Taking over channels

by JuliePosted on September 17, 2013

The New York Times was hacked today, reportedly by a group called the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), who has claimed responsibility for a number of highly visible hacks lately. They claim to be using their methods as a way of getting the word out about their cause. Basically, they take over the domain name of a well known publication like the Times and post their own messages to the site. In this case, they survived about 3 minutes before security kicked in and their messages were blocked. But they took the site down with them – NYTimes.com has been struggling for the last 24 hours to recover.

In old movies the evil antagonist sometimes intercepts the TV news report to say whatever he has to say – captivating the attention of the town, city, nation, or world (depending on his stage and the movie plot). The idea is much the same here – take over the most obvious channel to the public you can find and use it for your own messaging. It is the most complete form of interruption you can create in today’s society for news and information about the world around you.

When we look at the channels of communication that create and reflect culture in an organization, executives often get very excited about using them to push out a message. I’d suggest that can be as inappropriate as taking over a media distribution website to push your own agenda on people who otherwise wouldn’t see your message. If you want to ride a channel, get into the conversation instead of shutting it down. Learn to navigate through the discussions that are being had. Be a part of something instead of demanding that everyone pay attention to you for a moment in time.

I’m not making a political statement about SEA – just using the site hacking practice as an analogy for what I sometimes see happening in companies as they try to make one message stand out amongst a sea of information that is directed at the people who make up the organization. Before you take over, stop and ask yourself ‘is this the best way to use this channel? Is it the best way to connect with these people?’

Innovation requires space for thinking – are you willing to give that?

by JuliePosted on September 16, 2013

I wrote a post earlier this summer about innovation and creativity, pointing out that many companies say they want it, but what they really want are the outputs. They aren’t necessarily willing to embrace the messiness that comes with it. Today in the New York Times there was a great opinion piece about creativity and how we systematically eradicate it from the workplace and from the skills of our workers while saying we ‘really’ want it. Managing innovation really means managing the space around it – providing breathing room for life to happen. Are you willing to provide that in your company?

My favorite quote from the article:

“Creativity requires giving self-directed original thinkers space for the missteps and dead ends that are often prerequisites for groundbreaking work”.

Check out the full opinion piece here.

The Power of the Middle

by JuliePosted on August 6, 2013

A few months ago I wrote a post on the power of middle management. Too often we disparage the middle, but in fact they are incredibly powerful assets to most organizations, doing far more than ‘pushing paper’. They are the glue in many companies – the conduits through which tremendous work gets done. When underleveraged they become sluggish and disfunctional for sure, but done right, a strong middle management can make a company great. Unfortunately, too often we make middle management out to be a mill or mindless work, or a sandtrap from which there is no escape. We lean on middle managers to do a mix of critical thinking and rote tasks that can create a crushing sense of overload without corresponding value.

In addition, these days we seem to have such a hang up on wanting to be ‘leaders’ instead of ‘managers’, as if there were a way to be one and not the other in 90% of roles in businesses today. This language creates an automatic pecking order – leaders are somehow better than ‘just a manager’, and people who don’t manage to rise out of middle management over time are treated as underperformers, or ‘left behind’.

I suggest we let go of the baggage associated with “management” and remember the purpose and what is accomplished when strong management is an available resource. When you design for VUCA, the middle becomes even more important because it provides a space for stability in a variable world. Giving people opportunities to move around and grow within ‘the middle’ as well as moving up is critically important. Additionally, figuring out what motivates people at this level is tough to do in an aggregate way, in part because people’s motivations change as their lives change. If you want to unlock the power of the middle, you are going to have to get personal. Talking to individuals and figuring out growth plans that are right for them takes time, but it helps tremendously in terms of motivation and engagement.

Today the topic made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Check it out if you are interested in reading more about what’s going on in middle management.

Making a decision is critical – being right is only a bonus

by JuliePosted on July 26, 2013

I saw a quote today in an e-mail from a departing colleague. He referenced Teddy Roosevelt saying “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

It is a great quote about being willing to take chances and to make a change in your life even when the outcome is uncertain. Our greatest progress often comes in moments when we have the least amount of clarity about what the results will be of our actions.

