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Four pillars of collaborative leadership

Today's myriad interconnected social networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc - mean that most people are already connected in a collaborative way to others beyond their traditional domain. It's a question of how to leverage that in the office. In their HBR article, Ibarra and Hansen suggest four pillars:

1. Play global connector. "The first piece is really how you yourself build a network that allows you to add value collaboratively because you can connect," says Ibarra. "If you are stuck in your function, in your group, in your business unit, in your country, how can you see what's going on out there? How can you see the array of opportunities that could be passing you by?"

2. Engage talent at the periphery. "How do you think about the talent that you are bringing to the table?" Ibarra asks. "Everybody espouses the value of diversity, but saying it and doing it are very different things. We see very clearly that leaders who engage talent from the periphery - and that periphery could be geographical or generational or gender diversity - are going to be much better placed to collaborate."

3. Collaborate at the top first. "A lot of times, collaborations get mired in politics, or groups have great ideas that don't get accepted because the top is divided politically into turf wars," points out Ibarra. "You cannot encourage collaboration on the front line and then not collaborate with each other as a top team."

4. Show a strong hand. "Collaboration doesn't mean consensus on everything," says Ibarra. At some point, the discussion has to end and someone has to make a decision. "You need to understand as a leader when you step back, and then when you do come back in make sure people know who's got the right to make the final decision."

Following are my getting back to basics recommendations: Face reality that email is not going away.  It has 100% utilization for employee collaboration & communication.   It becomes an epicenter for collaboration. The ability to post social content, receive notifications, receive activity digests must tie into email and SMS.  If your activity stream could fit into an Outlook window - even better. Recognize that collaboration doesn't just happen inside your company's walls.  Collaboration crosses many boundaries from time, distance and corporate firewalls.  Employees are using multiple tools and multiple networks both outside & inside.  Adding one more tool to the mix doesn't make life easier. Consider deploying a content/collaboration aggregator to simplify employee's ability to manage various content flows & networks both inside & outside the firewall (Example: Xobni Enterprise) Collaboration is now form factor agnostic: No longer is one device utilized.  Content & collaboration needs to flow across whatever mobile, tablet, desktop, laptop- eventually smart TV device - that an employee utilizes. Ubiquitous collaboration needs equal opportunity.  For example, If employees can get email, internet access, Facebook, Twitter on their mobile devices but only access social collaboration on their laptop- then those most available will be the top collaborative tools.  Your internal social platform needs equal access, otherwise it will continue to be Cinderella locked in the attic during the royal ball. Your intranet should be one in the same with your social platform.  If an official portal is the place to get news, updates & find information - your social platform must seamlessly be an integral part of that experience.  Don't ship off your employees to a separate site to socially engage & collaborate. The intranet should become the personalized collaborative workspace for employees "one stop shopping." Rid yourself of multiple employee prof

The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.  

This is not a newly identified problem.  Those of us working on social collaboration efforts for a while recognized that integration is imperative from the beginning.  At the beginning, I clearly outlined integration as one of three foundational pillars for our strategy.  Unfortunately, various forces created challenges in this space. Social collaboration applications have been immature in this area for years (even after fierce calls for faster integration- i.e. CMS). Enterprises faced fork lift integration efforts to knit applications together.  Fork lift efforts get the budget axe when push comes to shove.  We managed to do the normal IT deployment model - the very model I fiercely advocated for us not to do.  We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools - without integration.   To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.

As enterprises gradually decentralize their operations and new networked business ecosystems start to find their way into profitable niche marketplaces, virtual, networked business teams gradually emerge as the wave of the future.

To be successful, virtual, networked business teams need a strategic framework in which to operate. They also need good planning and in-depth project analysis, effective and accessible technologies, constant coaching, systematic fine-tuning, feedback processes and the full understanding that their success cannot be determined by a pre-designated set of communication technologies by itself.

