Collaboration will push people management from execution to strategy

I was with a client yesterday, thinking about how to bring collaboration skills (and awareness) to future leaders. Several points come to my mind after this conversation:

- This particular client has broken down its HR department: HR administration, social matters and people development are really managed by very different departments and people. This is pragmatic HR innovation to my mind !

- Putting the whole collaboration affair in the People department is a great approach, but one that should be managed carefully. When looking at collaboration through classic people development lenses, we are brought to think about classic people development services (using training and development to develop new usages, skills, technology skills, ...). That's important but clearly not enough.

In this approach, it is more important to find key issues on which to collaborate (and learn to better collaborate) than to identify "collaboration skills" that would afterwards be deployed through training. I think that training can only come as a support of a wider methodology.

The best way I know is to open collaborative spaces (communities or networks) and launch these communities or networks with minimal support (ensuring only consistency accross communities and in the support given). In these "people development communities", if issues are carefully chosen, people should be oriented towards working differently (contributing rather than producing; rating rather than evaluating; ....), and should be recognized and rewarded for so doing (not financially on a first step).

Why act this way ? The whole idea, to my mind, is not to try to impose standards tools (blogs, wikis, feeds, microblogs, ...) or average skills, but to bring the employees to discover the ways that match their needs - that is, that help them solve business issues.

The people development department will not be deciding which are the key skills or competencies to develop, it will rather be building an advanced "framework for collaboration", in which employees will test and invent the new ways of working that make sense for their particular business (that match their industry, culture, processes).

Discovering how to manage the collective side of people development is one of HR paths to value creation.

After the crisis: the new or the old ?

I have been reading several posts lately about how the 2.0 (for want of a better name) could be what we need to go out of the crisis (here, here).

I think the question is even more important. By adressing the crisis wih the same state of mind and methods that we use to have, only at a bigger scale, are we not reproducing the same behaviours that took us where we are ?

By pouring money into ailing banks or carmakers what are we saving ? Jobs ? Or are we preserving a model that has proven its limits ? Time will say.

But in the corporations that are going to come out of the crisis, I think it is the leaders responsibility to innovate in management and governance, or at least to be able to recognize their limits if they are reaching them. We are probably at a paradigm change in management (and in society). For those that recognize it, it is a great opportunity.

People centered organizations

I re-read recently a couple of posts by Stowe Boyd, on his notion that "the individual is the new group" (here).

Stowe's point, as I understand it, is that the important thing for the new social tools is giving people the ability to form the groups they need at the moment they need them (Stowe says this much better and in more detail). This implies that groups (the vast majority of them) are short lived and serve a specific purpose. I think this should also be the case for networks and communities even though their purpose is often more complex and they are therefore longer-lived.

More importantly, I think this kind of thinking greatly illustrates the kind of organization that are emerging today: organizations centered on people. Organizations that give every employee the ability to organize the resources she needs, at the moment she needs them, in order to do her job (think, execute, share, solve problems, ...). And today, resources means talent resources, that is fellow employees.

And I think this goes way beyond tools (which are key):
- It means ensuring that employees have the sense of responsibility that is needed to go beyond the existing boundaries of the organization (geography, product, hierarchy, ...);
- It means ensuring that the employees that are able to break boundaries in the interest of the business are proprely recognized (I have already talked about how to reinvent assessment and development systems here),
- It means ensuring that employees have the skills and behaviors needed to be able to work in different environments (we call these collaborative models), hierarchical, community of practice, peer network, functional network, ...
- It also means ensuring that leadership at organizations recognizes the potential of these new ways of working and of organizing and that they go the whole way they need to go to adapt their own individual and leadership styles.

E2.0 ratings or Peer People Reviews : should companies change their development and evaluation processes ?

In a conversation launched a month ago by Andrew McAfee in this post, and continued last week through this post, there was a lot of buzz on whether it was a good idea or not to measure E2.0 participation of knowledge workers. I tend to agree with Andrew McAfee that measuring E2.0 activities would "encourage and increase participation and contributions". And I think we are looking at a major change opportunity.

I would first like to stress that E2.0 ratings should be linked to a correctly organized peer network or community (in a post last week, I pointed out that we call these Collaborative Models at the Boostzone Institute). If ratings are allowed from any employee in the company, I am worried that it will be a long time before they are taken into account by management for decision making. But within a peer network, these ratings can become a powerful tool for expertise recognition. In a interesting article from HBR, Creativity and the Role of the Leader, Diego Rodriguez, a partner from IDEO, points out that "contributing to an interdependent network is its own reward". I would go further, as Andrew McAfee does, and say that ratings can encourage friendly competition and self-improvement.

The change opportunity I am pointing at is how these E2.0 ratings could become the basis for network or comunity management.