Change management is about giving people the intellectual ability to understand what is coming with reasonable clarity, but change happens when people are willing to take an emotional leap to commit to something new, even though they don’t know what it will feel like until they do it. Think about some of the biggest changes you’ve made in your life – did you have all the answers before you moved on it? Did you know exactly what would happen? Did it all work out as you planned? Probably not.

The emotional commitment to change is tied to yesterday’s blog post on curiosity. You have to be curious about what will happen, because you won’t always know for sure. Sometimes you have to simply step up, take a chance, and make a decision based some parts on data and information and other parts emotion. Striking the right balance is the secret for sure. What has happened when you’ve made decisions based on the right balance of data and emotion? Anything exciting? I’ll bet those were the best decisions you ever made, even if they were intellectually ‘wrong’.

I’m not sure riding a bull moose is the best decision Teddy ever made, but he probably had a ton of fun doing it!

Trusting people who think differently

by JuliePosted on July 24, 2013

I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last 48 hours about the idea of trust. It is a difficult concept to unpack – you know it when you see it or feel it, but it is hard to explain. I often have clients who say “we just don’t trust each other”, or “the leadership team has trust issues”, but when it comes to explaining what that means, they struggle. “Oh,” they say, “it isn’t that I don’t LIKE so and so…. and he/she is a nice enough person, but….” and they trail off.

We often have a natural trust for people which whom we have a shared affinity. Republicans hear and trust Fox News to be ‘fair and balanced’, while Democrats look at the Huffington Post as a source of ‘truth and honest reporting’. I think in the workplace, operations people often ‘trust’ other ops people, because they understand how they think and what they are trying to accomplish. When the sales person enters the room, there can be a natural distrust of their motives because they think and act ‘differently’. Trusting someone who is different from you is a much bigger step than trusting someone who is similar.

Unpacking this concept and learning how it influences us all in the workplace, in our relationships and in life is a difficult task, but it can shed light on how we all behave, and explain the choices we make. Think about it for yourself – what happens when you extend your trust to someone who is quite different from you? Do you feel a little queasy? What happens in the interactions you have with that person? Are they warm or cold? Are they generative or practical? If they feel a little distant, you may not be really opening yourself up to trusting them. Try it tomorrow – you might be surprised by what you discover.

Change and Management – do they go together?

by JuliePosted on June 21, 2013

Since the early 1990s, when “Change Management” became two words we use together comfortably, the idea of managing individuals through change in the workplace has matured considerably. We now have maturity models, processes, templates, and detailed plans complete with measurements that assure us that our change efforts have been successful. I would suggest that much of this work has greatly enhanced how we manage technoogy and process projects. Focusing on how and when we give people training, how we communicate to them about what’s coming, and how they provide feedback, following the traditional ‘transmission model’ of communications, has its usefulness.

However, when it comes to changing ‘how we work’, management is an ambitious term for what is naturally a messy and turbulant process. Cultures emerge, grow, change, and die over time through collective efforts (or lack thereof) from all sorts of forces. Even worse for the management-minded, culture resists measurement – as soon as you turn a telescope on it you it moves (changes) and eludes you. That makes it exciting for social scientists and frustrating for management scientists – although often frustrating in a ‘good way’ 🙂

I suggest we need to bring together social sciences and management sciences to effectively think about this phenomena. But….. social scientists will need to wrap their heads around the manage pespective that values ‘hard numbers and proof points’, and management scientists (and practicioners) will need to be open to different ways of seeing and valuing progress. It remains to be seen if that’s a gulf that can be crossed in managemnet consulting and in industry, as well as in academia.

I might be wrong, but I am not confused….

by JuliePosted on June 18, 2013

When I think about the most generative, productive, and fun teams I’ve ever been on, we were not perfect communicators. We did not always practice ‘appreciative inquiry’ or ‘seek first to understand’, or ‘respectfully disagree’. Sometimes we really had at it – arguing loudly (in the olden days we would have called it shouting), disagreeing directly without any carefully worded phrases about how we can ‘agree to disagree’, but flat out saying ‘you are wrong, I’m right, and here’s why’. That created highly productive tension, where we were motivated to continue the discussion and through our disagreements, find incredibly creative and innovative new ways of thinking and doing.

