Category Archives: Leadership

Connected leadership

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How is leadership in a hyper-connected workplace different? It’s been an ongoing conversation here, as this comment by Stephen Downes, on leadership as an emergent property, provides a counterpoint to certain popular leadership literature, especially “great man” theories.

‘Leadership’ is the trait people who have been successful ascribe as the reason for their success.
It is one of those properties that appears to be empirically unverifiable and is probably fictional.

In preparing for our connected worker program, I reviewed my previous posts on leadership and created a short synthesis of the key points. With life in perpetual Beta as a guiding perspective, networked organizations have to learn how to deal with ambiguity and complexity. Those in leadership and management positions must find ways to nurture creativity and critical thinking. Too often there are organizational barriers that prevent this. The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling network learning, and strengthening networks. Anyone can show leadership in these areas.

Another guiding principle for modern organizational design is for loose hierarchies and strong networks. This is succinctly explained in the definition of wirearchy: a dynamic two-way flow of  power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. As networked, distributed work becomes the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent, and diverse. Supporting social networks ensures that knowledge is shared and contributes to organizational longevity. Organizations need to learn as fast as their environments.

As a result of improved trust in the workplace, leadership will be seen for what it is – an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This requires leadership from everyone – an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, learning with each other. In today’s workplace, it is a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

Leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top. To know the culture of the workplace, one must be the culture. Marinate in it and understand it. This cannot be done while trying to control the culture. Organizational resilience is strengthened when those in leadership roles let go of control.

Related posts:

The Connected Leader

From Hierarchies to Wirearchies

The Connected Workplace

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The Connected WorkerToday’s digitally connected workplace demands a completely new set of skills. Our increasing interconnectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems.

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected workplace will not wait for the training department to catch up.

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Loose hierarchies for knowledge management

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Knowledge-sharing practices are highly contextual. I have seen this with clients in multiple locations, across national borders. This makes sense when you consider that knowledge sharing is deeply personal as well as social, so it reflects the larger culture and the particular workplace. A 2011 study (via David Gurteen) concluded that even in the same company, knowledge management practices are different (note that the authors define Ba as shared context in motion).

Each subsidiary, although part of the same corporate group and including the same functional teams, displayed very different patterns of KM and organizational features. The regression model showed that different organizational factors – especially Ba, work styles, and organizational control – were responsible for the resulting KM profiles of each local office: formal Ba in the U.S. office, clear objectives in the French subsidiary, formal Ba in the Chinese branch, and a self-directed vision in the Japanese head office.

Source: A study of knowledge management enablers across countries, by Rémy Magnier-Watanabe, Caroline Benton & Dai Senoo, in Knowledge Management Research & Practice (2011) 9, 17–28 (PDF).

This need for contextual knowledge management practices aligns with the advice of Snowden & Kurtz who recommend “loose hierarchies & strong networks” in complex environments, as shown in this image by Verna Allee.

cynefin networks verna alleeSo, for large organizations, not only will no single technology platform meet all your knowledge-sharing, collaboration and cooperation needs, but no single approach will either. While there is a need to create a balance between individual and enterprise
knowledge-sharing tools, there is also a need to balance the needs of the central organization with those of external locations. In our distributed economic world, this is workplace reality.

With loose hierarchies and strong networks as a guiding principle, departments need to have the ability to try out different KM practices and see how they work in their unique contexts. Of course, this flies in the face of standardization of processes and the search for best practices that have been drilled into management heads for the past century. For knowledge management today, industrial management just won’t cut it.

industrial management

From ideas to ideology

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Charles Green wrote a few years ago that management is still fighting the industrial revolution:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

So basically, ideas are enabled by new technology around which new organizations are created. Only then do new institutions get built in order to support the new dominant ideology.

So what does the current set of pillars that informs management look like?

The industrial era was based on the notion of standardization and best practices. Factories and mass production enabled corporations, like General Motors, from which business schools such as MIT’s Sloan School of Management (Alfred Sloan was president & CEO of GM) were created to develop managers trained in some variation of the principles of scientific management. Here is an excerpt from F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911):

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

The network era is starting to take shape and some of the pillars are getting set in place, while others are in the making and not yet guaranteed to be part of the mix. Ideas like wirearchy and open business have been taken up in conjunction with new internet technologies, especially social media. There are experiments with new organizations, like  B Corporations that have social and environmental components, or peer to peer production.  It’s not obvious what the new institutions will look like, but we are seeing frenzied action in the educational sector as new and old players vie for dominance.

