Category: Theory Points
Thanks to sites like LinkedIn and yes, Facebook, online social networking is making a strong presence in the professional sphere. And as Carolynne posted, organizations are starting to encourage employees to use social networking technology for collaboration and to create cross-office connections. But as we place ourselves in multiple virtual networks, how can we get the most out of our online presence? Know that the basic principles about networks apply; to get the value out of networks—online or otherwise—it’s important to know how they work:
There are four types of people who operate inside networks:
- Isolate: People who communicate infrequently, if at all
- Average: People who communicate with average frequency to a moderate number of people
- Bridge: Those who communicate with the same amount as others, but have key relationships with people from a variety of groups
- Star: Those who communicate and maintain relationships with a significantly greater number of people than the average person
There are going to be people who are more active in online networks just as they would be offline. One role isn’t necessarily better than another, but the roles people play inside networks can have consequences on who we know.
It’s about the strength of your network, not necessarily the size:
- There’s one variable that predicts relationship quality with more power than any other: frequency of contact.
- The more people you care for, the harder it becomes to care. We don’t have relationships, we grow relationships. Cultivate the ones that really matter.
- You only have so much time, and there are only so many people with whom you can share that time. So spend your time on the relationships that matter.
There’s power in the “weak tie:”
- If you’ve cultivated the right relationships, you’ll benefit from their networks.
- If you’re cultivating the relationships that really matter, those are the people who have the right amount of influence and credibility to connect you to their networks—thus, you’re establishing powerful “weak ties” without even knowing.
Informal Networks are often the most trusted source of information.
- Rumor mills exist because of informal networks.
- People inside organizations make value judgments based on the information they hear from their informal networks.
We flock to networks because they’re powerful—they connect us quickly to trusted sources of information. And we like online networks because they’re fast and they’re easy. Remember that easy doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more effective (read more about Media Richness here). While online profiles aren’t a substitute for interpersonal relationships, if managed properly, they can make our existing relationships stronger. As we build more networks online, remember—it’s still all about building the right relationships.
Around Valentine’s Day, we hear more about relationships than any other time of year. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal provides two interesting articles on relationships and technology. One story, its not u, focuses on ending relationships electronically– primarily through email or text messages. Its author calls the technology-arbited breakups, “techno brush-offs.”
Each article makes the point that our interpersonal relationships are changing for the worse. Tough conversations once reserved for face time are absorbed by people’s familiarity with—and inappropriate use of—technology. One woman, the recipient of a combination-text/email breakup, considers such a message “a product of our times.” “‘I hate what this has become,’ she says. ‘Every computer and cellular phone needs a little instruction manual to let people know what can be sent in a text, what can be sent in an email, what can be said on the phone, and what must be said in person.’”
Yet the appreciation for interpersonal interactions conflicts with our everyday tendencies. We check and respond to email constantly and depend on the web for to-the-minute information on both personal and professional topics. The WSJ article, Deleting the Habit, talks about the similarities between technology reliance and drug addiction. “Addicts” have a hard time unplugging during once-sacred quality time– on vacations, during family time, and even while honeymooning.
Global Ideas Bank, a London think tank, holds an annual “International Internet-Free Day” to encourage people to participate in face-to-face interactions. The Bank’s director said to WSJ, “It’s good to speak to people.” But getting off the Web grid encourages people to do things that seem archaic to techno-junkies, like reading newspapers, having face-to-face conversation, or making phone calls from (gasp!) land lines while sitting still.
Though the content of these articles isn’t groundbreaking, few of us relate these key learnings to our professional lives, like unplugging during meetings and conferences, and having phone or face-to-face conversations rather than instant or email messaging. Using one-way communication technologies, like the latter, cuts valuable interpersonal cues from our interactions. And like breaking off love relationships via email, breaking tough or sensitive news to colleagues is more difficult for recipients when they can’t hear your voice, ask immediate questions, or see your facial expressions.
We advise clients to consider the type of medium through which they send messages. The concept of media richness relates to the amount of feedback a medium affords to a sender or receiver of a message. Lean media are best suited to deliver specific, tactical, or historical information; while rich media are better suited to deliver strategic, persuasive, or emotion-invoking messages. And conversations with your colleagues, direct reports, clients, or leaders often fall into one of these three categories. Highly charged topics simply require face-to-face discussion, or at least a phone call. (Read more about CRA’s take on media richness here.)
