collaboration – Emma Lo Russo

January 10, 2012January 10, 2012

Hope powering change

Last night I attended the Sydney Festival event Hope 2012 with the theme “Citizens seizing the day”.

Social Media was hailed as one of the agents of change. Certainly it has made it possible even in oppressed societies for citizens to reach more people and help gain momentum and support for their plight and desired change (think recent people lead change in Egypt as well as community support generated for those affected by QLD Floods, NZ & Japan Earthquakes etc).

However social media really only represents an easy, low-cost, high reach and engagement channel. It is not the channel that brings change but the opportunity it presents and the people who engage within it and the messages they share.

Listening to the personal stories of the great speakers last night and those across Australia, there were some common and consistent messages that suggest a blue print for bringing about change. They point to the cause of which the channel is only the conduit:

1) Hope Powers Change – you must first genuinely hope to bring about change . Hope then provides the fuel and momentum for you to continue in the face of adversity, inequity, barriers, and power imbalance. Hope also binds people together behind a common cause.

2) It starts with the first step – no matter how small, everything you contribute to bringing change no matter how small can make a difference. The benefits of taking 1 minute of your time, showing or demonstrating your encouragement and support, donating something small (time, message, money, resources). Just taking an action can generate, add-to or complete some great act of change in someone’s life. It has the added benefit of impacting you positively too.

3) Look for, understand & stand for basic human rights – equality, freedom, opportunity for everyone – how can you ensure this is enjoyed by everyone. Identify how many of your rights you take for granted that are not available to others. Identify the basic human rights that are being challenged all around the world including in our own back yard (and our legislation).

4) Connect directly with people affected – it is too easy to be disconnected from the person and people who needs help. Listen to their story. Listen to their hope. It is impossible to ignore and will help you know the right action to take.

5) Have Courage – it requires courage to stand up, have a voice, be counted and more importantly to act. It starts with the courage to ask yourself “why is this happening and what can I do to change it?”

It felt easy to applaud those making changes last night however significantly more difficult and uncomfortable to ask ourselves how much are we doing at the individual level to bring about change.

It matters not how much we have done to support required changes in the past, only how much we can do moving forward.

I reflect on the great George Bernard Shaw quote:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

It points to the need to stand resolute and that we must first look to ourselves as the instruments of change.

May 2012 be your year. Allow Hope to power the change you desire.

July 19, 2010March 29, 2017

Compliance vs Engagement

Doing the basic job required of us, in most cases, is easy to do. In fact we can often do much of what we do without having to really engage, invest and stretch ourselves.

We learn from an early age to follow instructions. To have our creative thinking ordered with a set of pre-determined decisions to create structure, harmony and order.

Certainly it helps to learn the consequences of taking actions that are outside of what is expected of us. However do we consider the dangers to progress if we merely look and teach others to comply?

How often do you hear “I do this because that is what is asked of me.” Or “I don’t do this, because the rules say not to.” In business we can often provide more processes, instructions and parameters to reduce risk and error margins, but what happens when it stops people from thinking or taking ownership all together?

In this past week, I saw two separate cases where perfectly intelligent and capable people were discussing a problem within their working environments. In being challenged as to why they did not see those problems as ones they could solve, the dutiful responses were offered around it not being their job, it wasn’t done that way, there was red tape, a usual way to solve this etc.

In reality, they had become compliant. Stopped thinking, stopped ownership, stopped engaging with the broader objectives and motivations for their companies and themselves.

It didn’t take long to unlock their thinking and to see alternate ways to own and solve the problems they were facing.

Unfortunately once I started looking for examples of compliance over engagement elsewhere, I started to see it everywhere – in customer service across multiple businesses, in my children, and in me. It has made for an interesting point for reflection.

Key to solving passive compliance is engagement ourselves and encouraging engagement in others. It is not enough to just observe or be present. Not enough to comply even if it gets you over the line and off the hook. What is required of us is to really engage with a problem you see and view it as something you can own, influence and drive towards a solution.

In these cases I refer to this week, by engaging with the problem didn’t mean these clients had to make the problem their own completely and feel the pressure to solve it on their own.

