Social media at conferences

 

   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:

1. Attendees will be exchanging thoughts about your presentation while you’re presenting and afterwards as well.

2. These exchanges may be supported by pictures and videos of you presenting, and which you don’t know are being taken.

3. These exchanges will be going outside of the conference room, and will remain in the internet after you’ve finished presenting too.

4. If your slides are being distributed to attendees, these may end up in the public area too.

5. People from outside the conference room will be providing their own thoughts on what you’re presenting.

6. You may be able to get some input from these exchanges – either live or moderated / summarised.  If you can get it, use it.

7. 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

 

    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

 

  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.

 

 

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Social networks and organisational hierarchies

 

   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

 

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

 

   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.

 

Technorati Tags: Dan McCarthy,Great,leadership,development,blog,carnival,best,2009

 

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Looking back to January 2009

 

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:

• WELCOM to the world's leaders Facebook
• MLab Management 2.0 conference
• Trust and Social Capital
• Collaboration in 2018

 

Or even the year before?

• And what about 3.0?
• More on 2.0
• Knowledge 2.0

 

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Picture credit: Πrate

Technorati Tags: Social capital,competitive advantage,business

Monkeys with Typewriters

 

   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:

1. It’s simple (because monkeys can do it)
2. It’s fun (why else would monkeys bother)
3. 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)

 

  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

 

• Consulting  - Research - Speaking  -  Training -  Writing
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• jon [dot] ingham [at] social [dash] advantage [dot] com

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Looking back to December 2008

 

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

• Lies, Trust and Chocolate
• Carnival of Trust
• Sociability and Solidarity
• The dark side of networking

 

Or even the year before?

• Leadership and Social Acumen
• Carly Fiorina: People aren't the soft stuff
• Social capital in Second Life
• Mintzberg on social capital
• Flooding and social capital

 

My contact details:

• Consulting  - Research - Speaking  -  Training -  Writing
• Strategy   -  Team development  -  Web 2.0  -  Change
• Contact  me to  create  more  value  for  your  business
• jon [dot] ingham [at] social [dash] advantage [dot] com

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Picture credit: Matthew Jordan

Technorati Tags: Social capital,competitive advantage,business