But, until now, projects supported by virtual business teams have not been brought back major successes. Virtual teams are having major problems and managing their progress has been a superlative challenge for most. Organizations face for the first time the need to analyze and comprehend which are the key obstacles to the successful management of effective online collaborative business networks. Though the answer is not simple, the solution is to be found in examples that are closer to us than we have yet realized.

Virtual collaboration for networked business teams is a complex and challenging activity in which there are major important components to be accounted for.

Virtual business teams DO NOT operate like traditional physical teams, as their requirements reflect a whole new way of communicating, working collaboratively, sharing information and mutually supporting other team members. The new technologies and approaches required to achieve this are completely alien to most of our present organizational culture. And this is why they fail.

Cooperative processes are not the automatic results of implementing collaborative, real-time communication technologies, but the result of a carefully designed and systematically maintained virtual team development plan.

For those of you who have alread

Here are five things that people introducing new technology to help collaboration should think about:

People in your organization already collaborate.
Not everyone likes to share.
Email is not going away.
People need to collaborate outside as well as inside the enterprise.
No single piece of technology will satisfy all types of collaboration.

A few years ago, the world's leading designer and manufacturer of office products decided that it needed an organizational overhaul. Coordination across product lines was poor. Design teams collaborated ineffectively. Key personnel were remote from customers. The company responded in part by reorganizing its work space, creating an office-free "village" where designers and architects could mingle and collaborate and customers could visit easily. Proximity does matter for promoting collaboration, and the space was conceptually compelling and visually appealing.

About Quantified Self
Are you interested in self-tracking? Do you use a computer, mobile phone, electronic gadget, or pen and paper to record your work, sleep, exercise, diet, mood, or anything else? Would you like to share your methods and learn from what others are doing? If so, you are in the right place. This short intro will help you get you oriented.

What is Quantified Self?
Quantified Self is a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking. We exchange information about our personal projects, the tools we use, tips we've gleaned, lessons we've learned. We blog, meet face to face, and collaborate online. There are three main "branches" to our work.

*The Quantified Self blog and community site. You are here! This is the central hub, where we keep track of all important goings-on, and you will soon be able to make connections, develop ongoing collaborations, and share detailed documentation of your personal projects.

To be successful and truly collaborative, knowledge-sharing systems require intuitive tools that connect people, reward participation, and align well with existing work and communication patterns. After IDEO's two-year internal development effort to create and implement "the Tube," their enterprise-wide intranet system, we gained new understanding and experience in balancing technology possibilities with behavior realities. The unique success of the Tube comes from the insight that effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that is enabled by technology, rather than a technological solution bolted onto an existing work culture. Now IDEO's Knowledge Sharing Team shares a set of design principles for building online collaboration systems that really work.

amplified individual Theme: the Amplified Individual Forecast Clusters: Highly - Collaborative, Social; Improvisational; Augmented Dilemma: Collective Creation vs Individual Recognition Signals: Co-working Arrangements; Teamwork in Virtual Environments; Social Filtering; Life Hacks; Visualization Tools Underlying Technologies: Sense Making & Visualization; Ubiquitous Displays; Amplified Collaboration Tools

Tom Friedman has penned a thought-provoking oped, "One Country, Two Revolutions."

In discussing the ongoing social media revolution underway in Silicon Valley, Friedman turns to 21st century leadership:

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed - everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don't have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges - from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before - as individuals.

Company Overview
The Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre is a global management consultancy specialising in the benchmarking, measuring and development of creative behaviors for organizational value.

Committed to developing human capital in organizations, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre collaborates with its clients to help them realize their organizations' visions to create tangible value.

With deep expertise in management innovation and a broad global network of academics and practitioners with proven experience in consulting in this space, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre can mobilize the right people, skills, alliances to realise your organization's key drivers for success.

Using the theories of organizational economics and its own unique IP, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre benchmarks and measures the key elements of the organization's key drivers for success - its management innovation infrastructure and its creative ecology.

