Copycats - "Use What Works" principle in action

"Imitation is the sincerest of flattery." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Harvard Business Review's got a podcast series that talks about (you guessed it) business and management ideas as well as some of the books recently published in the field.

In his HBR podcast, Oded Shenkar talks about his latest book Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge.

I think he does a great job of redeeming the concept of being a "copycat" - something that often has negative connotations of unfairly taking advantage of someone else's sweat and labour.

So when is imitation OK...and when it is just a blatant rip-off?

Take Shenkar's example: he stirs it up a little by stating that Apple, usually thought of as an avant-garde innovator, is actually an imitator in many ways. Apple's value-add comes from improved user-friendliness and intuitive interfaces...plus of course the aesthetics and geek-tech-wow-factor.

Therein lies the difference. Imitation is ripping-off when it fails to add value and improve upon the concept being imitated.

After all, it's natural: children learn through imitation. And of course it's true, "there's nothing new under the sun." Progress results not when we waste time reinventing the wheel but when we creatvely apply a principle that lies at the heart of a solution-focused approach - "Use What Works" - with the intelligent addition of "...and make it work better!"
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Laughing your way to better behaviour

People often say that they enjoy my use of humour (mind you, some folks also ask if I've done work on radio because they like my voice and I kinda wonder if what they really mean is that I have a "face for radio"). Catching up my talented and funny Australian friend Kay Ross (@kayross) here in Hong Kong yesterday, I was reminded again how important humour and improvisation are in all areas of work and life.

I like Tim Gard's view of how humour relates to human behaviour. He suggests you use humour to "refresh and renew yourself" - that you should use humour first for yourself and that will put you in a better state of mind to share it with other people. Now you need to be a bit gentle with yourself (no biting sarcasm thanks!) and to "laugh not with ridicule, but with objectivity and acceptance of self".

In other words, learn to be responsive, not reactive when faced with difficult situations. Find a way to laugh at the stuff that pushes your buttons and life gets a whole lot easier...and funner...and funnier!

As Tim notes, it's the difference between seeing funny thing and seeing things funny. Look for the humour in situations with a lighthearted attitude and stop taking yourself (and the world) so seriously.

So...what can you do to try it out today? You can change your mood, your perception and your state of mind while having some fun at the same time!

Hear more of Tim's insights in this short interview by my friend and colleague Tara Diversi (@taradiversi).

Tim Gard from Tara Diversi on Vimeo.

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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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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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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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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.

Promoting team engagement: article now online

You can find practical tips and techniques in my case study on Promoting team engagement at Lloyds TSB that's just been published at Melcrum's Internal Communications Hub.

To learn more about the details of this case study and get other great insights into building engagement, check out Melcrum's bi-annual Employee Engagement conference which I'll be Chairing on 21-22 April 2010 in Melbourne.
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Visitor, Complainer, Customer for change - how aware and involved are your people?

Summary: This second post in the People and the Change Journey series tells you how to assess people's level of awareness, involvement and readiness to engage with change. Learn the differences in how Visitors, Complainers and Customers view change and how to "pace" your interactions with each to produce success.

What is "resistance" to change?

One time a senior executive I was coaching recounted how a change initiative had manifestly failed to take root among this team.

Punctuating the end of his story, he threw his hands up and said, "I don't get it! I TOLD them exactly what I wanted from them. What went wrong??"

I'm not trying to be tough on the guy. Faced with a need for action and urgent deadlines, he was just trying to get his point across ASAP. His choice of technique was, however, not very likely to produce success - a bit like the English-speaking tourist in Paris who SPEAKS EVEN LOUDER when the waiter doesn't understand the food order, or an exhausted mother who screams harder so her child will finally do as it's told.

When you're frustrated it's easy to conclude that the other person is being willfully stupid, rebellious and is intent on resisting you. But what if, like the French-speaking waiter in Paris, the other person literally doesn't understand what you're saying because you each have a widely different view of the situation?


