Blogs Archives - Leading Virtually

Becoming a Better Leader Through Blogging

Peg Breen — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:02:02 +0000

The blockbuster film Avatar showed us how easy it is to move from one reality into another environment where the rules are different. Where a person can be reborn into a 10 foot tall, blue, non-English speaking, dragon-creature-flying, environment-protecting militiaman. So is it all that hard to fathom that leadership inside the four walls of an organization morphs into something different in the virtual world? I wondered about that and so experimented by creating a blog titled: Peg Breen’s Blog: In Search of Meaningful Work. (http://pegbreen.wordpress.com)

Like millions of other people, and thousands of other executives, I was without employment and in search of not only a new job, but one that I could be passionate about and that allowed me to use my talents. Since I was one of a close knit group who exited my organization at the same time, I decided to use the opportunity to demonstrate my leadership through this blog. I wrote about the stress of this kind of transition, the reactions that people have when you go through job loss, and what it was like to surface leads, network and stay positive despite the fact that, yes, you are “blue”. Not because you are on the fictional planet Pandora, but because of the emotions this circumstance creates. I set out to be a positive, inspiring, humorous motivator to my colleagues, and may have helped my own psyche as much or more than any of my readers.

I discovered that the intimacy and anonymity of blogs helps people let their hair down. They can release their emotions much easier, there are no titles or power broker relationships, just virtual-equals sharing their perspective. This is valuable inside organizations. Why? Because perceiving that you have a voice and that you’ll be heard, not censored is very empowering. Real organizations should do this more often. I also found that when I met my colleagues for dinner or breakfast, there was an even closer trust relationship. It seems that the blog enhanced our ability to show compassion, and to trust and collaborate on strategies related to our individual job searches. Finally, the blog gave me something that is a rare gift. The time to reflect. How many of us put in our 60 hour week, respond to 100 emails a day and barely get in our run at the fitness club? Through this written, intimate venue, I momentarily turned into the psychologist from the sitcom “Frazier” and in doing so was able to be everything a leader should be for myself and for friends I’ll value for a lifetime.

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How Blogging Affected a Business Leader

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:00:20 +0000

In my last post, I mentioned that the best way for business leaders to understand Twitter or other social media is to begin using them. I recently saw how experimenting with social media can help business leaders appreciate its power. I had an opportunity to advise a business leader, Ms. Peg Breen, about blogging. Peg was without employment like thousands of other executives and was looking for a meaningful position. She blogged about the stress of this kind of transition, the reactions that people have they you go through job loss, and what it was like to surface leads, network and stay positive. Peg gained a lot from this experience and I asked her to write about her experience and share it with the readers of Leading Virtually. She graciously agreed and shares her experience with us in the following post.

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Possible Ways to Increase Corporate Blogging

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:07:16 +0000

In response to my last post (Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging), Andrew Meyer of ‘Inquiries Into Alignment‘ commented about the problem of getting contributors. He points out that the number of active bloggers within a firm is typically low. In fact, in one of the research papers that I included in my post, the authors found that in a large corporation consisting of about 300,000 employees, only 20,000 (6%) were registered users of blogs. Moreover, of these 20,000, only 17% (3400 or about 1% of the total workforce) had blogs and only 3% (600 or .2% of the total workforce) actively wrote blogs (defined as posting 10 or more times).

One company that seems to be doing better on the blogging front is Sun Microsystems. When you visit blogs.sun.com and review the statistics available in the right hand panel towards the middle, you find that there are 4298 bloggers at Sun. This number is about 12.5% of Sun’s total workforce of about 34,000 people. Each blogger has made about 30 posts on the average.

In my last post, I focused on one of the most basic things that needs to happen to motivate people to contribute — help people understand how blogs can be useful. I also believe that more needs to happen to increase corporate blogging. I cover those points below.

