Author, Consultant, Executive Coach - Helping people and organizations grow into desired results

Tuesday 25 May 2010

Social Media conference in Sydney 29-30 June

Still getting your brain around social media?

Join me as Melcrum Australia holds its 2-day Social Media Conference at the Vibe Hotel in North Sydney on 29-30 June.

If you're looking for ways to integrate social media within your internal communication strategy and align it with your key objectives, check it out.

The format is one day of workshops on the 29th followed by a day of speakers (for which I'll be acting as Chair).

On the 30th you'll hear a keynote entitled Social Media: The communication revolution by UK-based Social Media Consultant Euan Semple. Now I know, I know, everybody and his dog is claiming to be a "social media guru" these days - but I've heard Euan speak and he's been at it a lot longer than most. Personally I'm looking forward to hearing his latest thoughts on the following:
There has been a fundamental shift in the way we do business. How we communicate with stakeholders and how we organise ourselves to produce those messages has changed forever. Euan Semple examines:
  • What these changes mean for communicators
  • How they represent a new wave of exciting opportunities for 21st century businesses and their employees
  • What lies in store for communicators and what role they will play in the future of business
You'll also hear speakers from Deloitte, Unilever, NAB, Suncorp, Ericsson and also Melcrum's own Robin Crumby.

Download the conference brochure here and I'll see you in Sydney!
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Tuesday 18 May 2010

Highlights of EE conf in Sydney

"Culture eats strategy for lunch. You can have a good strategy but if you don't have the culture and enabling systems to implement that strategy you will fail." 
~Dick Clark, CEO Merck USA

The second in the series of Australian "National HR Solutions & Strategies Summits" on Employee Engagement takes us to Sydney and a surprise change of venue to the Grace Hotel with its neo-Gothic exterior and Art Deco interior. 

Like the previous week in Melbourne, this conference delivered the goods with a series of insightful case studies and useful lessons on the people side of business. My favourite quote of the day is listed above; in what follows are some further highlights.

The engagement journey continues…
 
Reporter: "What do you think of Western civilization?"
Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea."
 
Sophie Crawford-Jones of PwC gave us an informative overview of how the concept of engagement has developed over the past four decades as well as her thoughts on where it’s going over the next few years. While I like with the theoretical construct Sophie offered, I also think it’s fair to say that, whatever the next big thing in engagement is likely to be in 2010 and beyond, organizations still have a great deal of work to do in the here-and-now. 

Or to paraphrase Gandhi: while many more people nowadays are familiar with the concept of people engagement, effective engagement practice is often still in its early days.
 
Who’s telling your story?
 
The good news is that, as organizations seek to create a culture that invites greater engagement with their people, there are some practices that have proven helpful. Several examples were given of how leaders and managers used compelling stories to link people’s proven resilience in the past in ways that help to get them through hard times today with a clear vision of the future. 

This narrative approach acknowledges the reality that every moment is an engagement opportunity. It's not just an "HR responsibility" but needs to involve senior leadership and happen at all levels of the organization. And it’s not one-off events or even CEO roadshows that do it - effective engagement lives and breathes in your culture and must be related to every single thing that people do in the business.
 
It’s great to have a CEO who "gets it" and even better to have one who can tell engaging stories. It’s also true that stories can only gain currency and influence people’s daily behaviour when they are told and retold. That requires leaders and managers throughout your organization who also "get it", who can spread the influence of those stories with equally motivating effect. In other words, it falls to your people managers to engage your people.
 
In this quest to develop people managers into effective engagement allies, I was heartened to hear how one organization is getting some good results. Josie Gosling gave NineMSN’s answer to making this happen, with what they call communication champions. The idea is as genius as it is simple: there are already a handful of people in your organization that everybody else asks to explain and clarify what’s going on. These people are "naturals" - they have a talent for communication and/or the status and influence within the organization’s social networks that make their voices stand out. 