Three views of change: VISITORS, COMPLAINERS, CUSTOMERS

Visitor

Someone who does not see any need for change

A Visitor believes things are fine just as they are and does not recognize that any problem exists. On the surface, Visitors can seem rather naive and may be in denial about the need for change: nope, everything's just fine here, thanks! Their agreeable nature is easy to mistake for engagement, when it may be just compliance, paying lip-service with no real understanding of the situation or what's required and expected of them.

Another class of Visitors are sometimes labelled as lacking in motivation, willingness and desire to cooperate. These employees are largely content to "just show up" and do the minimum required; disengaged and disenchanted staff also fall into this camp: well it's not down to me, is it?

Whichever the class of Visitor you encounter, they are united in one thing. In behavioural terms, Visitors are quite wary of the possibility that they might have to change something about themselves, most often because they simply don't see any reason for such change.

Complainer 

Someone with a problem but who does not (yet) feel the desire to take action

Complainers are impossible to miss: they are definitely aware that a problem exists...and seem determined that everyone else should know too. Given half a chance they will describe in excruciating detail just how bad it is, how they are suffering, moan, moan, moan, etc.

When offered suggestions on how to remedy their dire situations, a Complainer will reply: Wellll...I can't do THAT because of X and that other idea won't work either and I tried that already but those stupid people in (insert: accounts, marketing, engineering, senior management) never cooperate...Yes, but I can't...Yeah, but...Yeah, but....Yeaaahhh, BUT!

In behavioural terms, Complainers do not see any need to change their own behaviour. It's always someone or something else's fault and the need for change is located externally to themselves. They are great finger-pointers, masters of the "blame-storm."

What Complainers fundamentally lack is awareness that they themselves need to DO something about the situation they're complaining about. Though they clearly feel frustrated by their difficulties, they aren't (yet) ready to change. They will instead adopt the role of helpless victim. As a result Complainers are often labelled "resistant to change." In fact, they are not so much resistant as powerless: they actually feel they can do nothing, lacking the resources, skills, talents and attributes required to act.

Customer 

Someone who knows there is a problem AND is ready to do something about it

Customers for change are a delight to work with. A Customer for change sees there is a need for change, recognizes that he/she has a part to play in it and wants to do something about it. Customers, in short, are ready to roll up their sleeves and get down to creating solutions. You may safely give them direct tasks to complete and have confidence that they will accept the task and will find it useful.

In behavioural terms, Customers are clearly motivated to change their own behavior. They understand what's required of them, know what they want and accept that they need to work to get it.

Turning Visitors and Complainers into Customers

As a change agent it's useful to assume that people are doing the best they can with the resources and level of awareness that they have available to them at the time. The Change Journey often involves going to where people are in order to bring them along to where they need to be in order to succeed. To achieve this, try "pacing" people - meeting each different view of change according to its speed of moving forward.

VISITORS - Walking pace
Imagine a Visitor meandering along at an ambling pace with little awareness of any need for change and no urgency. If you meet them with a running pace and urge them to move faster, they're likely to ask, "Why?! What's the rush...?" If you grab an arm and try to pull them along to move faster, they're likely to respond by moving even more slowly. So when interacting with Visitors, it pays to remember the old adage: When it comes to people: fast is slow, and slow is fast.

Or put another way, Resistance leads to Persistence: the more you resist accepting the Visitor's reality (moving at a walking pace) the more that person will persist in the behaviour. Rather than being disappointed, impatient or frustrated with Visitors, you'll need to modify  your pace and find ways to engage with them at their own speed.

A useful technique is to highlight the strengths and positive characteristics that you notice the Visitor exhibiting. Remembering that your goal is to create an awareness of the need for change, you'll find positive feedback is far more likely to elicit an interested response than will criticism.

COMPLAINERS - Jogging pace
Complainers move faster than Visitors, however they often don't expend that extra energy in productive ways. The goal at this stage is to transition a Complainer into a Customer who knows there's a problem AND that they need to do something about it.

