This blog is about improving the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
Collaboration
Social media are rocking our world
Social media are changing what we do and how we do it. With our families. With our friends. With strangers. With our colleagues. At play. At work. Social media haven’t even come of age and they are already rocking our world.
Nowhere will these changes be more profound than in our workplaces. Social media are changing basic assumptions about how we organize to get things done.
| Was | Will be [if it's not already] |
| Centralization | Decentralization |
| Formal hierarchy | Informal networks |
| Chain of command | Collaboration |
| Central planning | Collective learning |
| Bureaucracy | Community |
| Departments | Tribes |
| High control | High accountability |
| Machine models | Complex adaptive systems |
I don’t for one second think that it’s as clear cut as this conversation makes it out.
I don’t believe institutions of the future will operate fully one way or the other. They will need to find the right balance – their right balance – given the nature of the work.
And, social media create institution-wide opportunities for connecting that simply didn’t exist for large organizations before. Social media are already driving changes in behaviour, attitudes and expectations. They are already having a profound effect on our institutions and the role of the managers who run them.
What is certain is that the function of management is changing. The days when power and authority based on hierarchy alone is gone. Instead, managers will need to be influencers. Facilitators. Consensus-builders.
And, it is certain that this will change the function of institutional communications especially internal communications. In a world where managers are influencers, what is the role of internal communications? In a world where employees will have access to what they need, when and how they need it [thanks Bill Jensen, Work 2.0], will the internal communications function even need to exist?
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Starting with nothing
OK it’s late summer and I’m dreaming and I thought you might like to dream along with me.
Imagine you’ve been asked to help create a Corporate Internal Communications approach starting from nothing. Let’s imagine this is a service business that has grown by acquisition. It’s in a highly competitive market about to launch a new business model. Cross-functional and cross-business collaboration will be critical.
The individual business units have relatively well developed Internal Communications. But, until now global communications have been limited to the odd e-mail and quarterly conference calls. There’s no global intranet. There’s no global newsletter. There’s no global employee survey. There’s pretty much nothing at the global level – no systems, processes, tools or tactics.
You’ve got carte blanche. What’s in and what’s out? I’d love to hear from you.
Update [August 20, 2010]: Thanks to the gang at CommScrum LinkedIn for your great contribution to this question.
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What can we learn from Chef Gordon Ramsay?
It has food. It has wine. It has crazy characters. It has drama. So it had to happen. Michael and I are now completely addicted to the original “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares”. We stopped watching television months ago. Now we’re watching streaming video online. And thanks to The Food Network we’re hooked on Chef Gordon Ramsay’s show.
Who knew how complicated running a restaurant could be?
And who knew that beside the food [Ramsay’s an advocate for fresh local ingredients and simple plates – a higher purpose for the customer], communication seems to be the most important ingredient for success. And, perhaps surprisingly, I don’t mean marketing communication or PR. I mean internal communication.
We’ve now watched about 8 episodes. And with one exception – a brigade of experienced French chefs and service staff from Michelin starred restaurants who clearly knew what they were doing – the mantra of every show has been ‘Communicate!”
Ramsay’s challenge; get communication going between:
Once you get past his foul language, the man is masterful. He starts by raising their awareness of, and gets them focused on, the customer experience. A reality check.
Then, he facilitates often profound change – he encourages, he cajoles, he demonstrates, he brings new and sometimes jarring perspective and insight, he’s rational, he’s emotional and slowly but surely most teams get it.
No crafting of messages. No pushing them out. He just gets them speaking to each other. He helps them get the right conversations/communications going in the right way and at the right time to ensure the best customer experience. Remarkably completely dysfunctional teams start working well together and end up delivering outstanding experience for their customer and each other.
So, should we be spending more time as facilitator and less time as message pushers? I’d love to hear what you think?
Random Posts:
“Where everybody knows your name”
There are very few of us who would associate the place we work with the Cheers theme song.
In fact that was the point of the song. Cheers is the place where we can escape our worries. A place where we’re understood and appreciated.
You’d think that a place where we spend 50% to 60% of our waking hours getting to and working in would be a place “where everybody knows your name”. But it’s generally not. Instead, it’s a place where:
- An EVPs executive assistant for over 5 years told me that her boss didn’t know she had children until she had to stay home one day with a sick child.
- A manager reported that he’d never met his Director face-to-face even though he’d been working for him for over a year.
- [fill in the blank]
What is it about organizations? After all we’re all there working toward the same organizational mission, vision and values.
What is it about these places that:
- Isolate rather than integrate?
- Create internal competition rather than collaboration?