So let this time of year remind you to move away from the computer, put down the cell phone, and take time to talk to your colleagues, friends, and family. Communicating this way may take more time (and sometimes gumption) on your part, but your relationships will more likely thrive and endure as a result.
(Read here about techno brush-offs and here about technology junkies. WSJ.com registration is required.)
Conflict is a necessary evil. When used correctly and depending on the attitudes and perspectives of those involved, conflict can:
* Diffuse a more serious conflict.
* Spark an urge to search for more facts or solutions.
* Increase group performance and cohesion.
* Find where you stand on a particular topic.
So how do you get to a spot where conflict can influence and help facilitate these positive outcomes?
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According to Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a psychologist and business professor at the University of Michigan, there is a widely held American belief that an impersonal work ethic is most appropriate in the workplace and more conducive to productivity. Sanchez-Burks blames our Protestant relational ideology related to our Protestant-rooted work ethic for discouraging emotional connections at the office. He believes weve been acculturated to accept that personal relationships and the display of emotions in the workplace are unprofessional and may interfere with communication and disrupt productivity.
Interestingly, in his research on Asian and Latin American groups, Sanchez-Burks found that unlike their American counterparts, these groups place a premium on personal relationships and actually count on workplace socializing to foster productive decision making. Additionally, he discovered that East Asians use less direct (read: more face-saving) communication both at work and in social settings because interpersonal harmony is valued not just outside of work, but at the workplace as well. Americans, on the other hand, tend to treat work situations differently from social settings. The American norm? More direct (sometimes blunt) communication at work and more indirect communication outside of work. Furthermore, in his research, Sanchez-Burks found that conflicts and misunderstandings were fueled by the different communication styles used across cultures.
Sowill the American drive to stay on task and impersonal put us at a disadvantage in a global economy and with a diverse workforce? Sanchez-Burks believes it will and suggests that corporate socialization isnt just nice to do, but is a valuable way to increase communication effectiveness, improve teamwork and reduce conflict, particularly in culturally diverse work forces.
I attended a talk last week where the focus was on the importance of good, solid interpersonal relationships to the bottom line. No one in attendance disagreed with this somewhat obvious idea, but one question by a young woman resulted in a lively discussion and debate amongst the group. She asked, How do you know if its great relationships that affect the bottom line or that a great bottom line is the recipe for great interpersonal relationships? In other words, which comes first, the chicken (relationships) or the egg (performance)?
In my continual quest to report and link the best academic research with important practical questions, I told this woman about a seminal article written by Dr. Barry Staw, a leading management academic at the University of California, Berkeley. It turns out that the womans question has been asked before and the answer was not what the experts giving the talk were promoting. According to Dr. Staw, its high performance that leads to strong relationships and not vice versa. In his classic experiment, Staw gave teams false feedback about their performance and then asked members to provide objective descriptions of how member had interacted. Teams randomly assigned to the high performance conditions reported more harmonious and better communications than did groups assigned to the low performance condition. Conclusion: If you want your employees and teams to bond, focus on garnering great performance out of them before working on the intricacies of their relationships with one another. Seems like common sense in some wayswell yes, but sometimes we need reminding since as we know common sense doesnt always lead to common practice.
In business were programmed to identify gaps, shortfalls and problems, and then fix them. If youve ever perused survey results, youll recognize the tendency to focus on the misses and breeze over the hits. We see an 85 percent approval rating, and immediately begin unraveling the mystery of the 15% who are dissatisfied to win their approval in the future. While it is valid and valuable to shoot for an approval rating higher than 85%, the positive deviance concept challenges the conventional wisdom about the best way to get there. Positive deviance posits that understanding and reinforcing the hits may be more useful than deconstructing the misses.
Can we succeed in fostering change when we focus on whats gone wrong? Often were unable to make change stick. Why? Change initiatives, like transplanted organs, are often rejected by the very body they were designed to save because they are foreign. An alternative: Amplifying positive deviance, an approach that may cause you to rethink your focus on the historical misses, gaps and deficiencies in our organizations. Amplifying positive deviance means finding small, successful deviant practices that work and then amplifying them for the community.
