Links for this week (weekly)

• The End of the Middle Manager

  “The technology revolution has brought us a lot—dramatic improvement in what we know about customers and how we interact with them, markedly better information for making decisions, the ability to work through virtual teams scattered around the globe. But its unseen legacy might be something much more fundamental: It has changed the very nature of how people work. One consequence seems clear: The classic job of the middle manager will soon disappear.

  “

  tags: management middlemanagement technology generationy mentoring coaching

  • Now technology itself has become the great general manager. It can monitor performance closely, provide instant feed back, even create reports and presentations. Moreover, skilled teams are increasingly self-managed. That leaves people with general management skills in a very vulnerable position. In the past their networks and abilities were built up in one company—but as tenure with a single company decreases, people lose the opportunity to develop deep knowledge that other firms might value. Plus, thanks to the internet and search engines, everyone now knows or can know something about everything. There is little competitive advantage in being a jack-of-all-trades when your main competitor might be Wikipedia.
  • Attitudes toward management have also changed. As my research makes clear, Gen Y workers see no value in reporting to someone who simply keeps track of what they do, when much of that can be done by themselves, their peers, or a machine. What they do value is mentoring and coaching from someone they respect. Someone, in other words, who is a master—not a general manager.
  • If you’re a middle manager now, you aren’t doomed to early retirement. But you must be prepared to make two crucial investments. The first is in acquiring and building knowledge or competencies that are valuable and rare—what I would call your “signatur
  • The second investment is in developing new areas of proficiency, or moving into adjacencies, throughout your working life.
  • My research suggests that advocacy, social and micro entrepreneurship, the life and health sciences, energy conservation, creativity and innovation, and coaching will be highly prized in the decades ahead.

• Breaking the Command-and-Control Reflex – John T. Landry – Our Editors – Harvard Business Review

  “Brennan starts by saying that business is going through a transformation and top-down leadership no longer works well for companies. But he believes that too many of his managers still operate in a “command-and-control reflex.” “

  tags: management topdown commandandcontrol hierachy humanresources hiring autonomy delegation

  • good at holding subordinates accountable but bad at setting clear expectations. When subordinates aren’t sure what the boss really wants to accomplish
  • Most managers, he says, can’t help but see collaboration as a kind of threat to their territory, and they raise a variety of “defense mechanisms” to thwart it.
  • To discourage the command-and-control reflex, Brennan puts a lot of energy into hiring. He looks for people who are open-minded and aware of their own foibles. Those are the ones more likely to encourage autonomy and collaboration even at the cost of control.
  • An accumulating body of evidence, from social science experiments to middle manager testimonies, suggests that high levels of inequality discourage cooperation and initiative on the ground
  • Corporate profits are also quite healthy, disproving critics who said that competition was getting so intense that bureaucratic organizations would soon disappear. Most companies have no compelling need to change, even in the face of a new generation of technology-native employees demanding autonomy.

• Social Business Scorecard Presentation

  “A development of my ideas in presentation format. This was a really useful exercise and it has helped me draw out some of the ideas and to identify areas to work on and make more robust. The project is one I’d like to make concrete, working with a team to solidify the ideas and to ground them in standard business practice. Areas that need developing are legion but there needs to be more work on the external / marketing aspects to draw the elements together.”

  tags: socialbusiness socialbusinessscorecard metrics ROI measurement

• Creating a Question-Friendly Environment

  “Questions are the basis of all creativity.
  Questions are the basis of all connection.
  Questions are the basis of all understanding.

  The challenge is creating a question-friendly environment.

  Although you have little (or no) control over the people in the environment, you do have (some) control over the environment itself.”

  tags: questioning questions management trust creativity problemsolving discussions conversations debate

  • Here’s how:
    —Think verbs, not nouns.
    —Think dialogue, not debate.
    —Think searching, not snooping.
    —Think curious, not judgmental.
    —Think insinuating, not imposing.
    —Think harmonizing, not manipulating.
  • It’s about the process:
    —Thinking
    —Challenging
    —Encouraging of diverse viewpoints
    —Admitting that there are multiple solutions to every problem

• Pourquoi les entreprises doivent se doter d’un HR Community Manager? – Le blog de Julien Cotte

  • La place du HR Community Manager se situe dans l’accompagnement des équipes, le fait de s’assurer que les messages ou décisions prises sont bien comprises, de proposer la création ou l’officialisation de communautés internes à la RH pour favoriser le travail en équipe, en projet…
  • toute l’équipe RH se doit d’être ambassadeur de la marque RH en interne. Le HR Community Manager est là pour les accompagner, pour renforcer certains messages, pour diffuser l’offre de service RH auprès des équipes RH et auprès des clients internes de la RH, pour faire connaître toutes les actions menées par la DRH.
  • a communication vers l’externe est donc essentielle, et les médias sociaux sont le nouvel eldorado des équipes RH et dirigeantes qui ont envie de faire savoir au monde entier que l’entreprise pour laquelle ils travaillent est “THE PLACE TO BE”.

