Organisational capabilities
• Talent management, collaboration and competition: GE and IBM

 

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,Talent Management,Summit,#ECTalent,GE,leadership,Susan Peters,CLO

 

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Social Business at the Economist’s Talent Management Summit

 

  On Thursday, I attended the Economist Group’s Talent Management Summit yesterday. You can see my blog posts from the sessions at Strategic HCM:

• Setting the talent agenda
• Future proofing the business (strategic workforce planning)
• Leadership behaviours for the future
• Recognising individuals: GE vs Aviva.

 

My first conversation with one of the delegates was with Tina from the US. We got talking about social media (I was just back from the Social Business Forum in Milan) and, emphasising the vital role of ‘social’, I remarked that though talent is important, I expected to find a bit of a vacuum around the potentially larger agenda of how talent is enabled to work together. How wrong I was! - I think I probably got more out of this conference from a social business perspective than I did from the day before (which emphasises why I think Enterprise 2.0 type conferences are still FAR too technology based).

Firstly, we had some good inputs from Rafael Ramirez at Said Business School at Oxford and Santiago Alvarez de Mon at IESE who talked about the need to understand the collective, rather than just the individual, future.

Two examples are:

- Barcelona’s football academy which selects your boys (Messi was there at 14) and teaches them how to play football, but more importantly, teaches them attitude, and develops a belief about playing as a team, not as individuals. Barca has a higher proportion of home grown talent than any other football club and a different culture, or attitude to work (also see this post on socialism in football).

- El Sistema – a system of orchestras in the poor parts of Venezuela which teaches kids to play instruments and which has found that children learn better when they play together than when they try to learn individually.

 

In business terms, leadership as a transformation of society – so you need to be in touch with society. Or if business is about relationships, then leadership is the quality of that relationship.

But there’s no relationship without the art of engaging people in courageous conversations, so we need to locate the point, in the organogram and in time, where courageous conversations are going to happen.

Leadership is not power. It’s trust, patience, respect, concern for the other, raising intriguing questions, and empathy: forgetting about myself and being in touch with you. But it’s impossible to be in touch with someone else if you are not in touch with yourself.

And its outcomes are trust, engagement, energy, inspiration…

Speakers provided some good business examples of collective futuring too. Eg Deborah Baker, Director for People at BSkyB (pictured) noted that leadership has become increasingly collaborative and team focused, as organisation structures have shifted to become less hierarchical, flatter, matrixed etc.

It’s about empowering others, and developing others. Reinforcing Santiago’s (or was it Rafael’s – sorry) point, Deborah noted that leaders can’t develop others unless they’re developing themselves. They need an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses to get the best out of others.

 

I love these points about there needing to be a focus on the individual before there can be one on each other.  As I’ve posted before, organisations need to be human before they can be social.  See this case study as an example.

 

More coming up from Phil Smith, CEO, Cisco UK & Ireland and Susan Peters, CLO at GE.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Rafael Ramirez,Said,Santiago Alvarez de Mon,IESE,Barcelona,football academy,El Sistema,Deborah Baker,BSkyB,social,leadership

 

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John Lewis’ Co-Ownership Model and The Royal Wedding

 

  I’m a republican.  And I’ve avoided the royal wedding today by flying to Atlanta where I’m attending an unconference tomorrow.

On the flight out I’ve been reading this month’s Management Today, which includes an interview with John Lewis Partnership’s Chairman, Charlie Mayfield, and I’ve been struck by the similarities between this company’s co-ownership model, and the reasons why I’m a republican.

 

Co-Ownership

As Mayfield has explained in the Times a few years ago, co-ownership provides a good basis for long-term planning in business:

“Our success in that aftermath and our future economic growth will depend on knowledge-based companies working in new areas of business such as genetics and climate change technology. Such businesses tend to thrive when the people with the knowledge feel they have a stake in their future. Innovation will also be key to their success.

They will not grow into sustainable businesses unless they are built on a structure that encourages a long-term approach to investment and gives the people involved a stake in their success. The modern plc may not be it.”

 

He clearly sees the ownership model as one of the central planks in John Lewis’ success:

“Our constitution is most definitely not a philanthropic idea.  It’s a commercial idea.  A competitive idea.  It’s not political, it’s about engaging people.  We create a culture of ownership and people feel valued.  So they perform better.  That is a very powerful performance lever.”

 

Indeed.  (The article also suggests that:

“If you stack shelves at Waitrose or sell bed linen at Peter Jones, you regard yourself as a cut above the till jockeys at Asda or Debenhams.  You are the creme de la creme, with skin in the game.”)

