Hacking love

 

   I posted earlier about the hackathon I’m participating in at the MIX.

We’re now developing a small number of hacks focusing on developing communities of passion and I’m participating in one on the need to create more love in the workplace (together with Lisa Haneberg and KC Ramsay).

I think this is another agenda that’s missing from Enterprise 2.0, HR and other conferences.  Yes, the use of tools, technologies and management approaches all help to create effective working relationships within an organisation (and don’t get me wrong, that’s a great start!), but there’s still a need for more – if organisations are really going to act to their full potential (rather than groups of individuals going their own ways, and acting against each other as much as they to for each other, and therefore for the organisation as a whole).

I’m not sure what we’re going to come up with, and I’m aware that for many organisations, love may be a step too far to take (although at the same time, I don’t think this has anything to do with current stage of development etc, and everything to do with ambition and willingness to take a risk).

So there are a couple of hacks being developed which I think will be really useful too.

So for example, Josh Allan Dykstra is working with a small team (I think team is the right term here, rather than community) of people to develop a hack looking at building a strengths based environment.  I think there’s a good overlap with love here, though with the use of rather softer language, and perhaps less, though possibly rather more achievable, ambition?

Josh notes:

“A strengths-based culture does encourage (and help people) to love each other for who they are. But it goes further than that, because it also helps people love THEMSELVES for who they are -- while at the same time providing an architecture to help SUPPORT them in the kind of work they are most passionate about.”

 

And Deborah Mills Schofield’s team is focusing on applying the classic virtues (courage, temperance, prudence, justice, faith, hope – and love too) to specific tasks or projects within a community of passion.

Deborah notes:

“the virtue of ‘love’ can be applied to really understanding customer needs - a passion for really meeting the unmet/unarticulated needs by living their world, understanding their challenges & obstacles etc so you can create a really meaningful solution.  'Love’ for employees can result in creating career development paths, training & education, health & wellness, etc. options for an energizing and meaningful workplace and work.”

 

(I hope Josh and Deborah don’t mind me copying their comments from a semi-public and into a fully public place – do let me know if you do!).

 

I really like these ideas, and agree with Josh’s point on the need for people to love themselves before they can love each other at work – ie an organisation needs to be human (treating people as people) before it can be social (focused on relationships) – a point I made again just last week.  (My write-up on Visa Europe refers to one of the best examples I know of on this.)

And I really like the idea of applying the classic virtues at work.  I’ve never been a fan of traditional organisational values.  I accept they can sometimes be very motivational and impactful, but suspect that in the majority of cases they are seen as corporate and manipulative – as well as often inauthentic and, as Deborah says, nebulous.  They’re also not part of the language of people we need to move towards.

I also think Deborah’s focus on specific tasks or projects provides a good point to start this sort of journey, through I worry slightly that the desire to ‘take as much of the personality / emotion out of it’ will reduce the impact of what can be achieved.

I’d like to see organisations incorporating the classic virtues – including love - as a central focus within their whole people management architecture eg within performance management for example.  Not for assessment and particularly not for compensation, but just to ensure the organisation (formal and informal) is actually paying interest to how human someone really is at work.

 

These and other hacks will be appearing on the MIX shortly – look out for them there.

 

Technorati Tags: Management,Innovation,Exchange,MIX,hack,hackathon,Lisa Haneberg,KC Ramsay,Josh Allan Dykstra,Deborah Mills Schofield,love,strengths,classic,virtues,values,HR,performance management

 

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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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Social Business Forum

Unsocial: the Unconference

 

  And I’ve also got another unconference focusing on social media, this one organised by Mavencast and being held on 14th June at the Imagination Gallery. There are actually two parts:

-   A more traditional workshop on HR and social media:

From recruiting and learning to internal communications and managing teams, social media presents a range of opportunities for improving the effectiveness of your organization.
This workshop provides an introduction to the technologies, applications and value of social media to internal communications and HR. You will gain insights into the principles that underpin successful social media strategies as well as the potential benefits and risks.

Led by Jon Ingham, an authority on social media, consultant, author and former HR director, this is an ideal opportunity to get up to speed with the application of social media to HR.