• Is Your Enterprise Socially-Networked Or Just Your Employees?

  “For any new business tool or technology, gaining a core of early adopters is both exciting and dangerous–if it only stays within an echo-chamber of early adopters. To become a business priority, it needs to grow beyond this group, become commonplace and create value for the organization. The question in the title may sound like a self-contradictory, but I have good reason to ask.”

  tags: soicialnetworking socialbusiness productivity adoption maturity SNA bottlenecks

  • That is an important point: work still needs to be enjoyable for people to stay engaged. But, once you grow beyond an initial group, any concept or technology becomes so common that it looses it high-shine luster. What is important is to distinguish common from productive.
  • . You need a basic understanding of level of dependencies and where they lie before you can get into the deeper question of how these dependencies reflect your organizational needs, processes, and strategy
  • Social network analysis may not and need not be a perfect mapping to show value. Even simple explorations can help identify basic issues such as bottlenecks and isolated groups.

• From Community Management to Command Centers

  “Community management is indeed a critical role in any fledgling social or adaptive business. Monitoring keywords provides us with invaluable insights that reveal the sentiment, volume and reach of activity within our markets. Identifying, tracking, and engaging customers and stakeholders helps us cultivate rewarding communities measured by loyalty and advocacy. Listening to conversations provides us with an opportunity to feel what people are saying and the experiences they’re sharing. If we pay attention, we can surface the ideas and touchpoints that gives us purpose and provide us with opportunities to earn relevance.

  Over the years, the role of the community manager has evolved. What started as a gateway to surfacing the conversations related to brands in the emerging conversational landscape, evolved into something far more sophisticated. And, we’re just getting started.”

  tags: communitymanagement adaptivecasemanagement adaptivebusiness conversations socialswitchboard collaboration commandcenters socialcrm dell gatorade feedback customerfeedback

  • This new obligation only intensified as social media moved from digital outliers to the mainstream. Now, some of the socially vulnerable brands in the world require a mission control not unlike what we envision when we hear those two words, “mission control.” The difference is that this new infrastructure is designed to ensure positive brand experiences as well as the impact of real-time brand democracy.
  • We are now moving from the era of community management to fully fledged command centers.
  • Dell is years into designing both a social and adaptive business. With the recent launch of its Social Media Listening Command Center, customers officially become part of Dell’s value proposition.
  • In December 2010, CEO Michael Dell and CMO Karen Quintos officially launched the company’s Command Center as the operational hub for listening and engagement across all social media, globally. Dell made its name in social media by responding to customer problems.

  • According to Dell, the Social Media Listening Command Center tracks on average more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as the mentions of Dell on Twitter that have a reach greater than the circulation of the top 12 daily newspapers in the United States.

  • More importantly, it’s about learning and changing based on repeat feedback.
  • Before we can collaborate externally, we have to collaborate within. This is also about efficiency and cooperation where it hasn’t really existed before. We are now creating feedback loops wherever touchpoints and intelligence are active and brewing.

• Intelligence Lorraine : de la veille au réseau social d’expertises multisecteurs

  “L’année 2011 s’annonce prometteuse pour Intelligence Lorraine, portail de l’intelligence économique régionale. Il vient de lancer, lundi 10 janvier, un bulletin de veille gratuit à destination des PME et de leurs salariés. Ce bulletin hebdomadaire, distribué chaque lundi par mail, regroupe les principales informations de la semaine écoulée ayant trait à la vie économique en Lorraine. Rien d’extraordinaire, pourrait-on penser, si ce n’est que c’est la première brique d’une stratégie ambitieuse dont l’objectif, à terme, est de fédérer un réseau social d’expertises multisectorielles au service de l’intelligence économique des PME lorraines.”

  tags: intelligencelorraine economicintelligence watch curation socialnetworks casestudies feedburner googlereader

  • Google Reader permet ensuite de sélectionner parmi ces flux tous les articles intéressants et de construire un flux personnalisé qui sera diffusé à tous les adhérents au bulletin veille via FeedBurner, un outil également gratuit de gestion de flux RSS.
  •  La première étape est d’abord de diffuser notre bulletin de veille en ciblant tous ceux qui ont besoin d’être informés sur l’économie régionale, particulièrement ceux qui n’ont pas vraiment le temps d’organiser une vieille systématique, comme c’est le cas de nombre de décideurs au sein des PME
  • Dans un second temps, il s’agira de regrouper tous ceux qui y trouvent un intérêt pour les inciter à participer à la réalisation de ce bulletin afin de le transformer en outil de veille collaborative.
  • La troisième étape consistera à constituer un réseau social régional d’expertises pour améliorer la connaissance du territoire et de ses enjeux économiques par le plus grand nombre de PME, améliorer la circulation et le partage des informations et identifier les opportunités pour aider au développement des entreprises.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.