Continuation of this article.
To be honest, I should say THE premise, because everything stems from it. After that, you can be rather directive, participative, think about developing each individual as well as wanting an army of clones who execute without thinking… you can build your own management 2.0 by fitting together the bricks you like. So we’re going to take a fast look at the needs identified in business, see why in reality they are often either not taken into account or not met in their entirety and find out what could make it all work.
Business needs
– Innovation as a source of value creation
– Engaging employees in a business project
– Improve cross-functional communication and operational feedback
– Capitalising on all the business’s internal knowledge
Managers’ needs
– Ensuring team cohesion
– Motivate teams
– Identify skills
– Take the temperature of the human context of their teams
– Giving a sense of meaning to each person’s role
– Identify potential and sources of initiative and reflection in order to develop them
– Create links between employees
– Encourage greater collaboration between teams and individuals
Employee expectations
– Transparency in top-down communication.
– Valuing their ideas and initiatives, taking them into account (and eliminating obstacles, combating the ‘little boss’ syndrome and withholding information in bottom-up feedback).
– Feeling involved (the ‘if only someone had asked our opinion’ syndrome or the ‘decisions are made without asking the opinion of those who are in direct contact with the customer and the issues concerned’ syndrome).
– Feeling that you belong to a community without losing your identity and becoming part of an army of clones.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, but you can add to the list by commenting on this article. Rather than being exhaustive and formalising all this to the extreme, I’ve preferred to present it all to you in verbatim form, by summarising recurring words that I’ve heard on many occasions.
Bottom line
We can isolate a few main points:
– turning the business into a community: this means creating links and encouraging exchanges, whatever they may be, as well as delivering a strong but concrete corporate message (no more soothing speeches, need for honesty and transparency to reconcile people with the business)
– share knowledge, all knowledge: if formalised knowledge is only shared from the top down, a lot of relevant information is lost because it needs to be used immediately, and an excessively long validation cycle that turns it into ‘official information’ means the business loses a definite competitive advantage. And share it between everyone: you never know who can make the most of information, and sometimes it’s not always those you first think of.
– Involve and motivate: this involves identifying the potential and individual initiatives needed to make the most of personal investment. It also involves removing the obstacles that we will see later.
There is a certain consistency in all this. From the business (strategic vision) through management (what I put in place to serve the strategy and achieve results) to operations (what I need to work effectively and feel involved in my mission).
However, it has to be said…that it doesn’t work, or works only a little, or badly. And yet many businesses have invested and continue to invest in this type of approach. So where does the problem lie?
We can identify human, organisational and structural factors, but it seems to me to be a mistake to separate them. The key point is to deal with them together.
The obstacles
– withholding information and the ‘little boss’ syndrome
– lack of consistency between words and deeds: transparency is frightening.
– Lack of openness to criticism: improving something means admitting that it can be improved. Between those who don’t dare to give positive criticism, those who don’t dare to pass it on, and those (and this is what leads to the two previous behaviours) who don’t want to hear it because they see it as a personal attack, we have just as many obstacles to innovation and improvement. As a result, innovation, which is often the work of operational staff, never reaches the decision-makers who can put it into practice. This results in a lack of involvement (‘it’s useless’) and a dry loss (‘I keep my project to myself and launch it elsewhere’). It comes as a surprise that many innovative businesses are founded by former employees of major groups? Logical, isn’t it, given the above?
– The emergence of a knowledge-based economy requiring employees with specific skills calls for new practices. Of course, knowledgeworkers have been around for ages, but whereas a few years ago they were a tiny fringe of the workforce (and confined to certain well-defined sectors), they are now increasingly numerous and are tending to become the majority in many sectors. Are their specific needs being taken into account (particularly in businesses that have not had this culture for a long time)?
– And last but not least, the key point: we haven’t understood that business has changed radically in recent years. Or rather, we haven’t learnt all the lessons and drawn all the consequences.
Let me explain, because I believe this point to be fundamental.