Let me quickly note two useful principles at work here: 1) a use what works (or solution-focused) approach helps you get fast results by working with people’s strengths, in this case communication "naturals", and 2) the realization that these communication/influencing talents can be found anywhere in your organization and don’t necessarily have anything to do with role or positional power.
 
Once you’ve identified these people…make them your new best friends! Do everything you can to develop their natural abilities (through mentoring, coaching and skills-building) and have the courage to "give it to ‘em straight" by making them part of the inner circle of communication practice. Giving them the big-picture perspective behind the messages will help them communicate better and, in turn, model the kind of engaging communication behaviour you want happening in your organization.
 
Setting the Stage for Success
 
Once the story of your organization is captured and consciously promoted, it will start to become clear which actors may not have a part to play in future performance. In both Sydney and Melbourne, conference speakers repeatedly made the point that low turnover can actually be a bad thing. As much as you need to actively retain your best people, you also need a standard practice to move out poor contributors.
 
Doing so in a grown-up and dignified way not only shows your commitment to do right by the people who ultimately leave - it can have a powerfully positive effect on those who stay. What's more, when a difficult situation is finally addressed the relief is palpable ("Well thank god…we've been talking about this for ages, now it’s finally behind us!"). 

As Chris Disley of Mars Food Australia pointed out, managers who can effectively manage low performers and disengaged people out of the organization actually get higher engagement scores as a result.
 
Chris also shared a crucial conversations exercise in which team members are asked, "If you left the company today to start your own business, who would you take with you…?" Naturally you need to contextualize the conversation and make clear this is a though-exercise, not an invitation to jump ship! While potentially confronting, such a process of rank-ordering people’s contribution from greatest to least can be a vital step toward having the kind of open and honest conversations that need to happen in effective teams.
 
Skills + behaviours = great performance
 
Finally, besides offering the quote that heads this post, Jason Flanagan of BT Financial Group gave some ideas on how to engage with your talented up-and-comers. He described how "high-potential" staff are matched with internal projects that tackle real business problems (e.g. bureaucracy-busting, new product development, etc.). Here I’d like to introduce a distinction that helps make sense of why this is a great example of people development that’s engaging too.
 
A skill is defined as "the ability to do something well" and is essentially the knowledge gained when for example you learn a tool, process or concept on a course. A behaviour, however, is "the way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially toward others" and manifests in the actual application of skills and knowledge - in real business contexts, on an ongoing basis.
 
So giving your top talent projects in the business is a great idea because it ticks many boxes:
  • they get the recognition they deserve (often worth as much or more than money) and a chance to strut their stuff
  • as they work on the project there’s a chance to identify skills gaps that may emerge and target them for further development (so you can send them on courses, e.g. effective communication skills, project management and the like)
  • perhaps most importantly, projects offer a practical way to apply their skills in real-world business contexts; combined with an effective mentoring/coaching program this means they learn a skill, give it a go through "live" application, talk through the results, then make needed adjustments (a double-loop learning process crucial to embedding a skill as an ongoing behaviour)
  • and all this development is not extra-curricular and in addition to their day-job, but sits within the organization and produces useful outcomes for the organization.

In sum, these were a couple of informative and useful conferences, filled with "war-stories" and good ideas from HR and Comms professionals. Their stories clearly made the point that your engagement strategy will stand or fall based on the ability of your people managers to make it real as they engage with people. The stories that are alive in your organization will grow and thrive to the degree that you’ve got talented managers breathing life into them - so it makes sense to set them up for success. 

And for those who don’t have a part to play in your story’s future, you need to actively do what’s right for them and your organization by applying the other basic use what works principle: if something’s not working, stop doing it!
 
