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.

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.

What do you want from people?

I put my document out there for people to collaborate on, but didn’t get anything

One of the most common shortfalls in collaborative projects is under-participation. People just can’t get other people to contribute to their work when using a collaborative environment, be it a wiki, blog, discussion thread, or whatever (the technology here really doesn’t matter). Aside from the problem of not thinking about who you want to collaborate and rallying your crowd, the most common problem is that people starting a collaborative project don’t really think about what they want from the participants. Rather, people tend to concentrate on what they don’t want from participants. (As an aside, a lot of people tend to think of over-participation as a more serious issue…I’ve yet to have that problem in my experience; Someday I hope to see it).

Seriously, What Do You Want from Me?

Fear not! In many cases, this problem can be solved fairly easily with just a little bit of thought from project leaders. Most importantly, you have to think about exactly what kind of input you actually want from the crowd. How do you go about doing this? Well, start with specific questions.

An example: imagine you walk into a bank and the loan officer asks how they can help you, what would your response be? “I’d like to get some advice on a mortgage”. However, when we approach collaboration in the workplace, we don’t ask questions like that: usually, it’s more like “What can you tell me about loans?” This question is unlikely to get you the answer you want and/or need, especially because you probably have a specific questi0n and/or problem that you want an answer for.

So What?

Basically, most people just want to know what you expect from them. People are busy and usually have enough to do. So, be specific in your requests (a common complaint in email). The best thing to do? Start with a specific question. If you want to know if a wiki solution could help solve a problem, don’t ask me what I know about wikis. Tell me about your problem, so that I might be able to provide information in a useful context! Your results are likely to be better. When you start a collaboration project, be specific in what you want from somebody: posting a long document on a website and saying “comment” or “review” (or nothing at all for that matter) isn’t likely to return you the right answers. There’s a lot of power in asking your colleagues “Does the section on Topic B make sense” or “Am I missing any key steps”.

McKinsey’s take on Web 2.0 – The first in a Series

Perhaps the most read, circulated, and probably influential Web 2.0 publication of 2009 so far has been McKinsey‘s article “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work“, by Michael Chuil, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts. I have read this piece with great interest and feel that I needed to organize my thoughts on this paper. Hence, a blog series is born: Over the next few posts, I will muse about each of the six techniques suggested by the author as important to making Web 2.0 work in the enterprise. First up: Leadership.

The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.

I find that this is one of the more hotly debated topics around change management: does change come from the bottom or from the top? Of course the answer is that change really comes from both the top and the bottom. In my mind, change often comes via pressure and innovation from the bottom, eventually requires buy in from the higher levels of leadership. The opposite happens as well: leaders have innovative ideas or see strategic opportunity and begin to sow the seeds of change in the base. Put simply, change needs champions at all levels.

Change, leadership, and Web 2.0

In this case, the article is right on. “Build it and they will come” in Web 2.0 is almost always a failure. And leaders who are willing to be champions for Web 2.0–especially with other senior leaders–are also key to the success of a Web 2.0 implementation. Similarly, the first step towards Web 2.0 implementation is almost always a small, bottom-up effort: everybody needs proof of concept and pilots before jumping in with two feet.

Indeed, a lack of perceived leadership support is often cited (in my experience) as a key hurdle for adoption. However, while the article talks about how senior leadership is important, I think that perhaps leadership at other places in the organization is equally important. This includes everyone’s favorite villain, the middle manager: leaders need to ensure that these folks are in the know about social media initiatives and understand where they fit into flatter organization.

Perhaps surprisingly, I think that Web 2.0 implementations are most dependent on leaders and champions at the working level. Web 2.0 requires that working level people, who are likely to benefit most from collaboration and working transparently, clearly understand and talk about the benefits of Web 2.0 amongst themselves. And for this to manifest itself effectively, working level folks have to take it upon themselves to champion Web 2.0 and share their lessons with their peers. This is mainly due to the inherent credibility with the working level, which senior leadership might not have.

The takeaway is this: success in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is dependent on having leadership through all levels of an organization. It’s not about the top, it’s not about the bottom. It’s about the whole organization.

The Long Tail of Collaboration Value

The Long Tail is of course one of the most popular and notable thoughts/books of the social media movement. From Wikipedia:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. . . . The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of “non-hit” items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

Uh Justin…what’s the point?

