A guidebook for principles of embedding self-sustaining collaboration within organisations. Primary message is have a good reason to create each social community, make sure it's aligned with teh business, nurture it and then let go.
One of our more striking discoveries is that most social media initiatives fail. Either they don’t attract any interest or they never create business value.Read more at location 145
“Operationally, we work as individual countries and regions or markets. The challenge is to get everyone involved regardless of location, job, or language. SHIFT enables us to develop initiatives at incredible speed by taking the structure of the company—and a person’s place in the organization—out of the discussion, so that we can all work together and move faster. SHIFT creates a truly global organization.” Based on the success he’d seen, he said, “With SHIFT, I know that we can mobilize the company faster and more effectively.”10Read more at location 219
Think of the three components this way: Community is the people who collaborate. Social media is where they collaborate. And purpose is why they collaborate. Social media plus community plus purpose create mass collaboration. And extensive, repeated success with mass collaboration in collaborative communities characterizes a social organization. Simple. But, like much else in organizations, this simple idea can be hard to execute well.Read more at location 289
Mass collaboration is defined by six fundamental principles or defining characteristics. Participation, collective, transparency, independence, persistence, and emergence, in combination, set it apart from other forms of communication and collaboration. A social media implementation that doesn’t display all these principles won’t enable mass collaboration.Read more at location 299
What if CEMEX management had taken the more traditional approach of (1) assembling a team to go out and audit all plants to identify the practices of the best ones and then (2) directing other plants to adopt those practices? It would have taken much longer, achieved a lower-quality assessment, and faced huge adoption challenges. Most likely, dozens of plants would have dragged their feet or claimed, “We can’t do that here.” In the end, management said the engineers had accomplished in six weeks using mass collaboration what would normally have taken two years.Read more at location 390 •
this requires a new and different mind-set. The people in a social organization no longer think entirely in terms of hierarchy and traditional management. They don’t automatically respond to a challenge by assigning its resolution to some person or group or by creating a structured process to deal with it. Because they’ve integrated community collaboration into the way they work and think every day, they ask instead: “Can a community do it better? Can we form a community to deal more effectively with this?” If the answer is yes, it takes that approach.Read more at location 453 •
Choosing community collaboration over traditional approaches will challenge the organization and individual managers within it. Companies that prefer to operate via prescribed processes, are obsessed with defining roles and responsibilities in great detail, and place great store in formal hierarchy will struggle to become social organizations. Managers who consider formal authority the primary tool at their disposal for influencing others will wrestle individually with their roles and functions in managing a community. And all managers will need to reconcile the tension between their continuing responsibility for outcomes with their inability to mandate or control what a collaborative community will produce.Read more at location 476 •
From all the cases we’ve studied, we can identify a few common reasons for failure: Social media initiatives fail most frequently because organizations focus on the technologies when they should focus instead on achieving a purpose through the new collective behaviors that those technologies make possible. New behaviors aimed at purpose, not technology, provide business value. Social media technology is a crucial component, but it’s an enabler with little or no value by itself. Its worth arises from what it allows. They fail because the organization lacks knowledge of the fundamental principles of mass collaboration. Not even great technology will save those efforts that ignore or omit the basic characteristics of successful social initiatives. They fail because not all challenges are well suited to mass collaboration. Organizations need to understand where collective communities are most likely to provide real value. Using mass collaboration in settings where it’s not appropriate wastes people’s time and the firm’s money and can even expose organizations to the possibility of mismanaging important information. Finally, they fail because the organization’s executives and managers lack the confidence to assign compelling purposes to communities and then allow the communities to find a way to fulfill their purposes. Managers stifle innovation with interference and excessive oversight, and, when the community does innovate, they lack ways to turn those ideas into organizational change.Read more at location 518 •
The term guide refers to the role of those managers who sponsor a community and are responsible for its results. In a real sense, the preparation that preceded this step was largely about “planning to let go.” Once the initiative has been launched and a community forms, it will take on a life of its own and, in large part, become the master of its own destiny. At this point, control will shift from the organization to the community and those in charge until now will move to a role of guiding rather than directing or controlling. Think of it as “managing by guiding from the middle.” It’s a difficult shift for some managers to make.Read more at location 646 •
Your aim in this meeting is, first, to identify those goals where collaboration is appropriate and, second, to articulate at high levels how community collaboration can foster progress toward achieving them. In addition to goals, you can use major business activities and known significant collaboration challenges to spur brainstorming.Read more at location 896 •