In both cases it was enough to shift the thinking from it being someone else’s problem to being “our problem” to solve. And to get them thinking about how they could lead and influence change. To think about possible options and opportunities.

Seeing the bigger picture and not being hamstrung by barriers – perceived or real, allows for progress.

By engaging fully with what you are hoping to achieve and not the process of getting there, promotes critical thinking and creativity. It brings action and results.

Where do you need to switch gears and move from compliance to engagement to really generate progress?

March 18, 2010March 29, 2017

Networking: a ticket to fast growth

We are taught from a very young age to embrace our differences. That we are unique and there is no-one else like us.

Each of us offers our own set of experiences. Although we can share certain experiences with others, it is the collective group of experiences that makes us unique – from the order and era we are born in, to our own journey of work, education, friendships, gains, losses and experiences.

Although we may be intelligent, resourceful and successful on our own, it does not necessarily mean we have all the answers or that the conclusions we make are the only conclusions possible to make.

As a consequence of the uniqueness of us as individuals, lays an opportunity to continue to exponentially add to our experiences and knowledge by engaging with others.

By engaging with other individuals we can tap into a wealth of many other unique set of experiences – challenging who we are, what we think and what are additional opportunities for learning and growth.

Make networking a priority – whether it is through friendships, associations, professional groups, or informal or formalized networking events. It can open you up to an extensive and infinite amount of new experiences, ideas, knowledge, skills and wisdom. And because each engagement with each person you meet is the sum of two unique individuals with two unique set of experiences, then the outcome and value it returns will be different and new with each single connection.

In the spirit of sharing my experiences, here are my top 10 tips for turning networking into growth:

See each potential meeting with someone as an opportunity to learn something new
Gain more from networking and all people engagements, by approaching with a learning objective – be clear about what you want to learn and consciously stay positive and open to new ideas, concepts, partnerships and approaches
Put yourself out there – networking is about you sharing something about you and asking someone else something of value or interest about them. The best outcomes are when there is value being exchanged on both sides
Have a quick pitch ready that explains who you are and how you help others, this can also open up new opportunities for you
Find or create networks of people who interest you or are people you admire and feel there is something you can learn from – time is limited so maximize your use of every single event you have to be at, and prioritize others that you feel there would be value in
Set a goal of meeting and learning one new thing from someone new each and every day. And continue to regularly meet with those where there is mutual gains in sharing ongoing experiences, successes and challenges
Choose carefully what you will commit to in terms of follow up. Never commit yourself to someone or something if you have no intention of delivering or know it will be difficult to do
Don’t wait to network. it is important to build a continuous and frequent networking engagement model. People often wait or see networking as a chore or difficult to do. However you never know when you need to call on a relationship or need to leverage new ideas, so keep these continuously warm and fresh.
Seek not just opportunities and learnings about what to do, but also key learnings about what to avoid. As US Admiral Hyman G Rickover said “It is necessary for us to learn from others’ mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself.
Be genuine and never pretend. This helps you find likeminded people and they you.

See Networking as a ticket to fast growth.

The more new people you can meet, the more opportunities for growth you are creating. It also makes for an exciting and easy way to stay energized so you can achieve all the things you want to do in your life.

December 7, 2009March 29, 2017

The extinction of the technoignoramus

“TITF” (pronounced tit-ef) my nearly 14-year old son said to me as I lectured him on his responsibilities.

“What?”

“TITF – you have Taken It Too Far” he said as he rolled his eyes and sighed again in frustration.

Well yes of course I have. I used words not acronyms for one thing.

Within days of this experience my friend told me about her 17 year old daughter who looked deadpan at her as she completed a joke and said without a hint of sarcasm “lol”. Clearly using the abbreviated form of “laugh out loud” was more efficient then actually breaking into laughter or even smiling.

Another friend told me of his son who had an intriguing t-shirt on – one with a picture of Chairman Mao on the front with a picture of Rolf Harris on the back and the word “ROFLMAO”. Obvious to his son and his friends (and probably anyone under the age of 21) was the clever use of these images with a well-known instant messaging short-hand statement. To the uninitiated, this stands for “Rolling On Floor Laughing My Arse Off”.