In a very classical view of HR, how would E2.0 ratings be considered ? As the measurement of an employee's performance in using E2.0 tools ? Probably. The reality is slightly more complicated. E2.0 ratings should be used to start building Peer People Reviews (PPR).

In classic People Reviews, a particular employee is given a triple assessment of himself: her performance, her potential for evolution at her current employer, her "development needs". This triple assessment is based on a hierarchical view of the organization: people are assessed by their managers, based on performance management systems that are deployed down hierarchical lines and on skill frameworks that, more often than not, are built top-down by HR teams.

I think these People Reviews are particularly well adapted to developing managers within a hierarchical organization. Most other systems (mobility, rewards) are based on this one. As for 360° assessment and other more "democratic" assessment systems, they are still management-designed tools and are far from the peer potential of E2.0 ratings.

Peer People Reviews, that is E2.0 ratings, to my mind, would be different from classic people reviews in at least two dimensions. From a process point of view, they are continuous assessment processes, continuously evolving as network member work activity produces additional ratings. From a content point of view, the ratings are very different from performance indicators or skills description. These, in classic people reviews, are designed in advance. In Peer People Reviews, only the rating categories can be designed: the content of the ratings will continuously evolve also, based on the evolution of content development by the network. And therefore, assuming that the peer network has a clear link with value creation, the ratings become a great indicator for network performance.

In the same HBR article mentioned above, the authors say that "one doesn't manage creativity. One manages for creativity". I would use the same approach to say that an organization does not manage community or network performance: an organization can only build the environment for community or network performance.

Individual People Reviews should be used to drive individual managers development, while Peer People Reviews should become a "common way of working" within any collaborative model. Building the framework for the Peer People Review and continuously monitoring it is management work.

Centripetal web ... and centripetal networks ?

Another very good article by Nicholas Carr.

In this one, he argues that, more and more, the web is going to revolve around "large objects" (that is popular websites or blogs): "Yes, we still journey out to the far reaches of the still-expanding info-universe, but for most of us, most of the time, the World Wide Web has become a small and comfortable place".

It is a very interesting article, as, to my mind, it also points towards the web becoming a real new geography, that will therefore need some regulation (amènagement du territoire).

Think of the web as a new geography. It is good to remember that real geography also revolves around cities where most exchanges are done and value created. Other lands need the support of the state to be able to develop their economic activity (in interventionist countries) or else they may decay (as is the case for suburbs in developed or developing economies alike).

I think the web will also organize around the places where most of the exchange is done and value created. At the fringes, risk takers (with some free time), will be able to find sources of creativity, new ideas, innovation, ...

And some regulation will be needed so that blogs and websites that are not maintained are not just discarded but that they remain alive and can be explored by future explorers, and that people are able to live their virtual lives far from the center of the information-universe.

I think something similar could happen with social networks. One or two very large SN will cumulate most of the traffic, while valuable, innovative, thought-provoking SN will not emerge due to a lack of ... people!

Managing the revolution ... through HR

Again, a very good article in HBR on mass collaboration. This one, written by Scott Cook from Intuit, gives me the opportunity to explain why this "user contribution revolution" is a unique opportunity for HR departments to reinvent themselves.

In the article, Scott Cook urges companies to identify and build "user contribution systems" that allow to benefit from the contributions of people outside of corporate boundaries. His examples, now quite well known, are drawn from Hyatt, Procter & Gamble or Honda as well as Google, Amazon or Wikipedia. He understands "user contribution systems" are "methods for aggregating and leveraging people's contributions or behaviours in ways that are useful to other people".

My first reaction to the article was to say: isn't any corporation a "user contribution system" ? I know I am pushing the idea, as Scott Cook states that in a user contribution system the company doesn't stand between the input (from people) and the output (their contributions, aggregated and leveraged by an ad hoc system).

But still, the corporate model is basically intended to organize people cooperation to deliver a higher value added service or good. True, users (in this case employees) are paid for so doing. Sometimes, as in insurance and particularly mutual insurance, "user contribution systems" seem to be at the heart of the business model. Mutual companies have built systems that profit from the contributions (risk profiles) of their clients to deliver to them a very specific service (protection against the risks of life).

So, what is this "user contribution system" teaching us ? Our own idea here at Bostzone is that we are discovering and professionalizing new collaboration models, new ways of organizing and collaborating. I have seen, as Scott Cook says, how countercultural this "user contribution paradigm is". If we go deeper, countercultural only means that collaborating anyway else than through known models (hierarchy or projects), seems to challenge beliefs about the role of hierarchy and authority. And rightly so. The new collaboration models will run through other channels than hierarchy. Their funding principles will not be, as they were in the hierarchical model, command and control.

