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By dan.pontefract, 03/09/2010 10:16 PM

Recently, via pretty much any social network and email system I belong to, the ‘How Millennial Are You’ quiz was making the rounds.

For disclosure purposes, I scored 82/100.

I am currently 38 years young and for most of my existence on Earth, I have lead pretty much anything I have come into contact with including but not limited to school presidencies, athletic captainships, corporate world roles and community endeavours. Not boasting, just providing some colour for you the reader about this humble ENTJ blog scribe.

My natural leadership DNA tendency is to include, involve, engage and be mindful of the human element … at all costs. Without the team, nothing gets accomplished. There’s an unattached adage I live by, which is “we’re not here to see through each other, we’re here to see each other through”.

This brings me to the aforementioned title point of purgatory.

Although potentially frivolous and certainly not scientific, the quiz mentioned above demonstrated to me that many leaders (regardless of generational classification) have 2.0 tendencies that Millennials also employ, but there are many individuals working in organizations locked into a 1.0 framework. Not bad, per se, merely an observation.

Don Tapscott (1998) describes Millennials using defined themes: (1) independence, (2) openness, (3) inclusion, (4) strong viewpoints and free expression, (5) innovation, (6) early maturation, (7) investigative, (8) immediacy, (9) consumer savvy, and (10) authenticity. Skiba & Barton (2006) augmented the definition to contain attributes such as interactivity, connectivity, and collaboration.

Forthrightly, I’m all of that.

As organizations wrestle with the latest 2.0 technologies, we not only need to stop, drop and roll, we need to think through how these defined themes not only affect Millennials, but how they affect leaders/employees of the organization who have demonstrated these traits for years. It’s not just a Millennial thing. It’s an everybody thing.

Secondly, the defined themes and traits of a Millennial, to me, are merely the definition of the new 2.0 organization itself. Call it Work 2.0, Future of Work, Future of Management, Culture of Collaboration  … I don’t care … it’s the evolution of the workplace, and it’s happening right now … across the entire globe.

Millennial, GenX, Boomers, Silent Generation, etc. are simply labels and we are retrofitting those labels into the culture of an organization. The culture of your organization is the single most important aspect to focus on if you want increased revenue, profits, customer satisfaction, etc. The identity of your organizations rests on finding ways in which to bring the Tapscott, Skiba and Barton themes to life, regardless of generational vernacular.

Once this is accepted, adopted and implemented, only then will the 2.0 technologies make sense for the organization.

I am a GenX leader with a Millennial frame of mind; I’m a blue ribbon personality who wants to ensure the entire team is treated equally and fairly. I want to ensure the team is continuously being engaged to explore options, ideas and opportunities before decision making or execution is underway. I use the latest (and sometimes greatest) 2.0 technologies to foster a collaborative work environment. This is fast becoming the new ‘norm’ from a bottoms-up perspective, but it’s incumbent upon ‘the organization’ to sort out how the technologies can assist the culture, which in turn assists the people inside of the organization to feel engaged and a part of the answer.

In conclusion, what is organizational purgatory?

Organizational purgatory slaps the Millennial label solely on Millennials. Taking the characteristics of a Millennial and attaching them to the cultural fabric of tomorrow’s organization is as 2.0 as it can get.

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By dan.pontefract, 02/22/2010 4:58 PM

Winter Olympic fever has enveloped my beloved city of Vancouver, but I’ve managed to take a break from the action to opine about an issue that clearly needs more than a mere blog post to help modify or even evolve.

Whether small, medium or large in size, organizations have been or are set to grapple with remote based leadership issues. I believe there are some compelling reasons why this is going to snowball quite soon, as mentioned below, but more importantly there are some Enterprise and Learning 2.0 implications to consider as well.

In my opinion, three of the main causes to affect the issue of remote based leadership include:

• Outsourcing/Offshoring

  • At least in Canada, two key points were raised in the study entitled “Basic Trends in Outsourcing and Offshoring in Canada” although the points are nothing new – simply put, outsourcing and offshoring continue to increase.
    • Point 1: There has been a trend to service outsourcing. Service outsourcing has increased in almost all industries. The rate of growth was highest in service industries
    • Point 2: Business services represent the largest category of service inputs being offshored by Canadian industries, followed by financial services and insurance services.
  • IMPACT: formal teams continue to shrink at ‘headquarters’ but virtual teams continue to grow between outsourced work to contractors, service firms, etc. as well as BRIC countries

• Home-Based Offices/Real Estate Contraction (telework option)

  • According to the 2008-2009 World at Work Salary Budget Survey, telework continues to be one of the fastest growing options being made available to employees, growing from 30% of US companies and 25% of Canadian ones offering it in 2007 and growing to 42% and 40% respectively in 2008.
    • Telework is easily being used as an option to reduce real estate costs, helping save bottom line dollars for any sized organization
  • IMPACT: More and more employees have the option to, or are encouraged to work from home thus separating the physical team and creating a virtual team

• Mergers & Acquisitions

  • According to both KPMG and McKinsey, the global M&A business is, well … back in business
  • IMPACT: Mergers or acquisitions often lead to restructuring, which can often lead to new team members, but mergers and acquisitions are often national or global in nature, thus team members are welcomed into the fold with different area codes

What has this got to do with Enterprise 2.0 and Learning 2.0?