Perhaps new institutions will look like Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC’s). Perhaps not. But before a dominant ideology emerges we will see much more experimentation during this shift period. Will the dominant ideology be more like the “unassailable techno-humanitarian” TED Talks, or perhaps have the grassroots qualities of Shareable? My initial stab at a new ideology is a Taylorist mash-up: The principles of Connected Management:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. And the duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

However, if history is to be repeated, things will only stabilize after the new dominant ideology sets in place. Meanwhile, we will continue to live in very interesting times.

connected management

The connected leader

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HBR: How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders

  • They improved their communication effectiveness.
  • They made an effort to share their knowledge and expertise more widely. 
  • They developed a broader perspective.
  • They began to encourage cooperation rather than competition.

These four skills, of the nine identified by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, are some of the core skills for connected leaders. Leadership, like culture, is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This is connected leadership, or leadership that understands networks.

trust emerges from effective networks

In complex environments, weak hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle. While many organizations have strong networks, they are too often coupled with strong central control. Letting go of control is what connected leadership is all about.

Here is how a connected workplace should function. It flips the traditional management pyramid.

leadership in connected workplace

Networked contributors (whether they are full-time, part-time, or contractors) do the bulk of the knowledge work at the edges of the organization. The narration of work  and PKM are becoming critical skills, as work teams ebb and flow according to need, but the network must remain connected and resilient. A key function of connected leaders is to listen to and analyze what is happening. From this bird’s-eye view, those in leadership roles can help set the work context according to the changing conditions and  work on building consensus.

The connected workplace requires collaboration as well as cooperation. Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed, but most organizations focus their efforts on shorter term collaboration. However, networks really thrive on cooperation, where people share without any direct benefit. Practising and promoting cooperation is another important leadership skill in the connected workplace.

Connected leaders know that people naturally like to be helpful and get recognition for their work. But humans need more than extrinsic compensation, as our behaviour on Wikipedia and online social networks proves. For the most part, people like to help others. Cooperation makes for more resilient knowledge networks. Better networks are better for business.

Solving problems is what most knowledge workers are hired to do. But complex problems usually cannot be solved alone. They require the sharing of tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that cannot easily be put into a manual or procedural guide. Research shows that tacit knowledge flows best in trusted networks. Trust promotes individual autonomy and this becomes a foundation for more open social learning. Without trust, few are willing to share their knowledge. An effective knowledge network also cultivates the diversity and autonomy of each worker. Connected leaders know how to foster deeper connections which can be developed through meaningful conversations. They understand the importance of tacit knowledge in solving complex problems.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Those who emerge as leaders need to understand the new connected workplace. Working smarter in this workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust.

The Connected Worker

Learn more about our Connected Leader Workshop, where we understand that you cannot train people to be social; you can only show them what it’s like to be social.

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organizational relevance

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Peter Evans-Greenwood has had some good articles lately. This is from his latest, is your organisation irrelevant?

However, the environment we operate in today is a lot more fluid than the environment of the past, the environment where the vast bulk of our current organisational theory was formulated. Information flows much more rapidly than it used to while the world seems to change every year rather than every generation. The traditional static view of the organisation – one where it has a well defined and stable structure (someone leads, others follow, even if you’re leading from the bottom) – is starting to look a bit long in the tooth.

 

Peter concludes:

Leadership is no longer part of a job description: something anointed on the chosen few. Leadership is a role to be adopted when needed, and then passed on when the need has gone. It’s a dynamic thing, moving around the organisation, reshaping the organisation as it passes from individual to individual, team to team.

Leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance. In this post-information era, organizations need to really understand networks, manage for complexity, and work on building trust. But almost all workplace systems, in organizations of any size, are at cross purposes to this. Networks, for the most part, are seen as something relating only to the IT department. The constant demand for more controlled processes (compliance training, for example) fails to build resilience into the organization. Every time the organization deals with an exception using a standard method, and fails to account for the unique situation of the employee or customer, it erodes trust.

The answers are so simple they are ignored by minds numbed by +100 page reports that tell us nothing. Give people a job worth doing, the tools to do it, and recognition of a job well done. In a transparent, diverse & open organization, management can then get the hell out of the way. This is how organizations can remain relevant.

Principles of Networked Unmanagement

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Cooperation

Collaboration is working together for a common objective, while cooperation is openly sharing, without any quid pro quo. Cooperation is a necessary behaviour to be open to serendipity and to encourage experimentation. In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity.