Well, this may require a logical leap here, but I think that the long tail is a valuable metaphor for the value of collaboration. You see, there may be a few “blockbuster” examples and a lot of less impressive examples of collaboration. But, like those items on iTunes that sells only 10 copies, successful “collaboration events” may only be important/significant to the 3 people that were directly involved. Not something that’s “sexy” or tells a good story.

However, given that, as Rob Salkowitz notes, most knowledge work is a collection of relatively insignificant tasks that ultimately lead up to more significant outputs, these individually insignificant collaboration events add up to generate significant organizational value. So while on an individual level, collaborative interaction may be relatively banal, the sum of these events is significantly higher, if harder to communicate.

Measuring Value

This is another of the unique challenges in measuring the true value of collaboration, especially in knowledge work. Most collaboration yields relatively low value individually; however, when taken in connection with other collaborative activities, the cumulative potential of effective collaboration is remarkable. One of the great ways to make the case for collaboration would be to figure out a better way to measure the value of the tail.

Are people already rewarded for collaboration?

One of the most interesting and debated topics in my line of work is how to reward people for collaboration and/or participation in Web 2.0 efforts. This topic is worth books in itself (and many, many individual posts that perhaps I will write in the future…), but I want to explore whether this whole problem could be avoided. This is crazy, you say: you have to incentivize workers in order to actually get them to collaborate or use Web 2.0 technology. Or you have to write it into their performance objectives.

Or do you? My theory, I submit to you, is that this is unnecessary. Why? Because collaboration is a means, not an end.

Craziness?

You have to incentivize collaboration and participation in Web 2.0 in order to get people to play, right? NSFMF! There’s gotta be a benefit in collaboration that is self-evident to the people participating. Blogging, using a wiki, or social bookmarking may be inherently public/crowd-sourcing activities; but participation by good will is not sustainable. There has to be a return on investment. This is why collaboration by mandate often doesn’t work well, because people see it as “another duty as assigned” and more work, rather than part of their actual job.

Perhaps think of it this way: prior to Web 2.0 technologies, did you really write into your performance reviews that you drafted products in Microsoft Word or worked with your colleagues via email, instant, messaging, and face-to-face meetings? Not so much. Likewise, a communications professional shouldn’t get rewarded for blogging; he should get rewarded for communicating. An intelligence analyst shouldn’t rewarded for making wiki edits; she should get rewarded for high quality intelligence analysis. Collaboration and Web 2.0 are just two ways that help her get to a higher level analysis. Collaboration is a skill, like writing, research, and presenting: it’s to be developed and honed.

The Ends Justify the Means

Take a moment to think about why you work with others. Ideally, it’s not to check a box. It’s to search for new ideas, get sanity checks, and find different points of view on my work and thoughts (or provide such services out of reciprocity or sense of mission). I do these things because I want to produce something that’s better than I could do alone. No matter how smart I [may think I] am, I’m not smarter than my network. Let’s face it, nobody’s smarter than all of their network. Isn’t that the whole point of this Web 2.0 thing?

Collaboration is an input. It is one of many. At the end of the day, people in knowledge work are rewarded (in a perfect world) for the quality outputs. The point of this entry is not to say that collaboration shouldn’t be rewarded: it’s that collaboration is already rewarded. It’s rewarded because the final output should be that much better if you’ve collaborated with outside peers.*

*Granted, this is of course dependent on having managers who are able to account for said improvement in quality of output…

Collaboration, Moneyball Style

In the field of sports writing, few names are more familiar than Michael Lewis. Though Lewis has written quite a few books, he’s best known as the brain behind Moneyball, which tracked a new way to create a successful baseball team without spending a whole lot of money. The poster child of the book and the broader movement is Billy Beane and his early 2000s Oakland A’s teams. According to Wikipedia:

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A’s became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.

Recently, Lewis wrote an article that basically called Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets of the NBA. This article argues that Battier, despite being “a marginal NBA athlete” and having a reputation as a “replaceable cog”, was perhaps the reason that the Rockets were a “championship caliber team” and not a “bubble playoff team”. For those interested in the complete argument, I highly recommend it. (And for football fans, one of my absolute favorite blogs, Smart Football, take a stab at Lewis’s latest article as well.

So what’s the point?

