Thought leaders are people, too (or had better be)

Companies—big ones, especially—love to be seen as thought leaders.  Presumably the opposite of being a thought leader is being a laggard and having to catch up with everybody else's ideas.

Thought leadership is fine when it's solid, unique and insightful thinking.  But many are putting all kinds of ideas out there as a marketing tactic to seem influential.  There's a mass-market version of this in the endless parade of bullet lists of "5 things" or "9 things" that at least fulfill their promise to be a short read but not one that's long on value.

A new book by business writer John Butman, Breaking Out, points out that the "ideaplex" is getting awfully crowded, and even having a leading thought is not the same as being actually influential.  "Ideas Institutes" seem to pop up quickly and always seem to be more in service of the speakers' need to speak than of the attendees' need to know.  Behind every TED speaker is a business plan for an idea-based cottage industry, waiting to Break Out.  But who really matters, or makes a difference?

In the book, Butman analyzes some "idea entrepreneurs" who have succeeded in longer-term influence and how they got there.  One concept stood out for me:

"Idea entrepreneurs do something that seems simple, but is difficult: they humanize and animate their idea.  An idea is, after all, nonmaterial, nothing more than a pattern in our brains, an ideal of how things could be, a vision.  You cannot simply hand an idea to the next person as you would a sandwich.  People connect much more fully with an idea if they can come to know and understand it as they would come to know and understand a human being.

"To that end, the idea entrepreneur essentially becomes the idea."

In a business environment, we always want to know something important or interesting—where's our company heading, what should we be working on next, how are our efforts paying off—but we pay a lot more attention when we feel we're getting to know someone important or interesting.  Intuitive leaders know to inject every message with some piece of who they are as a person, with passions and questions and skin in the game.  It can be risky, but the payoff is much bigger.

Do your next-generation thought leaders know how to practice the art of personalization in their business communication?

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Of course you meant well

DiversityInc is one of the best organizations out there in the area of advising businesses in diversity and inclusion issues.  They also love a good time: for example, their spring conference this week features an on-stage dialogue between Michael Eric Dyson and Ann Coulter.

One of their regular online features is "Things Not to Say" in which they list a few typical insensitive remarks made to people from a wide range of backgrounds.  Some of the remarks on their lists can feel a little over-the-top . . . until you consider that these lists are culled from the real-life experiences of people in the workplace.

Of course, YOU never say any of these things.  So have a look at the explanations of how to debunk these stereotypes . . . so you can help OTHERS.

There's a lot of work being done in diversity in businesses, and a lot of progress has been made.  Focus has shifted from egregious discrimination to what are called "microinequities," or the small, day-to-day ways that bias can be expressed consciously or—more often—unconsciously.  Whom we talk with in the hallways, what topics we raise with whom, what assumptions we voice about others' interests or capabilities: all of these can be hurtful and limiting on an interpersonal level and disruptive at the level of business productivity.

So: read 'em and weep.  I have voiced versions of some of these and thought about saying others, and you will undoubtedly relate to a number of them as well.  With a disabled family member, I'm strong in the area of disabilities sensitivity; but having grown up in the Midwest, I'm still catching up on awareness of Asian culture and differences.  We all have strengths and weaknesses in this.  The good news is that our reptile brains are malleable and coachable, and that people will give us credit for owning up to our ignorance or lack of experience.

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I didn't read your e-mail

Got an internal e-mail blast in your upcoming employee communication campaign?  Hold that thought.

The death of e-mail has been hoped for and reported more than it has actually occurred; but if current trends continue, next-gen employees are going to continue to turn in the direction of platforms they find more efficient, more effective and less likely to fill an overflowing e-box.

This brief recent item from the Boston Globe is anecdotal but revealing.  Among the trends?  Declining to put e-mail addresses on business cards.  And—surprise—a plea to use the phone, instead.  Part of this is natural selection for technology: e-mail was far too skinny a horse to load up with all of the uses to which it's been put.

Here's the question: As the trend to personalize technology continues, what technology platforms will employees trust and expect to deliver executive communications?  You probably won't want a 4-minute video of the CEO pushed to your cell phone.  Will you mind if it's a link from your Twitter feed pulled from your mobile app, instead?

Corporate communicators use internal media and platforms because they are there, controllable and measurable.  But personal messaging from relevant individuals (managers, team members, liaisons in other departments) seems to be rising in favor and credibility, so much so that some of the other channels are being actively ignored or deleted.

