Carol RozwellThere 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.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Change management, Collaboration dynamics, community, Social networking, Social networks, social software
4 responses so far ↓
1 JT Maloney December 2, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Hi – Those are very good ones. Seen them way too much. My addition –
Must use the application that IT provides. Yeech!
-j
2 What’s Your Social Media Status? | Above and Beyond KM December 11, 2009 at 12:59 am
[...] Carol Rozwell, Do what I say, not what I do [...]
3 Chris Townsend December 30, 2009 at 8:00 am
In my experience, the answer is in solving the complicated problem of making collaboration *directly* relevant — both to the business and to individuals.
If I’m a manager who needs to get a project finished and my back is against the wall, I will resort to sure-fire levers such as email which I *know* the project team will be checking. Mid-level managers are consistent sources of real-world opposition to E2.0 types of initiatives, despite their (sometimes) willingness in principle. This is because, all too often, the initiative hasn’t been designed to *directly* and *reliably* help managers achieve those goals that will determine their success and career trajectory in reality.
Similar principles apply up and down the line — from top managers to individual contributors. Imagine you are a young and highly-creative engineer who is looking to prove yourself. You’re likely to roll your eyes at some generic collaboration tool rolled out by corporate, because it’s not actually doing much to connect you specifically with other creatives who would be willing to brainstorm with you and make some magic happen (and importantly, within the bounds of what your boss has relayed to you as your success metrics).
Thus, there are two major necessary ingredients to getting past this type of (reasonable) resistance:
1. institutional will — back up vague and otherwise non-committal good intentions by designing meaningful rewards and quarterly incentives for both managers and employees — integrated directly into the corporate- or group-level planning process
2. dedicated ongoing management — understand the needs and objectives of both teams and individuals in their daily work, and then mold any collaboration system to support and empower the achievement of those goals (and better than, or as an extension to, systems such as email, etc)
Anything less than this is essentially passing the buck — and therefore endangering the success of the E2.0 initiative.
4 Carol Rozwell December 30, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Chris, thanks for your comments. You made many excellent points which could be expanded further. I was reviewing some survey responses from a client today in preparation for our meeting next week. They stated that the single biggest stumblining block to their prior attempts at collaboration was lack of leadership.
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