A Kudos Culture

People want to be recognized and rewarded for their thoughts, ideas, and contributions.” Few statements will garner less argument than that. Yet, when we think about “rewarding collaboration“, people tend to gravitate only to material rewards, which most of us don’t have a whole lot of power to change. However, when participating in collaborative environments, it is especially important to remember that psychological rewards are often just as powerful and behavior-re-enforcing as a restaurant gift card or a cash bonus.

People like to feel appreciated

At the risk of noting the most obvious observation ever written, I will go out on a limb and say that people like to feel important. Thinking back to sociology/psychology class, Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs hits on the people’s desire to reach levels of satisfaction beyond material reward to self-actualization. Similarly, Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory argues that job satisfaction is most closely tied to “motivating” factors like recognition, personal growth, and challenging work (as opposed to “hygiene factors” such as salary and company policy, which contribute more to dissatisfaction, but do not give positive satisfaction).

Getting out of the realm of theory, it is my experience that recognizing people’s contributions, even peer-level recognition, is a great way to reinforce and encourage collaborative participation. Just knowing that our work is useful/interesting/helpful for our peers in many cases is enough to encourage sharing inside of organizations. In environments where it’s difficult to know if people are actually deriving value from work–i.e. most knowledge-creation jobs–positive recognition of utility and value is an important thing.

In particular, I want to call out two groups of people to get more in the habit of recognizing valuable contributions:

• Lurkers: The lurker is a much-maligned creature. Even the name rings of someone stalking from the shadows. Forget the Paredo Princple/80-20 rule for a moment: if there were no lurkers, there’d be no audience! The lurker is an under-appreciated being (I suspect most so in environments without adequate metrics: imagine if newspapers couldn’t detect the number of subscribers and instead calculated readership based on the number of letters to the editor that they received). But in order to encourage people to continue providing information/content, sometimes the lurker has to leave the shadows. Lurkers should realize that there is value in simply thanking a poster if they find information/insight that is useful, even if the lurker doesn’t think he has something substantive to contribute.


I see you lurkin'...with your lurkin' self

• Question-askers: Readers of this blog know that I am a fan of telling people what you want from them. I am a strong believer that asking the question that you want to have answered is the best way to get the answer you want (this post is so full of the obvious, it’s ridiculous). But when we get responses, many times we don’t always take 15 seconds to thank people for their participation/contributions. This is absolutely critical to continued participation, especially in a professional environment.

Reinforcing collaboration

I think that it is important for organizations, in order to build a more collaborative culture, to build a “kudos culture”. People seek recognition and appreciation from collaboration and sharing: so thank people for contributions and reciprocate! Commenting, re-tweeting, sharing links, and answering questions are all valuable behaviors that demonstrate value and utility of information.

Twitter and the Search Barrier

I am currently reading Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Benefits, a book by Morten T. Hansen of Harvard Business School. It is an interesting read so far: he has laid out some of the key benefits and risks to collaboration, a number of which are quite interesting and potentially useful. However, what I have found most interesting thus far is his take on the four most significant barriers to collaboration. His list:

1. The Not Invented Here Barrier: People not willing to seek input from others outside their unit;
2. The Hoarding Barrier: People not willing to provide information for others outside their unit;
3. The Search Barrier: People are not able to find people, expertise, or information easily, and;
4. The Transfer Barrier: People are not able to transfer complicated knowledge from one unit to another.

All of these points have some validity, and are definitely important and significant barriers to collaboration in the workplace; however, I want to spend some time with the third barrier, the search barrier.

As a side note, I have as yet not read how Hansen proposes to overcome said barriers; I’m only halfway through the book.

What is the Search Barrier?

According to Hansen, the search barrier is the inability of a company or organization to “know what it knows”. This can be due to a number of factors: company size, physical distance, information overload, and poverty of networks are the ones that Hansen cites. The search barrier is one of the most significant hurdles facing large organizations: think about all the expertise and experience that exist in most organizations, and how hard it really is to tap that knowledge (specifically the tacit knowledge). Basically, it’s too hard or too much work to search through your organization to find the support/input that you need; consequently, organizations are inefficient because they are continuously solving the same problems.

So what does this have to do with Twitter?

It's about finding the RIGHT person, not just people.

In the spirit of continuing to treat Twitter as a solution searching for a problem, I think that this is a very real business problem that can be greatly helped by microblogging. After all, this is one of the most appealing, at least for me, uses of Twitter on the open internet.

Twitter actually addresses many of the key problems cited by Hansen as components of the search barrier.