specific enough to motivate an identifiable target audience to participate. It also clearly articulates the benefits to community members and the business value to the organization. No longer than a paragraph, it answers four basic questions: Who are the target participants? What is the nature or focus of their collaboration? What’s in it for participants? What value will the organization realize?Read more at location 1024 •
viable community you need at minimum thirty to fifty active participants.Read more at location 2008 •
This places two requirements on managers: (1) that they allow control to rest in the hands of the community itself; and (2) that they create a supportive organizational framework within which the community can form and do its work.Read more at location 2100 •
communities with essentially the same purposes that compete for resources and members. Putting ideas for spin-offs through the No, Go, Grow process can help avoid this kind of overlap and confusion. Also, avoid spin-offs that pursue the same purpose as the original community and are different only because they focus on a particular business unit, geographic region, or some other distinguishing factor besides purpose. Repeating the same purpose in a different part of the organization can easily create community silos and artificial distinctions that diminish the power of mass collaboration.Read more at location 2443 •
In addition, after some experience with the community, Loyola moved student discussion boards off the university site and onto Facebook. “We adopted the principle that we needed to be where the students are, not make the students go where we wanted them to go.” said Roberts.Read more at location 2570 •
its ability to function more or less independently creates the potential for competition with traditional corporate functions. Consider a community whose purpose is to find ways to improve the workplace. The potential for conflict with HR is obvious. While such a community may include HR personnel, it is not led by HR in the same way that a task force on working conditions would be. Such tension can lead corporate functions to dismiss communities or actively oppose them.Read more at location 2608 •
Time taken by people involved is another cost factor finance uses to assess social media–based collaboration. They tend to see time spent collaborating as time away from work or as an additional burden. Point out where collaborating is or should be a normal part of community members’ jobs already. In fact, collaborative communities are almost always a more effective and efficient way of doing what must be done to carry out current plans and meet current budgets. Communities often don’t create new work. Instead, they provide a new and better way of doing the regular work that has to be done or provide a way to achieve valued objectives. When Gilberto Garcia, the sponsor of global collaboration on CEMEX SHIFT, was asked about the time people spent, he simply said, “Successful people collaborate. It’s already part of their job. The rest need to collaborate in order to learn how to do their job better.”3 AcknowledgeRead more at location 2699 •
the now-common practice of provide-and-pray, in which organizations simply make social technologies available with the expectation that good things will happen spontaneously. They won’t in almost all cases unless you start by understanding and embracing four fundamental success factors:Read more at location 2954 •
It’s about the masses: Enabling mass collaboration is what makes social media unique and transformational. Mass collaboration requires the combination of three components: social media, community, and purpose. It’s more than a technology.Read more at location 2957 •
Make the purpose matter: Mass collaboration rarely happens by itself. That’s why simply providing the technology almostRead more at location 2959 •
always fails. Technology doesn’t attract participants—and without participation and contribution, there’s no community. If a community does form by chance, it rarely does anything useful for the sponsoring organization. You must actively nurture mass collaboration around a compelling purpose that is both meaningful to the participants and produces value for the enterprise.Read more at location 2960 •
Adhere to the six principles: A group that collaborates, no matter how large the group, doesn’t necessarily equal mass collaboration. To be truly collaborative, a community must possess six defining characteristics or principles: participation, collective, transparency, independence, persistence, and emergence. Take away any one of them and the activity is no longer mass collaboration.Read more at location 2963 •
Repeat and embed in your organization: Mass collaboration should not be treated as another organizational tool but made a core competence that’s woven into the fabric—processes, culture, systems, and practices—of your firm. The goal is to become a social organization so that, when facing any problem or opportunity, you and your colleagues throughout the firm always ask, “Would a community be a better way to deal with this?” If the answer is yes, you’re able to use mass collaboration to tap into the knowledge, experience, creativity, and passion of all those involved.Read more at location 2967 •
Move the corporate culture to one where it is commonly understood that every employee’s value to the company is much more than what they know. It’s what they share.Read more at location 3131 •
What happens when your competitor successfully turns its customer base into an extension of its sales staff? It could, in effect, turn your potential customers into your competitors. Social media has revived and energized theRead more at location 3267 •
Will you be a social organization? Or will you be competing against social organizations? In the next ten years, your ability to evolve into a social organization may determine if you thrive, survive, or disappear
Showing posts with label team building. Show all posts
Showing posts with label team building. Show all posts
Monday, 28 May 2012
Monday, 12 December 2011
The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders
A book that looks at how the top talent pickers across education, sport and business use tools to ensure they get the very best candidates that others will often overlook, and these are techniques we can all use.
