Louise McGregor ESN Playbook, Leadership

Support versus Commitment

In every big project in every company you need your senior executives on board. If you’re the project manager you’re asked to get the support of leadership.

On paper leadership support sounds good; it often comes with budget and it can pave the way for decision-making.

It’s not enough.

You need commitment of your leadership. So what is the difference?If you think of the bacon and eggs breakfast; the chicken was supportive, the pig was committed.

Commitment is visible in the organisation. If your executive is visible connected to your project then she has a real stake in its success. Budget will be more easily released, decision-making will become easier, other leaders will want to be part of it. Perhaps more importantly a number of the doubts about the project will dissolve, the fact that an executive puts their name on a project gives it a credibility vaccination.

Years ago when I was involved in implementing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) at a large financial institution we’d done really well with good adoption numbers and some real business results. We also had the support of our CEO, who’d even featured in a launch video. I was happy about the momentum we were building.

Then we got a new CEO who wanted to use the ESN to reach employees and have a real discussion. Wow. What a difference, his name was on a community and he was interacting with employees. The questions people had about using an ESN changed from “why” to “how”. There was a growing assumption that this would be how we worked.

So, look for executives who are ready to commit, ask for their visible commitment, and move the conversation from “why” to “how”.

Image:  After a Night’s Fast  | Pekka Nikrus  | CC BY-NC-SA2.0

 

Louise McGregor Business, ESN Playbook

Work Out Loud


Companies, particularly large companies, are organised into departments, and departments are organised into teams. It would be a rare project where you did not need the expertise of someone outside your own team. Yet silos within companies persist. Collaboration tools are starting to break them down, but we need more than that, we need to change our working behaviour. Rather than working to a defined goal and sharing the output, we should share the work in progress and the process; we should work out loud.

Bryce Williams coined the term and defines two behaviours that combine to form “working out loud”

Working Out Loud   =   Observable Work   +   Narrating Your Work

Or to paraphrase; “show and tell”.

Promoters of the concept give a long list of benefits;

Wow, with all of that good stuff why aren’t we all working out loud? Because it’s hard. It goes against everything our education and training have taught us.

All through school we’re told to show our own work, to prove what we know, and the pressure to do this grows as we face the exams of high school and then, if we’re lucky, the pressured halls of a university with still more exams, dissertations and theses. Even courses that promise group work still reward individuals on outcome, rather than process; meaning that teams form along ability lines pretty quickly – free-loaders and stragglers are left to rot. School is predicated on individual achievement.

Work isn’t.

At work we rely on the co-operation and collaboration of others, we draw on the expertise of others and after a project is completed it can be hard to discern who was responsible for each detail. Most often it doesn’t matter who did what, in a good team the pride is shared.

The idea of working out loud fits our new reality of work, plus we have the tools to share our work, and collect feedback/input in an easy way. But the change in behaviour is still a challenge, both as individuals and as a company change.

Bryce Williams suggests some ways to think about use cases for working out loud. While I do think that systematic efforts to change people’s behaviour are needed the biggest way to stimulate this change is to model the behaviour you want to see in the company.

The behaviours I try to demonstrate to build up my own habits of working out loud are;

  • sharing updates on the ESN Playbook I’m writing as often as possible, and these are becoming more content related
  • drawing on the work of others and providing commentary (as in this post)
  • sharing work of others – and giving them credit
  • asking for input or feedback

There are more ideas for working out loud (as well as what not to do) in this great article from HBR. What will you do to build your working out loud habit?

 

 

Louise McGregor ESN Playbook

Risk and an ESN

There are some genuine risk issues to consider when you set up an Enterprise Social Network, they fall into roughly four categories;

  • technology (if this is a business tool, what is availability required?)
  • legal
  • data
  • user behaviour

In the first phase of implementing our ESN we spent a lot of time discussing these, particularly the last one. I felt that too often we build something starting from a risk perspective – focusing on all the things that can go wrong. I really want us to start from a principle of trust, after all we wanted our people to trust each other in their online collaboration.

I kept these three principles in mind in all the discussions with the risk and legal professionals;

  • We trust our employees – most employees do the right thing, few make mistakes, and only a tiny tiny minority deliberately go against policy
  • We will demonstrate that trust
  • We will address real risk or legal issues

There were several “fear-based proposals” that came up for discussion during the implementation. I recall one proposal that someone should review all the images used by people in their profiles. My heart sank. I made a counter offer – as it was non-standard functionality it would need to be built and would cost x euro, I asked them to let me know when they had budget available. I never heard back. In the two years since launch thousands of people have chosen an image for their profile, most often an image of themselves. None have been problematic in any way.

In the end we went with the simplest terms and conditions we could when we introduced a collaboration platform at ING. We had really simple terms, in daily language and framed in the positive; “be nice”, for example, rather than “do not”.

For the most part people were “nice”, they posted mostly work-related content, were generous with their comments and mindful of the tone they were using. Even more remarkable, on the rare occasions when someone wasn’t “nice”, it was the community who addressed it directly and on screen. In at least one case the response reminded the poster that our business values include “respect”.

A reporting mechanism was also a requirement for us – so all users can report a post that they think is an issue – in 2 years, with over 50,000 users and over 25,000 posts we had just two posts reported, neither of which had lead to any real negative impact.

We’re not alone in this finding – other companies report similar outcomes.

It turns out that when people are posting under their own name, and where their colleagues and boss can see it, they post responsibly. You can trust them.

Image: Risk via pixabay