If we accept the notion that a leader’s job is to create the right conditions that bring out the best in his/her people (check out Liz Wiseman’s excellent new book Multipliers for a fascinating perspective on this), they’re clearly not getting it done here.  And the impact is significant – especially when you consider the well-documented correlation between team climate and organizational performance – namely financial (outperforming the S&P), customer satisfaction, and employee retention.  Ben Schneider’s linkage research provides some compelling data in this area.

And, you know what Ben found to be the most important enabling condition for fostering engagement?  Psychological safety…allowing employees’ minds and hearts to be expressed in their work environments.  Schneider contends that this is a critical and necessary antecedent to engagement attitudes and behaviors.

Given this, I feel that there’s a missed opportunity in a lot of the leadership development and strategic communications work being performed today.  From much of what I’ve seen in the marketplace, many initiatives often do not directly address the most foundational leadership aspect that affects climate at each & every employee interaction – the quality of the communicator’s presence.

“Woo-woo” as this may seem – isn’t it true that presence is a constant variable and provides the foundation upon which all other face-to-face communications are built – strategic messaging, client presentations, and giving difficult feedback, to name just a few?  When a solid connection exists, a lot of data gets transmitted (often unconsciously) – in the form of feelings and attitudes that convey “I’m being heard right now” or “This leader is solid, and someone I can trust and follow” or simply, “I matter.”

And they do indeed matter.  Conveying these feelings and attitudes are the main ingredients for creating a climate of safety and engagement.  Yet, it’s often either overlooked or erroneously taken as a given that leaders will deliver their well-crafted messaging on-point with optimal impact.  Of course, getting the right messaging to the proper stakeholders matters a lot, but if you’re truly looking to unlock discretionary effort – presence matters, too.

For those of you familiar with Otto Scharmer‘s groundbreaking leadership work on Theory U with with Peter Senge at MIT, this is essentially what he’s getting at – that our inner attention and intention hold the key to inspiring ourselves and others.  Incidentally, he calls this critical leadership discipline Presencing (and his global action research organization at MIT – the Presencing Institute).

Most of us are familiar with the famous social psychologist Albert Mehrabian stat that 93% of communication is non-verbal.  Whether you accept that factoid or not, it’s undeniable that “how you say it” – your presence – certainly colors how the message is transmitted, received, and interpreted by others.

So let’s not wait for an annual 360 to heighten a leader’s self-awareness in order to call attention to how he/she “shows up” and “holds the space” in communication and listening through solid presence.  Each of us can cultivate this stronger presence right now, in every interaction.  What’s required is an ongoing, moment-to-moment attention and intention to listen with openness and non-judgment, and speak from a place of connection.  This is easier said than done in our information-overload, multi-task world.

Each interaction provides a leader with an opportunity to inspire trust and action, or erode it.  The more we can attune leaders’ awareness to this truth, the more we can move the needle of engagement and tap into a latent potential that will produce real upside in organizations.  It’s always there, right in front of you….and it starts, and ends, with the quality of our presence.

I’ll be presenting my findings at the annual FOT retreat next week, but wanted to share a couple of top-line findings and one of my interpretations with those who won’t be joining us in Monterey Bay.

Headline #1: Some of the world’s most progressive firms actually do no formal workforce planning. Rather, they take an organic, grassroots approach to cross-functional collaboration and resourcing for projects and business initiatives.  This, in turn, means that talent needs are largely dictated by line managers and project leads.  This makes a lot of sense, as these are the people who intimately know the needs of the project and the types of people required to get the work done, but it struck me as paradoxical, given the high level of people-process sophistication at these firms.

Headline #2: Job descriptions don’t really matter once talent is inside the organization. People get staffed on projects based, firstly, on who they know, and secondly, on what they know.  As such, the quality of an employee’s personal network and own branding & reputation tend to be the key determinants of success – in terms of being presented opportunities or pulled into projects.  This practice is supported by collaborative technology platforms, but in fewer instances does the technology actually drive the internal resourcing process.

While new collaborative, enterprise social software is all the rage these days – and rightly so – in the end, they’re just tools that provide access to more data.  Sure, this technology is tremendously valuable at the front end in terms of locating the right people or skill-sets, but once you’re inside the organization, project resourcing still tends to occur, more or less, the old-fashioned way…It boils down to who you know, and who knows you.

So what?  I interpret this as another data point that confirms how important it is for leaders to wield social capital and effectively communicate to “tell the story” of a new idea or project in order to build momentum and swiftly align the proper resources – human, financial, or otherwise – to ensure the project’s viability and success.  In addition, leaders must be skilled at what I call “container shaping” – setting the right tone, objectives, and clear strategy to promote the enabling conditions for this emergent collaboration practice to take hold and thrive.

