A recent Phi Delta Kappan essay examines “what leaders should do when they don’t know what to do.” As the authors note, this is a challenging issue, since “[a]t the gut level, many managers believe that saying ‘I’m at a loss here’ is tantamount to declaring ‘I am not fit to lead.’”
No matter how capable or well prepared, managers regularly find themselves confronting bewildering events, perplexing information, or baffling situations that steal their time and hijack their carefully planned agendas. Disoriented by developments that just don’t make sense and by challenges that don’t yield to easy solutions, these managers become confused — sometimes even lost — and don’t know what to do.
Many managers inevitably will respond to these symptoms by simply denying that they are confused. Others will hide their confusion — their search for sense — because they see it as a liability… Acting as if they are in control while really not knowing what to do, these managers reflexively and unilaterally attempt to impose quick fixes to restore their equilibrium.
Sometimes, these managerial responses may even succeed in making the immediate symptoms of problems go away, but they rarely address underlying causes. More often, they lead to bad decision making, undermine crucial communication with colleagues and subordinates, and make managers seem distant and out of touch. In the long run, managers who hide their confusion also damage their organizations’ ability to learn from experience and grow. Yet, despite these drawbacks, few managers can resist hiding their confusion.
The authors prescribe a sensible solution, which boils down to being strategic about framing the issue: Candidly acknowledge your confusion but speak with certainty about the next step needed to achieve clarity. You can read the whole thing here.
Earlier today I took a call to help a client think through how they could use message boards and blogs to manage and disseminate competitive intelligence among their employees (+/- 10,000 folks, globally distributed). In doing so, I sprung wikis on them … a tool with which they (like many people) were unfamiliar.
Here’s how I described the three tools:
* Message boards are like cocktail parties. Walk in, poke around, start a conversation about nearly anything with nearly anyone. Of course, like a cocktail party, you miss a lot, and finding the conversation you want can be difficult.
* Blogs are like radio shows. Get one or more passionate experts together, give them the mic, and let them go. The audience may be hundreds of thousands, and they’ll vacuum up the content as long as it’s relevant. And if they want to engage, they can call in and be part of the conversation (through comment threads). What’s more, the broadcasters will talk about what each other is saying, and in doing so, drive the discourse along.
* Wikis are like encyclopedias. Or archives. Or a filing cabinet. They’re where the reference documents go. You don’t know you need it until you look for it, but with a simple search what you’re looking for rises to the top. What’s more, the material is in pencil, not ink, so the people before and after you can improve the article as they see fit, making it more and more robust over time, and adding any articles they think should be part of the reference set along the way.
In this schema, my suggestion was:
* Find 10 or 20 opinion leaders in the company who are passionate about competitive intelligence. Give them each a blog, or let them all contribute to one blog, and let them start broadcasting. Don’t worry about the ones that don’t post often or do a poor job – the best will rise to the top and the audience will read the best.
* Set up a wiki to which all 10,000 of the employees in the audience can create and update topics related to individual competitors and matters of competitive intelligence. Link to it from the blog / blogs, and encourage the opinion leaders to archive their wisdom there as they see fit.
* Create a message board just for the heck of it. Use it as a “tip line” where any of the 10,000 employees can start, join, or eavesdrop on a conversation about competitive intelligence. Have the bloggers prowl the message boards for things worth broadcasting, and when you find stuff that’s worth keeping, archive it in the wiki.
That was my thumbnail take. I’ll add to it this article from CommonCraft (a very strong blog by Social Design Consultant Lee LeFever that’s worth a regular read, by the way; tip of the hat to CorporateBlogging.info, and tip of the hat for it to CommEcon … see how this “blogs linking to blogs” thing works?) about how blogs and wikis can interrelate. It’s consistent with my thumbnail, and goes to the next level of granularity.
We regularly keep an eye on Internet message boards for information about our clients of which they should be aware. Here’s one such site you might want to add to your list of regular web reads: Vault.com. Much of the site is subcription-only, but recent messages and other features are rich enough that it’s worth a regular visit.
Most organizations have outsourced, are in the process of outsourcing, or are considering outsourcing and conducting a “sourcing evaluation.” Fact.
As we’ve worked with our clients during each of these stages, we’ve learned many lessons about the process and how employees (both in and out of scope) respond to the news.
One of the most important lessons relates to how employees educate themselves about the outsourcing industry. In-scope employees are often just as savvy as the executive team about the pros and cons of outsourcing and how it will affect their business. They read offshore newspapers, download whitepapers, and participate in online message boards to stay informed, among other things.
So this morning when I finally checked out my FierceCIO email update from Friday and saw this, I immediately thought of the employees who may be “in-scope” and also read it…I know the article has made its way around most organizations by now. (The article is about a recent study of organizations who have outsourced. It seems many of these organizations are unhappy with the result. I question the validity of the research, but now that it has made its way to popular press, most will not scrutinize that aspect of the study. You may download the full article from Information Week here: Download file.)
I also know that those employees who have read it are in the process of crafting a question to post on the intranet Q&A page or getting ready to ask it at the next brown bag or town hall (or have even emailed it to your CIO).
So what do you do?
# Don’t be surprised. Communication professionals need to be as informed as the employees during an outsourcing evaulation or process. There are plenty of email updates you can subscribe to via Google, FierceCIO, Yahoo!, and others to stay up-to-date. When you see articles like this, make sure your leadership team isn’t surprised either.
# Don’t deviate from your original messaging. Articles like this do not change why your organization has decided to think about outsourcing or the process you’re using to make sure it’s the right decision for you.
# Email the article to employees and proactively address it. “We know you saw this. We saw it, too. It doesn’t change the reasons why we’ve chosen to look at this.” This will make some leadership teams squirm…pre-test the idea with a pulse group or other informally networked employees and provide that feedback to your leaders if they’re unsure about the idea.