 

So the suggestion is that co-ownership changes employees (‘partners’)’  perspective about their employment and employer, making them more engaged, with higher performance a result.

I think there’s a bit more too it than this.  I’d suggest the main benefit of this less hierarchical approach is enhanced co-operation - that John Lewis’ people are not just in the game but are playing in the game together.

 

Republicanism

I probably don’t really need to explain the analogy I’m making here.

But let me just emphasise that one key difference between John Lewis and other UK retailers is that Mayfield reports indirectly to his staff (through a 70-strong council of elected partner representatives), rather than simply the other way around.  It’s not too dissimilar to a Presidential political model where the populate appoints the President.

In other more traditional organisations, the boss is much more clearly on top.  He (still less often she) are the corporate equivalents of our dear old queen.  And employees don’t have the same sort of stake in the business that they do at John Lewis and they don’t get the same chance to ask questions, they simply need to do what they are told (as in the anthem: “Long to reign over us”).

So just as John Lewis gets improved performance from its enhanced engagement and co-operation, wouldn’t Britain (the United Republic?) benefit from giving its people (citizens not subjects) more of a stake as well?

 

Technorati Tags: Charlie Mayfield,John Lewis Partnership,Management Today,monarchy,royalty,royal wedding,republic

 

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Reinventing Organisation

 

    This post continues my review of Julian Birkinshaw’s ‘Reinventing Management’ book.  UY97WDM42EPH

In this book, Birkinshaw discusses the role of a company’s management model, ie "the conscious choices made by a company’s top executives to define how work gets done”.

I noted in my last post that:

“The required distinction isn’t between management and leadership, it’s between internal and external, or the organisation and the business.

To me, Julian’s management model isn’t a model of management vs leadership, it’s a model of the organisation vs the business.”

 

I want to explain a bit more about this.

In my book, and in my Strategic HCM blog, I talk about a human capital value chain which produces human, organisation and social capital.  What I’m really talking about here is a value chain for the organisation, rather than Michael Porter’s value chain for the business (which I also write about, along with a further value chain focused on customer loyalty).

Here are some relevant points from my book (I’ve just updated the text to refer to the organisation rather than human capital alone):

“There is a third value chain driven by human, organisation and social capital.

In this chain, the current potential of the business, including the value that people associated with the business may choose to invest in it, are the ‘raw materials’ that form the inputs to the value chain. These inputs go through a series of transformational processes that could be part of a major change programme. Alternatively, they could just be the activities undertaken by individuals and teams who are flexible and adaptive to change and who, by responding to emerging situations, transform the way that business is performed.

The output of the processes is improved organisational capability which provides a return on human capital. This capability is also expressed as human, organisational and social capital but is now created value, intangible capability, not just a ‘resource’. It is valuable, rare or unique, sustainable over time and not easily imitated. This capability provides the basis for business sustainability, differentiation, competitive advantage and transformation.

The progression from the customer to the organisation value chain is similar in nature to the progression from Porter’s value chain to the customer- driven one. Businesses can always access financial capital if they have got profitable customers. Businesses can always find customers if they have got appropriately capable people. Again, this is not saying that either investors or customers are unimportant – but by moving focus to a deeper source of value it is possible to have a greater impact on the business.

This is why Richard Branson at Virgin has always said he focuses on people first, customers second and shareholders third. Jack Welch at GE stated ‘there are three key measures in business – customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow, in that order’ but later admitted he had listed customers and employees the wrong way round.

Again, we could just see this as an extension of Porter’s value chain or of the customer value chain with more focus on employees but, also again, it is really something different. This chain has its own focus and its own output, the potential for sustaining and transforming the business, rather than margin or loyalty. In particular, unlike the two previous value chains, the output of the organisation value chain does not have a direct financial impact. This is simply as a result of the fact that we are working with intangibles. Porter’s value chain delivers a current financial impact. The customer value chain delivers this in the future. The people value chain provides the potential for a transformed level of financial impact.”

I go on to explain that the organisation value chain in the context of the balanced business scorecard (see the slide above):

“The organisation value chain describes a transformation in which a number of inputs, including the existing capability of people in the organization, progress through a series of activities based on the organisation’s people management practices to provide tangible and intangible resources and capabilities. These then produce impacts in the rest of the business which show up in the business process, customer and financial perspectives of the balanced scorecard. The value chain actually forms one part of an integrated value chain with the strategy map of the balanced scorecard, where ‘output’ in the HCM value chain leads on to ‘business processes’ in the balanced scorecard. This integration is the reason for the CIPD’s description of human capital as a ‘bridging concept – defining the link between HR practices and business performance in terms of assets rather than business processes’.”