The traditional water cooler is all but empty because no one is around the office anymore to refill it, and thus, the way in which people lead must also change.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you set up time in your calendar to randomly phone, email or instant message team members?
  • Do you have an IM platform that allows this? (presuming you have a phone and email)
• Do you create idea factory web-jams over asynchronous means to instil a sense of virtual brainstorming?
  • Do you have a wiki or alternate platform that allows this?
• Do you post quips and updates on your whereabouts, initiatives, questions or thoughts?
  • Do you have a micro-blog option that allows this?
• Do you track project updates and discuss options in an open manner with all team members?
  • Do you have a collaboration or document management platform that allows this?
• Do you post illustrative thoughts, issues or ideas about the team, the business, etc. for discussion?
  • Do you have a blogging option that allows this?
• Do you post short, informal videos about anything business related that the team could benefit from?
  • Do you have a YouTube-type system that allows this?
• Do you engage with your team face-to-face, even if not physically face-to-face?
  • Do you have a platform such as Webex, LiveMeeting, Elluminate or Centra that allows this?

There obviously are many more questions to ponder and post, and I’d encourage you to do so, but the bottom line is that teams are going to increasingly become virtually segregated and leaders need to act differently.

Leaders must shift their thinking, they must re-think their style, they must suspend past assumptions and they must embrace new ways to address the obvious fact that:

• Outsourcing and offshoring is not going away
• Teleworking is on the rise
• Mergers and acquisitions are set to increase (again)

Embracing the cultural change components of Enterprise and Learning 2.0 (which I refer to as Learnerprise from time to time) are clear steps in the right direction.

Now, back to the Winter Games.

Comments (4)

By dan.pontefract, 02/06/2010 11:05 AM

Inside the organization, a dilemma now exists and is rapidly taking shape.

Employees want to connect with one another. Reasons are plentiful, including but not limited to the following:

• Increasing job demands > less time to get it all done
• Global workforce redistribution > 24 hour clock syndrome
• Cross functional – cross pollination projects > less formal/hierarchical teams
• Formal information overload > email & intranets are being ignored

Micro-blogging is starting to become a very effective way in which organizations can mitigate some of the aforementioned points. The problem, however, is that due to the rise in popularity of Twitter and its consumer driven use as a life-casting tool, the inherent company benefits get lost in the shuffle.

First of all, let’s discuss technology. I personally don’t care what tool, application or technology is being used to drive enterprise-wide micro-blogging, but it must be secure and ideally it’s behind the firewall.

Stand-alone options such as Yammer, Present.ly, Socialcast and Socialwok (amongst others) have cloud-based and internal VPN instances that you can deploy, but again, I argue that you should bring this functionality inside of your organization for reasons concerning intellectual property and security. Mike Brevoort does a good job of comparing these four tools over here.

Of course, if you already utilize platforms such as Confluence, Jive, SharePoint, IBM Lotus, Salesforce.com amongst others, there are built-in micro-blogging or status update features. Incidentally, the stand-alone options mentioned above have been, or are trying to integrate into the larger collaboration platforms. (this is a smart move in my opinion)

So what has this got to do with leadership and culture?

My main point is that micro-blogging will become a way in which we can flatten the organization. This will drive a missing connection between the field, the front line, the individual contributor, the manager, the director, the VP and the executive suite.

Today, employees are normally ‘heard’ when they are in team and project meetings or individual 1-1 sessions. Occasionally, they chime in on discussions in town halls, or potentially through ratings and discussions on the company intranet or wiki.

When micro-blogging enters into the equation, the connection can be so much more powerful. “Senior Leaders” can lurk, listen and actually get a stronger sense of what is going on in the company be it opinions, ideas, issues, etc. Individual contributors can not only contribute and be part of the dialogue, they can ‘hear’ the opinions and ideas of their peers (not necessarily in their team or even business unit) as well as the senior establishment of leaders.

This can do so much for the organization in terms of leadership and culture, including:

• Better understanding of what is going on in the organization across many teams & projects
• Personalizing the aura of senior leaders
• Seeking opinion before decisions are made
• Driving engagement and the feeling that everyone’s opinion matters
• Providing information that is timely, be it formal, informal or in fact social / community driven

Micro-blogging, by virtue of its definition, has an additional benefit which is the fact the updates are short, concise and succinct. It forces everyone (whether at the low or top end of the company food chain) to carefully think through their update or response.

To me, it’s a natural example of both informal and social learning.

Are there any risks?

If security is sorted out, the risk as I see it is if employees use the tool as a life-casting option. But, as an organization matures in the 2.0 world, it’s my belief that this will be less of an issue and micro-blogging will become a natural part and indispensable piece of the connected workplace.

On Twitter, (obviously an external example) I follow the CTO of Cisco (Padmasree Warrior) and CIO of BT (JP Rangswami). Their external Twitter micro-blogging tweets are transparent, open and shed personal light on their obviously senior roles. Sure, some of their tweets are life-casting in nature (this is Twitter remember – it’s external) but if they are in fact using internal micro-blogging tools at Cisco and BT, imagine how connected they are to their org, and what their employee population might be saying about their leadership?

That’s a culture I would want to be a part of.