- Dehumanize rather than humanize?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that colleagues at work need to be your best friend. Or that a weekly beer with people you don’t really even like is a solution? I’m not really a fan of the drive for employee engagement [what's really being measured?, implication that employees need to give more?, etc]. But, I do think that organizations can be places that encourage courtesy and respect. And it starts by knowing some basic things about the people you work with. Who are they? What matters to them?
Is your organization doing anything to humanize the work environment? Is there anything you can do in your corner of the workplace?
“Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
Wouldn’t you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.”
With thanks to Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo
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Innovation culture & internal communications
There’s been a lot of talk about the need for organizations to innovate. But, since organizations don’t innovate, people do, there’s also been a lot of talk about building “innovation cultures”. My friends at CommScrum have taken the discussion further and begun a conversation about innovation and what the drive to an “innovation culture” means for Internal Communications. Here’s how I’m thinking about it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
“Innovation culture” seems to me a lot like the next generation “leadership culture”. Then everyone had to be a leader. [how that was possible I have no idea.] Now everyone has to be an innovator? [makes about as much sense as everyone’s a leader.]
So, the challenge for Internal Communicators is not to get caught up in the organizational hype and feel pressured into delivering on demand tools and tactics [sound familiar]. Instead, we need get the answers to these fundamental questions.
What needs to be innovated? Products? Services? Systems? Decision taking? Codes of Conduct? Accounting procedures? Pay policies? You get my point. Some things really benefit from continuous innovation. And some things just don’t. In fact getting too innovative would be detrimental and perhaps even illegal.
Why? To improve our employee experience? To improve our customer experience? To make it easier for the CEO to brag on the golf course? To get a headline? Understanding what’s motivating the drive for innovation will tell us how important it really is to the organization’s strategy.
Who will be most impacted? And what will the implications be for what they do and how they do it? No matter how wide or deep the drive for innovation goes, not all employees [I include execs in here too] will be affected equally [see What? above]. As communicators if we assume anything different we may find ourselves creators or amplifiers of mixed messages.
What? When? and How? It’s important to get an adequate take on what’s already being planned/done to create an “innovation culture”? And to understand how those changes will support employee innovation. New processes? New reward systems? Training? Supporting tools and tactics? For an interesting take on what needs to change, check out Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan’s book, “Leading outside the lines”, p.177. This should give us a clear idea of how seriously the leadership is taking the change and where their priorities are. It should also help us discover where, when and how we can be most helpful.
What do you think? Will the drive for ‘innovative cultures’ change the role of Internal Communications? And, if so, how?
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Getting grassroots
This week I’ve spent a lot of time with people who are part of grassroots movements of one sort or another. And, I started to think about whether there was anything we can learn from grassroots movements like these that are making important and fundamental societal and environmental change?
It started last Friday with a fabulous evening – the Equitas host family dinner – spent with 3 of the 130 Human Rights educators who are here in Montreal for the International Human Rights Training Program. A Cambodian working on a peace and reconciliation program in a world where some citizens fear reprisals in the wake of Khmer Rouge convictions. A Brazilian Human Rights lawyer who devotes time to an NGO working on local Human Rights issues. And a children’s rights activist from The Gambia. Each of them committed to changing their society from the bottom-up. They come here to learn. They will go home to share and act. And they will change their world one action, one person at a time.
Then, because I have a crazy idea of building a rooftop garden – my field of dreams – on our Church hall, I’ve started meeting local people in the community who are working on related projects. They are working on food security, urban farming, creating a sustainable university campus and greening the downtown. They are students at Concordia who are piloting a sustainable business growing herbal tea to supply a student run and operated tea shop at the Loyola campus. They are professionals working with local action groups to green some of the most debilitated parts of the downtown. There’s one young man who went to jail for an action he took to change a regulation in The Plateau. And guess what they did. And, they are profs and grad students working on urban farming projects. It’s amazing. They are changing our urban landscape one planter at a time. It is amazing what’s going on just outside our door.
What do these movements have in common?
- They are “natural and spontaneous” movements
- They are driven by passion for the ‘cause’.
- They operate outside of “traditional power structures”
- They use “traditional power structures” to raise awareness and funds.
- They rely on informal networks to share information and resources.
- Their projects start small and local but with the clear intention of leading to big and sustainable change.
- They pilot and learn and share and pilot again.
- They build pride in the work and the community.
What do you think? Is there anything we can learn from grassroots movements that we can apply to institutional change initiatives?
Random Posts:
From conversation to joint creation
This just arrived thanks to the Ideas Project.
John Hagel, author and business strategist, builds on the main idea presented in my last post by making a powerful argument for why social media need to be part of internal strategies. Social media are no longer just about conversation. They are tools for helping institutions set the conditions for collaboration and joint creation.
If you’re a professional communicator what if anything does this mean for you and what you do?