 

-   The unconference, focusing on the social business:

By attending ‘Socialising the workplace’ you can discuss issues and share ideas with some of the best minds and leading practitioners of social media solutions, collaborating on best practice and implementation such as:

• Technology trends from workplace applications to analytics
• The principles of successful implementation
• How social computing is being applied

 

Use discount code SD-10 for 10% of the booking price for the workshop.

 

Technorati Tags: Mavencast,unsocial,social,unconference,HR,social media

 

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Social Business Forum, Milan

 

  Then on Wednesday 8th June, I’ll be presenting on HR 2.0 at the Social Business Forum in Milan – Europe’s main enterprise 2.0 / social business event:

Over the past three years the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 has been recognized as the main event on collaboration and cooperative business approaches in Europe. In 2011 the Social Business Forum will take this further by expanding the conversation to focus on the most critical organizational, economic and business challenges and opportunities social media in the business environment is creating for companies.

With the help of experts, international speakers and successful case studies, the event will show how a deeper engagement with an entire company’s ecosystem (employees, customers, partners and stakeholders), can revolutionize collaboration, marketing, services and innovation and thus provide a strategic lever for improving productivity, efficiency, responsiveness, and competitiveness.

The program will address collaboration, communication and innovation in the social media era with a strong focus on the following themes:

• Evolution of organizational, leadership and management models
• Definition of strategies which connect new ways of interaction enabled by social media
• Increasing agility and flexibility by connecting customer communities and participative initiatives with employees
• Engagement with and transformation of individuals into change agents
• Socialization of customer management, innovation and product development processes
• Sustainable approaches to the cultivation of communities and customer engagement
• Frameworks for measuring the return on investment and the vitality of communities
• Intranet evolution using collaborative tools
• Tools and methodologies for the analysis of informal exchanges and collaborative networks
• Improving the efficiency of knowledge work and knowledge sharing
• Sharing best practices and success stories
• The integration of social software within the flow of existing applications and practices

 

Among others on the stage the experiences of Nokia, Webank, Scottish Water, Toshiba and Fujitsu will be presented.

More than 25 speakers already confirmed including Sameer Patel, Keith Swenson, Stefan Lindegaard, Esteban Kolsky, Mark Tamis, Bertrand Duperrin, Andrew Gilboy, George Siemens, Mitch Lieberman, Craig Hepburn, Roberto Masiero, Fiorello Cortiana, Arrigo Andreoni, Massimo Paoli, Norman Lewis, Laurence Lock Lee, Emanuele Quintarelli, Emanuele Scotti, Rosario Sica and many others.

Register Now

 

Let me know if you’re going to be at the summit – it would be great to meet.  Or you can follow the tweets at #sbf11.

 

Technorati Tags: Social business,enterprise 2.0,summit,conference,Milan,2011

 

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Moon Shots on the MIX: Developing Communities of Passion Hackathon

 

  I’ve posted previously on Gary Hamel’s Moon Shots for Management and on my support for these.

I’m particularly interested in (and passionate about) this one:

 

Moonshot #22: Enable Communities of Passion “Passion is a multiplier of human effort, but it can’t be manufactured. It’s present only when people get the chance to work on what they truly care about.” Passion is a significant multiplier of human accomplishment, particularly when like-minded individuals converge around a worthy cause. Yet a wealth of data indicates that most employees are emotionally disengaged at work. They are unfulfilled, and consequently their organizations underperform. Companies must encourage communities of passion by structuring work and revising management processes to help people tap into a higher calling at work, by connecting employees who share similar passions, and by better aligning the organization’s objectives with the natural interests of its people.”

 

For a year I even moderated a ning-based community focused on further exploration of these moonshots - wanting to better understand the enablement of communities from a practical as well as conceptual perspective.

More recently, I’ve kept an eye on the development of Gary Hamel’s new forum for developing the future of management: the Management Innovation eXchange, or the MIX.

So when the MIX announced the formation of a Hackathon to develop hacks focused on developing communities of passion I was keen to get involved and am now working as part of a small group to develop a shared understanding about the value and attributes of these communities, the barriers in their creating and sustaining them etc.