 

In my view, it’s this organisation value chain that Birkinshaw writes about in his book.

Each of these chains, the business chain and the organisation chain, require both leadership and management. Birkinshaw’s model isn’t really a Management Model at all – it’s simply an organisation strategy / design.

The distinction is important.  So for example looking at the experience of Shell and Lehman, Birkinshaw notes “That the right Management Model for a big oil company is not necessarily the right Management Model for an investment bank”.  This isn’t necessarily true.  It could still be the implementation of this – the management of the organisational design – that was wrong.  From a leadership / strategy perspective, it might have been exactly the right organisation design (or management model).

(And anyway, “Your Management Model can only become a source of advantage if you find ways of working that separate you out from the crowd”, so there isn’t just one right management model / organisation design anyway.  As Julian notes later on, Linux, Google and Microsoft all operate – successfully – with different Management Models.  So can oil companies and investment banks.)

Or take the example of peer assists introduced by John Browne at BP. This was one of the processes scrapped by Tony Hayward.  Why?  Well according to Christopher McLaverty, BP’s head of Leadership Development, it was because BP had been “over led and under managed” – so BP also saw this (rightly, I think) as part of their leadership, not a management, approach.

 

The distinction is useful because it shows that business and organisation (not leadership and management) focus on two separate outcomes – the business focuses on customer satisfaction and financial results.  The organisation focuses on organisation capability – human, organisation and social capital.  And this allows us to focus on outcomes rather than activities which helps to make our activities more strategic.

Birkinshaw’s management model focuses on new ways of co-ordinating activities, new ways of making decisions, new ways of defining objectives and new ways of motivating employees - all activities.  My organisation value chain focuses on what is really important - human, organisation – and social advantage.  Activities are only useful to the extent that they lead to these.  And once an organisation is clear about the type of organisation capability it wants to create, it can easily choose the activities that will lead to the required outcome.

The example of AG Lafley’s Connect + Develop open innovation approach at Procter & Gamble is instructive.  Birkinshaw suggests that Lafley made a public commitment to changing the company’s innovation model.  I don’t think he did, did he?  He made a public commitment to an outcome – that 50% of P&G’s innovation would come from outside the company.

 

We need to look at outcomes rather than activities.  Organisation not management.  Reinventing organisation.  Strategic HCM and Social Advantage!

 

Technorati Tags: Julian Birkinshaw,MLab,Reinventing Management,Organisation,2.0,value chain,balanced,business,socrecard,human,social,capital,capability

 

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TalentedApps continues the Carnevale di Venezia tradition

 

   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!

 

  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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CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm (Part 3)

 

  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:

1. Openness and Transparency
2. Conversation (MBWA)`
3. Content (co-creation of the brand)
4. Collaboration
5. Communities (shared interest groups or tribes connecting around various 'social objects’)
6. 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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CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm (Part 2)

 

   Live blog from the CIPD 2009 conference final panel keynote:

 

 

 

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

 

   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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HR’s responsibility for social capital / media

 

   The new Leadership Carnival is now up at Mountain State University’s Leader Talk.  Becky Robinson has assembled a fine collection of posts (including mine on the Undercover Boss), so do check them out.

Most interesting to me is a post by Sharlyn Lauby, the HR Bartender: Is Human Resources Capable?

Referring to a post by Chris Kieff at 1 Good Reason – Social Marketing, Sharyln considers whether Marketing or HR should be responsible for social media in their organisations.

One reason for having this blog is to get away from HR, so I’m not going to dwell on this, but my main thoughts on this are:

• Someone, other than the Chief Executive, needs to take responsibility for the accumulation of social capital in an organisation
• Many HR functions are already developing separate / more strategic roles focusing on human capital – it makes sense for this role to also take responsibility for social capital
• The major challenge in the implementation of social media is behavioural, so this also gives HR a role
• However, social media also has a focus outside the organisation, which is not within HR’s remit, and there is obviously a technological aspect too, so IT and Marketing also have to be involved
• So, HR should take responsibility for social capital, including how social media is used to develop this.  I’m less fussed over who actually has operational responsibility for social media, but probably IT.