As many have already stated (Lowell Bryan in Mobilizing Minds, for instance), this is a revolution in organization. It started when the matrix model was invented and continued with reengineering, communities of practice or project modes.

This revolution will be harder to drive at the individual level. We can already see employees needing to be at the same time a manager, a member of a community of practice and a project team member. This is difficult in itself. All the more difficult if, most times, any contribution other than the hierarchical one, is not, or not well enough, taken into account.

Why did I say this was an opportunity for HR to reinvent itself ? Well, HR basic process are built to identify, attract and, above all, assess and develop people within a hierarchical organization. Hence the extreme difficulty for many HR functions to devise adapted programs for experts or transversal populations. Most HR systems are based on a "do not hold me accountable for what I can't control" view of the world. This is particularly true for most annual review processes, that have a difficult time including peer assessment or network assessment anyway else than as a "complement" to line assessment.

HR is invited to reconsider all dimensions of its people development organization:
- Competency or skill frameworks. These are oriented (towards higher hierarchy or higher expertise) and static (evolution is not built within their fabric). It is likely that such systems will not be adapted for employees that will spend their careers switching between collaboration models;
- Development and assessment systems. These have been designed based on hierarchical organizations. They are selective by nature and often result in companies having to choose between two talents (in these scarcity times!). These systems and processes will need to expand and develop new dimensions. I can already see processes that extend beyond corporate boundaries.
- Talent development skills of employees. This is to my mind the most critical aspect of the people development organization of any company. Most of the times, the talent development responsibility has rested with HR and management. It is important that it know becomes a shared and collective responsibility.

Big times ahead for the HR function.

Le web 2.0 et son impact sur l'entreprise

Le 15 mars prochain, à l'association des anciens de Sciences Po, j'aurai le plaisir d'animer avec Yann Mauchamp une séance sur le sujet de l'impact du web 2.0 sur l'entreprise, et notamment sur son organisation et sur la fonction RH.

Pour ceux d'entre vous qui comptent y participer, nous sommes preneurs, Yann et moi, de vos remarques et questions, pour inclure dans notre travail les sujets qui vous intéressent le plus.

Vous pouvez répondre à ce billet pour nous communiquer ces remarques ou, pour les membres de Boostzone, lancer les conversations que vous jugez pertinentes dans le Cercle.

Au plaisir de vous croiser le 15 !

Death of the Dinos, ou l'opportunité qui vient avec la crise

Je suis depuis longtemps le blog FastFoward, intéressant et ludique.

Dans une récent article, Death of the Dinos, intéressant et amusant à lire, Rob Paterson souligne que la crise de crédit et la révolution dans le coût des transports sont des conditions favorables à l'apparition de l'entreprise 2.0.

Il y a même une approche intéressante de ce qu'est une entreprise 2.0 : "The new will be based on network models. It will use the network effect and it will use social capital to do big things. It will use its distributed intelligence to “see” what to do and to understand the chaos that we will be living in".

Par rapport à l'article, je suis plus mesuré, dans le sens où le changement sera moins brutal qu'à "la chute d'un astéroide". Mais il est certain que les difficultés de gestion actuelles sont une opportunité pour les entreprises embarquées dans des projets 2.0 de construire des avantages compétitifs décisifs.

Ce que je vois dans mon activité, c'est que les collaborateurs des entreprises perçoivent très rapidement les bénéfices qu'ils peuvent tirer de la transformation en cours. Ce qui fait de cette période de transformation une période très différente par rapport aux précédentes, c'est que les équipes de management, les dirigeants, ne sont pas en train de conduire un changement top-down, mais bien d'orchestrer une transformation en profondeur, dans laquelle les initiatives sont prises à tous les niveaux.

Identifier les initiatives les plus pertinentes, fixer des priorités parmi les initiatives, déléguer la responsabilité des projets, admettre de s'adapter aux changements suggérés par la base, challenger les idées reçues (notamment en termes de technologie et de ressources humaines), assurer les synergies entre tous les projets de type 2.0 qui émergent aujourd'hui dans les entreprises, voilà quelques uns des défis auxquels sont confrontés des équipes de management qui n'ont pas toujours été formées pour cela.

Transformer les usages des réseaux sociaux en usages professionnels, un avantage concurrentiel ?

Il y a une forte tendance ces jours-ci à la transformation des outils de réseaux sociaux en outils professionnels. Par exemple, ces (ici et ici) quelques outils qui transforment twitter pour l'entreprise ou le monde académique.

La transformation des usages sociaux pour les adapter au monde de l'entreprise est moins simple qu'il n'y parait. Bien sûr, tout le monde souligne le potentiel des réseaux sociaux dans l'entreprise, en termes d'innovation ou de productivité individuelle, par exemple.

