HR in the Social World
Human Resources.
The term and title conjures up images of payroll, benefits, and interviews. It almost seems clinical at this point and definitely not the group you look forward to receiving an email from. Why is that?
If there is any group in the company that should be responsible for getting people to work better with one another, to collaborate, to communicate, to make the most of the most important asset of the company, shouldn’t that group be Human Resources?
HR is the business of people. And People are social. The relationship is transitory. HR is Social.
There is a groundswell change to how business is managed and conducted. That groundswell is social. HR has the opportunity to redefine their role in business by championing tools and platforms that enable social business. HR truly begins to facilitate a higher level of collaboration, efficiency, and by proxy, productivity throughout the entire organization they are tasked with shepherding. But where to begin…
I recently spoke at Jive Software’s worldwide customer conference, JiveWorld, last week. Obviously this is a crowd receptive to the idea, having already purchased a social platform, but it’s worth noting that businesses are only starting to scratch the benefits epidermis of moving conversations out of email and into a structured, collaborative, and social environment. Ideas are running fast and welcome.
The idea is this. Your social platform provides the collaboration substrate. People operating on that substrate need incentive to collaborate, in essence to get out of their native environment and into this new warmer and more effective medium. The work they do needs to exist here. To accomplish what needs to get done, key information needs to exist in the new environment. Once early adoption occurs it needs to take root via interactivity. Other people inside and outside the work group need to not only consume the information but also interact with it.
The incentive is positive feedback from the environment and even more importantly from the other people participating in the environment. And just as Gabe Zichermann describes in his book on Gamification by Design and in his Keynote at JiveWorld11, in order to provide that positive feedback loop it’s extremely important to know how the individuals are wired; what motivates them, what makes them feel satisfied. A targeted feedback loop is what lifts the entire system off the ground.
Three easy steps:
1) Post your important work into the social environment
2) Comment and collaborate with others in a way that targets their motivational core
3) Reward others in a way that creates a sense of fulfillment
HR is the group that helps managers build incentives and manage to success. HR can help to build social best practices, foster communication and collaboration, help to embed monitoring and reward systems into social environments, and lead the evolution of business from hierarchical and stultified to social, collaborative, and hyper-performing.
Let’s start working together better. HR, you can help lead the way.
Moneyball for HR
photo by j9sk9s
Three years ago this month I started the research behind RoundPegg. I’m a bit of a baseball nerd and love the assorted flavors of statistics that have brought evidenced-based management to the sport.
My goal was to help business professionals replace some of the subjectivity within talent management with statistical rigor. We are still on step 2 of this process now, but the vision hasn’t changed.
At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I thought it was a good time (given Moneyball’s huge box office opening last weekend) to trot out a soliloquy I wrote to my soon-to-be business partners about the opportunity we had to make an impact.
———RoundPegg: The Beginnings———–
I’ve been thinking a lot more about RoundPegg’s place in the changing the future and why I get so fired up about all this. I tried to elucidate the concept through an incoherent story I told on Friday about the conversation I had with a friend at the Houston Rockets and how they were using statistical measurements to assemble teams to predict the outcome of highly inter-connected interactions. Particularly in a sport where individual success often comes at the expense of team success and the stats reported are selfishly obtained. Like our workplaces.
Coincidentally that same conversation he and I had was recently played out by Michael Lewis (author of MoneyBall) in what makes a tremendously long article to read online, but if you’re into sports or using statistical measurements to build teams, an interesting one.
With that, I hope, a better explanation of why this is so huge and the direction we could take this is such a game-changer.
Ultimately, I see RoundPegg completely changing how people work together by changing how we evaluate, grow and utilize people.
Where we begin to de-emphasize previous experiences (having already done a task) and recognize the inter-connectedness of our work teams and the importance the ‘softer’ skills play on our work outcomes. Where we stop managing and supervising and start coaching and leading. Where we let people put their strengths to use and the current ‘managers’ are only there to herd energy and keep the bus running straight. I wrote a post on why I thought this was important over the weekend.
A couple sentences that illustrated this point for me in the NYT article:
“Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding.”
What we’re trying to do now by making sure we get the right people on the bus is just the beginning. It’s vital and quite lucrative, undoubtedly, but if we succeed in forcing the conversation to acknowledge that our working relationships are as much or more important than the tasks I’ve previously completed then it’s a foot in the door and we can continue that story into the workplace.
After that it comes down to providing the tools for personnel development on an ongoing basis. Eliminating the bullshit, demoralizing annual review and collecting regular data on our performances, like box scores, that will enable organizations to develop and get more out of their employees and allow RoundPegg to collect data about how we all work together and what drives success.
We’ll be able to recognize whether someone is a net positive or negative to a team regardless of what his individual track record may be. We can identify strengths and weaknesses in a far more objective measure than ever available before. We will be able to put them in a position to capitalize on their strengths, figure out the secret sauce behind work teams and cobble them together for organizations in a way that drives the business like we only hope for today.
We’ll also change what we acknowledge as contribution. Our organizations will foster collaboration as a way to move ideas forward instead of internal competition (e.g. boxing out the right guy so your teammate can grab the rebound). And we’ll be able to measure the intangibles. Where it’s not always the guy who speaks loudest or most or with the most conviction who is construed as having the best ideas. It comes down to evaluating people for their unselfish play that often gets overlooked now.
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It’s been fun to re-read this. Our vision remains and we’ve made a lot of progress to the goal. But, obviously, this is something that is going to take time, but we’ll get there…for the good of us all.
The Dependability Quotient (DQ)
Sometimes the best mentors are your peers.