• Company size could be less of an issue, if only because the network of followers (a.k.a. the target audience) serves as the filter of information. So you aren’t searching all the units of an organization for an answer; you are asking people to serve as a filter and pass on information and/or people that they already know.

• It’s clear that microblogging helps with bridging distances. However, it’s also important to note that microblogging enables “weak ties“, allowing for people to maintain relationships that may become more important in the future.

• Though relatively counter-intuitive, microblogging can help with information overload, because your network serves as a collaborative filter. For the same reason, microblogging can help solve the problem of poverty of networks by making it easier to keep in touch with colleagues.

But microblogging is just a technology

In much contrast to the rest of this entry, I do want to emphasize that simply having the technical capability for microblogging does not ensure success: effective deployment also entails organizational and process challenges in order to achieve the desired results. Social media success is only sometimes about tools; most times it’s more about changing behaviors and inculcating more collaborative mindsets.

Defining Collaboration

One of my favorite blogs is “The Big Shift” over at Harvard Business Publishing, a blog about innovation, collaboration, and other trends in business.  In a recent post, they lamented that “Popular as the word is, collaboration mostly goes undefined.”  They go on:

Many people, we suspect, would define collaboration as any situation where people work together in a coordinated way to achieve common objectives and would include highly specified and synchronized coordination, such as traditional assembly line operations.

I would take this statement a step further, in that many people (and organizations) would define collaboration more broadly than this even to include things like “coordination” and “information sharing”, both activities that I (and I suspect the authors of the Big Shift) would argue are not really collaboration.  And while this may seem like a semantic arguments, the Economist Intelligence Unit stated: “The labels themselves are not important, but labelling every initiative as “collaboration” creates a misnomer that robs [organizations] of the ability to deploy resources efficiently and effectively to create the most value.”

Things That Definitely Aren’t Collaboration

A word on two activities (there are many more) that are grouped with collaboration, but are entirely different activities.  These two are coordination and information sharing.

Coordination generally involves sharing an already-written draft document, report, policy, or proposal with stakeholders inside and outside the initiating organization.  While it sounds good, this is more of a C.Y.A. activity than anything meant to produce value: get other pieces of the organization to check off some boxes, hopefully while not changing products too much.  Coordination, in my opinion, is usually a value-subtracting activity.

Information Sharing is another activity that is sometimes called collaboration, but to me is just a piece of the collaboration process.  In the words of 9/11 Commission members LTG Peter Kind (United States Army, Ret retired) and Katharine J. Burton, “Access to information does not necessarily lead to effective knowledge sharing and collaboration.  When people share knowledge, they are not just sharing information; they are also sharing cultural and social references.” Access to similar information is an important piece of collaborative knowledge creation process; however, it should not be confused with collaboration.

My Definition of Collaboration

Having said this, much like the Big Shift, I have now posted more than 30 posts to this blog without ever really having defined collaboration.  My definition  of collaboration is the following (drawn mostly out of my client service experience):

Collaboration is the interaction of and among employees and their partners—exploiting their diverse expertise and organizational resources to more effectively create superior value and/or deliver more efficient services than an organization or individual could have accomplished alone.

I believe that this definition highlights that the value proposition of collaboration for organizations, as “higher value” (in terms of service delivery) is ultimately the driving force behind the focus on collaboration in organizations  Additionally, this definition deliberately characterizes collaboration as a means to achieving an organization’s goals: collaboration is not an end itself.

Want to Improve Collaboration? Close Your Email.

One of the most serious problems in organizations today is our (ab)use of email. There’s no question that email has fundamentally changed the way people work and how people collaborate. However, now email is often thought of as a scourge: leave the office for a week, come back to 500 emails waiting for you, of which probably 50 require action and 10 are very important.

In terms of communication, Email is usually the first resort. Sadly, that means that email is now also most people’s primary means of collaboration. But here’s what email collaboration looks like:

Created by Manny Wilson

Not exactly the cleanest business process. Not pictured is the person in the middle of the process: the stuckee given the unenviable task of aggregating all of the changes made in the various silos into the “master document”.

Here’s an idea: Try Something Else!

So, as a first step towards improving collaboration: don’t use email. Sounds simple, but of course the difficulty is in the execution. I’ll start with the why. There are several reasons that you should move away from email for collaboration.