In fact there are several good ideas for improving your own performance in your own job now, never mind picking your successor.
Time and again those interviewed came back to selecting on character rather than ability - but how much of our selection process tries to ensure their existing experience matches what we need them to do rather than how they did it!
America. It’s not that we don’t know enough about candidates. Today’s dossiers on serious contenders for a CEO’s job frequently surpass what the U.S. Senate knew about Supreme Court nominees a few decades ago. It’s not that there are too few talented people to fill crucial openings. This is a country in which talent proliferates.Read more at location 640
hire. His advice always flowed from the same starting point. Before you do anything else, he wrote, “Think through the assignment.” That sounds painfully simple. It seems so obvious that many leaders dash past that step.Read more at location 646
that good teaching is not about charisma. It’s not anything magical or elusive. These teachers set clear goals for their students, motivate people (in this case students and their families) to work hard toward these goals, work relentlessly to accomplish them, and constantly assess their effectiveness and improve their performance over time.Read more at location 794
The best experts in any field constantly stretch their horizons so they can do something new. That is how they stay sharp. Nobel laureates do this; great composers do this—and so do the savviest judges of human potential. They refuse to become so habit-bound that familiar customsRead more at location 923
“The best candidates are constantly trying to figure out why they went off the path,” Kiev added. “They’re introspective. They remember every detail. The ones who don’t learn much have hazy memories. They tend to blame external factors. They sound intellectually honest, but they aren’t. Their excuses are plentiful.” In Kiev’s view, the difference between rebounders and evaders is “hardwired into people. If you’re inquiring well, you should be able to get at it.”Read more at location 1078
Consider this admonition from a popular management primer on hiring: Lou Adler’s Hire with Your Head. The author’s number one precept is as follows: “Remain objective throughout the interviewing process, fighting the impact of first impressions, biases, intuitions, prejudices and preconceived notions of success. This way, all information collected during the interview is both relevant and unbiased.” That’s a fine way to pick out a lawn mower. It’s not a great way to choose people.Read more at location 1360
One of Dr. Weiss’s favorite ways of spotting the nonobvious winners is to see how candidates answer a quartet of essay questions that are aimed at drawing out students’ character. Those questions ask students to talk about rewarding experiences, overcoming adversity, areas of pride, and moments of exclusion.Read more at location 1544
Ask audition masters what they are hunting for, and the deepest answers involve subjects’ character. Regardless of differences in the exact ways that talent is expressed, each domain’s underlying quests are strikingly similar: Who tries hard? Who prepares well? Who recovers quickly and calmly from a setback? Who works well with others? Who can size up a turbulent situation and come up with a plan?Read more at location 1627
What the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team wants is remarkably similar to what Johns Hopkins, Facebook, and dozens of other high-talent organizations are seeking, too. The FBI’s list is as follows: Initiative, perseverance, and compatibility.Read more at location 1776
Discipline, trainability, and judgment. Loyalty, leadership, and maturity.Read more at location 1779
Mediocre engineers were seen as silent saboteurs, spewing out flawed computer code that could take years to fix.Read more at location 1877
For a while, Canfield scouted the world of stand-up comics. As he later explained, they are marvelous storytellers. They hone their material relentlessly, so that it connects with an audience. (If they don’t, they become sit-down comics.) And they are keenly aware of audiences’ short attention span, in ways that other narrators often overlook.Read more at location 2041
Menkes started running critical-thinking tests for corporate clients. He wrote a book about his approach called Executive Intelligence.Read more at location 3456
“CEOs who are persistent and proactive get things done. CEOs who are not, do not get things done, even if they are good listeners, team players, etc. And if you do not get things done, the people working for you get frustrated or even leave, particularly the better ones.”Read more at location 3581
Seek out “talent that whispers.” The world is full of overlooked people,Read more at location 3636
Rely on auditions to see how and why people achieve the results they do.Read more at location 3682
To learn the most from an audition, pay attention to more than the absolute caliber of the performance. Concentrate hardest on what you can learn about the candidate’s character.Read more at location 3687
Be willing to pick one trait that matters more than anything. Often the ability to recover from setbacks is what separates people who surpass expectations from those who disappoint. ResilienceRead more at location 3705
Be alert to other invisible virtues, too. Curiosity is also invisible on most résumés yet it is a remarkable talisman in many careers.Read more at location 3714
accomplish. If you choose to champion great talent, you will be picking one of the most altruistic things a person can do. Making the most of the next generation of achievers is akin to parenting, except on a larger scale. The benefits to society are likely to be much greater than the personal gain.Read more at location 3770
Thursday, 28 July 2011
Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down by Vineet Nayar
A story of how a compaby albeit a high tech one, transformed itself and saved the business from a potential terminal decline. It really should be a must-read for today's managers leading organisations where we rely on the intellectual commitment of our teams.