Check back for more insights from the Future of Talent Institute retreat in the coming weeks.  Talent guru Kevin Wheeler will be providing his always thought-provoking forecast of workforce trends to watch out for in 2011, which should provide a lot of fodder for future posts here at Trends at Work.  Stay tuned!

Until we collect and crunch our data, I can only hypothesize what the key implications will be.  But a preliminary hunch I’ve formed is that culture will become increasingly important as organizations rely more on a contingent (or contract-based) staff.  In particular, going forward, leaders will be required to take a market segmentation approach to shaping their culture among their various sub-groups of contributors within (and beyond) their organization’s walls.

Why?  Well, I define culture as “the way we do things around here” – which includes implicit and explicit norms, values, attitudes and assumptions that drive behavior and decision-making.  In the context of a more amorphous, fluid organization, there are different segments of contributors that comprise the workforce.  And in such an environment – where short-term, free-agent employees constitute a large part of the employee pool – what binds people together? And who do these people turn to for guidance on what’s acceptable (or not)?

The power of group norms on shaping individual behavior is strong, and cannot be underestimated or ignored; Solomon Asch’s classic research on conformity and social pressure provides great support for this.  And perhaps such insight is an even more important consideration when there is, by design, more turnover and a fragmented employee base.  Understanding where the nucleus of your culture resides and bolstering it from the inside-out is where you’ll get the most leverage.

As such, I believe an organization must turn more of its marketing and branding emphasis inward, targeting its own employees with impactful, consistent messaging – aimed at both the core full-timers and contingent workforce segments.  But the stronger focus must be on core employees; after all, this segment constitutes the “keepers of your culture” – these folks are the guardians of your brand’s attributes and the provide guideposts that your revolving door of talent will look to for direction about what will fly, or not.  So, the more these employees can articulate and embody what the culture represents (and equally important, what the culture does not represent), the more they can influence the more transient contributors and simultaneously reinforce what your company’s purpose, strategy, and work processes are.

I’ll report back with empirically-supported findings from our study soon, but I encourage leaders to think about the impacts of a free-agency economy on their workforce planning, organization structure, and culture…as this trend is already here.  And it’s here to stay.

It’s the latter.

In short, transparency and empowerment are his mantras.  He puts the employee first, the customer second, and wants decisions to be made where they should be made – where the customer meets the client.  In this unique approach, the top becomes accountable to the bottom.  Inverting the power structure within organizational hierarchies seems so out there, huh?

Not so much…his firm is one of India’s largest IT companies, and growing rapidly.

I predict that at some point within the next few years, our collective mindset about how work gets done in organizations will drastically shift.  We’ll all look back at the way that companies from the Industrial Age through the entire 20^th century have functioned (and most still do) and we’ll scratch our heads, or laugh…or both.  We’ll reminisce about those inflexible hierarchies and systems that couldn’t move quickly enough to respond to the shifting market.  We’ll cringe at the silly notion of fitting employees into narrow job descriptions that have no tangible connection or line of sight into a finished product and then wondered why they weren’t really motivated.

The good news is that this shift is already well-underway.  Remember the days when the great man theory was the prevailing concept to understanding leadership competence?  Or when face-time in the office mattered more than actual performance (it probably still does in many places…)?  Outdated as they seem today, those notions were in fashion not so long ago.

The paradox here is that in order to flip the authority dynamics inside organizations and give power to the front lines, as Nayar is doing, it still must be led from the top.  This is disruptive change, in the truest sense.

Sure, I can point to a few firms today that have done this already (with great results, I might add) – W.L. Gore, Semco, and AES immediately come to mind.  And these scant examples are of legendary status within corporate culture and management consulting circles.  But most organizations are nowhere even close.  Rather, they’re largely still trapped in these outdated paradigms.

That’s why Nayar’s my man.  We need him.  W.L. Gore had Bill Gore, Semco had Ricardo Semler, and AES had Dennis Bakke.  Those leaders had what it takes to boldly lead such transformational change – vision, dedication, and hunger.  So does Nayar.  It’s counterintuitive, but he understands that stakeholder engagement and a strong culture are the lynchpins to HCL’s success.  Loosening the grip of control is the key to thriving in the loosely-affiliated, volatile, unpredictable business landscape we operate in today.  And he’s brave enough to buck convention and turn his organization upside-down, literally, in order to position it to thrive into the future.

