6 new rules of management and leadership

Image by Rafael Steil via FlickrHere are some thoughts at what will be the new rules of leadership and management in the era of social organizations:

1. Control is passe. Focus on empowerment
2. Sharing leads to influence.
3. Knowledge facilitation is the new authority. 
4. Authority is given by your followers. It is a function of how much you share. Not your authority or position.
5. Command no longer works. People have too many options
6. Dehumanizing people only leads to disengagement

Would you like to add any more to the list? Leave a comment below

The Maturity Map of Enterprise Social

Image via CrunchBaseFrom an interview of Jay Pullur, CEO of Qontext in today's Hindu

Is there a maturity map of enterprise social networking that you would like to describe? Are there low-hanging fruits that should be pursued first?

The maturity model for enterprise social networking can be understood to be at three levels, based on how widespread the usage is and hence the impact it has on the organisation.

1) Engagement: The social platform serves as an employee engagement platform, replacing more conventional intranet or portals within the enterprise. Intranets have moved from static to dynamic with the backing of content management systems and portal software, but still need IT staff to keep them up-to-date and are not end-user managed. A social platform now serves as a ‘social intranet,' where everyone is both a creator and consumer of content.

Such social intranet provides the low-hanging fruits for enterprises; this is easy to implement (needs no process changes), and improvement in internal communication is perceptible. It also builds a culture of sharing information in the organisation.

2) Collaboration: Social platform acts as the backbone of most collaboration and communication activities in the enterprise, taking the place of email-based document exchanges. A significant business benefit of this would be reduction in information silos (inboxes were always private and non-sharable), and email overload (through social design and information self-service).

3) Process improvement: At the highest level of usage, the social platform supplements enterprise applications with collaboration capabilities to facilitate people-driven parts of the process. The association of data and transaction records with communication and content items will help in decision-making, exception-handling, and work coordination.

Enterprise social platforms, such as Qontext, can be implemented within organisations that plan to use the same at any of the three levels above.

Reflections on the Employee Engagement with Social Media workshop

Image via WikipediaYesterday I conducted a workshop under the aegis of National HRD Network on Employee Engagement and Social Media. The participants were primarily HR professionals who wanted to explore the area and understand what they could use social media. Only one participant came from a firm that has an internal social network and she claimed that it is hardly used by employees.

I realised during the course of the program that employee engagement is a major issue - and yet HR people seem clueless on how to deal with it. They seem to understand that an internal social network might help in connecting employees to other employees, visualise work, facilitate knowledge sharing and aid in serendipitous discovery that would lead to innovation, and yet, they also worry about "how do we ensure that employees don't misuse these tools?"

Well, the answer to that is that you can never ensure anything. A tool is a tool. It exists in the context of the organization and also creates new contexts within that organization. Getting people to connect and form communities of practice and communities of interest can benefit an organization or harm it depending on how people feel.

Employee engagement can be measured by the discretionary effort people put in - organizational citizenship behaviors. External factors as well as intrinsic factors to the organization impact such behaviors.

Social networks and communities are about relationships. A relationship is like a dance. It often looks like people are taking two steps forward and one step back - but in the end it might end up creating a beautiful visual if both sides are committed to it and trust in each other.

HR and Social Business

Bill Ives blogs on a discussion at the current Enterprise 2.0 conference about Marcia Conner's discussion with Andrew McAffee, Paul Greenberg and others in his Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes, and I thought I'd highlight this part:

Marcia said it is not about the technology. You need to look at activities. Marcia also said that the word collaboration will not be discussed as it becomes mainstream. It is what we are doing that will become important. She noticed at this conference that people are sitting alone at the tables doing their work. She also said that HR will become big (for the first time ever Andy added). She has been talking to senior HR people and they are calling exec meetings. Andy asked if anyone is listening. Marcia said these people are becoming more strategic and will have a voice. However, HR will have to undergo a big change to command listeners.

Marcia said the vendors at this conference were not at the last major HR conference because they have the old school view of what HR is. However, the conversations at the HR conference were around doing things in the new way using the new tools that were not there. The social tool vendors need to go to the HR people to help shape the conversations and not wait for the HR people to come to them.

Paul said that some organizations will need to fail for the changes to really occur. Marcia said she sees change occurring as she is being asked to help organizations become more distributed. Ted provided an example of a banker who changed jobs as he was hired to make changes in an old style bank so there is appetite here.

More musings on online influence

Image via WikipediaI've posted earlier on online influence here and here. So I was reminded of it again when Pinstorm came out with its list of India Influencers (I rank 24 today, but the rankings change today) - which is an average of an individual's Klout and Peerindex scores. Then my ex-colleague Gaurav Mishra, posted some more research on India's online influencers.

