RealTime Leadership

A much discussed article by Tony Bingham, the President of ASTD, appeared in the August 2009 T+D Magazine under the title “Learning Gets Social.”  In the piece, Tony delivers a shot across the bow for many learning and development departments, saying basically, if we all don’t get on board and start leveraging and supporting Web 2.0 technologies for learning, we’re simply going to be deemed irrelevant by the businesses we support.   The article quotes Karie Willeyard, CLO of Sun Microsystems, saying:

If the learning organization doesn’t get into that 70 percent and use social media, they’re going to get left behind.   They’re going to become irrelevant because people are going to be able to post and share knowledge with one another without the learning function.

The fact is, most employees are already embracing web 2.0 collaboration and sharing tools without the learning function, and the numbers are growing every day.   Two major trends t are fueling this shift to informal learning:

1. The Millennial Generation – those born between 1977 and 1997, essentially grew up with the Internet and are familiar with learning and sharing information online.  As the Baby Boom generation retires, this is the generation that is currently moving into the workforce and changing the landscape.  By 2014, it is estimated that the Millennial generation will comprise 47% of the workforce.  
2. Technology – continues to make it easier to share, collaborate and learn online.  Today, if someone wants advice on how to become a better leader, they use Google, Wikipedia , Twitter, LinkedIn or other Web 2.0 technologies to address their unique learning need immediately.  They don’t sign up for the management training course offered next quarter.

The collective force of these two trends is transforming how employees learn, shifting the model from a didactic model to a collaborative model.  Tony Bingham makes the case for how Millenials are changing learning landscape:

In education, they are forcing a change in the model, from a teacher-focused approach based on instruction, to a student-focused model based on collaboration.

I refer to this as a shift from the “Sage on the stage” model to the “guide on the side.”  Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the sharing of information and make it easier to collaborate with colleagues.  The widespread acceptance of these new technologies is rapidly increasing the shift to delivering learning at the point-of-need, giving employees the information they need when they need it.
Although the Bingham article is a great wake-up call to the learning profession, it fails to address the critical question of what can or should be done to address informal learning.  Bingham ends the article by saying:

“The pieces are there, and now is the time to connect those pieces to create a learning masterpiece that meaningfully demonstrates the critical importance of each and every one of your roles.”

Huh? This sounds to me like he is encouraging the learning profession to continue with its command and control attitude of dictating learning.  What’s needed, in my opinion, is for the learning profession to focus on supporting and fostering the technologies and experiences that will allow and empower employees to collaborate, share and learn on their own accord.  The “learning masterpiece” Bingham refers to will evolve on its own if we give employees the tools to share and collaborate, and then trust them to do the right thing.

Earlier this month, while catching a flight home to Seattle from New York City after a long week on the road meeting with clients, I made it to my seat, sat down and breathed a huge sigh of relief.  For a moment, it was bliss.  I knew in a few hours I would be home to see my family.  But then the slow, creeping realization set in that my email in-box was overloaded with hundreds of emails I was unable to get to while on the road.  Furthermore, I had five voicemails on my cell phone and probably more waiting for me on my office voicemail, which I had not yet checked that day.  Although I was working hard all week, the work flowing through my inbox did not stop.

Just as the visions of un-read email set in, and the feeling of dread started to take over, I was greeted by the gentleman in the adjacent seat, who by good fortune was Paul Burton, an expert on time management and productivity.  For the next five hours, Paul diligently and patiently coached me on his method for managing the flow of work that was beginning to overwhelm me.  Together, we opened my Outlook and he began to change and configure my settings.  The alert that went off every time an email arrived, gone.  The preview pane that allowed me to read the first few lines of an email (and thereby saving me time?), gone.   The “to-do”  list scribbled with paper-and-pen in my notebook, gone and replaced by the Task feature in Outlook. 

Next he took me to a view in Outlook that showed my calendar for Monday and all my tasks that were due.  My schedule for Monday was ugly, back to back phone calls and meetings.  Paul said, “You have train wreck coming on Monday and you didn’t even know it.  But that’s okay, we’ll deal with it.”

As our plane made its way across the country, Paul and I went through my entire email in-box, quickly categorizing email in one of four categories; Trash, Archive, Reading and Work.   The Trash and Archive items were promptly eliminated or filed away, while the Reading and Work where scheduled in the future using the built-in reminder system in Outlook (of which I was vaguely aware but completely intimidated by).   The very last email in my in-box was from April, a request from a colleague about one of our products.   Who knows what sales opportunity was lost or what credibility was eroded by my inability to reply to a simple request?

Paul’s method for time management is called QuiteSpacing, and it requires a fundamental shift in how we think about work.  Whereas before, I was constantly writing and re-writing to-do lists, since implementing the QuiteSapcing techniques, I have effectively managed the flow of work as it streams in through email, voice mail and my physical in-box.  Before I was managing my work like the old Ford production facilities, now I’m managing work-flow like the Lean Toyota Production system. 

Once my inbox was cleared, I felt a sense of freedom and I was able to focus on the one or two very important work items I needed to complete before Monday.   When I arrived home to my family,  insted of thinking about the work that was piled up, I was able to focus my attention on my wife and kids and be fully present for them.

Since the arrival of the Internet in the early 1990s, the amount of information bombarding busy executives has steadily increased.  Think about the distractions that hit us every day; email, voicemail, mobile phones, blackberrys, blogs, twitter, meetings and conference calls just to name a few.  As this revolution in work management has been developing, unfortunately the tools, technologies and skills required to manage this information have simply not kept up.  Overtime, we have developed habits, most of them bad, for how we deal with information. 