 

You may also want to check out this previous post on this as well:

 

Photo credit: Achim Hering

Technorati Tags: Leadership Carnival,Mountain State University,Leader Talk,Becky Robinson,Sharlyn Lauby,HR Bartender,Chris Kieff,1 Good Reason – Social Marketing,HR,responsibility,social media

 

 

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At MLab with the Undercover Boss

 

   Earlier this year, Channel 4 broadcast two documentaries / reality TV programmes featuring senior execs, suitably disguised, spending time with members of their workforce in order to better understand the situation on the ground.

I saw both shows and was impressed with the openness, integrity and attitude of both Andy Edge from Park Resorts and Stephen Martin from Clugston Group.

But broader opinions were divided. Kris Dunn at the HR Capitalist was one of several bloggers questioning the efficacy of, and particularly the environment that had enabled, this approach.

“Could your CEO go undercover to figure out what was going on within the front lines of your company? I've got a couple of reactions to that.  First, if they could do that, the fact that the visibility of your CEO is that low might be part of the problem.  Notice I said "might", because there are multiple ways you could spin that....

So, here's the point when it comes to the CEO going undercover.  Not only did Martin go undercover, but he's going to make a TV show about it.  That raises the ante in the minds of employees.  It's one thing to go undercover, but now you're making a TV show about it.  So work with me here: in the eyes of the employee - you came undercover, brought a film crew under false pretenses, then documented the stuff that was wrong.”

 

Kris’ post was actually made before the show, and I thought I’d wait until I’d watched the programme to respond to it. Of course, I then forgot to do so. However, I’ve just sat through a presentation made by Martin at MLab - Gary Hamel and Julian Birkinshaw’s Management 2.0 think tank. So here goes.

 

Taking a decentric view

Some background first of all (the following section provided my summary of Julian Birkinshaw’s presentation):

 

In their meeting in Half Moon Bay last year, Birkinshaw and Gary Hamel asked their band of revolutionaries to score the series of challenges they had developed (and which then led onto Gary Hamel’s Moon Shots) in two ways:

• How important is this? (and most people scored the challenge between 8 and 9 out of 10)
• How much progress have you made (and people scored it between 2 and 3).

 

The challenges for which there were the greatest difference between importance and progress were:

• Depoliticise decision making
• Reduce fear and increase trust
• Retrain managerial minds
• Dramatically reduce the pull of the past
• Expand and exploit diversity.

 

They had over 1000 qualitative comments explaining the problems in meeting these challenges and in reviewing and coding these, they identified the following main barriers:

• Limited bandwidth: not enough time and too few resources -19% of comments
• Old and orthodox thinking- 15%
• Disincentives to act – fear of change, executive self interest -14%.

 

What these barriers make clear is that management is the problem and the solution.

One of the reasons for this is that in general, we have little insight into the feelings and views of the people we are managing (fear, confusion, disinterest and distrust all get in the way).

So how do we overcome this lack of insight?

Birkinshaw suggested that we do this by taking a decentric view of the world – trying to understand how management is being perceived from the employee’s POV.

(Evidence for this lack of insight is provided by the fact(?) that the only management books which have been written from the employees’ perspective are ‘Dilbert’ and ‘Who moved my cheese?’!)

This is where Stephen Martin steps in.

 

The case for going undercover

Martin explained that when he was first approached to do a reality TV show he said no, but the opportunity to gain an understanding of his workforce was just too great.  Normally he feels as if he is in an ivory tower – everything gets filtered through levels of management. He needed to understand how the business was going from employees perspective.

One example Martin gave us was a pay cut that Clugston needed to make recently.  HR had tried to explain this by sending employees a letter!  The business hadn’t understood how this action would be or had been interpreted by its workforce.

 

So, was this a good idea or not?

Both Martin and Edge, and their businesses, clearly gained from their experience.  Martin identified some previously unknown talent, and made some significant changes, for example around their apprenticeship programme.  Edge, if anything, experienced even deeper revelations, starting the programme thinking that staff simply needed a pay rise and finishing it with a deeper appreciation of the other things that Park Resorts could be to engage and recognise its staff.

But does this justify their deception?

In an ideal world. certainly not.  But many businesses do many worse things with their staff.  If going under cover can help develop a better / decentric perspective on a workforce, and reduce the other damaging things they do, then I’d suggest this may be a worthwhile trade-off.

Of course, the aim must be to go beyond this.  Asda is a good example.  Their former HR Director, David Smith, who also presented at the event, explained that he always used to spend one day a week talking and listening to his staff.

It needs a level of trust to be able to do this.  But I think it shows that there are even better opportunities than going undercover.