However, these rankings need to be taken with a caveat. Online influence cannot exist in a vacuum - and therefore you cannot say that I am more influential than the people who are ranked below me on the list.

Influence is defined as the action or process of producing effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of another or others. Influence is most often linked to power - however online influence relies almost solely on one being accepted as an expert/credible source by others. Which is why Twitter emerges as the app that's used most often by these services (they use Facebook too, and Peerindex looks at your blogging/quora posts too) to calculate a person's "influence" - because as gaurav recently shared in a tweet "not having any client, team, P&L (no power) means that the only way I can influence others is by sharing more, serving more."

And that's the heart of influence in the online world.

The more you share and participate, the more your influence will rise. Social media is not really domain specific. I tweet about movies, cricket, HR, OD, Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0 several times a day. I share my insecurities and vulnerabilities.

A person's influence on social media is based not on what what degrees he's got, what college he's gone to, whether he's a CEO or a MBA student - it is about how much content he creates, how much content he curates, and more importantly whether that adds value to his audience.

Influence in an online world is like the correctness of Wikipedia. It's not absolute - its probabilistic.

Indian firms are superior in Talent Management than their global peers

Here's an interesting article I came across How Indian Firms Beat the World for Talent

The reasons the article states are due to these advantages Indian firms have

1. A legacy of HR influence: India’s socialist past created both large public-sector undertakings such as the Indian Oil Corporation and family-owned enterprises such as Tata Group, Reliance and Birla Group that invested heavily to develop human resources. According to Ernst & Young’s Rajan, “Indian firms have shown a higher propensity to invest at the high end of the HR value chain as compared to multinationals. For many years public sector undertakings have invested in leadership capability development and their head of HR has historically been a member of the board. Family-owned enterprises have made similar investments and recently transformed HR so it can more effectively support talent building.”

2. A well-trained and closely-knit talent fraternity: India’s graduate education system produces top HR leaders from its institutes of management. The XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, established in the 1950s, is a top 5 Indian business school whose graduates include HR leaders for Procter & Gamble India, Hindustan Lever, Hindustan Coca-Cola, Bharti Airtel and Wipro. These top Indian talent leaders often form strong interpersonal networks with talent peers outside their companies. Compared to talent leaders in the U.S., Indian senior talent leaders seem to have deeper relationships with, and are in more regular contact with, their external talent peers. This increased interaction enables them to more easily share best practices and India-specific market information.

3. Strong individual commitment to talent development: It’s not unusual for Indian corporations to hold internal leadership development courses on Saturdays. These meetings aren’t held on the weekend to accommodate the schedule of the CEO or a visiting professor. The companies simply have a five and a half or six-day work week. Ask the typical American or European executive to give up a Saturday for a leadership development course and eyes likely will roll. Indian leaders, on the other hand, are less likely to complain about being away from home or not having work/life balance.

4. A unique understanding of India: Indian firms have the obvious advantage of understanding how to manage talent in an Indian context. Coca-Cola’s Murthy offered a simple but telling example. “Indian firms are very adept at managing the slightly more emotional nature of Indian leaders. While Indian firms have flexibility to support employees’ feelings and emotions, multinationals are often bound by rules and regulations that prevent the type of empathy and coaching that can support success.”

5. The ability to develop and pay: Two key factors to engage and retain great talent — professional development and compensation — are easier to come by at many Indian firms. “Because of their success, Indian companies can offer large wealth creation opportunities through stock options or shares. Western firms aren’t listed on the Sensex (the Indian stock exchange) so can’t offer similar benefits,” Murthy said.

Driving Employee Engagement using Gamification

Image via WikipediaOrganizations have always used internal competitions to drive employee performance and engagement. I remember, when I used to work in pharmaceutical sales (before the days of email) we would get the company newsletter in the mail, which showed which of my training batchmates were performing well and achieving how much of their sales quotas. This was a vital part of the communication that we would look forward to every month. That's because we were just 3 employees in the city and the competitive spirit made us look forward to understand how we were doing in our peer group.

Fast forward to the present day, and "game design" has become a by-word thanks to the success of online games being played by common folks (on platforms like Facebook) Social Games like Zynga's FarmVille, CityVille, Mafia Wars are addictive and tap into basic desire of humans to see how they are progressing (moving from level to level) vis a vis their peers and to publicly declare (through badges) their status.

How can this be applied to the workplace?