Which leaves you where?  How will you test for and determine communications methods that have the highest value for employees?

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Your employees are actually entrepreneurs—you know that, right?

For workers in the new global economy, there was one and only one lesson from the economic downturn: We are all entrepreneurs.

Businesses--and especially large ones--found out they need the capacity to quickly grow, shrink or change business models to meet emerging conditions.  Employees get it.  The old career-loyalty contract is shredded, replaced by a mutual-interest agreement that is dynamically renegotiated and frequently revisited.  Companies asked for employment-at-will, and workers have responded with employed-at-will.

In the end, it's a much more mature relationship.  Concepts like "family" and "the company takes care of me" never really belonged in the workplace.  The upside for companies is a new cohort of talent that is more business-savvy and insistent on results and beneficial value.  They'll want to know all about your business--but they'll expect you to want to know what they think of it, too.

No surprise that there is energy behind training youth at both the primary and secondary levels globally in the ethos of entrepreneurship.  This new thought leadership piece, which I was proud to author for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship in time for this year's World Economic Forum, describes the imperative to start 'em young.

This educational background will arguably shape your next generation of workers more powerfully than an MBA.  Do your communications with your employees respect their role as entrepreneurs?

The next expectations of your workforce

 

In all of the wide discussion of "business use of social media," we've finally reached a maturation point.  The comparisons with Facebook or even LinkedIn are gone.  We now have some specific terms of success--collaboration, meritocratic contributions, reduction in email--that point directly to productivity gains.  What remains is either to wrestle SharePoint to the ground and bend it to our will, or to actively look for more elegant platforms that sit well on enterprise servers.

McKinsey Quarterly has put out the above video featuring Don Tapscott, who will be part of the World Economic Forum this week and has published an insightful TED book, Radical Openness.  He's making a career midwifing companies from old information flows and barriers to new knowledge pathways.

Implicit in this analysis is the understanding that your workforce is showing up in your organization with expectations for input, collaboration, and access.  Does your corporate culture encourage those values or thwart them?  And do you understand the changes that will be necessary in traditional, top-down employee communications in order to participate credibly in this new environment?

First, the bad news

Think transparency is easy?  When something goes wrong, does your business culture really encourage you to bring it forward?  It should.  This has long been a tenet of effective business teaming, but a commitment to transparency is usually one of the first casualties in times of overwhelming stress or unmanaged change.

Some great excerpts from "Lessons from the dark side of information use" by Donald Marchand, in The Journal of financial transformation published by the CAPCO Institute:

"Here is a test question: Do people in your company trust each other enough to talk about failures, mistakes, and errors in a constructive manner, free of unfair repercussions? . . .

"Managers who discourage their people from identifying 'bad news', punish the bringers of bad tidings, suppress constructive responses to mistakes, errors and failures, stifle opportunities for preventive action or improvements to company performance. . . 

"Transparency is critical for human improvement, whether improving the poor shots in your golf game, or tackling operational or customer service problems.  Managers who cannot hear bad news cannot turn it into good news; they are incapable of learning, and they discourage learning among their employees."

Turning bad news into good news is NOT spin.  Do you know how to do it?

Full disclosure: CAPCO has been a client.

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Know how to TED?

TED is driving communications.  Are you ready to be TEDified?  You could do worse.

If you feel a little under-a-rock about TED, have a look.  TED conference presentations are one of the current darlings of social media, forwarded and shared like crazy, garnering millions of views.

Why?  Because 18 minutes turns out to be an almost ideal time frame to deliver stories and ideas--even complex ones.    And it's significant what types of stories are most popular on TED: they're the ones that follow a pretty standard arc of Here's who I am, Here's something I tried, Here were the results.  In most cases, the results are surprising or delightful and almost always inspiring.

TED presenters are also allowed to use slides and videos, but not to distraction; the clear focus is on the presenter on an open stage, no notes or script prompts, showing that they are open, responsive and knowledgeable.

Business presentations should take a page from TED.  If you say there are some corporate messages that don't fit the TED arc, I would ask: why not?  Are you really resigned to the belief that certain messages must, by nature, be a big bore?

The laws of good storytelling are as ancient as our race.  What's the next presentation you need to make -- and how could you take it from okay to great?