Create a culture that supports blogging. Organizational culture can have a strong impact on the adoption of blogs. Workers in cultures that are collaborative and value openness and stimulation are more likely to take up blogging. Changing culture is easier said than done. However, I believe that leaders of departments or teams should have an easier time changing the culture of their departments or teams. Such leaders often have significant impact on setting the expectations of their direct reports as well as on how they are rewarded. They also have more frequent opportunities to share their vision and ideals with those in their department or team and influence them.
Make sure that rewards cover the blogging effort. We are all creatures of habit and we typically do what will help our end-of-year performance evaluation. If there are no rewards for the effort that one puts into blogging, then only few who are intrinsically motivated will blog. Part of the reason why managers may be averse to rewarding the blogging effort is that they are not sure of the contribution that anybody’s blogging effort has made. I believe it is a matter of time before we implement technology tools that will help us figure out the value of contributions of different bloggers. For instance, the Conversation Tracker at Blogpulse can help you see the breadth and depth of the impact of a particular blog post. Cataphora makes software that helps a company figure out whose communications or contributions have the greatest impact (see related BusinessWeek article).
Tie blogging to strategic initiatives. Changing culture and reward systems cannot happen on a whim. It has to make sense from a strategic perspective. Which means that blogging needs to be tied to the strategic initiatives of your company or business unit. Only then will the ‘powers that be’ take the lead in changing the culture and reward systems.
Give evidence of success. People can be swayed if there is strong evidence of benefits of blogging. Ideally, the evidence should indicate that blogging benefits the company’s strategic initiatives. Strong evidence requires measurement. For instance, one could track indicators of engagement among individuals touched by the blogs. 360-degree feedback of those who have taken up blogging may also be tracked. For a marketing team, customer satisfaction could be tracked. If blogging improves the scores on these measures, then use this evidence to persuade others to blog. In many cases, measurement may be seen as onerous. Work with the HR department to help you with measurement. Or contact academics to help you out. Many academics, including yours truly, may be willing to help you out for free if you let them use your site for research or let their students carry out a project at your site.
Blogging should not add to the total effort. Ideally, blogging should not add to the total effort that your workers exert during the day. We all have limited time to finish our work. If blogging is seen as an addition to the already high level of work to be done, it is not likely to take off. To overcome this situation, see if there is communication occurring via email or other means that could be shifted to blogging. At one of the companies I advised, I suggested that status reports or activity plans that were normally sent via email be moved to individual blogs.
Create a simple blogging policy. A major company (with 10,000+ employees) that allows its employees to blog has a 19-page policy that bloggers need to agree to before they can blog. On a typical day, one sees only one or two blog posts from the entire company! On the other hand, when you visit Recent Posts at Sun blogs, you normally see about 5-6 new blog posts every hour. Sun has a blogging policy (or set of guidelines) that is only about 2 pages long. More importantly, it is in a language that is simple to understand.

Blogging, like any IT initiative, has to be a part of a larger business initiative. It has to make sense strategically (see evidence of better returns when an IT initiative is aligned with a firm’s strategy; additional evidence). Moreover, it will most probably require changes in the social system of your organization or business unit to really take off. Making these changes requires leadership, including being a role model. Unfortunately, most of the time, organizational leaders don’t understand that for IT initiatives to succeed, it takes much more than simply acquiring the technology and turning on a switch. Their leadership is the critical ingredient that is missing most often.

I offer my thanks to Andrew Meyer for making a stimulating comment on my blog post. I welcome additional comments, including those that would help companies increase adoption of blogs.

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Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:38:26 +0000

Blogs have been around more than a decade now, but corporate blogging, or the use of blogs within firms, is still limited. From my teaching of business executives and professionals, I believe that this is probably due to a general lack of understanding of blogs and how they can improve social relationships and task performance.

In this post, I focus on the following.

Common reaction of business executives and professionals to blogs as personal diaries;
Social and task benefits of blogging; and
How to increase blogging at work.

Common reaction to blogs as personal diaries

I present blogs to my audience (of business executives and professionals) as a web diary. I make them do a small exercise in which I direct them to look at selected blogs to help them gain a better understanding of blogs. They see that in a work context, a blogger typically shares her/his thoughts, activities s/he is engaged in, interesting things s/he has experienced or come across, goals for the day or week and how well they were achieved, specific work-related problems for which s/he is seeking solutions, and the like. My audience also sees that blog readers interact with the blogger via commenting.