My six and ten year old daughter’s are learning mathematics through an online tool that not only provides relevant and prescribed homework activities, but allows them to “dual” with anyone at the same level who is online anywhere around the world. Assuming that they don’t want to just work to improve their personal best and total scores which allow them to move up levels and win prizes.

If they play with their Nintendo DS’s together or with friends – they can link up, see each other virtually and send visual or text messages to one another. They learn through interactive smart boards and are encouraged to remember their security log-in and to email their “safe” friends at school. Online G-rated games allow them to collect virtual points then shop for branded goods – often advertisements for the latest and greatest toy or gadget slyly marketed as movies.

Don’t worry about spelling – they happily use and rely on auto-correct and voice recognition tools saving their minds for more creative pursuits.

And these are just a few examples of how, where and when technology forms part of their lives already at such a young stage.

It thus makes for an interesting time for any business who wants to appeal to and attract a younger audience – whether this is as potential customers or as employees. Technology is deeply integrated in their lives and is considered as important to them as oxygen is to the rest of us. This is regularly reinforced to me as I use the threat of technology bans as my preferred tool to generate positive behavioural change in my children.

Technology is how they connect, communicate, conduct relationships, learn, evaluate, play, shop, design, share, promote, read, relax and even simply be a fan of their favourite band and brand. They are able to read moods, decipher genuine and honest representations, find and filter quickly to relevant information and multi-task across multiple platforms.

They connect and share information through SMS, Instant Message, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Linked in, Bebo, Orkut, QQ, or their personal blogs. They share information in groups and communities all of which take precedence over checking their 1 to 1 email (most applications are not smart enough for the way they wish to engage when you can reach 1 to many through other mediums).

They scan a web page, click and watch the first seconds of a video to see if they will give you the next 10 seconds of their attention. Communicating your message quickly and succinctly is no longer an art, it is a necessity to get cut-through and engage this generation.

In business, we increasingly rely on technology to manage most aspects of our customer and employee relationships and engagements. While there is much value in face to face daily transactions, I have seen first-hand the smartest and brightest employees sitting a metre apart instant messaging each other rather than engaging in verbal communication.

It is not that they can’t verbalize, it is just they find instant messaging a much more efficient form of communication. There is much to be said and done, and abbreviating it, using shortcuts or forums to share solutions easily changes the scale of reach from 1:1 to 1: infinite. And this is able to be done much more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

Sharing knowledge and thoughts instantly in forums and in collaborative enterprise wiki’s now forms the basis for other’s future education. It can act as a referencing and training tool for employees, partners and customers. It is easy to see how it has more potency and is far more powerful than communicating individually and sequentially. Collaborative documentation tools make easy task of finding, reviewing and tracking of content that can be accessed by many.

Many years ago when I joined a progressive technology company, I joked about how I was the “technoignoramus” of the company. I knew if I didn’t actively seek to understand, embrace and use the latest technologies I was going to become irrelevant, maybe even extinct.

Recognizing that there was a gap in my knowledge regarding emerging technologies, I made it my business (and eventually helped me lead the business) in determining how, when and what were the best ways to leverage these new technologies within our products and our enterprise solutions.

This resulted in a growing of the product development roadmap and changing from heavy self-developed software applications to those that were available and supported in the internet “cloud” – much more accessible and beneficial to our moving global workforce. We were able to reduce communication costs through the use of Skype and deliver extended customer training programs using video and having it supported through YouTube.

Today I still continue to seek knowledge and look to participate in using new and available technologies in order to better understand them. I will play with them, use them, observe others using them, read about them and link to them. This has formed an important element in the role I now play in assisting other businesses and individuals understand where technology fits into their overall business, marketing and customer engagement strategy and see how best they can be leveraged.

With all of this technology around us, it still surprises me how many baby boomers and generation X’s still resist embracing new technology and social networking platforms.

