Well, of sorts.
Melcrum’s Strategic Communication Management featured this blog in their November edition.
This made me feel terribly guilty for failing to water my blog garden for weeks. I’ve drafted but failed to finish several posts in the past fortnight. I will write one in the next day or so – I promise.
It was just coincidence that I began reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody on the tube on the way to the recent FutureGov Consultancy/Huddle event on internal collaboration, but a fortunate and relevant coincidence nonetheless. Shirky argues that the web can enable people to self-organise, and in turn will transform our world. The event’s speakers argued that those same ideas of self-organisation and reduced costs can – and should – transform our bureaucracies.
In a small group everyone is able to speak to everyone else to organise their time and resources. Once an organisation gets beyond a certain size, management is needed. But managing resources itself takes resources, and these costs tend to grow faster than organisation size.
This makes organisations quite inefficient. Like all large organisations, councils use quite a lot of resources on managing and communicating internally.
Huddle’s Charlie Blake Thomas told an all-too-familiar story: Someone sends around a Powerpoint Presentation by email to ten people. People make their changes and send it round to the group again. Soon you have eight or nine different versions in circulation. Version control goes out of the window. Inboxes are clogged up with crap.
In the past this was neccessary, but these days there are better ways of collaborating. Huddle is one of them, but other collaborative software is also available.
However, technology is no panacea. Becoming more collaborative requires cultural change. Councils are rigidly heirarchical structures and quite set in their ways. We’re used to working in silos, and many prefer it that way.
But as Bob Dylan so famously sang, the times, they are a changin’. It’s clear the public sector as a whole has a few turbulent years ahead as a result of tight public finances and changing demands.
In addition, local authorities are increasingly delivering services in partnerships, thanks to initiatives like Total Place. All of this means becoming more collaborative is not a choice, it’s a neccessity.
Anne McCrossan argued that old boundaries – between and within organisations – are increasingly irrelevant. The emphasis shifts from org chart structures to informal communication networks and those individuals within organisations who act as gatekeepers, hubs and pulse-takers. Organisations need to take advantage of these tacit information-sharing relationships in order to build effective networks.
Moving away from rigid structure towards a more collaborative way of working brings big benefits for organisations. First, it fulfills those needs that sit at the top of Maslow’s Heirarchy; social participation gives people the power to self-actualise. By sharing information more widely, we present opportunities to learn. A social organisation is, by definition, a learning organisation.
Most importantly, it makes us more efficient. By reducing the costs of communicating and managing, we free up resources for service delivery. Private sector organisations thrive when they bring down management and transaction costs. We need to learn from their best practice in order to make the most of our resources.
McCrossan’s presentation echoed in many ways the work of employee engagement guru John Smythe. Smythe argues for employee engagement programmes aimed at moving employees up the engagement ladder – that is away from old structures of command and control towards a culture of co-creation.
Like Smythe, McCrossan emphasises the role of leadership in bringing about change, with a focus on behaviours and relationships rather than command and control.
Affinity, she contends, is stronger than structure. Organisations work best when they share a common purpose, comunicate that purpose, and bring colleagues along towards the common goal.
This is something local authorities ought to be good at; those of us who work for one know that ultimately our job is to make life better for people in the borough. But all too often we’re guilty of focussing on our own work and not the bigger picture.
Becoming collaborative organisations gives councils an opportunity to redefine their purpose. By focussing on working together with residents and partners towards our common goals, we can become more efficient and effective, as well as becoming better places to work.
Over the coming months and years local government will be asked to redefine its own purpose in order to become leaner and more efficient. That means rediscovering those shared goals and giving people the tools to work more efficiently towards them. Structures are inefficient: harness common purpose, though, and organisations can achieve more efficient delivery.
Today I have exactly nine months left of my twenties.
On my 18th birthday, someone gave me a notebook, and on each page I wrote one thing I wanted to do before I turned 30. Some trivial, some important.
