Among the issues that concern many managers, and even directors, we often find ‘learning to be closer’, ‘being transparent’, ‘learning to listen’, ‘knowing how to collaborate’, … and for many young people with potential, ‘speaking out’, ‘defending one’s projects’, ‘asserting oneself and existing in a group’… and so on. In fact, many teambuilding sessions are entitled ‘together’… ‘working better together’, ‘communicating together’… which is only logical, given that the aim is to bring a team together.
Many of the bloggers with whom I’ve discussed the subject recognise one thing: their blog has helped them to communicate their ideas, to defend them, some shy people have become more self-confident by seeing the support that was created around their words, you learn to listen to others to enrich your own thinking, you give, you receive… so much so that in hindsight this blog has given me the effect of excellent coaching for almost no money at all.
In the same way that I wondered a year ago whether the values of web 2.0 could not be transposed to a business on the basis of blogs and collaborative tools (and we all know that this is typically the type of value that businesses are looking to develop within their organisation), I suddenly wondered whether these tools deployed internally could not also be used to support a personal development approach.
At this stage, I’d like to share with you the first elements of a thought process that is still in its infancy:
– It’s easier to write than to speak in a meeting… an employee who starts to put down his ideas on his blog and gradually exposes himself in this way is taking his first steps towards becoming ‘more assertive’. Having begun to assert themselves ‘virtually’, can we assume that in time this will also lead to a change in the way they relate to others?
– In the same way, can such a tool help a manager to take the first steps towards ‘getting closer to people’?
– Can the use of ‘2.0’ type tools, whose essence is above all community-based and bond-building, help teams to make the progress in self-improvement that is needed to spread a culture based on sharing and collaboration? Is the tool the prerequisite for spreading this culture, or is it the other way round? Are the two concomitant, or does it depend on the case and the project?
– Do we have any feedback on how people have evolved in businesses that set up internal blogs or wikis (Disney and others) in the early days? Do we know whether certain employees have, in the medium/long term, become more self-confident, developed a certain leadership skills and experienced significant ‘personal development’ that can clearly be attributed to the use of this type of tool?
– In today’s large businesses, the individual communicates and exists via the intranet and internal communication tools. Interventions aimed at developing certain human aspects of the individual and their relationships with others take this dimension into account. In other words, when we develop a person’s relationships with others, do we take into account the fact that he or she will have to transpose this attitude to online tools as well, which is not necessarily easy for generations that are not very comfortable with, and somewhat at ease with, these tools. It’s one thing to get people to change their ‘face-to-face’ relationships, but if they can’t transpose this to their online relationships with others, I’m afraid the approach will lose a lot of its effectiveness and interest.
I think you can quickly see what’s at stake here. If it turns out that these tools can contribute to a personal development approach (and I do mean contribute, don’t you? it’s not a magic wand either), collaborative 2.0 intranets would be of interest for management, for KM, for information sharing and would also be a tool for the HR department, which could use them to support its employee development policies.
In my opinion, there is a real impact, but we still need to compare it with past experience (and here we lack both material and hindsight) and possibly ‘package’ something that is really usable and effective for an HRD. The existence of the individual and his or her relationships with others will be increasingly important online and it’s important for an HRD to try and find the tools to deal with this new situation, isn’t it?
– there is a collaborative intranet 2.0: we can assume that over time it will have positive effects on the development of employees, ranging from ‘a little’ to ‘a lot’, depending on the person concerned
– there is a collaborative 2.0 intranet: this can be used for a specific development action for an employee and we can take advantage of the existence of an internal blog, for example, to get the individual to work on it as part of a coaching approach.
– There’s no such thing as an intranet: could we consider opening an ‘individual blog’ to accompany certain personal development initiatives, when the subject justifies it of course, so that the person concerned can start to put their progress into practice in writing on a permanent basis? We can think of everything to do with individual communication, confidence in front of an audience, the search for proximity in the internal communication of a manager who is struggling to reach the greatest number of people…
I did say that this was just an embryonic thought… but what do you think?