First, we have to understand that the benefits of gamification are most when applied to repetitive tasks that people might normally consider boring. It would however be counter productive in workplaces that focus on creativity and depth of thinking.

A reward and recognition system that uses the principles of gamification will easily help to drive employee engagement to a higher level and linking it to productivity. In my opinion it can also drive desired behaviours around sharing and knowledge facilitation without focusing on actual monetary rewards.

Came across this infographic on the case for Gamification within the workplace

Here's an interesting take on "turning work into play"

The serious guys, the military and some of the really big companies like Unilever, have created training packages for some of their employees — and this is where they’re coming from. Not necessarily just the 3-D rendering, the fancy, realistic, virtual world experiences, but also the built-in use of frustration and reward.
Training employees on a large scale, companies have often had this problem: how to standardize and roll out good training programs. So they were doing these experiments that I think were successful.
h+: I know I’d feel better about job training if it felt more like killing zombies, but how do non-gaming businesses react to the introduction of both game technology and actual games to the workplace? Is there resistance to this trend?
Helgason: I hear from people that it can be very all-over-the-map, from very positive to people not understanding what this is all about. Fear and all that.
I was on a panel a while ago, a virtual worlds forum, with a lot of people selling solutions, working with big enterprise, and they spoke of some resistance… but even on the panel, there was a sense that the resistance was going away or that there was less of it now than two years ago.
h+: In some places, you can even find the use of mass market games in corporate training or education. I know of a gaming lounge in New York that rented time on Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, a squad-shooter, to companies for team-building exercises.
Helgason: Yeah. I failed to mention this [in the gamification post], but yeah, just using traditional games for various uses, that’s obviously true as well.
They did some very large experiments teaching kids with Sim City and The Sims — just playing the games. But these games are extremely rich in knowledge and structural understanding. You can communicate an understanding of a society and how a society works. It was a research project sponsored by Electronic Arts. They rolled out these games and played them in schools, and someone ran around trying to figure out the kids’ retention and how well they could apply this knowledge afterwards. The conclusion was that they taught them really well.
In education, you have these terms. One is what you can remember in a multiple choice test right after you learn, and then how much you remember a week after, a month later, and the third is how well you can apply this knowledge in a completely different area.

Social Collaboration and Fighting Information Overload

While I have often talked about the use of social technologies to connect employees with other employees in organizations, it needs to be recognized that collaboration in organizations need to happen between employees and other groups of people like partners, customers also.

An effective collaboration tool would also look at building communities in the "extended enterprise" - like a customer of ours who have 50,000 employees and external partners connected with each other. 

It's also notable, that while younger generations take to social networking in the workplace, there are many who still are more comfortable with email. A social collaboration platform must be inclusive, connecting both these groups - bridging the gap between the social intranet and the desktop.

Many people are talking about how the activity feed is going to become the new center of serendipitous discovery and connections within organizations. However, activity feeds are like rivers. Step away from it once, and you can  lose something important. Gartner had a blog post on the same issue, called Activity Streams overload.

Which is why, the concept of "pinning" becomes critical. It alerts the individual of changes and updates to the groups/communities/documents/business records he/she is interested in following more than others. In facton The App Gap blog, Bill Ives posts on how the concept of pinning will help reduce information overload:

Enterprise 2.0 is about making interactions appropriately transparent and accessible. Qontext has added a new capability to promote this transparency and access. They call it “pinning.” It is somewhat like tagging but different. Instead of putting a tag on an activity, you pin the activity to a record. It is the opposite of categorizing email, for example, where the receiver puts the tag or category on the item. The pinning is done by the system as content is created to connect it to its context. Once an item is pinned, you can easily go back to the source and see all the accumulated context.
This is a great way to address the content overload issue. As more social content is created within the enterprise through the various tools, there will be a need to filter the fire hose. Qontext takes a different approach by allowing you to view contextually relevant information without having to determine manual filters.

So while collaboration depends on conversations and communities, remembering that business is also about getting things done, information overload needs to be contained so that people get the information when they want and which is useful for them

The Current State of Collaboration in India

Qontext, India’s leading contextual collaboration software, is conducting a report on The Current State of Collaboration – 2011.

We are therefore reaching out to get your views on how knowledge sharing and collaboration are being conducted across organizations.

Choosing to participate in this survey would ensure that you will get a free copy of report of The Current State of Collaboration.

Filling up this short survey will not take more than 10 minutes of your time.

Please feel free to share this survey with your colleagues and friends at other companies as well.

Click on this link to start the survey

Of course, if you complete the survey, you also get a free copy of the results.