Organizational Development consultant extraordinaire; honorary member of Team SocialFish. Jamie is also Vice President, Organizational Effectiveness at Management Solutions Plus (http://www.mgmtsol.com), an AMC in Gaithersburg, MD. Read more about him at http://www.getmejamienotter.com/about.html
Vineet Nayar is the CEO of HCL Technologies, a large company in India. He talks about trusting his younger employees, and really giving them responsibility. But here’s the rub: he doesn’t have a choice. Nearly half of India’s population is under the age of 25.
“have generational issues been superseded by social media and social business? I don’t think so. I think generations are still a big challenge for organizations. So the question is, how do generational issues connect to social business? Here are some points to think about.”
Learning requires challenging your own assumptions, rather than just reacting to surface information. Learning, in fact, requires that we be more nuanced about data, because data rarely give you the answer. If they do, then the problem you were trying to solve was pretty simple. To be “actionable,” it turns out, requires more than data. You need data, plus thinking, plus conversation, plus insight, plus some more data, plus some assumption-testing and a healthy dose of experimenting.
“Surprisingly enough, you can start the process of humanizing with performance reviews. It may sound odd–choosing that annoying process that many people hate in organizations as a place to start humanizing. But it turns out to be perfect. It’s a nice little container for working on that discipline of clarity, and despite its history of mandatory annual meetings and somewhat coerced “development plans,” it turns out to be a great opportunity to give up some control.”
In our circles, everyone understands that social technologies are a must for marketing and communications. That bandwagon is pretty crowded these days. But I am still amazed at how slow these same people are to integrate social technology into management practices outside of the marketing department.
MIT’s Sloan Management Review paired up with Deloitte to do a research project around social business earlier this year. They got nearly 3,500 responses to their survey from managers in companies in 115 countries and 24 industries, so it’s a nice, broad study.
Implementing social CRM within your association is actually culture change. You can change culture one process at a time.
“All enterprises typically engage simultaneously in the improvement of operations and the innovation of processes and products. The level of emphasis on these two activities will determine an enterprise’s ability to respond to changes in their competitive landscape. Speed is a key factor, and the combined level of emphasis on operational improvement and innovation is a direct reflection of it.”
McKinsey released a study in July that suggests use of social media internally can actually improve the productivity of knowledge workers by 25%. That’s a big deal. These are your highest paid workers. And to think, many people discourage social media because they don’t want their employees “wasting time.” Granted, the researchers are not suggesting that viewing photos of cute kittens will increase productivity. Use of social technologies internally needs to improve communication and collaboration. Interestingly, one way that happens is by reducing the time people spend on email.
Human organizations are beautiful things, but they have that real-world beauty, not fashion-shoot beauty. Open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous sound like fairly lofty ideas–and they are aspirational–but make no mistake, they require some real-world grit and determination to achieve. They don’t look good just for the sake of looking good. They are the beautiful result of hard work like facing conflict, confronting truth, and forging clarity.
Maddie Grant, CAE and Lindy Dreyer are strategic consultants at ICF Ironworks.
We also manage the SocialFish blog, the biggest industry social media blog for associations and nonprofits. We have regular bloggers writing for us on social strategy, implementation, social theory, social business and lots of other topics that interest us and push our industry forward. Every author's posts are their own, and none represent the views of ICF Ironworks or ICF International.
More on our consulting is here.
Happy reading.
Lindy Dreyer
lindy@socialfish.org
Follow @lindydreyer
Maddie Grant
maddie@socialfish.org
Follow @maddiegrant
Washington, DC
202-713-5343
“When it comes to tracking and using “engagement” data – the actions, interactions, and even conversations that relate to an organization’s wo…
“One of the most surefire ways to encourage conversation on your nonprofit or association is through the use of hashtags on Twitter. But in order to…
Just for fun, I randomly decided I was going to archive a big pile of old concert flyers from the 80′s when I was growing up in DC. so I’ve started a…
Microfinance is a multi-billion dollar industry with a rich history for supporting entrepreneurship and its endeavor to end global poverty. In recent…
As you know, my work with Lindy is all about helping organizations build the long term capacity for the work of social media management. We’ve seen s…
Copyright © 2008–2013