The overview   

Provides a holistic view of the organization as a creative system
Benchmarks the organization's management innovation capabilities and capacities in that syste
Identifies critical areas with potential for development and improvement
Recommends and delivers interventions to drive value, success and growth.

organisations are complex; activities are complex. For some time in middle of the previous century, managers tried to ignore this fact and establish perfect processes. Today, we slowly start to acknowledge the fact, that our work environment is complex, interdependent and constantly changing; we need to work together to create a transparency what is changing and how we can best adopt to new situations.

InsideOut Development founder, Alan Fine, began his career as a tennis coach working with up-and-coming tennis professionals. As he worked with athletes, he realized that the biggest performance challenge wasn't that people didn't know what to do, but rather that they didn't do what they know. In other words, performance breakthroughs come from the inside out.

From these experiences, in mid- to late-1980, Fine and two other collaborators, Graham Alexander and Sir John Whitmore, developed the GROW Model--one of the world's most recognized and influential coaching models today.

GROW is an acronym representing the four core components in any significant decision-making process. The meanings of the first three letters are shared by all major iterations of the model. "G" represents the "Goal" the individual seeks to achieve; "R", the "Realities" a person should consider in the context of the decision process; and "O", the "Options" open to the decision-maker. "W" has been interpreted in a variety of ways. But Fine defined it as "Way Forward"--a specific action plan that he feels maximizes the precision and proactivity of the GROW Model.

Welcome to the Complete QS Guide to Self-Tracking!
Here you will find tools, apps, and projects that are tagged, rated, and reviewed by the global Quantified Self community (that includes you!) This guide is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneer Portfolio, which supports bold ideas at the cutting edge of health and health care, in partnership with Institute for the Future. Our goal is to gather and organize the world's collective self-tracking resources in one place, in a way that is useful and encourages collaboration between self-tracking experts and beginners who are just starting out. Dive in now and explore some of the Tools or Members who are part of this site...

The rise in consumer-oriented social networking applications and platforms over recent years has drawn curiosity from enterprises both large and small. IDC believes that curiosity has turned into business opportunity as the lines between consumer and enterprise continue to blur. Unfortunately, adoption of social software in the enterprise has encountered some skepticism due to the hype surrounding the technology and the perception that it is the younger generations' means for socializing with friends. It has also been criticized as being a waste of time. Yet there is evidence to suggest that this doubt is shifting and that enterprise social software is becoming the next generation of collaboration tools to enhance organizational productivity.

I had intended writing a series of blog posts in the run up to the pilot launch of  The Smart Work Company's social learning platform in September. Turmoil in global financial markets, with the downgrading of the US credit rating and simultaneous shenanigans in the Euro zone, gives focus to the topics I want to explore.
The series, Smart Working in Turbulent Times, will include themes that I have talked about before in previous blog posts in a random way. My hope is that this series will pull topics together to create a rationale for smart working, to explore what it is, to make the case for why now (urgently) and to show how smart working practices can be enabled, drawing on researching new ways of working over a fifteen year period and years of practical experience of helping senior executives make the transition to new ways of working.
Themes
Off the top of my head, the themes will include:
What?
Context: turbulent times past and present - there are lessons
How organisations work (and don't) - relationship dynamics, power, culture, conflict, alliances, psychological needs, performance environments etc
Smart principles underpinning design for:
Viability (including emotional and psychological well-being)
Adaptability
Autonomy
Integration
Collaboration
Wirearchy
Distributed diversity
Collective intelligence
Social skills
Thinking skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Performance environments, including:
Cultural and social environment
Online place
Physical space
Whole system of leadership
How?
All this research and good practice that others have found effective in specific contexts and at specific times cannot be be copied or rolled out. What to do?
Draw out principles and interpret for your own situation
Create hypotheses about what is happening or what you want to happen
What might work?
What might enable or prev

Connected company case studies and examples
50 social media stories worth bookmarking

A collection of E20 case studies and examples

Cases in collaboration

DIA embraces E20

E2o examples and case stories

Peter Kim's wiki of social media examples

Socialtext case studies

ZDNet Zappos case study

Awesome chapter from Digital Habiats