They cite discomfort about strangers knowing something about them or the arduous chore of sorting through meaningless messages to find those of interest or value.

The one I have seen many shudder at is the concept of “follower” on Twitter. Somehow this is equated as “stalker” to some. Certainly in business if you have a bunch of potential customers and partners interested enough to stalk you, this can only be a good thing, right? They actually tell you who they are, tell you they want to follow you so that they can hear what you have to say, and to whom and what you recommend. And you can choose what it is that you share with them.

At a personal level it is about understanding the different available platforms, the controls you have and the intent of the people you choose to “friend” or “follow” and who you allow to follow you. You need to be comfortable about what information you provide and finding your comfort levels about reading and seeing information about others. One of the rules I follow is one I was taught many years ago – don’t ever write anything you would not wish to show your grandmother or would not want published or have attributed to you on the front page of the national papers.

Advantages of using technology are many – especially in being able to stay abreast of your own personal data and of others that you are interested in, their life successes, major events and challenges. I recently easily organized and could keep track of both a common interest group and a family event using Facebook.

I am able to take my office everywhere with me on my iphone which can double as my entertainment tool allowing me to watch the latest TED video or listen to my favourite songs. I can publish my own blog through WordPress (which has surprised and thrilled me at the size of my readership). I am able to easily keep in close contact with global friends and colleagues. I have been able to meet people and new businesses and have opened up many new relationships or rekindled older relationships that previously were either dead or dormant through using a combination of online networking and communication tools.

There certainly can be no safety in the expression “technology is not for me” or “technology is too scary” or “I delegate technology to others”. I fear for those who take confidence in standing behind the good old days with statements like “I believe in personal, intimate face to face interaction and in protecting my privacy and those of others”. In the past fortnight I have personally heard each of these statements. And unfortunately, none of them for the first time.

I know I don’t know everything. In fact I am far behind many leading technology pioneers. But I make it my business to become an early adopter and stay abreast of technology trends and changes. This helps me understand how they are utilized, where they work and fit in to the bigger personal, social, product roadmaps and commercial pictures. I see this as part of a strategy to help me stay relevant now and into the future and I urge you to do the same.

To be able to engage and be relevant to the broader population, especially the generations that follow us, both you and I can not afford to be a technoignoramus.

If you choose to stay closed to embracing and using new technologies, your days of being relevant or being heard or understood by others may in fact be numbered.

May 20, 2009March 29, 2017

The Teamwork Bridge: Helping remote employees feel connected

As the world increasingly becomes globalized and technology makes it easy for us to work remotely, you may increasingly find yourself in a situation where you need to manage a virtual team.

Having worked for an Australian listed company where 97% of its revenues were offshore, the workforce as a consequence was split to nearly two-thirds in remote offices resulting in many direct reports crossing multiple regions. Even within head office, in order to attract and retain the best talent, we needed to provide flexibility around balancing work hours with personal life. This meant a percentage of local employees also chose to work from home offices in various percentages of their working week.

So how do you manage your remote employees, particularly those that are working in multiple global regions and ensure that the vision for your company is well understood, that the objectives and timeframes are clear, that the culture is being lived, that they are motivated, energized, feeling part of a team?

This article is designed to share the best tips and practices learned over 5 years of leading a global organization, and addresses how you can achieve a unified work force where employees feel connected and as one team – no matter where they are located.

1. Set strong foundations – hire world-class employees

This is a critical business success factor. You need to feel confident you have the right person to represent and lead your company, can evangelize the culture, live the values and be able to make decisions every day that is in harmony with, and will deliver on, your overall business objectives.

There is no doubt, the stronger the person you have, the greater the success you will see as they are able to make judgment on how best to localize the strategies to achieve the broader objectives within their specific market or region.

The more capable and competent the person, the more possibility you have for cross border promotion and the building of a greater organization. So don’t ever compromise on recruitment, with the stakes being higher for those representing you in overseas regions and outside of regular view and contact. You need to have full confidence you have someone you can trust in the job. Great business success depends upon top talent.