With Visitors your choice of language is important. See if you can reframe the Visitor's complaints about the negatives, barriers and obstacles they face into positive statements about things that they actually want to have happen - as goals for change and requests that  can be acted upon. To be clear: do not give a Complainer any tasks to complete. A Complainer's self-concept is often that of helpless, passive victim. The suggestion that he or she should act will often elicit a long explanation of why it's impossible to act, with lots of "Yeah, but" statements.

Rather than telling Complainers they need to act, enable them come to the conclusion for themselves. Use very passive, indirect language, "what needs to happen to improve the situation?" and assign them observation tasks: "what is happening that you want to continue to happen? What else?"

CUSTOMERS - Running (even Sprinting!) pace
It's worth mentioning as well that among Visitors and Complainers you may find "hidden Customers." Hidden Customers have goals that they want but may not be well-versed at expressing them or are simply stuck in the rut of avoidance and ineffectual whingeing about their situation. Again, pace yourself to the person's reality and help them to frame a goal that meets their preferences, helping them to become a Customer for change.

People will shift back and forth between the three states of Visitor, Complainer and Customer over time and in different contexts. Working with Customers is the ideal - then your task as change agent is to agree on the race, then point them in the right direction and just get out of their way!

Follow these tips to achieve success with your team and remember that sometimes when it comes to change: slow down in order to speed up!


Adapted from material by Stephen Covey, John Kotter and Fletcher Peacock in his book, Water the Flowers Not the Weeds.

People and the Change Journey (series)

Strategy + Operations + People = Execution (Getting Things Done!)

Strategy, Operations and People are the "building blocks and heart of good execution," according to Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy's Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.

On how the three interact, they write:

The people process is more important than either the strategy or operations processes. After all, it's the people of an organization who make judgements about how markets are changing, create strategies based on those judgements and translate the strategies into operational realities. To put it simply and starkly: If you don't get the people process right, you will never fulfill the potential of your business. [p 141]

People and the Change Journey

In a series of posts over the next two weeks I'll share some insights into how you can help people through the Change Journey - by assessing their awareness and readiness to tackle change, their competence to learn new behaviours, and how your interactions with them can set them up for success or cause them to stall out and disengage from the change process. Watch this space!

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Happy Chinese New Year: The Tiger

Gung Hay Fat Choy / Gong Xi Fa Cai

This weekend we enter the Chinese Year of the Tiger, year 4708 of the Chinese calendar and the third in the cycle of 12 years in the Chinese zodiac.

Today I want to wish all my friends, colleagues and clients throughout Asia and around the world a prosperous and healthy year ahead!


Goodbye to the Ox

Last year was the Year of the Ox, which was meant to bring prosperity through fortitude and hard work. It's usually a conservative year, one of traditions and values, of stability and growth where patience and diligence pay off.

Perhaps the first stirrings of economic recovery that we've seen at the tail end of the year have been a product of societies resetting their moral compass and looking to more conservative practices in the financial sector...?

Welcome to the Year of the Metal Tiger

Hot passion meets cold steel with the arrival of the year of the Metal Tiger. This combined sign signifies both the energy to begin activity and the determination to follow it through to the end.

Forget about last year’s slow plodding! Events set in motion now will pick up speed and continue until either the objective is attained...or the whole endeavour crashes and burns.

A character trait of high-spirited Metal Tigers is that they tend to jump to conclusions. To stay on the positive side of this energetic year, a useful corrective to this habit that we all exhibit on occasion is to ask lots of questions rather than making unfounded assumptions.

If you are in a leadership role this year, you may do well to remember the following:

In the past the best leader was the one with the best answers.
Today the best leader is the person who knows how to ask the best questions.

Tigers - powerful and proud...yet endangered

Even if you do not follow Chinese astrology, there is a crisis this year that is very real and that you can help to do something about.

The world's tiger population is under threat.

It is the WWF's goal to ensure wild tigers are no longer facing extinction by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022. You can help support their work to save tigers by making a donation.


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