Mais lorsque nous passons du réseau social ouvert, où nous échangeons avec des amis, vers les "corporate social networks", où nous sommes censés travailler avec des collègues, rien n'est plus pareil.

C'est pourquoi, à mon sens, l'adoption de ces nouveaux outils ne pourra pas se faire sans:

• Une vraie réflexion sur l'impact de ces outils pour l'amélioration des modes de travail collectif des entreprises,
• Une réflexion sur l'impact que ces nouveaux outils ont sur la culture existante des entreprises.

En termes d'adoption, ce n'est pas simplement d'usages qu'il faudra s'occuper. Ces nouveaux outils ont un très fort potentiel en termes de transversalité, et donc de remise en cause de certains échelons hiérarchiques ou de certains rôles (le rôle de courroie de transmission du management intermédiaire, pour prendre un exemple).

Dès lors, c'est d'une vraie remise en cause de l'organisation qu'il s'agit. Et nous sommes donc dans un projet de transformation, sans doute assez profonde.

Cette transformation ne concerne pas au premier chef les processus de l'entreprise, qui seront certes impactés, mais plutôt indirectement. Elle concerne les modes de travail individuel et collectif, en quelque sorte, l'arrivée de la collaboration comme nouveau paradigme de management.

Le potentiel en termes d'avantages concurrentiels à construire est immense, de même nature que celui qu'ont construit à d'autres époques certains grands groupes (GE, Allied Signal, Valeo, pour prendre quelques exemples) reconnus pour la qualité de leurs systèmes de management.

LinkedIn+NYTimes : intégrer l'information et les réseaux sociaux ?

Une nouvelle du jour qui est censée faire du bruit: l'intégration de LinkedIn et NYTimes (commentée ici et ici, par exemple), pour le plus grand bonheur des membres. A mon sens, ceci est plus du niveau de l'effet d'annonce. La valeur sera plutôt dans l'utilisation qui est faite par les entreprises de cette intégration, comme j'explique plus bas.

L'idée à priori est séduisante, et d'ailleurs, c'est déjà une réalité dans certaines entreprises: lier le contenu non seulement au profil individuel, mais aussi au profil social (aux réseaux auxquels j'appartiens et aux contenus les mieux "notés" par ce réseau).

Pourtant, on peut questionner ce "platform-level collaborative filtering". Je peux comprendre que le filtre appliqué par le réseau est plus "intelligent" que le news-feed que j'organiserai tout seul, selon mes intérêts. Ca va dans le sens du "Wisdom of Crowds", mais en dehors de faire du buzz pour LinkedIn et pour le NYTimes, j'avoue avoir du mal à comprendre ce que moi, LinkedIn member, j'ai à y gagner, sauf à supposer que je sois un utilisateur très actif de LinkedIn, qui devienne en quelque sorte mon point d'accès privilégié vers le net.

Ce qui me semble plus intéressant, si on suit le raisonnement de Ross Dawson, c'est ce genre de démarche en entreprise. Selon votre position dans l'organisation, votre rôle, votre fonction, vous recevez des informations, du contenu, qui vous est particulièrement adapté. On y est déjà d'ailleurs dans certaines entreprises, et c'est une bonne façon de diffuser de la culture d'entreprise, de l'information d'intérêt général, voire de l'information pour experts, si le système est suffisamment fin.

Si on arrive, dans ce genre de systèmes qui se mettent en place, à réserver une place à l'innovation et aux idées "venues d'ailleurs", on devrait arriver à avoir une diffusion de l'information et du contenu de premier plan (un exemple trouvé sur le blog "The AppGap", Spigit).

On aurait construit un continuum entre la génération de l'idée (qui est humaine) et sa transformation et postérieure utilisation.

Un double préalable, à mon sens, à l'exploitation de cet environnement de travail de rêve:

• Une culture qui pousse les individus à se servir de ces contenus comme leviers pour travailler ensemble; il ne suffit pas que l'information vienne jusqu'à moi pour qu'elle soit utilisable. Il faut que je puisse savoir qui l'a produite, et dans quelle contexte. Et d'ailleurs, dans mon expérience, le vrai transfer d'information, voire de compétence, se fera au téléphone ou en direct;
• La capacité de l'organisation à remettre en cause cet environnement dès qu'il devient trop stable. Je pense que, aujourd'hui, la valeur pour les entreprises réside aussi bien dans l'innovation que dans la rapidité à transformer cette innovation en services puis en profits. L'environnement de travail créé est formidable dans l'exécution, mais je crains qu'il ne puisse qu'aller dans le sens contraire à l'innovation sans une véritable culture entrepreuneuriale.