The thing is, this CEO knows well that buying his enterprise social software on its own doesn’t magically get his clients what they’re after.  While it’s indisputable that they’ll get some immediate pay-off such as the potential (certainly not a given) for employees, customers and strategic partners to interact in different ways, the point here is that getting the most out of E2.0 requires deep inner work – on behalf of leadership and the organization-at-large.

You see, this technology won’t take hold if the espoused values aren’t the values in-use in an organization.  That’s culture change guru Edgar Schein’s words, not mine.  And, I contend that if we were to conduct a gap analysis on this in most organizations,  you could drive a Mack truck through that gap.  Because, frankly, a lot of companies just don’t walk their talk.  They say one thing about who they are and the values that define their decisions, but in practice, there’s incongruence all over the place.

And if leaders have a credibility problem with their stakeholders, this stuff just won’t fly.  Simply buying a social media solution in and of itself doesn’t cause the problem to go away.  Actually, to the contrary, it’ll only exacerbate it if the leadership practices don’t change, and they’re just perpetuating the same old culture but now touting a new software solution.

So it got me thinking…The same truism applies to organizations as it does to individuals:  In order to produce lasting change, there’s got to be a deep commitment and readiness from within to want to improve the status quo.  This is usually instigated by intolerable discomfort or self-awareness, or both.  What must follow is a cognitive-behavioral action plan with incremental steps to move, gradually (but not too gradually…pushing people past their levels of comfort and gaining momentum are key), in the direction of achieving clearly-defined goals.  That’s why assessing leadership readiness, and subsequently an overall organization’s cultural readiness, should be the first step in any E2.0 change management approach.  If leaders don’t have the clarity, burning desire, or stomach to drive the change that E2.0 adoptions will test, they should reassess whether they want to embark on this journey altogether.  And until that happens, these will remain aspirational (and elusive) – rather than living and breathing – values.

A quick footnote: A word to the wise regarding effective change management for E2.0 adoptions.  Start small.  Identify who and where your highest likelihood for early wins exist, and begin there.  That requires a lot of due-diligence – hence the up-front readiness assessment described above.  For some finer details about this, see my post If you (just) build it, they won’t come.

So, one of the techniques we’ve employed with great results was to frame up an organization as a conversation, or more accurately – the collective conversations that occur inside and outside the walls of the company.  If my clients accept this notion of organization as conversation, they can then pay closer attention to the words they use to talk about the strategy, values, and team mission, as well as the deployment of these carefully-constructed messages.

And, as they’ve done this, what has happened is that it has sharpened these managers’ sensitivity to perceptions – what’s being said, by whom, and how it’s being said, as well as – perhaps most importantly – what’s NOT being said.  This is a biggie, especially with the ‘operating from their own set of assumptions’ piece discussed above.  As they start to socialize these assumptions throughout the organization, they get immediate insight into what is fact vs. fabrication.

Sounds so simple, but it’s amazing what ascertaining these tidbits of information can do.  And, this is blatantly obvious, but these insights are only arrived at through ongoing conversations.  And these conversations will only occur if (1) the intention is there, (2) it becomes an ongoing practice is an ingrained leadership discipline, and (3) the leaders establish the proper enabling conditions – a climate of safety and openness – for their team members to be compelled to have this honest dialogue.  Taken together, you have a pretty in-touch leader.

It’s worth acknowledging that this approach is heavily influenced by the work of linguist George Lakoff and organizational theorist Gareth Morgan’s book Imaginization.  Essentially, these guys are talking about the impact that words and metaphor have on our individual and collective mental models, and how human beings acribe meaning (leading to action) through the use of words, metaphor, and story.  As such, the more that managers can use powerful language to align people under a common purpose and appeal to individual’s hearts and minds, the higher likelihood of spurring commitment and desired behaviors.

I have many, many more thoughts on this topic and will be sharing them in subsequent posts over the next few weeks…but before I do, let us have a conversation.  I’d love to hear YOUR initial ideas on how reframing organizations as conversations causes a shift for you, or not, regarding how you can be more effective as a manager or consultant with the organizations you work with.  To prime the pump, you can think of applying this org as conversation metaphor to leadership, strategy execution, employee engagement/commitment, corporate communications, community building, organization design, or whatever else comes up for you.

Let me know what you think…and stay tuned for more on this in the weeks ahead.

