Archive | May, 2008

Socialutions And The Social Media Pretenders

by on May 27, 2008 in Business

Last week, Scott Allen turned me on to the concept of Socialutions. At the heart of this idea is that no new business solution can take root inside an organization until the correlating out-dated ideas, mindsets, and operating methods are weeded out.

Now you may be thinking to yourself, “But Chris, this is nothing new…this is just common sense.” To which I would reply, “Yes, but when do most organizations use this common sense?” If fact, most organizations will simply try to lay the latest business fad on top of their current operations and culture. Regardless of whether they implement this innovation with the best of intentions or not, they’ll soon discover that this course of action will lead to failure with a high probability rate.

Let’s take social media as a fresh example. Loads of businesses and non-profits are adding social media tools to their everyday work as a way to keep up with progress (or worse, to demonstrate they’re “hip” and “edgy”). They’re creating corporate blogs, podcasts, and vblogs; engaging in communication channels like Twitter; building collaborative pages via wikis and Facebook. I’m not suggesting that there’s anything inherently wrong with any of these activities, but I do argue that simply adding them to your business operations without understanding…

  1. the true ethos of social media and its focus on authenticity and diffusion of control
  2. how to integrate these tools with your overall strategy and disperse throughout your entire organization
  3. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY what old behaviors and actions need to be cast aside in order to make these initiatives work

…will expose your organization as a hipster wannabe and leave you thinking that this social media stuff doesn’t work after all.

It’s not that social media doesn’t work, it’s that without making the necessary changes to your culture to accommodate it you’ll just be pretending. From the Socialutions blog, here’s an excerpt from a recent post called How Long Can They Pretend?:

The quality of social interaction is driven by the organizations entire “system” of interactions led by management. The current craze by brands wanting to ride the “social wave” is akin to corporations trying to ride the “quality movement” of the 80’s and 90’s. Those that used quality as a differential started by changing the thinking that managed the “system” and it permeated from the top down. Those that faked it hired a Quality Guru and made quality their responsibility. The later failed.

If you truly want social media (or any other initiative) to work for your business, don’t assign one person or one team to make it happen and then step out of the process. That’s really just pretending to give a damn and setting those folks up for impending failure. If you’re a senior manager, take some time to learn about your organization’s systems and culture (and if you don’t know how, hire someone to help you…yes, that’s a shameless plug). If you’re serious about changing how your business operates in the 21st century and how your people can be an important part of that growth, do them and yourself a service and don’t pretend to be something you’re not.

Four Professional Growth Issues For Managers (And How To Address Them)

by on May 22, 2008 in Work

Managers, when it comes to your employees where does professional development rank in your list of priorities?

A. It’s vitally important and I discuss it frequently
B. It’s important but don’t talk about it much
C. It’s not important – or – there are more important things to focus on

If you answered ‘A’ above…congratulations! Keep on doing what you’re doing. However, for all you folks who answered ‘B’ or ‘C’, let’s have a friendly chat, okay? I won’t lay a guilt trip on you (okay…try not to) and I promise by the end you’ll come away with a new appreciation for why growing your employees is important.

When I work with managers, I often hear four common reasons for why professional development gets pushed to the backburner:

Good Ol’ Fashion Fear of Change
Perhaps the greatest fear expressed is that if you grow someone, you’ll grow them right off your team or out of your organization. That might just be true. When people grow as professionals, they do change…and change can bring fear. In this case, it’s the fear of changes in the environment. There might also be a fear that if the employee leaves you just paid for growth that will benefit another organization and not your own.

So, what if you grow an employee and they leave? As Jamie Notter once pointed out, think of it this way: what if you don’t grow them and they stay?

What you can do: It’s time to confront this fear and realize that professionals must hone themselves or else they become dull and rather useless. If the employee stays, they’ll be far more useful to your organization’s purpose. Yet if the employee leaves, you can still take pride in the fact that you helped them move on to something important. And here’s an often ignored bonus: you now have a potentially new social link to another organization in order to share ideas and experiences.

Not Enough Time or Resources
This usually follows with, “When things settle down and get less crazy, then I’ll be able to give more focus to professional development.” Here’s the problem with that statement: it’s never going to get less crazy than it is now. If anything, it’s just going to get crazier.

What you can do: Stop finding reasons for not making disciplined time or resources available around professional development for your people. If time is the reason, create ways for your employees to make time (e.g., move some lower priority tasks off their plate to make room for professional development). If resources are the reason, it’s time to evaluate where you spend your money. If you don’t see professional development as an investment in your company’s future success, there may be something there to reflect on further.