The origins of positive deviance are a fascinating case study (see extended entry), but how can we apply it to organizational problems? Barbara Waugh, Worldwide Personnel Manager at Hewlett-Packard, used the process of amplifying positive deviants in an effort to become the best industrial research lab in the world. Waugh conducted a worldwide employee survey and canvassed for answers to basic questions. With 800 pages of frustrations, dreams and insights in hand she identified three primary HP challenges around programs, people and processes. She communicated the findings to leadership, got buy-in and set off with two guiding principles: get the people of HP to move the organization forward, and create lasting change through incremental progress.
Next, she identified positive deviants and cultivated over 100 small and attainable grassroots initiatives to move HP Labs in the right direction. As Waugh stated, her job is to support the positive deviantsto feed them and give them resources and visibility. She sought small wins from within rather than massive transformation and discovered local answers to existing problems. Her efforts have had lasting effects and a tremendously positive impact on HP, including the development of a knowledge-sharing model that has helped thousands of HPers share ideas.
For more information about the concept of positive deviance at Hewlett-Packard, check out this link.
Where can you find opportunities to amplify positive deviance? Consider situations where youre planning to:
* Perform a survey
* Undertake a change effort
* Solve an existing problem
* Institute a reward or recognition program
All of these situations are alive with opportunities to find what already works in your organization; to learn from the deviant successes, magnify them and see that theyre shared with others. Solutions that already work are likely to keep working. You need only to support, sustain, and communicate the untapped resources inherent in your organization.
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A few years ago, a leader I admire, upon hearing a stinging criticism leveled against him, remarked, This is one of those situations where I need to remember that feedback is a gift. Framing the receipt of negative feedback as an asymmetrically beneficial economic transaction struck me as both counter-intuitive and highly compelling. Since then, I have shared this idea with many of the other leaders with whom Ive worked. In particular, Ive suggested that they try a technique that Ive used with success: When hearing uncomfortable information, remain dispassionate and avoid becoming defensive by repeating silently the mantra Feedback is a giftfeedback is a giftfeedback is a gift
As silly as this practice might sound, the emerging field of neuroeconomics lends support to it. According to an article in the current issue of Business Week, people too often act against their own self interests when they process information
[n]ot in the prefrontal cortex, where people rationally weigh pros and cons, but deep inside, where powerful emotions arise. Brain scans show that when people feel they’re being treated unfairly, a small area called the anterior insula lights up, engendering the same disgust that people get from, say, smelling a skunk. That overwhelms the deliberations of the prefrontal cortex. With primitive brain functions so powerful, it’s no wonder that economic transactions often go awry.
The inference? The feedback is a gift mantra works by maintaining the synthesis of negative feedback within the prefrontal cortex (where you can act on it rationally), and prevents the anterior insula from taking over (and producing instinctual defensiveness).
Over at CommEcon, Kelly Thul and I are bantering about “market-based” approaches to controlling information overload (here and here).
We’ve coached a lot of folks in how to communicate credibility through their nonverbal behavior. You can learn to read nonverbals just as well, and when you’re really good at it, it helps you become a mind reader of sorts.
I recently stumbled on a site that summarizes much of the available data: DataFace: Facial Expressions, Emotion Expressions, Nonverbal Communication. Read it before your next performance review, or, perhaps, your next poker game.
When advising clients in how to deal with cross-cultural communication issues, one item we consistently return to is the matter of time. Cross-cultural communication research demonstrates that cultures vary in how they interpret and think about time, and that these differences influence message interpretation. Specifically, some cultures are monochronic and others are polychronic. Monochronic cultures are one thing at a time cultures. People in monochronic cultures tend to:
* Think of time as something tangible, like a road down which we journey, or something which we spend
* Segment time
* Dislike interruptions
* Believe the taskand its completion–comes first
* Focus on fewer relationships
* Not change set planseven if it might improve the quality of the process
The United States, Northern Europe / Scandinavia, and Germany are examples of monochronic cultures. Polychronic cultures, on the other hand, are many things at once cultures. People in polychronic cultures tend to:
* Think of time is a single point, and not as something tangible (like a road) or quantifiable (like an asset we can spend)
* Involve many people when completing a task
* Focus on completing transactions over holding to schedules
* Believe relationships come first
* Change plans easilyespecially if they believe it will improve the quality of the process
The Mediterranean nations, Latin America, and parts of Africa are examples of polychronic cultures.
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