2. Importance of Induction

Again another critical business success foundation factor. Often in the speed to implement new plans, not enough time is spent on providing a comprehensive induction program for your new employees. It is important that an induction program extends beyond the immediate first weeks or handover of duties. Consideration and time must be given to discussion of values and of culture, plus discussion of previous successes and failures and why they went right or wrong (this is to encourage learning and comfort in discussing the good and challenging times of the business or the role).

Other induction strategies like shadowing in meetings to help share the company language, best stories and best practices can help provide confidence. Initially you or others may lead, however as soon as you feel confident, it is important to switch roles and shadow and coach with your employee leading until you are confident they are fine to stand alone. The main requirement to have confidence in managing this person remotely is for you to ensure you establish a solid relationship and equip your employee with enough information, enough experience, enough confidence very early on in the appointment to be able to confidently represent the company.

See the induction period as a minimum of 6 months and provide close contact and encouragement to ask questions. If this is an appointment in a different region, an example schedule may be:

Solid briefing them through the recruitment process already providing a strong foundation and qualifying tasks around understanding of the products, markets, competitors etc
A fortnight induction with you at HQ – allow them to see and hear first-hand how the company operates, allow them to meet their other stakeholders, key customers etc
Assign a work buddy that you trust can also help evangelize the values and culture
Once they are “live” ensure close contact with you & encourage them to really share first insights and ideas (this is a great way to discover objective new insights)
Ensure they are equipped with everything they need – resources, budgets, etc
Visit them regularly in the first 6 months but offer practical & philosophical help – e.g. visit their customers, partners, media, present jointly to their team or answer Q&As
Request after 3 months a revised high-level plan. This will ensure you get a good understanding of how deep their understanding is and any areas that you may still need to help them with. Look to have them present to others early in the engagement to help formalize the shared learnings. Encourage questions around feedback.
Get the team together within that period to ensure relationships are built at the team level even if they are all working remotely away from each other.

It is important not to micromanage the person – this is just a period of foundation setting around the “what” and the “who”, and unless the “how” is important then allow that to be determined by your employee. As soon as you think they are ready you need to give them enough space to do what you first employed them to do!!

Although this point addresses induction, the need to stay engaged as part of developing the individual overall is required.

3. Importance of frequent & open Communication

Be frequent, regular, consistent and coherent in your communications. Help your remote employees feel part of what is going on in your organization through regular:

Phone calls
Chats (instant messaging, Skype and others)
Video hook ups
Wikis, forums, blogs and other web dashboard “single views” for all employees
Engage others in your team to inform/provide briefs to your remote employees – just as long as someone is sharing what is going on!
Share drafts of communications, plans, pending decisions and presentations for input
Localize communications if there are language barriers
Make regular face to face time – even if they are overseas, coordinate at least a quarterly face to face meeting (you to them or they to you)
Regular face to team meetings
Email helps provide background and can be used to help overcome the tyranny of different working time zones, but don’t rely on this as the only means of communication

If you have followed step one and you have smart people, they generally will be very good to pick up on what is or is not happening within your business. However it is important you do not leave them guessing and trying to fill in gaps that can lead to wrong conclusions. Instead include them in sharing the ups and downs, the challenges you or the organization are facing etc, in order for them to have the opportunity to input and help. Apart from the relationship building upon honesty and transparency, a benefit is that they can help either solve or at least understand what else is happening in the business which may be possibly impacting them or others they are dealing with.

4. Regular team meetings

Feels like it is stating the obvious right? But with remote employees you need to make sure that they not only have their time with you, but that they have time feeling part of the team, both to build their understanding of each others’ styles, challenges, and dependencies, but also to help provide a forum to share key learning, insights, projects, achievements that they are working on. It is a good way for the team to identify where and how to help each other successfully meet the business objectives. It is also essential to build and retain the values, character and culture of your organization. When you are in the position of managing your people over multiple time zones, you need to agree to the appropriate frequency and ensure these virtual meetings always occur.

If you are managing a global team, remember to change time zones for calls to suit the different employees (be fair and schedule this accordingly). There will always be someone who will be up in the middle of the night – just make sure it is not always the same person! And include yourself in the schedule of middle of the night calls. Make sure you give plenty of time and priority in team meetings to those not immediately in front of you and who do not have the benefit of the pre or post discussions that can follow a meeting.