As we shift to a networked economy, our organizational frameworks have to change. While collaboration inside the company and with partners may have worked in a market economy, cooperation amongst a greater variety of network actors is now necessary. We are seeing this with customers getting involved in product design and marketing becoming more “social”. Shifting our emphasis from collaboration, which still is required to get some work done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked ecosystem, means reassessing some of our assumptions about work.

Cooperation in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us, and our children, will be working.  Cooperation is the future, which is already here, albeit unevenly distributed.

Since cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate, people in the network cannot be told what to do, only influenced. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. That’s like being on Twitter with no followers and never getting “retweeted”. You will be a lone node and of little value to the network. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be perceived as having some value by many others.

Teamwork

Most of us have seen those fancy teamwork motivational posters on workplace walls, and almost every job description includes teamwork as a critical competency. Teamwork is over-rated, as it can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. A big economic stick often hangs over the team; “be a team player or lose your job”.

Teams promote unity of purpose, not openness, transparency and diversity of ideas, essential for building trust in networks. Think of a football team, a common business metaphor in North America. There is only one coach and everybody has a specific job to do while “keeping their eye on the ball”. In today’s workplace, there’s more than one ball and the coach cannot see the entire field. The team, as a work vehicle, is outdated.

As much as organizations advertise for “team players”, what would be better are workers who can collaborate and cooperate by connecting to each other in a balanced manner. There are other ways of organizing work. Orchestras are not teams; neither are jazz ensembles. There may be teamwork on a theatre production but the cast is not a team. It is more like a social network. Teams are what we get when we use the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator. In a complex world, unity can be counter-productive.

Jobs

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. Most workers are paid to do only one thing – solve problems. When dealing with work problems we can categorize them as either known or new. Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management help us to map it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge gets automated.

Complex, new problems need tacit (implicit) knowledge to solve them. Furthermore, as more work becomes automated & outsourced, exception-handling becomes more important in the networked workplace. The system handles the routine stuff and people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. As new exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution gets automated, and so the process evolves. The 21st century workplace, with its growing complexity due to our interconnectivity, requires that we focus work on new problems and exception-handing. This increases the need for collaboration, working together on a problem; as well as cooperation, sharing without any specific objective.

One challenge for organizations will be getting people to realize that what they actually know, as detailed in a job description, has decreasing value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge in new ways is where business value lies. With computer systems that can handle more and more of our known knowledge, the 21st century worker has to move to the complex and chaotic edge to get the valued and paid work done. There are many people who will need help with this challenge.

Networks

Workplace leaders everywhere need to help the current and upcoming workforce enter the 21st century network economy. Another change to manage will be getting people to work more transparently. Transparency is necessity for effective networks. For instance, a major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found. With greater transparency, information can flow horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics can then emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Working transparently and cooperatively is much less controllable than many managers will be comfortable with. But in this network era that we are entering, the increase in complex work, and rise of networks as the primary organizing framework, will create an even greater need for cooperation.

“In the long term, +N [network] dynamics should enable government, business, and civil-society leaders to create new mechanisms for mutual consultation, coordination, and cooperation spanning all levels of governance. Aging contentions that “the government” or “the market” is the solution to particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to new ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.” – David Ronfeldt

We, collectively, are the solution to our problems. We just have not figured out how to get optimally organized. Network theory can provide many of the answers. The first step is seeing that we have a problem and that our current work models are inadequate. Doing the same things better will not help. Looking outward, beyond our organizations, can enable cooperative behaviour. Casting off old management models, like jobs and organization charts, is another step. Shifting to a networked economy is going to take cooperation, and that only happens when we let go of control, just the opposite of Taylor’s principles of scientific management* which have informed us for the past century. Here are my introductory Principles of Networked Unmanagement:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

—

* Here are F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

Do you know when it’s time to let go?

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According to my colleague Jay Cross, Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo originated the 70:20:10 framework at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina. Their 1996 book, The Career Architect, stated that lessons learned by successful managers came roughly:

  • 70% from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving
  • 20% from feedback, and working with and observing role models
  • 10% from courses and reading

Research also shows that most workplace learning is informal. But when do you move from formal instruction to informal learning? An interesting article on management coaching  uses the metaphor of riding a bike. When is it time for the parent to let go of the bicycle and let the child ride alone?

Jesse Lyn Stoner says:

How do you recognize that moment – that it is time to let go? I consider these four questions:

Do they have the skills and knowledge they need?
Have they demonstrated their ability to do this in other settings or similar ways?
Do they want to do it?
Do they have the resources they need to do the job?

