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Happy new year every one. May 2015 be an auspicious year for you and yours.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center highlights how important technology has become to modern workers.  

The Pew Research Center surveyed 1000 American adults and ended up following up with 535 who were working full or part time. The findings are fairly straight forward: the internet and e-mail are perceived by online workers to be very important communication tools for productivity. Both technologies serve as multipliers allowing workers to communicate more broadly than traditional phone.

Interestingly, social media was not rated that highly by either office based workers or non-office based workers.

The study can be found online at the Pew Research Center website.

Questions for OD Professional

The study raises some issues in the people space:

The trend to a more mobile and internet connected workforce will continue. How are you helping your organisation to build capability to manage that change in direction.

Jeffrey Yergler, PhD is a former colleague of mine from the Graduate Program in Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University. Dr. Yergler posted a link to a guest post in the CIO Blog at the Wall Street Journal. The blog post is about the essential skills needed for graduating MBA students.  

The post is penned by  Irving Wladawskw-Berger a former executive at IBM. Sadly, the op-ed is behind the WSJ's pay-wall. Wladawskw-Berger has posted a copy of the op-ed piece on his own website.

Wladawskw-Berger's argument is that engineering and management schools need to do a better job of developing "soft skills" in their students.  Wladawskw-Berger points to recent research by the Third-Space project on the core soft skills need to be successful in the modern workplace.  The Third-Space project identified five core soft skill which are:

ADAPTABILITY

Demonstrate mental agility and resilience in ambiguous situations; be flexible when handling change and less likely to rely on stale legacy solutions. Happily think beyond black-and- white to the gray areas, and ask expansive, unexpected questions that lead to better solutions.

360-DEGREE THINKING

Think holistically – be capable of seeing the big picture, recognize patterns, and make imaginative leaps based on those patterns.

INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY

Have a deep hunger to learn and grow. Show a desire to dig deep – to be creative and willing to risk and experiment in order to learn.

CULTURAL COMPETENCE

Have a capacity to think, act and move across multiple boundaries of functions, silos and global cultures, including the sometimes insular worlds of engineering, law, and business.

EMPATHY

Demonstrate strong emotional intelligence as well as effective listening and collaboration skills. Have superior communication skills. Be smart, ambitious, yet humble enough to be inclusive and consider the views of others across a variety of disciplines, cultures and perspectives.

The argument that soft skills are important applies as equally to MBA and Engineering students as it does to employees in most modern organizations. 

Oddly enough, we just finished adding empathy as a new value at the organization where I work. Thinking forward for through the next decade empathy is a key skill the organisation will have to master to retain the trust and confidence of the New Zealand public.

Supporting links:

 Irving Wladawskw-Berger

The Third Space. About Us (HTML)

Over the last several months I have been reflecting on the nature of “management”  and what managers really do. Management has been described interns of essential functions (Planning, organizing, staffing, coordinating, and controlling) - this described what needs to be done. But how to go about giving effect to those function is another question. Another frame of reference is French and Raven's basis of power.  French and Raven's is a more academic approach based on the application of power.

The six C's of Management

Parking for the moment the leadership versus management question, and at the risk of sounding like a link-baiting management blog, here are the six essential ways manager get things done.  Keep in mind there these are high level tools.

The six basic tools for managers are

Convocation (who they invite to the table).

Commitment (what they agree to do).

Commission (who they ask to do things).

Censure  (Who they hold to account – and why).

Celebrate (Who they recognize - and why).

Confide (Provide information to).

Here are the six basic tools in more details.

Convocation (who they invite to the table). The tool of convocation is a fundamental one to effective management. Often, getting stuff done is about getting the right people in the room to start with. Likewise, who is excluded from meetings can also be important from a political and symbolic perspective.   

Commitment (what they agree to do). Core to management is committing to work on behalf of their business unit or teams. Importantly, committing to a line of work doesn't mean the manager is doing the work, rather that the business unit / team / function will undertake to do that work on behalf of the organisation.   