5. Identify the sub group working parties – and create cross-functional teams and ownership across borders

This is a practical tip to ensure you don’t focus too much on the doing yourself or within your headquarters team only. Spread and share your projects and create cross-function teams and ownership of certain objectives within a sub-set of virtual teams across borders. The creation of these virtual teams helps you utilize all your available talent but also ensures a strong culture of collaboration, teamwork and global awareness and understanding of the entire business.

6. Foster collaboration

Every point within this article is about fostering collaboration, but it is also a topic worthy of its own highlighted focus and attention. Ask yourself these questions: What example do you provide in collaborating with your team? How can you create an environment of collaboration and do this through remote employees? How do you encourage problem solving? Provide cross-regional resources? Virtual teams? Use this point more as a prompt to continually ask yourself how you can foster collaboration within your team. For remote employees this is critical to ensure high motivation, engagement, loyalty, commitment and for your culture to live and breathe in the way you would hope it could.

7. Discipline in practices

This is just good business practice and as a manager and leader of remote employees it is important you keep discipline in how you apply this to different time zones, regions and needs. From personal experience, it can be quite taxing: to be available first up in a morning for say the US, to be available for APAC in the day and then the EMEA during the evening. If you want to keep a work/life balance then you will need to have discipline around planning the how and when to do all the things you need to do.

It is important that you build in time for:

Acknowledgement of employees work, give feedback in the timeframes that you commit to, give them some structure so they have good expectations to rely and operate within.
Provide available times or implement a system where they can let you know when they need to touch base outside of scheduled times. This should help you instead of being “on-call” 24/7 to everyone
Share and acknowledge successes, their milestones and achievements of your direct reports and those of their team
Provide regular performance and development feedback, make time for personal and professional development discussions and formal acknowledgement of performance reviews

8. Provide a clear career path – circulate employees across offices.

If you want to hire world class/world’s best talent you need to be able to demonstrate a great career path. Working for a global or virtual organization provides many great benefits and interest to employees and you hopefully you have already made sure you have hired those with enough ambition to deliver great results as the path to the next step. Ensure you have an individual development and career plan in place and look at what would be involved in delivering this from an investment and career path perspective.

It is important to ensure the movement of your people is two-way. Don’t just handpick the best talent from external offices and bring them to head office. Plan for senior organization leaders or future leaders to spend time out of headquarters within the various regions. This helps cement culture and brings a deeper level of understanding of your business in all regions and areas of your business that can bring not only immediate benefits, but also long term ones.

9. Harnessing available technology

There is much technology available to help you work remotely and stay connected with each other. Using cloud-based technologies like Gmail & Google docs for real time collaboration no matter where you are located can help. As does SaaS programs such as SalesForce for your customer relationship and data management purposes, and Intaact for Financial systems, ensuring everyone has access to the same information and infrastructure in real time no matter where they operate. Other technologies such as VOIP e.g. Skype can help keep costs low but frequency of contact and virtual face to face visibility high. Whilst Skype is good for one on one meetings, if you can’t afford internal video conferencing facilities for group meetings, you can hire out venues that provide it for you.

As to your IT server requirements, there are plenty of hosting services that allow you to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, with highly scalable, reliable, fast and inexpensive hosting from providers such as Amazon S3.

There is a plethora of virtual on-demand solutions that can help you manage your business no matter where your employees are located. This enables you to focus on your core business, leaving the business of managing the IT to those who specialize in it as well as providing you with flexibility and scalability that is difficult to compete with if you choose to keep your entire infrastructure in-house.

Building a strong and collaborative team

As a business leader you must have set firmly an overall organization development strategy that includes the objective of building a strong and collaborative team.

These tips are all about creating a team bridge – a way to help your remote employees feel connected. Connected and engaged employees are more likely to be motivated and will deliver much more than if they are left alone.

As Jack Welch best summarizes it “The team with the best players wins”.