We Have Bigger Problems to Solve Right Now
See above. Again, it comes down to priorities. Also, ask yourself this: Would growing the skills, experiences, and knowledge of our employees help us solve this problems more effectively?

It’s the Employee’s Responsibility
Managers, if this is your belief we need to work on changing that now. Here’s a simple question: what is your role in your organization? Take a few minutes to reflect on this. Hopefully, somewhere in your response, the word lead appeared. If you are a leader, know that a key responsibility of leaders is to produce more leaders. That takes a firm belief in the value of growing your employees.

What you can do: Assume the responsibility for growing your people. Yes, it’s the employee’s responsibility to be open and eager to achieve their own development (it’s the old horse and water thing). Yet, you must create these professional development openings and then create the space for your employees to use what they’ve learned. Going back to the first issue around the fear of employees leaving…if an employee has the ability to grow and use this new growth in their work, they’ll likely be far happier and fulfilled in what they do.

Remember managers…if your employees look good, then you’re going to look good. The manager/employee dynamic can be a mutually beneficial relationship…particularly if you take care of your employees and their need for professional development.

Five Things That A Playground Can Teach Us About Relationships

by on May 19, 2008 in Life

This weekend, I took Katie and Leah to one of the many local parks here in Austin. The brilliant thing about our city parks are the really neat playgrounds…and on weekends, there are always a gaggle of kids enjoying the freedom of playing. As I watched, it occurred to me (with a little help from Jason) that there is a lot we can learn about relationships – and in many cases relearn – from observing how kids interact with each other.

1. Lack of judgment
Watch kids play and first thing you notice is that there is a lack of personal judgment taking place. When a new boy or girl enters the scene, they don’t fret and wonder how this fellow player is going to add to their social circle. They don’t worry if hanging around with them is going to build or kill their cred as someone cool or hip. They don’t get hung up in a bunch of the social tangles that we create everyday. The only question they have is whether they want to have fun and play.

2. Sometimes you need a buddy
While kids can go off and play by themselves, they know that the teeter-totter doesn’t work very well with just one rider. And the merry-go-round works way better when someone else helps push. Listen for the laughter on a playground and you’ll likely see a group of kids enjoying the heck out of themselves – together

3. Free to begin, free to leave
There’s no planning, no exchange of business cards, no tearful goodbyes (well, only when you have to actually leave the playground). Kids live In the moment. They’re single-mindedly focused on swinging higher, sliding faster, climbing farther. When a friend leaves, another friend may enter.

4. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow
Notice that there’s never one person ordering others to go push them on the swings or spin them on the merry-go-round. There’s just a mutual sense of helping. And if someone’s hogging all the fun, they get left behind pretty quickly. That built-in sense of fairness means that there’s always a fluid agreement of leadership and followership.

5. It’s all about sharing the experience
For kids, it’s the fun of being together and enjoying the companionship and fellowship of others. There’s an acknowledgement that discovery is better when you can share it with someone else.

If all of this is true, what happened? Unfortunately, we went through that crazy mixed up time called adolescence. We were bombarded by all sorts of messages about what’s cool and hip and dorky and childish. Most of us figured out that some pretty good defensive armor was necessary to survive the hallways of middle and high school. Then, as adults we never stopped to check whether these things we learned during these tough times still work. If we did, we’d recognize that they don’t.

No worries. The cool thing is that as adults, we now have the maturity and insight to come back around to the lessons we intuitively knew on the playground. So, next time you find a playground inhabited by some fun-loving kids, sit down and just observe. And think about how you can bring some of these lessons that may be locked inside of you back out into your work and life.

Any other playground lessons to share?

Need A Lie Detector? You’ve Got Bigger Problems Than That

by on May 18, 2008 in Work

From the “Sad But True” file, it appears that British businesses could soon be employing lie detectors as a way to deter healthy folks who call in sick for work. And if American Idol, The Office, and countless other Brit imports are any indication we’ll be seeing something similar in the U.S. any day now. You can already imagine where I stand on this imbecilic nonsense. My reaction is similar to Judy McLeish’s who wrote Voice Risk Analysis to Identify Those Feigning Sick – Is This a Joke?. Look…if your company thinks it has problems with employees calling in sick just to play hooky you need to take a good look at how you are engaging them. Instituting a lie detector not only misses the bigger picture, it literally pushes them out the door.

If You’ve Never Failed You’ve Never Lived

by on May 17, 2008 in Creative

This YouTube clip is making the rounds through Twitter and it’s just too darn good not to share here. It’s also related to Vicky’s first post at the new Remarkable Parents blog.

“If you’ve never failed…you’ve never lived.” We can stew about our failures or we can celebrate them. Which one do you think is going to help us create the kind of life we dream about?