Commission (who they ask to do things). Allocating work to individuals is one of the basic tools of management.  Commissioning is the fancy term for allocating work or asking for work to be done. Who you ask to do things is often more important that what you ask them to do.  

Censure (Who they hold to account – and why). Censure means the expression of formal disapproval. Holding to account, either privately or publicly is an important tool. Often managers are more interested in celebrating (see below) and fear having the tough conversations. Censuring is all about having the tough conversations in a timely fashion.  

Celebrate (Who they recognize - and why). The inverse of censure is celebrating. Celebrating accomplishments at a individual, team, and group and even organisational level is an important tool for managers. Good managers think intentionally about, who, what and why they celebrate.  

Confide (Provide information to). The final tool for managers is the sharing of information. This includes providing information to people and groups. In many organizations information is the lifeblood of effectiveness, and the more timely and relevant the information the more effective the functions can be.

There is a good book on visualizing work called Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. The book is an entry to the world of Kanban which in Japanese literally means "signboard or billboard." Kanban was designed to control the logistical chain from a production perspective. More recently it has been used in the agile software development space. At its core Kanban in the software development space is about  (a) a backlog of work (b) things that need to be done this week (c) in progress, and (c) done or completed. This reflects a very simple workflow of (a) to do, (b) doing (c) done. This simple workflow can be scaled from the simple workflow above to relatively complicated workflows. I became aware of Kanban a couple years ago when I was working on building a talent management system across the New Zealand public service. It became a very effective tool for managing my teams work. Over the past year I have been learning the rythem and dynamics of a new role. With a full year, I now have a better understanding of the seasonal nature of work for my current organization. My project this past week I have been working on getting clarity around how to apply a Kanban style board to a more strategic role. The requirements for my strategic Kanban are: 1. Shifting the focus from near term (doing) to the future (to-do). [My managers are responsible for doing.] 2. Ensuring a long enough time horizon to make sure I am leading my function to a proactive position rather than re-active space. 3. facilitate conversstions with my managers about accountability and trade offs. 4. Foster understanding of interdependence and pre-requisite. My first draft, outlined in my book, is in the photo below.

The board as designed has a focus on: (a) the three forward quarters (e.g. Q4-15, Q3-15, Q2-15), (b) the next three months (March, Feb, January), (c) in progress, (d) waiting on, (e) done. The board is designed around the standard 76mm square post-it note.

The actual board is now up and I am working through the process of getting it populated by with my direct reports. It is shown in the photo in the header.

There is a good book on visualizing work called Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. The book is an entry to the world of Kanban which in Japanese literally means "signboard or billboard." Kanban was designed to control the logistical chain from a production perspective. More recently it has been used in the agile software development space. At its core Kanban in the software development space is about  (a) a backlog of work (b) things that need to be done this week (c) in progress, and (c) done or completed. This reflects a very simple workflow of (a) to do, (b) doing (c) done. This simple workflow can be scaled from the simple workflow above to relatively complicated workflows. I became aware of Kanban a couple years ago when I was working on building a talent management system across the New Zealand public service. It became a very effective tool for managing my teams work. Over the past year I have been learning the rythem and dynamics of a new role. With a full year, I now have a better understanding of the seasonal nature of work for my current organization. My project this past week I have been working on getting clarity around how to apply a Kanban style board to a more strategic role. The requirements for my strategic Kanban are: 1. Shifting the focus from near term (doing) to the future (to-do). [My managers are responsible for doing.] 2. Ensuring a long enough time horizon to make sure I am leading my function to a proactive position rather than re-active space. 3. facilitate conversstions with my managers about accountability and trade offs. 4. Foster understanding of interdependence and pre-requisite. My first draft, outlined in my book, is in the photo below.

The board as designed has a focus on: (a) the three forward quarters (e.g. Q4-15, Q3-15, Q2-15), (b) the next three months (March, Feb, January), (c) in progress, (d) waiting on, (e) done. The board is designed around the standard 76mm square post-it note.

The actual board is now up and I am working through the process of getting it populated by with my direct reports. It is shown in the photo in the header.

Dr. Tabor sent me the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html