May 10
23
We have perhaps overdone organizing. Between the slew of competency maps and role definitions, the real potential of high performance teams is falling in between over-organized business units and matrix structures.
On the other hand there is vitality, responsiveness and action happening in more social settings. The natural groups in the lunch and break rooms, the hobby groups, the facebook buddies, the after-office huddles, are all conversing purposefully, most likely for different reasons. Individually many of them know, what the company does not – e.g. who is the best person for a particular job, where to find that elusive powerpoint so vital to an upcoming customer presentation and most importantly how to get things done, when the rest have given up.
It appears therefore that the social contract between these individuals is more powerful than their employment contract with the organization. What is it that blocks this energy in the formal medium but is liberated through the social medium?
There are perhaps many reasons. To me it appears that the unwritten social code is not burdened by reporting relationships, or limited because of dispersed geographies, rather is enabled by mutual empathy for even conflicting points of view. Everybody comes to the party.
The social-quotient of an enterprise is something that really does not get captured by traditional means of employee-satisfaction surveys or town-hall meetings. However they can be observed at cafeterias, recreation rooms, Facebook chatters and chat messages. Company intranets represent, if at all, an insignificant part of this energy.Given that most organizations still block Facebook and Twitter, that doesn’t stop over 70% of employees from using them at work anyway.
So, do we have a conflict or an opportunity? I agree that opening up the flood gates to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. isn’t exactly a great way to solve the crisis. But neither is being bull-headed about not embracing some of these emergent paradigms (like Enterprise 2.0) and supporting technologies going to get us anywhere.
There is a huge opportunity however for leadership to strategize and leverage this social quotient (SQ), and the huge energy and collective intelligence that is abound in an enterprise’s ecosystem. Thought Leader Dan Robles has some interesting insights in his post titled “How knowledge assets live in community”
In a recent Frost & Sullivan Report on the Impact of Collaboration (as reported by Jacob Morgan) :
“Companies that deployed collaboration tools saw improved performance in innovation (68% vs 39% that didn’t deploy), sales growth (76% vs 50% that didn’t deploy), and profit growth (71% vs 45% that didn’t deploy). These are pretty solid numbers across the board. To help break down collaboration even further Frost & Sullivan separated companies into 3 categories: basic, intermediate, and advanced collaborators”
Having said that, here are a few ideas on what could be relevant to most enterprises:
- Align a geographically dispersed work force around strategic focus areas and get their participation through ideas they may have. Increase your Idea Funnel on a continuous basis.
- Uncover the Human Resource potential within the enterprise by encouraging, analyzing and rewarding their contributions. Discover the real leaders on a continuous basis.
- Engage Customers and Partners in strategic initiatives and increase the intimacy. Increase your revenue potential on a continuous basis
- Engage Marketplace communities to garner ideas and talent on a continuous basis. Scale your innovation initiatives without scaling your costs.
Enterprise Software has been eclipsed by social software on the Web with hundreds of millions of users using services such as Facebook, YouTube, and other major sites. Social software now has the ability to create new experiences, elicit participation, build network effects, and engage with virtually everybody. It is, to say the least – redefining the value and scale of human interactions.
It’s time we un-organized a little. It’s time we leveraged the social-quotient. What do you say?