These are the types of questions that training departments and HR professionals should be asking. When is it time to let go? Are they looking for indicators, or are they just wed to their preferred methods of control. I think it’s a great question to ask: When do you let your employees ride on their own? If there is no clear answer, perhaps most workers are still encumbered with training wheels.

If the organization has no methods in place to mark the time that employees can ride on their own, then they may be treating their workforce like children. At what point can someone make decisions to spend a few hundred, or even a few thousand, dollars to address an issue that is important to get work done? With metaphorical training wheels, nobody falls, but the riders never achieve full speed either. Are these the kinds of employees you want? Give them a chance to really ride.

[This post was written after a great 70 KM bike ride on a fall day in the middle of the week]

The collaboration field needs to cooperate

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Eugene Kim looks at a variety of disciplines in the collaboration space, using LinkedIn network analysis to see if and how they are related. The resulting map, and Kim’s explanations are most interesting for anyone doing work related to enterprise collaboration.

According to Kim:

The densest cluster is the organizational development cluster, which is left of center. There are a bunch of skills here that are tightly interconnected, largely centered around leadership development, coaching, and group transformation.

The other large, dense clusters — management consulting, participatory processes, design thinking, and collaboration / technology — are largely distinct, although there is some bridging, mostly around learning-related skills. This makes sense: A high-performance group is a group that learns, a conclusion that you should draw regardless of your starting point.

The last sentence underlines my own focus for the past decade or more. Work is learning and learning is the work. Collaboration and learning go hand in glove.

Training, HR, OD, KM, IT, etc. use different models, speak different languages and go to separate conferences. However, they’re all in the business of collaboration. They just don’t do it with each other. Given the imperatives for continuous growth today, these disciplines need to give serious consideration to recombining their organizational DNA.

Just read a few professional journals and blogs and you will see that the same workplace issues are being faced by HR, IT, OD, KM, Marketing, Communications and T&D departments. Similar complaints and parallel strategies are being developed in isolation in each of these areas. We really need to get away from our self-imposed tribes and adopt network thinking and practices.

All levels of complexity exist in our world but more of our work (especially knowledge-intensive work) deals with complex problems, whether they be social, environmental or technological. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks; our work evolves around developing emergent practices; and we cooperate to achieve our goals. In the network era, collaboration specialists need to cooperate. Cooperation is quite different from collaboration.

In many ways it’s a case of the blind men and the elephant. We are constrained by the blinders of our profession’s models. That’s why I like to take my models from a variety of fields, as no single discipline has a network perspective. Everyone is struggling to keep up with change but most are using outdated tools and models. As Lou Sagar commented on Umair Haque’s 2009 post, ” … the emergence of new business models are ahead of the organizational framework to embrace and manage the impact.” Not much has changed. That pretty well sums up the problem in my mind. We are all blind men unable to understand the new realities of work.

 

I believe that a wide range of disciplinary silos can be incorporated into one support function. Professionals could have a variety of roles, depending on organizational needs, but all have to be focused on the organization and its environment. Separate departments create tribes and internal cultures that may be at cross-purposes with other departments or the overall organization. With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are internal departments of less value, they could subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately.

I am sure there’s more than one way to achieve better functioning organizations but tearing down the artificial disciplinary walls would be a good place to start. With a networked, cooperative mindset, it is possible.

A guide to complexity and organizations

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Via Jay Cross is this amazing synthesis – Organize for Complexity – of how complexity affects our work and the ways in which we can change our organizational structures to account for complexity, instead or adding more complication. If you know nothing about complexity, read this. If you know a lot on the subject, keep it as a job aid or use it to help others.

I like the depiction of market dynamics, to which I have added the upper image. It shows the fundamental shift we are going through as the network era unfolds.

The definition of complex systems is quite useful:

Complex systems have presence or participation of living creatures. They are living systems – that’s why they may change at any moment. Such systems are only externally observable – not controllable.

A complex system’s behavior is non-predictable. Here, it’s natural that there is a level of error, uncertainty and illusion that is much higher than in complicated systems.
A complex system may possess elements that can operate in standardized ways, but their interaction would be constantly changing, in discontinuous ways.

The paper includes design principles as well as “how-to” implementation suggestions. Start with, “Design principle ‘Beta’: Self-regulation within the team. Control through peer pressure and transparency. Principles and shared responsibility.” This is a comprehensive, but not heavy, read. I am sure I will turn to it often.

I must say that I agree with pretty much everything in this paper, so I strongly recommend it.