21CLeadership

Zenger and Folkman admit that the flaws seem obvious ones that any leader would try to fix. But they found that ineffective leaders were often unaware of their flaws. The authors suggest that leaders need to take a hard look at themselves and should seek candid feedback on their performance. I believe that simple awareness of what constitutes effective leadership behaviors and how one is performing on them may not be adequate for improvement. In this article, I suggest an intervention that might work for you.

Specifically, I focus on the following:

The knowing-doing gap;
Closing the knowing-doing gap;
Goal-setting as a simple intervention;
The power of goal-setting;
Preventing relapse with email reminders to yourself;

Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of rather interesting and insightful blog posts that have been covering IBM's journey to become a social business. A journey that started back in 2001, but that it had its main roots well substantiated within the company for much longer. Interestingly enough, when everyone was starting to think about going social within the enterprise, IBM had already well established, and recognised, since May 2005, the well known Social Computing Guidelines that soon became an industry standard in setting up a reliable and trustworthy governance model and guidelines for knowledge workers to engage with both internal and external social networking tools. However, fast forward to 2011 and I still get asked, every so often, how is IBM doing in the social business space, not just from a vendor perspective, but also from its own internal social transformation. Are we there yet? Have we already made that transition successfully? What has been the experience like so far?

Well, I could probably summarise it all with a single sentence at this point in time: It's been a long journey, indeed! We have learned a lot, we have become much more efficient and effective at what we do, but we still have got lots more to be done! Like for almost everyone out there, becoming a social business is a tough job, for sure, we are not discovering anything new in there, there needs to be a significant cultural shift, a change of mindset, a change on how we do and conduct business, but the good thing is that the trip to provoke such social transformation has been worth while all the way coming from a Globally Integrated Enterprise into a Socially Integrated Enterprise (a.k.a. SIE)

The truth is that everyone is, indeed, a community facilitator / manager nowadays, as you saw in a recent blog entry where I referenced Gautam's comments along these very same lines. So I thought I would develop further on this topic, specially since, earlier on today, I bumped into a couple of rather relevant and interesting links very much connected to this topic that I am sure you would enjoy quite a bit. The first one is coming from my good friend, Gautam Ghosh, once again, who earlier on tweeted a link to a blog post that he put together in September 2010 and which, despite the months gone by already, it's just as valid today, if not more!, than ever before. Have a look into "5 Skills for Online Community Managers" and find out what some of the community facilitator traits would be like, according to him…

The top five reasons I see projects fail are (1) No slack in the system (2) Managing for the knowns (3) Not limiting work-in-progress (4) Political promises and (5) Sloppy communication.  Let's examine these:

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

Ignite is a rapid-fire form of presentation. The presenter must present 20 slides in 5 minutes. Every 15 seconds a new slide advances automatically. It is amazing how much information one can cover in 5 minutes if you boil the message down to essence. It takes me longer to prepare a 5-minute Ignite session than a one-hour presentation. And I suspect people retain more information when I've finished, too. Talk about making meetings efficient. Watch some of these and give it a try.

A collection of frameworks and figures from Altimeter Research, see more at Altimetergroup.com. Fantastic insight into all manner of networks and social business.

There is a deep gulf between the sterile, one-way and almost Orwellian practices of the corporate IT network and the rapidly-evolving, chaotic organism of today's Intranet.

What would it look like if the social world of Web 2.0 collided with the corporate Intranet? What would happen if information was disseminated from outside in, instead of inside out; from the people working on the front line? This is precisely what an interesting experiment at global consulting firm Capgemini is revealing. Many of the company's 110,000 people are based on site at client locations and it is here that 'real-world' challenges must be addressed. The IT consultants in particular, who form about half of the workforce, are in an environment where the information they use goes out of date very quickly.

To help keep its teams up-to-speed, and to stay on top of the disruptive changes in their operating environment, Capgemini began a few years ago experimenting with Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time. CTO Andy Mulholland says that it is contributing to the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."

Management's changing role. Capgemini uses Yammer for: aligning activities, problem solving, information sharing, providing clarification. Now think about the things managers do for a living - and you quickly end up with a pretty similar list. Social networking technologies, in other words, are increasingly being used to provide the support and input that employees used to get from their managers. This frees up managers, in turn, to spend more time on the real value-added work - such as motivating their employees, structuring their work to make it more engaging, developing their skills, securing access to resources, and making linkages to other parts of the organisation. Warren Buffett is famous for saying that it is only when the tide goes out that you can see who is swimming naked, and the same metaphor applies here: when employees can get all the basic support they need for their work through Yammer, rather than through their line manager, the real qualities of the line manager are exposed and some are found wanting.  