Today’s large businesses are multilocalised. This is hardly new, but at a time when information technologies are making communication ubiquitous, they often don’t know how to exchange information at a distance. They may know how to transmit information, but they don’t know how to exchange. By exchange, I mean an open discussion that allows ideas to be compared and contrasted, so that a shared idea emerges that could lead to progress or innovation. By exchange I also mean ‘conversation that can create closeness and a bond’. It knows how to pass on data, not ideas. Today, an ERP-type system is perfect for transmitting data for optimal management of the business. But it is incapable of creating links, giving meaning or generating ideas. Email is not appropriate either, especially as it is often misused, intrusive and even counter-productive. As for instant messaging tools, they presuppose the synchronous presence of interlocutors, which is difficult to achieve outside of one-off events: time differences, individual schedules, etc. make it difficult to have lasting exchanges via this medium. What’s more, it essentially limits the number of participants, and its one-off nature restricts the topics covered due to lack of time.
Large businesses are not uniform. It is not a single network but a multitude of small interconnected networks. By this I mean human networks. The fact that the business is so dispersed means that the human network hardly extends beyond the sphere of a single department or agency, because it cannot work on a larger scale. Hence also the difficulty of sharing an identity within the group.
The individual who collaborates within the business has, on a personal level, a behaviour based on socialising, sharing information, exchanging ‘good tips’, valuing his or her initiatives… all in an informal way that he or she cannot implement within the business even though it corresponds to the expectations of the latter.
Finally, with the help of computerisation, the individual in the business exists via the network. They communicate, are known (or ‘knowable’, identifiable), via the intranet, their directory and what is circulated there. They send emails, feed the internal IS with raw data that the ERP systems will then process… The intranet, the network, is the only thing we can be sure is shared by everyone, the only place where we can be sure we can find the whole business. So anything that we want everyone to share, anything that we want to make collective, any managerial project that we want to change the way everyone works individually and as a group must have its counterpart on the intranet. The way in which the intranet functions must allow the human practices of the business to be expressed in the same way as when individuals are in contact with each other. Today, we have to recognise that the intranet and the network are made up of standardised processes, and that the information that circulates on them is of two types:
– management purposes: data entered into an ad hoc tool for processing
– for information purposes: information designed and/or validated by an ad hoc department is distributed throughout the business.
These two functions are essential, of course. But when it comes to creating links, encouraging exchanges and freeing up expression for greater innovation and feedback, it is inconceivable that these practices, which are possible within a ‘face-to-face’ human cell, cannot be extended to the intranet. Moral: we act in micro terms and every managerial project comes up against the transition to the macro scale, which is the only way to make it universal and sustainable.
To come back to the beginning of this (long) point, the intranet must be the image of the business’s social relations, its virtual double. Individuals must be able to act and (above all) interact on the intranet in the same way as they do with each other.
Premises
So here are the possible approaches I’ve taken: as I said, there’s nothing new except one key point…
The objectives of management are therefore to
– encourage innovation
- – Stimulate creativity
- – free up initiative
- – give and build confidence
- – keep innovation within the business
- – bringing innovators together, creating synergies
– encourage exchanges
- – create links
- – identify potential, ideas and initiatives, so as to enhance their value, and thus involve and motivate them
- – obtain feedback
- – associate, discuss to better involve
– give sense of purpose
- – make everyone understand their importance and their role
- – ensure that everyone knows the importance and role of others
- – disseminate a shared vision and develop it together
– ENABLE ALL THESE PRACTICES TO EXIST ON THE ONLY TERRITORY SHARED BY EVERY MEMBER OF THE BUSINESS: THE INTRANET.
The first points reflect my vision of management. The last is, in my view, a sine qua non for success. It was with this in mind that I said that the human and the organisational merge: human practices must find their place on this space, which must itself be calibrated to accommodate them. A new type of tool is therefore needed to support managerial practices, in the same way that it is only by adopting these practices that we can get the most out of the new tool. The combination of practices and tools would deliver exponential gains compared with simply implementing the practices or a new tool separately.
And it was because these practices seemed to me to be close to the values of web 2.0, web 2.0 of which I could see certain bricks (and for good reason) serving as the pillar of the intranet in question… that the addition of managerial principles and the tool quickly found itself stamped ‘management 2.0’.
At the time I was at this stage of my thinking (a year ago), it was all just fine words, because while the practices were either well established or in the process of being, the tool was just a vague vision into which I didn’t really know what to put… blogs, wikis… what else? And I’m not a computer scientist or a developer!
In any case, here’s the 2nd step…to follow: Management 2.0, definition and content.
PS: Thank you for having survived the reading of this unreasonably long post, even if my regular readers know that I’m used to it…