There are echos of the Trust Quotient book I read last year but this one is nore about applying prnciples ina concrete way to a real business.
today the asset base of an organization increasingly resides in the talent and creativity of its employees. Knowledge-based businesses, especially, depend on excited teams of individuals who are eager to take on one challenging task after another and to act as custodians of the tacit knowledge in the organization. To manage them—especially Gen Y employees, and particularly in global organizations—requires a new set of capabilities. Vineet’s story shows how a company can focus on its value creators—the frontline employees—to achieve remarkable growth and profits.Read more at location 35 •
as CEO, or as any leader or manager, you must stop thinking of yourself as the only source of change. You must avoid the urge to answer every question or provide a solution to every problem. Instead, you must start asking questions, seeing others as the source of change, and transferring ownership of the organization’s growth to the next generation of leaders who are closer to the value zone. Only in this way can you begin to create a company that is self-run and self-governed,Read more at location 189 •
Management did not say to the employees in the value zone, “What can we do to help you?” Instead, we wasted their precious time and energy by requiring them to make endless presentations to us about irrelevant things and write reports about what they had or had not done. Not only did we have to stop wasting their time, but we also had to find a way to put the value zone at the center of the organization.Read more at location 473 •
Employees first. Customers second. Management … third?Read more at location 495 •
If your organization has more than a couple of hundred people in it, most of them don’t know you. You know you are trustworthy, but they do not. I believe that your personal trust quotient is lower than you think it is—probably quite a bit lower.Read more at location 712 •
The Trusted Advisor. Maister says there are four dimensions of trust:
Credibility: Credibility comes from professional expertise. If the person possesses deep knowledge and follows good practice, you feel trust in what he or she says and does.
Reliability: Reliability is revealed through actions over time.
Intimacy: This aspect of trust is about emotions. You instinctively feel that you can or cannot discuss many kinds of issues with a certain person
Self-orientation: The self-oriented dimension is Maister’s fourth aspect of trust. This one, though, reduces the trust quotient. It is about your motives and the things you care about. Can I trust you to think beyond your own self-interest?Read more at location 743 •
Opening the Window of Information The idea was to open the window of financial information.Read more at location 836 •
Opening Up the Office of the CEO: The U&I PortalRead more at location 875 •
Catalysts are simple actions, rather than elaborate programs of organizational transformation change that plod on for years and years, and they can help transform a locked-up culture into one that is constantly changing.Read more at location 1028 •
the value zone no longer lay in the technology itself and certainly not in any particular hardware or software technology. Customers could choose among many options, all of which would likely enable them to achieve their goals if implemented well. Something had to be different, then, about the way the technologies were brought together and implemented for each customer. Something more had to be changed about how we delivered our services.Read more at location 1095 •
enabled customers to cut down the cycle times in their most critical business processes, including these: Order to cash: from the moment of accepting a customer order to the receipt of payment for delivery of the order Desire to hire: from the definition of an open job position to filling it Concept to manufacture: from new-product prototype to finished production unitRead more at location 1121 •
And so we designed a survey that asked questions like these: Does this manager help you enhance the value you are delivering to the customer? After discovering that you have a problem, does this manager help you define the problem and help you identify its solution? When you approach the manager with a problem, does he or she respond by offering solutions or resolving the issues involved? If you can’t reach the solutions on your own, does the manager enable you to reach out to other people in the organization who help you achieve the solutions?Read more at location 1422 •
We saw that the EFCS concept, when applied to a large acquisition like the AXON merger, could generate such powerful results that we completed four more successful acquisitions in that year. With each of them, we proved that when a CEO focuses less on governing and more on enabling, the executive can accomplish much that might otherwise have been too risky to undertake.Read more at location 1869 •
The speed of thought, of change, and of implementation gets suffocated by too much hierarchy, wherever it may be. The only way to remove hierarchy in the organization is to recast the role of the CEO as one who asks more questions than he or she answers. The rest of the hierarchy will soon tumble.Read more at location 1880 •
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