Hope you found these ideas useful and they take you a few steps closer to good people engagement, increased contribution and better business results.
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Friday 14 May 2010

Thoughts and themes from an EE conf in Melbourne

Just wrapped up the Melbourne Employee Engagement conference and a couple of clear themes emerged:

  • There's great value to be gained in giving your people access to the senior leaders in your organization - if that's not possible, remember that it's your people managers who will need to carry your engagement efforts.
  • High salaries and a great safety record only get you so far in engaging your people. If they have to "park their brain at the gate" and get their intrinsic satisfaction (i.e. happiness and real engagement, a.k.a. "flow" experiences) from activities outside work, you've still got your work cut out for you as an organization.
  • Acquisitions and mergers are a fast way to grow a company and gain needed technology and market share. M&A's attract lots of "bean counters" looking to realize efficiencies...equally important (and too-often forgotten) is the need for people-positive engagement practices. No company ever cut its way to greatness and in the final analysis it's people who make the competitive difference. Great to hear about practical ways to demonstrate the value of the intangible people dimension.
  • A compelling presentation reminded us all of the power of stories to engage and motivate people. In the same vein, you'll find a tmc-related example of practical application of storytelling in an organizational setting (combined with the solution-focused technique The Affirm) here.
  • One of my favourite quotes of the conference was from Michael Specht: It's not a social media problem, it's a management problem. If you don't trust your people, if they're already wasting time in other ways, and you give them social media tools - they're just going to go play. Highlights the role of technology as not only an enabler but an accelerator of what's already happening in the organization - hence also an amplifier. If you're disconnected from your people no amount of social media will reverse that trend.
  • My equally favourite quote of the conference: Change programs [to improve people engagement] are not a sprint. They're a marathon. Enjoyed the insight offered that when leaders and manages fail to communicate using "formal channels," the result is not silence; instead the "informal" communication channels (i.e. the rumour mill) move in to fill the vacuum. For me the interesting question becomes: given that conversations in your organization are happening all the time - what can you do to get positive conversations working for you?
Those are my highlights from the Melbourne conference - tune in next week for an overview of both conferences.
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Wednesday 12 May 2010

People Engagement sessions in Melbourne and Sydney

I'm presenting a couple of sessions at this year's "National HR Solutions/Strategies Summit" happening on 13-14 May at the Bayview on the Park in Melbourne and on 17-18 May at the Amora Jamison Hotel in Sydney.*

The sessions are entitled, "It's not Business. It's Personal" - People Engagement that works, on how to use the people-centred practices of Appreciative Inquiry and the Solutions Focus to turn engagement strategy into everyday reality. 

There's a white paper on the subject too, a version of which will be available via this blog in the near future.

For the moment, here's an excerpt from the report summary below:

High people engagement is a hard thing to get right but the payoffs are tremendous – in monetary and nonmonetary terms, including:
  •  improved operating income and higher profitability 
  • better company performance 
  • lower staff turnover, absenteeism and sick leave 
  • better customer satisfaction and increased sales
Engagement describes a relationship and, like any relationship, it takes time and constant attention to nurture its development. And business-as-usual doesn’t cut it. Because it’s not business, it’s personal.

Making business personal means having a people-positive culture. Appreciative Inquiry and the Solutions Focus offer practical, action-based ways to quickly bring out the best in your people and, by extension, your organization.

The Solutions Focus in particular is such a SIMPLE (though not easy!) approach that people quickly find themselves asking different questions and interacting in more positive and productive ways. And so “the way we do things around here” starts to shift in ways that actively engage people, because they’re the ones doing the shifting.

Your organization’s engagement strategy will stand or fall based on the ability of your people managers to make it real as they engage with people. Think of the numerous touch-points in your organization where engagement is created (or lost) every day. Equipping your people managers (a.k.a. your engagement allies) with these AI and SF tools can speed up that shift toward a healthy engagement culture.

Remember the engagement gold standard: when your culture fosters adult, two- way relationships between leaders/managers and employees, in which challenges are met and goals achieved, you get good people engagement, increased contribution and better business results.

Turn the “soft stuff” of human behaviour into your competitive advantage by engaging the whole person: make your business personal.