The business world loves sports metaphors. Everyone knows that. So how’s this for one: someone who’s good at collaborating can be a clear difference maker in an organization. This is not to say that people who are good at collaborating don’t have skills or value to contribute beyond being a good “collaborator” (a word that I don’t particularly like, but will use it…); rather, it’s that someone who is good at collaborating can really take a project to another level. A star performer who’s great at making those around him/her better is better than a star performer that doesn’t play well with others. The best of the best do both.

The catch-22 in business, as in basketball, is that it’s very difficult to understand exactly what it is about somebody who performs like Battier that makes them so valuable to a team. There’s no stat (other than wins and testimonials) that will highlight that value and there’s not an easy way to figure out who these performers are, except by reputation (or maybe social network analysis).

Moneyball Management

Moneyball was all about creating new ways to measure performance and value created by players. And these new measures were created because the old ones weren’t sufficient to tell the story. Collaboration is one of those other things, that if we can measure an individual’s ability to collaborate, could revolutionize the way we evaluate the creation of value. After all, guys who win (even if they don’t have any one great thing they do) will have a job until they choose not to.

Measuring Collaboration

Anybody who has experience in collaboration software or enterprise 2.0 knows that there is a endless demand for proof of value. However, as I gain more experience with consulting in the area, I’ve learned that this is really a red herring: the metrics people want don’t really exist. And almost always, people looking for metrics aren’t particularly interested in those that can be collected (largely participation-related metrics).  That’s not to say participation metrics aren’t important, they just don’t tell enough of a story to answer the mail (generally).

Everyone knows this: Collaboration in knowledge work is famously difficult to track and measure. Moreover, few organizations realize that they don’t know how well (or poorly) that they actually collaborate. Nor do they realize that social software offers a more effective and efficient means for collaboration: email works just fine if you don’t even think about how inefficient it is (though it seems like more effort is being expended to improve how we use email).

More Widgets vs. Better Widgets

There are generally two ways that collaboration can improve work: process improvements or quality improvements. It’s more widgets (or faster-produced widgets) or better widgets. More widgets improvements are generally easier to cataloged, for obvious reasons: producing a report in a week instead of two is easily quantifiable (assuming quality is held constant).

However, the improvements that people and managers generally want to see qualitative improvement, and the metrics to prove it. But how can you measure whether a knowledge output is 50 percent qualitatively better than a previous report. To make it worse, knowledge work is rarely repetitive enough that you can measure improvement without meticulous analytic review. And how difficult is it to get someone demanding metrics and proof that a new way of collaboration is worth the effort?

The Million Dollar Answer

So needless to say, if you can come up with a way to reliably “measure” collaboration, you will be rich indeed. In the meantime, the best tactic (in my experience) is being able to tell the story of collaboration, including more than just participation stats. Communications is important: you have to be able to tell the story. The who, when, and where are important; but it’s important to both be able to and have a means to tell the why, what, and how.

Collaboration as Competitive Advantage

One of the hardest parts of being a collaboration consultant is that quantifying and qualifying why collaboration is valuable, especially in knowledge-creation organizations, is extremely difficult. Everyone knows that collaboration is goodness, but why? What is it about collaboration that is just so great?

A while back, I heard a presentation by Jeffrey Mann and Carol Rozwell (Gartner Analysts), that summed up the (potential) value of collaboration nicely: they presented a collaboration maturity model, and occupying the top line was simply the phrase: “Collaboration as Competitive Advantage”. The slide said that collaboration, in its most mature form, collaboration is so ingrained in an organization’s activity that it gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.

It’s put so simply, yet so accurately: organizations can best their competitors by enabling smart people to swarm quickly and deliver advantages in cost, quality, timeliness, and flexibility.

Collaboration enables improvement in all of these areas. We can reduce costs by improving efficiency and reducing duplicative effort. We can improve quality by increasing the number of eyes on a target and by bringing multiple points of view to bear on any given problem. We can improve our timeliness by again increasing efficiency, but also by better positioning information for discovery and integration. We can also improve our flexibility by empowering people to work across organizational lines and by not binding them to traditional production cycles (especially if that model doesn’t fit the problem).

So just as Nordstrom derives it’s competitive advantage from top-flight customer service and Wal-Mart from its ability to get low cost items to its stores efficiently, organizations can derive unique value from their ability to effectively and rapidly organize teams of smart people to solve hard problems. If an organization understands its own social networks, people, and leaders well enough, I contend that this advantage can be within reach.