“Leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top.”
“Understand the social network not as your new water cooler, but as your new production line.”
Do we really understand why cultures control information-sharing?
As social business advocates we champion information-sharing at work and bemoan cultures that don’t. However, according to recent academic research, there may be good reasons, beyond intellectual property and privacy issues, for people not to share,
An ethnographic study of a bio-informatics team in China looked at practices around sharing software. Sharing data is central to contemporary science, and software is of primary importance to its progress. Accordingly, investigators — from the School of Computer Science at Fudan University in Shanghai and the Human Centered Design & Engineering department at the University of Washington in Seattle — to understand the tension between sharing and control within an emerging discipline that merges biology with IT.
A fishing pole instead of a fish
One of their findings relates to internal practices. For example, members of a team write their own code, or script, in the course of their work. But instead of posting it online for all team members to use as needed, they share it only when asked for it. Investigators uncovered good reasons for this practice.
Training junior members of the team has high priority; so faculty and senior researchers need to determine when to share what is already available and when to have students practice coding themselves. Finding answers on the intranet may help scientists-in-training solve an immediate problem. It does not, however, necessarily develop the skills they need to innovate in the future. Hence the use of a “request-and-give” protocol for sharing.
Documentation and peer review
Another finding looks at boundaries to sharing software across the wider scientific community. When submitting an academic paper for review, scientists must also provide documentation, rationale and algorithms for the software they used in their work. In this way the publication of scientific findings is tied to the associated software as part of the peer review process. Proliferation of undocumented software is thereby controlled and the scientific community gains access to software they can trust and use.
So, what is the purpose of this non-judgmental way of looking at sharing versus control? For the authors of this study it’s the way to create better social software. Do you think their findings apply to social software in business settings? And if so, to what extent?
More than culture, it’s job structure that impedes social business
Excerpts from Jon Husband blog on Enterprise Collaborative:
A primary tool in designing work and structure is job evaluation. The methods used today were created in the mid-1950’s and haven’t changed much since then. Their core assumptions are directly derived from, and have helped embed, Taylorism at the core of the modern organization
I don’t mean job evaluation as in assessing a person’s performance on the job – I mean the function usually managed by HR departments that ‘measures’ or ‘weighs’ jobs, and assigns them to levels and pay grades based on job “weight” with respect to skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions (the legal criteria for assessing pay equity).
I believe that these tools and their underlying assumptions are used to create the skeletal architecture of hierarchical organizations, the pyramid we all know.
These fundamental principles of work design need to be examined and re-conceived if the significant power of social computing is ever to be realized.
The definitions of the know-how (knowledge and skills ) factor levels are paraphrased from the semantic definitions on the actual Hay Guide Chart.
A - Unschooled and unskilled
B - Some school, some skill
C - Basic high school, routine work
D - Vocational school, community college, trades, senior administrative
E - University graduation, senior trades, managerial (reads the books)
F - University plus 10 years experience, grad school (puts the books to use)
G - Deep knowledge and expertise (writes the books)
H - God (has others write the books)
These methods did not envision or foresee the Web, hyperlinks and the exchanges of information which have spawned and carry the bit-by-bit layering and assembly of knowledge and peer-to-peer negotiation of results and responsibilities we are seeing emerge with greater frequency in this new networked world.Any of us familiar with medium to large sized organizations can begin to see, I believe, that the fundamental Taylorist assumption that knowledge is structured vertically and put to use in siloed pyramidic structures and cascaded down to the execution level must be straining at the seams in the increasingly highly-connected social networks in which many people work today.
I think many executives and senior managers sense massive challenges to the power and status relationships (the core of yet-to-change organizational structure) that exist in most of today’s larger organizations. This sense of a growing challenge is behind many senior managers’ and executives’ struggles to understand or become enthusiastic about the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0. There is no Guide Chart yet about networked know-how, problem-solving or accountability.
via Why E2.0 and Social Business Initiatives Are Likely to Remain Difficult ?
Students, social influence and social media
IBM 2012 Global Student Study: almost half find social voice through social media
Social media is exposing students to alternative ideas, philosophies and life experiences. It is also giving them an opportunity to exert influence in a much more interconnected world.
- 61 percent of students say social media helps increase their awareness of the world. They believe that “compared to older generations, social media has made me more aware of global issues and how I can make a difference in the world.”
- Nearly half of students said social media has given them a more powerful voice in society (47 percent) or helped them increase their engagement in real-life activity (40 percent).
Leadership In A Social Era: Notes From #Pivotcon
…three challenges for leadership. I think these form a power law: the first is twice as large/critical/difficult as the second, and the second is twice as large as the third. So I am going to take 2 minutes for the first, one minute for the second, and 30 seconds for the third.
1 Welcome To The Postnormal
We’re no longer living in the old economy, based on industrial-era principles. That’s over. We’ve crossed into the Postnormal, and most leaders are either unaware of that transition, or are seeing only disconnected parts of it.
It’s not just that things have sped up: it’s the changes that this degree of speed brings.The Postnormal is an era typified as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, or VUCA. This translates into a context where
- things are changing unpredictably,
- we don’t know what is good or bad information,
- economic systems are so interconnected we can’t analyze the impacts of our efforts on them,
- and we can’t effectively ‘read’ the situation we are confronted with.
Denise Caron says it well [emphasis mine]:
We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and elimination of uncertainty to solve, to a world of dilemmas, which demand patience, sense-making, and an engagement of uncertainty.
So learning how to lead and thrive in the Postnormal must be leadership’s first job.
2 Leadership In The Time Of Followership
The rise of the social web is changing the world, and causing some to equate large followings online with leadership. John Holt countered that, saying this {emphasis mine.]
Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. The include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about.
3 The 3D Workforce: Distributed, Decentralized, and Discontinuous
Part of the postnormal world of business is the 3D work force: distributed, decentralized, and discontinuous (as I explored in a recent GigaOM Pro report on Work Media, aka enterprise social networks). It’s a work anywhere, with anyone, and any time world. But there is a lurking fourth D: disaffected. Businesses are confronted with growing numbers of uninvolved workers, many who have lost faith in their companies since 2008, perhaps as a result of company-led economic ‘adjustments’.
The Simplest Way For Leaders To Gain Lasting Loyalty - Forbes
“There are of course a number of ways for leaders to gain loyalty that involve variations around compensating your employees, running a sound ship and producing strong results for your organization. These are all naturally true, but I’d argue there’s one other method that’s simpler and more fundamental and will serve you well in good economic times and bad … “
5 ways social business benefits organizational culture
For those who worry that culture won’t support social business, look at what social business can do for the culture:
1. Feedback and appraisal – occurs much more frequently and with more people involved
2. Decision making – not just managers
3. Transparency – default is no longer ”need to know”
4. Employee interactions – employees opt in to interaction instead of being distracted in an ”open office”
5. Results oriented – manages measure employee output, not hours worked
The C-Suite. We know who they are, but do we really know what they do? In the era of empowered employees, the chief executives are either working for you or against you. First in a series, this article features the CEO and insights from IBM’s CEO Study (via Meet the C-Suite: Understanding Their Impact on Social Business)
