Carol Rozwell

There is much evidence to suggest that the same techniques used to train animals, either pets or performers, is just as effective with children, spouses and employees. What’s the trick? Positively reinforce the behaviors you want to see continue. The corollary is also true: you need to model the behavior you want others to exhibit.

I raise this issue because in so many of my recent conversations with clients about the adoption of social software and collaboration tools, a huge disconnect emerges. Managers and team leaders say they want employees to ‘play nice together’ but then they actively discourage collaboration through actions, directives and metrics.

You are aghast at this assertion? Well consider a few examples from recent discussions:

• Community leader who refused to use the community team space in the collaboration tool and instead preferred to use email when authoring and updating deliverables.
• Team manager who will not allow employees to add expertise to their social profile to avoid having them ‘poached’ for other projects.
• Leadership team that awards recognition solely to individual contributors.

 I suspect there are plenty of examples that we’ve experienced over the course of our work. Please feel free to share stories of actions that discourage collaboration, and, more importantly your suggestions for fixing the problem.

This week, I attended a vendor event. It followed several Gartner events where the attendees used Twitter as an additional channel to experience, participate and make the event their own. What I find significant is that in the course of about a year, microblogging during events has become de rigueur.

Admittedly, not everyone attending an event tweets and not all tweets come from people who are actually at the venue. People interested in experiencing the event who cannot be physically present get a window into the key points and impressions of those who are there.

So after watching the tweet stream, here are a few things I have learned.

There are three types of microbloggers:
• Most people microblog about the points that resonate with them. They highlight key points made by a speaker, the people they meet or they just make general observations. Most often the tweets are positive.
• Some people will (shamelessly) self-promote. These are the people – often times working for vendors – that want to make sure you know they are there. They may take a point a speaker makes and direct attendees to their booth at the show or simply let others know something about their activities.
• Only a small percentage of microbloggers will make snarky comments. This is the biggest fear of most clients I speak with, that there will be a vitriolic stream of microblogs criticizing the speakers, the event or their company. In fact, this happens rarely. When it does happen, the snide comments speak volumes about the microblogger. When taken in context with all the other positive comments, they stand out as just a bit of nastiness.

Another thing I learned is that the collective kicks in quickly. Again this week I saw that when someone steps out of line, the collective will ‘call it.’ If someone proffers incorrect information or makes a comment that is inappropriate, other attendees step up and make a correction.

Organizations of all shapes and sizes are figuring out how microblogging fits into their marketing strategies. What is clear that microbloggers should not be ignored.

Cnet posted a story on the analyst keynote delivered at Gartner Symposium last week  Gartner: Loosen up on social networks, security which received many thougthful comments. Here is some additional detail related to the talk:

• Social media is a new and emerging communication channel. Enterprises will make the decision to utilize, resist or ignore it in the workplace. But opting to resist or ignore it is a decision – one that shuts your organization off from valuable insight.

• Work is a collaborative activity and humans interact as social beings during work. Few, if any, jobs can be completed without the involvement of collaborators so ‘greasing the skids’ of relationship-making and maintenance is essential for performance.

• An employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem. Don’t blame it on social media. Productive employees are too busy with work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a means to get their work done. Check out any of the Gartner groups on LinkedIn – you will see they are clearly work-related conversations.

Social media is an additional communication channel that augments others such as the phone and email. It offers a new source of information and, perhaps, insight. I’m talking about the opportunity to actively seek information in realtime, as well as to mine collected information for new ideas and perspectives. As an analyst, I can continually monitor what’s being said in social media such as Twitter, facebook and LinkedIn about topics and issues relevant to my research. For other ideas, see Jeff Mann’s research Four Ways in Which Enterprises Are Using Twitter 

Work is a collaborative activity. Today people work on 8 – 15 projects at any point in time. They are constantly switching contexts and needing to create or re-establish work relationships. Social profiles give people the opportunity to find out about the expertise of colleagues and ‘get to know them’ even before they meet. They can shorten the ‘mating ritual’ that occurs as a new team forms and allow fellow workers to stay in touch with each other.

Researchers at UCLA found brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system. To read the article on their work, see  Managing with the Brain in Mind

Researchers at Harvard Business School found that team familiarity is positively related with team performance. To read the working paper, see Team Familiarity, Role Experience and Performance: Evidence from Indian Software Services

An employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem, not a social media problem. Dealing with performance issues head-on is uncomfortable. An employee who is not carrying their weight demoralizes the whole team. I once had to fire a guy who came into the office, opened up the newspaper and sat reading it all day. Today, he might have spent all his time on facebook, but he still would be underperforming.

During the BPM Summit in Orlando, the attendees engaged in person and in social media. We have been experimenting with using Twitter at Gartner events as Jeff Mann describes in his blog post (http://blogs.gartner.com/jeffrey_mann/) as a way of allowing attendees to share their thoughts and observations with people at the conference and those following the event from the comfort of their office.