I’d largely forgotten about this exercise, but as I was moving house a couple of years ago I found the notebook and realised I’d done almost all of the things I’d listed in it.
So I’ve visited Asia and both ends of the Americas, bought an original piece of art, got my degree, gone somewhere I don’t speak the language and where no one speaks English, and so on. Most important of all was ambition number sixteen: fall in love, which I did five-and-a-bit years ago and remain happily so today.
However, three wishes in the book remain unfulfilled. These were:
Now the first two sound tricky, but if I really wanted to go I could book a plane ticket. No, the latter’s the hard one.
To give you some background, I am entirely blind in my right eye, which means I have pretty bad spacial awareness can’t see anything on my right-hand side. I also have really awful balance, which might be related to my first point, but that could just be me making excuses. Consequently, I am appallingly bad at every sport I’ve ever tried.
I’ve posted this challenge to Feats of Tweet, the new project from Paul Smith, better known as the Twitchiker. Paul wants to harness the goodwill of the Twitter community to help people fulfil their goals and wishes. He’s invited people to Tweet in their wishes, and will select a few to go to the public vote on Monday (it’s a great idea, do check it out if you haven’t already).
My own unfulfilled wish isn’t likely to garner much sympathy when up against desperately-needed transplant organs, and rightly so. So I’m asking you, people on the interwebs; do you do any sport at all? Could an unfit, half-blind not-quite-thirty-year-old join in?
Over the next nine months I must surely be able to find some from of exercise that I’m not totally, depressingly crap at. But what? I’m willing to try pretty much anything. What can you suggest?
In an interview with Management Today this week, former BBC Director-General Greg Dyke said the key to building up a high degree of trust and loyalty among employees is to make sure that they say the right things about you to others:
‘Leadership is about the stories that are told about you – both positive and negative’, he said. ‘You’ll be judged by those stories more than anything you say or write, and people will need to like what they hear about you. The most effective leaders are the ones who are loved by their staff. Always think as a leader: how will this be seen?’
His words echo those of the Wizard of Oz, who said ‘ A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others’.
In all but the smallest companies, it’s not possible for the CEO to develop a personal relationship with all employees, so instead they rely on internal communication (as well the informal networks of office rumours and gossip).
But is it really the job of communicators to present their Chief Exec as a loveable kind of guy? Or does that risk leading us, David Brent-like, to confuse popularity with success?
David Ferrabee cautions against what he calls the ‘Wizard of Oz approach’: ‘If you do put employees in front of the CEO a lot, they might find out he/she is not actually the Great and Powerful Oz, but just a WC Fields lookalike’.
And therein lies the problem. It’s not a leader’s job to be liked; it’s their job to lead. Most CEOs are affable kind of people. Most are good communciators – they need to be so to have reached that position. But it doesn’t follow that they have to be the kind of person colleagues would be happy to go for a beer with.
In the introduction to the recent MacLeod Report on Employee Engagement, Peter Mandelson says ‘organisations that truly engage and inspire their employees produce world class levels of innovation’.
What inspires people is encouraging innovation and ideas in the workplace that are focused on competitive advantage or shared vision. That means engaging with colleagues and managers and bringing them along with you on a journey, communicating honestly and clearly.
Arguably, building a personal mythology for a leader could stifle rather than encourage innovation. After all, how many colleagues would be willing to challenge the Great and Powerful Oz?
Dyke’s job as the leader of a quasi-public sector organisation in the midst of bitter battle with senior government figures meant he slipped easily into the role of staunch defender of his organisation and his staff.
But few other leaders are in such a position. Most answer to shareholders, or in the public sector, elected leaders, so simply presenting yourself as likeable is not a viable leadership communication strategy.
So while Greg Dyke inspired extraordinary loyalty from his staff, his strategy’s not goingto hold water for many others. Other leaders wishing to develop their own organisational profile need to communicate in the way that suits their organisation, their objectives, and their own leadership communication style.