It’s my belief that successful Web 2.0 platforms across enterprises hinges not only on the robustness of the technology itself, but also understanding how people tick.  Taken together, you can design and execute well-conceived change management strategies that gain traction AND support your E2.0 aims.  This, no doubt, will get you the optimal outcomes you’re after.  Daniel Siddle hit it on the head with his recent blog: Balancing Technology and Culture During a Social Business Implementation.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not picking on the technology.  The stuff that firms like Socialtext, iCohere, Spigit, Jive, and Confluence are pumping out is great, and only getting better every day.  My vendor rocks; they put out new releases every two weeks and provide really attentive customer service to ensure that their suite is meeting our needs.  This sort of commitment to making their platform as user-friendly as possible will certainly grease the adoption process.  But on its own, it’s still just a tool – and won’t necessarily accelerate companies along the Social Software Value Matrix.  The complementary piece to the technology itself – the requisite behavior change at the individual, team/departmental, and enterprise levels – is too often not addressed at the outset.  Rather, it’s taken as a “given” or dealt with as an afterthought, only when the initial stab at adoption goes south.  And that’s really too bad.

So, where to begin?  Well, like anything in life – start small.  When I say small, I’m talking about behaviors here, not desired outcomes for using this technology – as you’ll need large-scale adoption in order to realize its true benefits (and you should also think big and ambitiously about how E2.0 will impact your top and bottom line).  But small to me means integrating social software in the daily, rudimentary workflow of employees.  Translation: focus on the low-hanging fruit of human behavior.  What’s this?  Get employees to upload draft documents to a shared workspace rather than email them to a distributed list, help them remember to get in the habit to tag and categorize their shared intellectual property, and microblog about what they’re working on right now.

Sounds easy enough, huh?  Sadly, it’s not.  People need more than a list of marching orders, and they certainly don’t need this sort of change to be mandated from the top – as it seldom works.  Rather, I’m reminded of a mantra from my Group Dynamics course – “involvement leads to commitment.”  Amen!  It would behoove organizations to be thoughtful about their E2.0 integration plans BEFORE they embark on this implementation journey.  How?  Conduct a few focus groups to discover where the organic energy for these tools currently exists in your company and leverage those assets you already have.  Put together a steering committee of E2.0 adoption enthusiasts to drive grassroots, “bottom-up” adoption within your organization.  When employees feel like they own the platform, they’ll nurture it, use it, and evangelize it to others.  You won’t need long-term contracts with expensive consultants like me to manage the process for the long-haul .

The kicker is, though, that this needs to be planned out in advance of any integration campaign – like when the ink on the contract with your E2.0 vendor of choice is still wet.  It simply doesn’t work the same way when you’ve already tried to push the change out to employees.

The more we can unpack these human aspects of organization change, the higher likelihood of success for E2.0 adoptions.  So I’ll continue along this thread in subsequent posts over the next few weeks.  Stay tuned!  In the meantime, let me know what your experience is with this stuff – either as an employee on the receiving end or leader trying to catalyze E2.0 adoption in your organization.

But they’re missing something: it’s really not about E2.0.  Nope.  The way I see it – these tools simply are a conduit to transform your business.  In a nutshell, this is really a culture change play.

You know this already – but these tools are coming to an organization near you.  Actually, they’re already here.  Today, people in your organization are talking about your brand in tweets, LinkedIn, Facebook, and on discussion forums.  And they’re changing your culture, whether you like it or not.

As a result, we feel it’s critical for leaders to really get this point: the more you pay attention to these issues when you put together your social media strategy, the better positioned you’ll be to shape the culture that’s already shifting under your nose.

Yet, what’s not being talked about in the blogosphere so much about E2.0 is how to best attend to a company’s underlying culture with respect to social software integration – the values and implicit assumptions that operate below the surface, yet drive the visible attitudes, decisions, and behaviors exemplified in your organization – and how this impacts performance.  Or in an E2.0 world, success or failure.

If you simply sit back and take as a given that these E2.0 tools will magically produce the outcomes you want, guess again.  Rather, you must be deliberate and conscious about the cultural impacts of your social media strategy, and design the change management around the adoption accordingly.  Leaders must get ahead of the curve and set the tone for how these tools can support the strategy.  Because if you botch it, you actually may be doing more harm than good; you run the risk of undermining the integration altogether.  Worse yet, you’ll be damaging your culture.

I contend that failure to address the cultural considerations of E2.0 integrations up-front can have a net-negative effect on your organization’s culture, brand, and productivity.  Yikes!

As social media blurs the lines between our business and personal lives, we can’t control how these technologies are used by everyone all the time – nor should we want to.  But we certainly can be methodical about the cultural implications these tools have on our organizations and strategies, and address them in ways that help leaders shape the conversation to optimize their effectiveness for the enterprise’s benefit.  It starts with a cultural due diligence with rigorous tools such as the Denison Organization Culture Survey, a values assessment such as  Life Journey Mapping, and conversation-based assessments with all stakeholders.  Then, and only then, do you really know what you’re getting into.