A site where you can set up a goal and monitor your progress.

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...

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.

Keeping an organization performing is a constant battle. Every organization is trying to overcome its inertia, to gain momentum, and to become more productive. This battle with inertia means there is constant change-change that people often resist, deny, and frequently become angry about.Ultimately, everyone in the organization wants higher performance. This occurs at its highest levels in spite of resistance to change when people are clear what their team or personal goals are; understand the business outcome that their team or personal goals contribute to; and ensure that each task they do supports these goals. One way to raise the performance of an organization is to help all individuals become more efficient and effective in their daily tasks. Historically, leaders have tried to develop this effectiveness and efficiency in their people by using two approaches: A command-and-control approach: Controllers lead their people as if they are herding sheep. Their mind-set is to train their people well enough to be able to control them. It works, but it costs a lot of time and energy. A knowledge-based approach: It is often assumed that if people have more information, they will be able to do things better based on that information. This is the organizational equivalent of reading a book on golf and expecting to be able to play at the level of a professional. More often than not, it is not a lack of knowledge that blocks performance, but a lack of consistent, accurate implementation of the knowledge that people already have that blocks individuals, teams, and organizations from performing at their best. People in organizations are rarely stupid, but they often suffer interference that blocks their performance.

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.

Stories of companies and individuals transformed by coaching. InsideOut's GROW process is a powerful technique for bringing about change through coaching.

When I ask Hamilton, skeptically, if it is possible to conduct a conventional business meeting in a virtual environment, he answers that of course you can - but why would you? He is convinced that the zaniness of virtual environments plus the steep learning curve of making your avatar function from a keyboard is an effective icebreaker, especially important when partners need to overcome differences in cultural traditions, languages, work ethics, and political systems in order to complete a project together. Second Life's oddities lend an improvisational quality to interactions that it's harder to achieve in formal business meetings. "Playing in a band I learned that you need to leave spaces for others to fill," Hamilton insists. "Given this opportunity, people step into the gap. Talented teams connect, commingle and co-create."

Based on the experiments results I would like to recommend the following way forward (for my team, but likely for any team): Don't formalize narrating your work and don't make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn't like about the experiment. Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don't share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture. We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about "Learning Innovation". If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the "Learning Application Portfolio" and so on.

The large innovative move from an established company, or the disruptive startup that become a billion dollar company at the founders first attempt, is the exception. There is no silver bullet, a single thing they did and which we can replicate. Most of us need to play a longer game if we want to see success. Each time we roll the dice we need to ensure that the odds move a little further into our favour by: being frugal with our resources moving to a position where we have a better chance of success make the most of the opportunities that are presented to us learning from our previous mistakes

Wisdom is relational, if at times only with ourselves.  It is shared, between body and mind, person to person, human and nature.   It is an arc of spirit that extends from one subject to another, being to being.  Bending across geography and time, but more often eye-to-eye, or gut-to-heart, wisdom occurs.   It's an occurrence, one that we hope will last days or years, but sometimes it flashes like lightning.  As a happening, I cannot carry it with me.  We access it, experience it, witness it.   If wisdom exists in the spaces around and within us, why is the world not evolving as we desire?   I often turn the other way.  I don't want to see it.  In order for the arc to connect me to a book, a person, or the earth itself, I must commit to seeing things as they are, to being engaged and curious, and open to the transmission - willing to see the beauty and the pain, the divinity and the humanity, whatever is present.

Updated design principles Speed of change, ubiquitous connected networks and intensified complexity arising from abstract, distributed knowledge flows are key features of the emerging wave of smart working. Design principles for performance environments therefore additionally need to focus on complexity, the changing nature of knowledge as power, network viability, mobility and social learning.

To have a successful digital workplace (which I define as 'work is something you do, not a place you go to') it is vital organisations have the right strategy, culture, environment and infrastructure to exploit the benefits fully. It needs to become the natural way of working so everyone is more effective and productive and your organisation more efficient and successful.

My 'must have' principles for a great digital workplace include: Strategy: it is vital that your digital workplace strategy is aligned with your organisation's overall strategy.  There is no point planning to invest time and resources to move in one direction if your organisation is going in the opposite way. Engagement: this is needed at two levels.  Firstly with stakeholders you need to endorse your strategy.  Secondly with early adopters who will embrace enthusiastically and spread the word. Governance: a consistent, relevant and appropriate level is needed that minimises risks and enables the maximum benefits to be achieved. HR policies: policies need to encourage people to change their way of working that also benefits the organisation. IT infrastructure: people need to be confident they can use what they need for their work when they need to - simple!