Nearly 100 people tweeted during the BPM Summit, creating 438 tweets. Predictably, the majority of the tweets were generated by a small percentage of the tweeters. Fifty-nine percent of the tweets emanated from just 10 people although a wide range of people tweeted – even some who were attending the event vicariously. The most prolific tweeter sent 10% of the messages.

We continue to learn best practices for using Twitter during events and look forward to the continued support of colleagues who take the time to share their perspectives with fellow attendees and their social network.

While listening to an interesting program from the BBC on the use of social media for learning Learning Curve, I was struck by connection between learning and collaboration discussed by many of the interviewees. To paraphrase, “the real learning occurs when people talk about the content.” In another time, we might have called this exchange a knowledge transfer of business expertise. Today, it’s more likely to be called social learning. Or just collaboration.

Why do I make the point if it is obvious? We see learning leaders struggling to articulate the value they bring to the organization. We see collaboration teams ask about the ROI of social software. It seems there is an opportunity to collaborate on how to quantify the value of social interactions that make an organization better prepared to deal with change.

I had the opportunity to review an organization’s strategic plan for knowledge management recently. While the document was well organized and covered the essential points one would expect (scope, goals, objectives, opportunites and risks), it described an approach that sounded circa 2000. When I spoke with the uber manager, they explained the trouble they were having getting the project manager to think differently about knowledge management – to shift the paradigm from capture to connections. In some recent research on knowledge management in an age of social software (Socialization of Knowledge Management), I described this shift and its implications for the supply and demand side of knowledge. But somehow the changes were not being included in the plan.

So if you were in the manager’s place, what would you do to help people on your  team understand the change that has taken place?

What are your tips for exposing colleagues to the joys of social software?

She comments that both of these resources are valuable. They point out how critical it is for learning activities to connect to the business success, business metrics and business goals.

For another take on determining the value of learning, do check other this recent research:

Forget ROI, Measure Time to Competency to Calculate Learning Value

Let me know what you think.

It’s been an interesting few weeks in the market for corporate learning systems. First, there has been ongoing interest in acquiring shares of SumTotal from various private equity firms (SumTotal First Take). Since we published the First Take, the merger agreement has been amended. Then Saba announced an agreement with IBM (Saba-IBM agreement). Now there is another acquisition in the works which I’ll tell you about next week.

These changes are part of the larger trend we wrote about last year: the emergence of a social learning platform. It is having many impacts. One of the ‘ones to watch’ is the shift in the balance of power toward the learners and the unleashing of a torrent of activity that will lead to the creation of user-generated learning content. Most learning professionals are prepared for the positive aspects of learner-to-learner interactions – things like expertise sharing, uncovering best practices and finding like-minded learners. Are they ready for the deluge of learning objects they will produce? How will it be organized and made available for reuse in ways that make it more accessible? Can it be done in ways that are less heavy-handed than some of the approaches employed for knowledge management in years past?

Yes, interesting times.

The other evening, we decided to ’splurge’ and eat out at a family joint around the corner. You know the kind of place, good but not great food, nice people and leftovers for lunch. We were seated across the aisle from a table with three women of ‘a certain age.’ When I glanced over, I noticed that they all had their heads down, wrinkled brows and were staring at their handheld devices.

“Oh,” I thought, “another situation where the diners were using technology to avoid each other.” We’ve all seen these, right? Two diners having a night out where one can’t put down the cell phone and prefers to text or make calls while their companion sits there.

Gosh was I wrong! Turns out that in the next few seconds the ladies were passing around their devices to each other. Clearly I had caught them at just that second when they were searching for that perfect picture to share with each other. The picture passing-around-and-sharing continued for a while, then one of the grandma’s pulled out her MP3 player and began to show her companions snippets of a video. Probably she had one like my nephew who plays in a band, I thought.

So what’s the point of this story? It was nice to be reminded that technology can bring us closer together as well as separate us. After lots of travel time during which I saw people hide behind their devices to avoid others, this display of technology-enabled social interaction was a delight.

And, oh yes, one other thing – technology works for all generations. That myth about it being strictly for the ‘kids’ is just that – a myth. Long live Generation Digital!

After a client meeting where I was asked to diagnose why one of their communities of practice (CoP) was languishing, I wrote a finding with a few tips ( Communities need coaches). That got me thinking about how a CoP champion (or maybe they should be called a shepherd) could determine whether the community members are engaged and if the community is adequately serving its members. CoPs are a special kind of social network that comes together because of a passion about a topic or issues. Unless the passion is being nurtured, participation will drop off and the community will fade away. This is true for communities that operate both inside and outside of the organization.

Some questions about whether the community ‘works’ for its members seem straightforward: are members engaged during the community meetings, is there a lively dialog that keeps members coming back. But some measures of community health seem less easy to assess – and traditional measures of ‘how much’ or ‘how many’ may not apply. For example, just the fact that a CoP is large does not mean it is healthy, vibrant and serving the needs of its members.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on how to measure the succes of a CoP. What thoughts do you have about specific questions that can be used to perform a community health check. What people, process and technology issues need to be examined?