Others include:

• Develop a culture focusing on role vs grade so that people get used to communicating openly
• Create a shadow Board
• Find opportunities for reverse mentoring (eg on the use of social media) to encourage two-way relationships
• Encourage un-moderated social networking within the organisation.

 

What other ideas would you add to this list?

 

See my other post on the MLab Engagement event: http://moon-shots.ning.com/forum/topics/m-lab-the-art-of-engagement

 

And posts on the previous MLab Management 2.0 event:

• http://blog.social-advantage.com/2009/02/mlab-management-20-donald-sull.html
• http://blog.social-advantage.com/2009/02/mlab-management-20-jack-hughes-topcoder.html
• http://blog.social-advantage.com/2009/02/mlab-management-20-bruce-rayner-you-at.html
• http://blog.social-advantage.com/2009/02/mlab-management-20-peter-cheese.html

 

Technorati Tags: Management Lab,MLab,Gary Hamel,Julian Birkinshaw,Undervover Boss,Andy Edge,Park Resorts,Stephen Martin,Clugston Group

 

 

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Management models and Social Advantage

 

    In the latest issue of the MLab’s Labnotes, Julian Birkinshaw suggests that organisations need to think as much about their management models (the choices firms make about what happens inside their organisations) as they do their business models (choices about their sources of revenue, their cost structure etc).

These choices include:

• Choices about the nature of the objectives the firm pursues (ranging from alignment to obliquity)
• Choices about how individuals are motivated to pursue these objectives (extrinsic to intrinsic)
• Choices about how activities are co-ordinated in the firm (bureaucracy to emergence)
• Choices about how decisions are made in the firm (hierarchy or collective wisdom).

 

I think this is a useful, new input to management thinking.

However, I’m not sure about the four dimensions of Birkinshaw’s framework (the four choices above).  Where does the Social Advantage approach fit into it this for example?

 

Social Advantage as collective wisdom

Although it doesn’t fit the framework that neatly, I’d have to say that Social Advantage fits best with the last two choices: managing across (emergence vs bureaucracy) and especially managing down (collective wisdom vs hierarchy).  But then these are ‘means’, and  think Social Advantage is very much about ‘ends’.

And I think some other dimensions are probably at least as important to Social Advantage as those presented in the model.  For example, what the organisation focuses on – outcomes or business impacts, And how importantly the organisation sees people working together in teams, or just sharing information between themselves.

 

Collective wisdom AND hierarchy

Also, although Social Advantage is probably best supported by a flat structure, I don’t see that it requires the end of hierarchy.  To me, the dimensions of the model are probably paradoxes (this and that) rather than polar opposites (this or that).

Anyway, polar opposites aren’t really in the spirit of the Moon Shots – particularly M20:

“ Better optimise trade-offs.  Management systems tend to force either-or choices.  What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimise key trade-offs.”

 

So, I don’t feel very positive about the framework, but I suppose if it encourages organisational leaders to think about their management model, and perhaps what dimensions will be important to them, then I guess it will do its job.

As Birkinshaw himself notes,

“There is no one best management model…  Rather, there are choices to be made, and the appropriate choice depends on a host of circumstantial and competitive factors.  Firms who generate competitive advantage out of their management model are the ones that make conscious and distinctive choices about what principles to follow.”

 

Also see:

• The social advantage
• Moon shots for social advantage
• Social Advantage after the downturn
• Management innovation: Can dogs do the tango?
• Moon Shots (ning).

 

Technorati Tags: Julian Birkinshaw,Management Lab,MLab,management model

 

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Cisco’s management experiment

 

          A number of other blogs have posted on Cisco’s unusual management structure recently, see for example:

• Henry Blodget, Business Insider: Has Cisco’s John Chambers lost his mind?
• Brad Reese, Network World: Management vision of Cisco CEO John Chambers under fire
• Ben Worthen, Digits (Wall Street Journal blogs): Cisco CEO John Chambers’s big management experiment.

 

As you’ll see if you read these posts (and can probably tell from their titles), these posts; readers’ comments on these posts; and also employee feedback (eg on Glassdoor.com) are quite disparaging.

I’ve also posted previously on Cisco’s network organisation structure design, and on their new Collaboration Framework.  Both of my posts are broadly favourable (although they don’t deal specifically with this top level structure), so what’s going on?