 

Developing the Hack

  The hackathon is definitely producing some interesting outputs already – you can see these up at the MIX.

I particularly like Steve Todd’s definition of a community of passion, based upon his Wordle that I’ve included above:

“Together, an innovative new group of members share their interest and ideas, for the purpose of one common goal, and build many different, unique solutions.”

 

As well as his definition for what it means to enable a community of passion:

“Question your mind,think of others, identify talent, find knowledge.”

 

Todd suggests the key enabler for communities of passion is selflessness.  I’d certainly agree selflessness is good, which is why I think other heavy users of social media often make such good social companions.  But I think there’s more to it than this as well.

For me, the real key goes beyond selflessness, it’s togetherness.  It’s not about me, but it’s not just about you – it’s about us.  (The problem I think is that Todd took out all the words such as passion, community and people in creating his Wordle – but this means that this means the essential truth of what community is about.)

 

My input focused on the problem of limited time / priority.  People have so many other things to do that there are only a couple of communities they can ever be that active in.  This means that the strongest contributors in one community are often limited to being lurkers (legitimate peripheral participants) in others.

In organisations, this means leaders need to:

• Educate their employees that participation in community is important
• Provide their people with enough free / unallocated time to invest in community activity
• Help / allow their people to prioritise – to decide which two or three communities are most important to them (feedback from these would then provide the basis for these employees’ performance management, accepting that the employee would be a lurker in any others).

 

Developing the Community

  The other thing that has interested me is how the Hackathon group / team has itself been developing as a community (I’m not actually sure whether it has ever been designed to be a community, and in some ways falls out of the confines of a community as defined above in that the group has a very clear task focus.  However, for me, there’s a clear logic in the group becoming a community which is to provide an experiential, action learning based approach to developing the communities of passion hack.

 

It’s one of the things I’ve never liked about the MIX – it’s really a very anti-social site.  There’s no real way to discover who’s there (other than using google - site:www.managementexchange.com), or to communicate with them, other than in the context of a particular update.  And it’s also very hierarchical – with regular posts from Gary Hamel’s friends (the mavericks) – meaning it’s even less likely that effective collaboration and innovation is going to take place.

Not everyone has liked the system we’ve been using for the hackathon – Saba’s Collaboration Suite – eg there have been quite a few comments on its clunkinness.  But I actually prefer the Saba system to the MIX – it’s at least got an element of social – allowing people to connect to each other and chat more generally.

However (and I don’t know if this is a flaw with Saba’s system or just the way it’s being used), I’ve also found the hackathon process very constraining.  We’re following a design thinking approach which I think has been useful in helping us work together in a systematic way to achieve something of value, but hasn’t enabled much bonding.

I think we needed a sense of who we are and how we relate before we started to put those relationships to use.  I think doing this lies at the heart of most innovation, and communities of passion too.

 

Also see these posts:

Gary Hamel on the Future of Management:

• What’s your HCM POV?
• Management innovation: can dogs do the tango?
• Requirements for organisational innovation

Management Lab:

• MLab Management 2.0 conference
• At MLab with the Undercover Boss

Julian Birkinshaw on Reinventing Management:

• Reinventing Organisation
• Julian Birkinshaw: Reinventing Management (“There must be a better way of running large companies”)
• Management models and Social Advantage
• Julian Birkinshaw on Management Innovation

My / other hacks at the MIX:

• Is 2011 the time to stop treating people like tools
• My best hacks and stories at the MIX

 

Technorati Tags: Gary Hamel,Moon Shots,Management,Innovation,Exchange,MIX,Hackathon,Communities,Passion,Saba,Live,Collaboration,hacks

 

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Social business webinar

 

   My next webinar on the social business, and will be on Tuesday 3rd May.

“The social business is often defined as one that uses social media or Enterprise 2.0 technology.  However, it's much more useful to define it by outcome rather than activity.  So Jon Ingham's definition of it is an organisation in which social relationships between employees and with others are valued and accumulated.  In this webinar, Jon will describe the range of tools, technologies and other activities - face-to-face and virtual, which are available to organisations to develop their peoples' relationships.”

 

You can book here.

 

Technorati Tags: Social,business,enterprise,2.0,HR,webinar

 

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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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