The personal transformation I have gone through over the past few weeks has allowed me to look at the field of leadership development from a slightly different perspective.   For example, how can we expect leaders to have the prescense of mind and the clarity of focus required to truly coach and develop their direct reports if they are completely overwhelmed by electronic information and requests?  In the past, the answer to this question was to send executives to “time mangement” training along with their soft skills training, but unfortunately, so much of what passes for time management training today is right out of the 1980s.  We don’t need help with our file-o-fax, we need help with our in-box.  Outlook has incredibly usefull features for information management, but most of us are unaware or simply do not know how they work.  The irony is, we think we’re too busy to take the time to learn and actually change our habits.  What I have come to realize is; how leaders deal with electronic requests is integral to the competencies of delegation, feedback, performance management, execution, networking; really every aspect of leadership.

If we want our leaders to truly breakthrough the constant noise and distraction of modern business, and transform into true people-leaders, we need to quiet their space and give them the freedom to  be themsleves.  And to effectively do that, they need to acquire the skills to effeciently manage the flow of electronic work and requests that define the modern office.

One of the long-standing assumptions about leadership in today’s wired and global economy is the critical importance of multitasking.  With information coming at us through email, RSS, Twitter, smart phones and the like, the ability to perform multiple actions at once, quickly prioritizing tasks and making decisions, would seem to be an important contributor to leadership success.  However, the more this vaunted “skill” comes under scrutiny, the more doubts there are about the correlation between multitasking and good leadership. 

The most recent assault comes from a study published by Stanford University that discovered multitaskers are not better than unitaskers.  Writing about multitaskers in New York Times, Ruth Pennebaker recently summed it up:

They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

This research echoes my own experience with multitasking – namely that it is difficult if not impossible to do effectively.  In addition to being incompetent, many multitaskers run the risk of alienating their peers and subordinates.  Daniel Goleman and others have demonstrated the importance of emotional intelligence in a leader.  One of the critical components of emotional intelligence is the ability to listen to others and “be present.”  It is very difficult to be present for your employees and customers when you’re talking on the phone while checking email at the same time.

With the growing popularity and ubiquity of technology, the critical leadership skill that is missing today is the ability to concentrate on one task and to authentically be present to those around you.  I believe it is easier to slip into reactive multitasking mode then it is to have the presence of mind to block out what is not important and to focus on the emotional leadership skills that allow us to collaborate with others and inspire employees to do their best.

John Medina, the author of Brain Rules produced a series of videos on why multitasking is ineffective:

In July, the U.S. Army broke with long-standing tradition and began encouraging all personnel to contribute to U.S. Army Field Manual.  The Army Field Manual, which contains detailed information and how-to’s, serves as a playbook for soldiers operating in the field.  The New York Times reports:

The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

This is a major cultural shift for the quintessential “hierarchical” organization.  When people think of “top-down” management, the military is almost always one of the examples cited.  Now, the military is leap-frogging many U.S. corporations by opening the field manual to be authored by any and all personnel.  The director in charge of the project says:

For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki.  The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.

I applaud this cultural shift by the military, and I think we are only scratching the surface with respect to how technologies like wikis, blogs and twitter will eventually flatten our organizations and empower the people on the front lines to make more and better decisions. 

 The wiki-Army Field Guide is an extension of the trend that started in 2001 when Jimmy Wales and Larry Senger applied the wiki concept to the encyclopedia.  At that time, the “select few” who were allowed to author encyclopedias were academics and researchers hand-picked by the editors.  While the information provided in the old format was often very good, it became outdated quickly and the total number of articles was limited by the size and cost of the books themselves.  Now, Wikipedia, has over 3 million articles in English alone, and is continuously updated as new information becomes available.  It will be interesting to see if the Army Field Manuel experiences a corresponding increase in size.  No doubt, the wiki Army Field Guide will be much timely and up-to-date.

 There is also a trend to watch here for leadership development.  In the past, many companies have handed out Leadership Resource Guides to their managers.  Some of these were written by “experts” within a company, but most often they were books written by the “select few” from consulting companies.  The Successful Managers Handbook from PDI and For Your Improvementfrom Lominger are two popular examples.  I consider both of these books to be analogous to the Encyclopedia Britannica before 2001 and the Army Field Guide before July 2009.   These books are being displaced by fast-growing  wiki leadership resource guides like Leadershipedia.  Any registered member of the Leadershipedia community can access and edit a comprehensive resource guide with tips, articles, books, blogs, podcasts and videos related to leadership and management.  If you’re not already a member, I encourage you to become one today by registering. 

At RealTime Performance we have also seen a trend in companies interested in developing a custom version of Leadershipedia that aligns with their own organizational culture and values.  Ross Smith of Microsoft developed the wiki-based Manager’s Playbook with tips and suggestions on how to build trust and become a better leader at Microsoft,  RealTime Performance recently started a project with Johnson & Johnson to develop a custom wiki-based resource guide for IT leadership development.

The bottom line is that wikis take authorship away from the “select few” experts and open up authorship to everyone. This changes the flow of knowledge from a top-down model to a network model, where everyone has the potential to be both student and teacher.  This, in turn, fosters collaboration and teamwork.  And in the end, better information gets into everyone’s hands, and the quality of decision making goes up across the board.