When I talk to clients about creative tension, they nod and listen carefully (they have been well trained), and then with a wink and a nod say ‘yes, but respectful disagreement, right?’ or ‘managed tension, right?’ To which I want to say ‘wrong’. We have moved so much to moderate positions, to a calm, rational, respectful environment, that there is no room for passion, for the energy that comes from truly arguing with someone. When I look at companies that are struggling with “innovation”, part of what I see is a lack of passionate team members who are committed to being a team, but also to having the normal, “I am human and not always perfect” connections. I’m at the point where when someone gently says to me “I think you must be confused” when what they really mean is that they disagree with me. I look them straight in the eye and say “I might be wrong, but I am not confused.” In other words, don’t be afraid to challenge me, to say that you think I’m wrong. I’d prefer that to someone avoiding confrontation by suggesting that I’m somehow addled in my thinking.

Sometimes the things that stitch teams together the most are those moments of incredible challenge, where someone has had a complete meltdown, and the team needs to figure out how to pull itself together and move on. Those are the moments that form us – not the polite niceness of communication via communications training templates. Think about the best teams you’ve been on – best meaning most productive, innovative, and interesting. Were they always perfect? Were there moments of complete disarray? Were there sometimes very upset people? I’m willing to be there were. Interpersonal distress creates great bonds that tie people together for a lot of reasons.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should go to a work environment full of angry, disrespectful people. I’m a fan of appreciative inquiry, crucial conversation templates, and other devices that help us to get our points across in moderated ways. But I also think that we need room to sometimes let things slip, to be a little organic and messy, and to express our passion in less than perfect ways. Not all the time, but at times for sure.

Management folks seem to think there is some terrifyingly slippery slope in this way – that one moment of passion will lead to chaos in the workplace, or tyrant behavior, or mass hysteria. So they punish people who get out of line – sometimes quickly and harshly, rather than investigating what is driving their passion and figuring out how to leverage it to create productive tension. But a calm, moderated workplace produces mostly calm, moderate results, and most companies with whom I work are looking for exuberant results – growth, innovation, market share, etc. That seems incommensurate to me.

Remembering the Importance of the Middle

by JuliePosted on April 30, 2013

At the Organizational Design forum today in Denver I had a good reminder of the power of the much maligned middle management layer of many organizations. Middle managers are often the punch line of a joke, the punching bag of consultants, the first to blame when things go bad and the last remembered when things go well and all sing the praises of ‘leadership’.

But it is the middle managers who are the horizontal glue holding many organizations together. They are close enough to operational roles to know how things ‘really’ get done, and they are often the future. There is much to be learned from how middle managers manage to get things done, and how they make decisions every day that affect customers, employees, and partners.

Many thanks to Andrew Zolli from PopTech for a great reminder of the power of the middle in his reference to Hancock Bank’s ability to respond quickly to Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf – back up and getting cash to people just days after the storm.

Connecting strategy and decision making

by JuliePosted on April 15, 2013

If a strategy exists, but people don’t use it to make decisions, does it really exist? An existential question? Perhaps, but it is also an important one when thinking about the ROI of investing in a ‘strategy refresh’, or creating a strategy for an organization. The biggest complaint I hear from clients about strategy is that a lot of time and effort (and money) goes into creating it, and it ends up on a shelf somewhere. The people involved in creating it ‘get it’, but they fail to communicate, to role-model, or to apply it. The people who weren’t involved get un-contextualized communications that they can’t hope to apply in a meaningful way.

You need to spend at least as much time helping people understand how to apply a strategy as you do developing it. In today’s VUCA environment of continual change, turnover, market fluctuations, and information moving at warp speed, you can’t afford to have only a few people in the organization who use the strategy to make decisions.

Here’s a presentation I gave recently on the importance of ‘engaged strategy’ – it talks about how to create a different type of strategy that people throughout the organization can use to effectively make decisions: ODF Presentation vf

What Happens Then

Julie Williamson talks about What Happens Then?

Category Archives: Management