• People get enough email: If you can contribute to your colleague receiving less email, I will guarantee you that they will genuinely appreciate it. So, rather than sending out another email to lose in the email, try using another platform!
• Email is not discoverable: To me, this is the most important piece. Email conversations are by definition not discoverable. So if I have a question, I could email five people; unless they forward it on, I am limiting my potential sources of answers. However, if I ask the question in a online, discoverable forum, I can still get the same 5 people to answer the question, but also add everybody else with access to the platform to the potential sources of information. As an added bonus, the knowledge gleaned from the discussion is then captured in a discoverable venue, rather than trapped in an email box.
• Email won’t help you bump into others: One of the great benefits of working in the open is that you can actually bump into people with similar work focuses and similar experiences. Working in a more open environment allows for fortuitous opportunities in order to expand social networks. And given that workforces are becoming more dispersed, this will likely become more important as face-to-face opportunities dwindle.

Executing

Let’s face it, it’s hard to get out of email. It’s been too successful in penetrating the business world. How many times a day do you have a face-to-face or phone conversation that ends with “I’ll type up an email summarizing what we just said”? Well, there are some good ways to start:

• Signal: Rather than sending out questions via email, post the question online and send out the link. It’s still an email, but the discussion and answers will be more discoverable to others
• Do Point-to-Point in the Public: We have a lot more means to talk point-to-point in public nowadays:  Wiki User Pages, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc. Communicating on these is a good first step because they are all more discoverable then email.
• Get out of your comfort zone a bit: Working in the open is a new, weird thing, so it’s not unusual that you would feel strange doing this instead of email. But sometimes you just have to make the leap. Give it a shot.  As a colleague tells me, “If you aren’t out of your comfort zone, you aren’t doing your job.”

PS. A note about email notifications. Email works well as a notification for these other tools.  Getting an email that says to check a wiki page because it’s changed is inherently different from getting a document in an email, because you can delete the notification and know you won’t be missing information later.  If you get a document in an email, you will likely keep that email/document combo because you just don’t know if you’ll need to refer back to it.

Link it All Together

When thinking about the power of virtual collaboration, the emphasis is usually on creating opportunities for collaboration between geographically dispersed groups. And rightly so: virtual collaboration’s most significant asset is that it enables groups that would not be able to collaborate (at least without re-locating) to work together.

However, there is another feature of virtual collaboration that is also empowering, even for teams that are co-located: the ability to hyperlink content, enabling the fusion of information in a meaningful sense. Think about Wikipedia, and why it’s so much easier to browse than a traditional encyclopedia: it’s because there’s just so many available links in a given article (so many in fact that you rarely have to use to the back and forward buttons on your browser). And there are clear lessons to be drawn for collaboration in a professional environment from this practice.

More than Search Engine Optimization

Links do more than provide “Google juice” (admittedly, however, this is important, especially as more and more organizations are turning to Google to power internal enterprise search).

• Links provide context: Links have the distinct benefit of allowing people to read more information if they choose and/or need to do so. So again, thinking about Wikipedia, if I want to get some quick background about a given topic, I can go there and read just that article. However, if I want to get a bit more context, I can read through the given article, as well as a few other key articles that are linked to the main article that I’m interested in.

• Links assist in the analysis of data: Given all of the hubbub around link analysis (and social network analysis), hyperlinking content together helps to further analysis. Again turning to Wikipedia for an example, you can look at all of the articles that link to a given article. I can see the hundreds of articles that link to the article about Steve Jobs, for example: on that list are a number of connections that I never would have thought of that I can explore: Why does the “Walt Disney Company” link there? What’s the relationship between Jobs and Larry Ellison?

• Links help to bridge gaps: An especially valuable use of hyperlinks is to bridge gaps between collaborative constituencies (a topic that will be the topic of the next post…). In the professional world, collaborative environments are usually segmented and walled off by specific job functions/types (i.e. different Sharepoint sites or team rooms). It’s true in almost all organizations: accountants work in a different collaborative environment than consultants; developers use different collaborative tools than marketers; and, FBI agents don’t work in the same environment as intelligence officers. However, links can help to break through these walls, primarily by linking to content outside of the walled confines of more limited environments. Linking to this content makes it helps people think more strategically and enables more collaborative thought, while also being a strong alternative to pulling content into closed environments (making content more discoverable).

Tying it all together

Linking is a simple, yet under-utilized tool/technique: most times, out of laziness, constrained time, or other reasons, we produce digital content (be it an email, document, or other) and don’t use the power of linking to it’s full extent. Linking gives us the power to enable our audiences to be as smart as they want to be, while also enabling us to demonstrate diligence in research and knowledge of key sources. Put simply, linking is, in many ways, what drives discoverability and integration of information in a digital environment.