 

Cisco’s management structure 

During the last eight years, Cisco has been replacing its top-down divisional structure with committees of executives from across the company.  More than 750 company leaders are currently involved in 59 committees (12 councils for $10m+ business opportunities, 47 boards for $1m+ opportunities, and below this, a number of working groups) - see Cisco’s top level organisation chart at the top of this post, and also take a look at a previous post of mine that also refers to some of this.  Cisco’s current goal is to broaden participation on these committees to 2500 or more employees.

The motivation behind these changes has been to move from a command-and-control operation dominated by competing departments to a widely cross-functional, collaborative company which uses the various standing committees to facilitate executive decision-making, create cross functional alignment, and guide business initiatives.  Cisco now makes 70% of its decisions in these committees (up from 10% just two years ago).

In addition, the new structure has enabled Cisco to increase the number of markets the company is targeting from two in 2007 to 26 today (each of which could soon reach sales of $1 billion, accounting for more than 25% of Cisco’s revenue) and this number could increase to 50 next year.

Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers has said that part of his goal in making the changes has been to make spread his executives thinly, making them rethink how they work and what they work on.

Eventually they "realize they can’t keep their head above water and if they want to swim they have to give [some responsibilities] to their teams".  The new management structure "makes everyone uncomfortable, including the CEO," he says.

 

The criticism

While most commentators understand that Cisco needs to change, becoming more innovative in order to grow organically, rather than relying on acquisition as it has in the past, its recent changes have drawn substantial criticism.

The new structure is reported to add bureaucracy, remove accountability and slow down decision making.  It’s also blamed for the company’s falling market share in certain key product categories.

 

My perspectives

Cisco’s structure is certainly different, and it must have been a brave, or foolhardy, decision to require top executives to spend 30% of their time serving on 10 or more committees.

I’ve worked myself in one public sector organisation in which I and other executives were required to spend significant time working in committees and this certainly generated a lot of waste there.  So it’s easy to see how this committee based structure could result in a massive bureaucracy that simply produces slower and lower quality decisions.

But Chambers clearly believes that business needs to change – see these comments in a recent New York Times interview:

“I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a different leadership style — more collaboration and teamwork”

“Big time, the importance of collaboration. Big time, people who have teamwork skills, and their use of technology. If they’re not collaborative, if they aren’t naturally inclined toward collaboration and teamwork, if they are uncomfortable with using technology to make that happen both within Cisco and in their own life, they’re probably not going to fit in here.”

 

If Chambers is right that collaboration is the ‘next big thing’ then it might have been a bigger risk to keep things as they were than to change.

To a certain extent, I think criticism of the changes bear similarities to push back against organisations allowing people to use social media technologies during work times (the ban Facebook debate).

Both this structure, and individual use of social media, may lower individual productivity.  But that’s no longer the point.  They key now is productivity of the group, delivering organisational speed and innovation.

Cisco doesn’t want to replicate the experience of Sony being take over by Apple for design of the ipod (Chambers had a similar experience to this at Wang where the company got left behind by the rise of the PC) and it obviously needs to organise itself differently if it’s going to produce different results.

And the scale of the transformation will certainly make it very clear to executives how their behaviour is expected to change – avoiding one mistake made by a lot of organisations undergoing change.  But given this, a lot of employee feedback bound to be negative.  I think Chambers is right too see the fact that over 20% of his leaders have left the company as a positive.

 

The Difference

I think the key to Cisco’s success (and I predict they will continue to be successful) is the way that they have made these changes.  Yes, the top level structure could have degenerated into a paralysing bureaucracy, but I don’t think it has, and I don’t think it will.

See my earlier post on Cisco’s Collaborative Framework for a review of the approach it’s taken to support these changes, and which I think have been critical to ensure that they have been implemented well.

And probably even more important, has been Cisco’s single minded focus on collaboration.  This hasn’t been something it’s tried to introduce lightly, or quickly, or half heartedly.  So it’s been able to produce, what in my terms I call organisational capability – a capability for collaboration.

I don’t know if collaboration will be ‘the next big thing’ – although I believe it will.  But I also believe organisations have access to a wide variety of other different options for competing.  They key is to choose one and do it properly, not worrying too much about the way that business has traditionally been done.

So I guess John Chambers won’t be too worried by the recent criticism!
 

 

Also see: McKinsey’s conversation with John Chambers

And this interview on CNBC:

 

Technorati Tags: John Chambers,Cisco,Henry Blodget,Business Insider,Brad Reese,Network World,Ben Worthen,Digits,management,vision,experiment,rerouting,operating committee,councils,boards,working groups

Rerouting Cisco graphic: Ben Worthen, Digits (Wall Street Journal blogs): Seeking growth, Cisco reroutes decisions

 

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