While cutting my teeth at my first ‘real job,’ I had a friend who constantly dwelled upon his Dependability Quotient (DQ). His take was that he was only as good an employee as his word. He was a freelance consultant so the need for a high DQ was more obvious than for all of us securely employed at Big Co., USA.
But, the need for a high DQ is the same regardless.
Work is all about trust.
Every interaction, even those with people with whom you are (supposedly) on the same team, is about trust.
In his case, the more people trusted him the more work he would get, the more money he would make and the more often he’d be recommended to others.
Even so, it holds true for all of us corporate monkeys as well. The more often we successfully follow through on our word the more access to big opportunities we get. The more we can be leaned upon to help senior executives. And the more we are entrusted to do what’s right for the organization and we don’t waste as much time being mired in office ‘politics.’
While my friend and I never explicitly talked about how to quantify DQ, I’d guess his mental equation went something like this:
DQ = 0.75*(# of completed commitments) – 1,000*(# of failed commitments)
While that’s likely overstating it, you’ve heard the old pearls of wisdom that say it takes 10 happy customers to make up for one pissed off one. Or ten positive remarks to cover the sting on one negative. DQ would follow an amplified form of those.
We work interdependently these days. There are very few things that one person accomplishes solo. So in order for you to look good you need your manager, peers or subordinates to follow through on the items they committed to do for you. And vice versa.
To get ahead, take the long view. Worry less about the petty politics and work on establishing your DQ. Only one of those will follow you for your entire career.
Think about who you’d love to work with again. My guess is that they were the ones you trusted implicitly after hundreds of repeated actions where they followed through and made you look good.
Thanks for reading. I’m off to tackle something I’ve promised to do for our team. Chalk another 3/4 of a point up to my DQ.
When ‘A’ Players Make ‘B’ Teams
photo by .mw
A few days ago we saw what it means to be the leader of a team and Alberto Contador clearly wasn’t it.
Today provided us another good lesson, compliments of Messr. Contador. He was riding comfortably behind two rival challengers and one of his teammates who also happened to be contending for a podium finish. In the next frame, Contador stands on his pedals and tries to break away. The two rival contenders chased him down, but his teammate did not.
Ultimately, Contador may have knocked his teammate out of a top three result and may have cost his team a chance at sweeping the podium for the first time in 85 years. All for a shot at proving his strength (though he was chased down) or to gain an additional ten seconds, at best, on his rivals over the course of the final of the mile climb (this would have been easily made up downhill).
There was no point.
This is a clear example of when having an ‘A’ player on your team actually makes your team weaker. In a business setting this may be the star who doesn’t communicate, doesn’t allow others the opportunity to shine or throws his teammates under the bus in external situations.
His results may be stellar, but the team’s cumulative results decrease when he’s added to the team.
Don’t get so blinded by the seemingly shooting star that you lose sight of your collective team’s performance. We often start to blame the others for being inferior. In reality, we’re promoting bad behaviors, poor values and deteriorating the morale on our team.
‘Stars’ are great and we should all be so lucky to have them, but if they don’t play well with others then what good are they?
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Note: I believe we oversimplify when we see business people in a caste view. The rankings are fluid. ‘A’ players don’t exist independently of an organization. And who you’d view as a ‘B’ or a ‘C’ player on paper could be enormously valuable and raise a level or two on your team. More on that here.
Milking Productivity From Groups
photo by robert francis
An excellent post at PsyBlog on the effects of group dynamics on productivity. Basically, the more people you add to a group the less effective the group becomes when the workload is additive. One interesting study showed that when people were asked to clap or yell as loud as they could their output in a group of six or larger was 1/3rd of what it was on their own.
As the author notes, “… a group problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group – social loafing wouldn’t necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.” So this doesn’t wholly apply to our knowledge businesses, but I think we can all remember times when we were guilty of this or saw it in others in a group.
The post recommends several ways to minimize the effects of social loafing, including:
- Make it known the task is important
- Foster a group identity / belonging to the group
- Make the contribution of other members well-known so as to decrease the ‘sucker effect’
All good, but there are a few worth adding.
- Assign a communicator. Team construction is vital. Having a communicator on the team who’s primary job isn’t necessarily measured in output, but rather whether everyone is aware of what others are doing, is a start. His job is to make sure everyone knows the latest developments and thus implicitly communicates the accomplishments of others on the team so as to minimize the ‘sucker effect’ even further.
- Frequent iteration. Apply the Agile method of software development to your team. Break large tasks down into daily or weekly deliverables. Assign the responsibility for the task to the individual. If it requires the team to collaborate it is still that individual’s responsibility to get everyone together to accomplish the assignment. Deliver something every week and iterate as required.
- Show your work. Time should be set aside for each individual to ‘present’ their contribution to the rest of the group. Even if it’s just thought starters, the contribution should be formally recognized so that it is visible to every member.
- Limit group size. Seems obvious, particularly given the graph on the PsyBlog post that shows individual effort halves in groups of 8 or more. Group dynamics expert and HBS luminary, J. Richard Hackman, found that the optimal group size is 4.6. Obviously, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish but err on the side of too small and you’ll force everyone to shoulder more of the load.
- Relinquish ownership. Unless ownership of the project and the subsequent success or failure is fully granted to the group, individual’s will have some cover to hide behind. While the output/goal may be dictated by someone outside the group acknowledge there are many ways to arrive at the same destination. Grant the freedom to determine that path to the group and let it be known that the rewards and recognition are all theirs.
If other solutions have worked for you please leave them in the comments for others to see.