After this exercise, I commonly hear “If my team and I do this, when will we do our work? This is going to be a complete waste of our time. My company will never allow this.” I then probe my audience and ask them about the state of communication within their organization. It is rare to find individuals who are happy with the level and nature of communication in their organizations. For instance, communication from the top may be rare and largely one-way. That from their peers and subordinates may be largely via email and focused almost entirely on the task at hand. Very rarely do I find someone from my audience telling me that the communication in their organization is open and personal.

Social and task benefits of blogging

What my audience typically misses after the initial exercise is that blogs facilitate an opening up of people and their communication. In their research (pdf) on corporate blogging at a large corporation, Anne Jackson, JoAnne Yates, and Wanda Orlikowski found that being able to communicate (freely, widely, informally, without bureaucracy, quickly, easily) was one of the most cited benefits of blogging. By facilitating open and personal communication, blogs can have both social and task benefits. As I argue below, spending time on blogging may actually turn out to be time well spent.

Open and personal communication improves social relationships and builds friendship. Research has shown that good social relationships and friendship in teams leads to greater task monitoring, cooperation, and commitment, all of which improve task performance. Based on findings from more than 5 million interviews, the Gallup organization has found that people with best friends at work are also more satisfied and productive. In R&D organizations, project success has been found to be strongly linked to open communication within and across project teams (see Sloan Management Review article; pdf).

In virtual teams, too, frequent and open communication is vital for improving relationships and team performance. Blogs can help facilitate frequent and open communication. A friend of mine who took up blogging to stay connected with her teammates during her travels shared the following story with me.

When traveling, I create blog posts to share my experience. It creates a different type of conversation; rather than focusing on business download they tend to be more all-encompassing. One blog post may include an overview of how unions are viewed in China – and also a quick update on a killer deal I got shopping or my own clumsiness with local culture. I am amazed how much it helps my team conversations. My team used to think that my traveling was glamorous and often done at their sake. Now, they understand the hard work that happens on the road. They also feel very included in each lag of the trip. The blogs allow easy communication across 12-hour different time zones. I’ll post my daily reflections and go to sleep. When I wake up, rather than grabbing a newspaper and wondering what is happening back in the US, I grab my computer and read what my group is up to.

The above story gives us an indication of how the sharing of experiences facilitated by blogs can improve understanding among co-workers and improve relationships. Leading Virtually readers may also recall the story of Ms. Stephanie Nielson, a blogger who built strong bonds with distant and anonymous readers by sharing her life experiences on her blog.

How to increase blogging at work

So what can business and virtual team leaders do to increase the adoption and use of blogs in their work settings?

Form a small team of co-workers to take up blogging with. Ideally, the co-workers you invite to blog should be those who love experimenting with new technology.
Your team should make a conscious attempt to blog frequently – say, once every day. The blogs posts don’t have to be long. But they should be authentic and personal. Sharing experiences, thoughts, plans, and reactions to recent happenings make ideal candidates for blog posts. Project and status updates normally provided via email may also be good candidates for blog posts.
Track indicators of engagement among individuals touched by the blogs. 360-degree feedback of those who have taken up blogging may also be tracked. These measures can be used to assess the impact of blogging.
Use the measurements to fine tune the blogging effort and help your team of bloggers succeed.
Use the story of your success to spread the message of advantages of blogs. Success stories that are backed by numbers can be very persuasive.

Summary

I have often been challenged about the utility of blogging in a corporate setting. In my view, there are numerous benefits that businesses can achieve through communication that is facilitated by blogs. With increasing competition and pressure to do more with less, corporations should seriously look at blogs as a tool that can increase organizational performance.

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What President Obama Teaches Us For Leading Virtually

Rebecca Jestice — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:02:02 +0000

I watched in awe from early this morning as the world got ready for the inauguration of Barack Obama as President. I felt joy and hope as I read my dad’s email this morning saying that he was so excited to see the moment that he had dreamed of, but thought might never come in his country. And I was inspired by Obama’s speech–a mixture of the stark reality of our time and determination for a bright future. This was truly an historical moment and it was amazing to see the first African-American president take office in the US.

Obama is an historical president in other aspects, too. Obama ran the first campaign in history that fully embraced technology in order to reach constituents and his transition is being touted as one of the most transparent (see this NY Times article for an interesting look at campaigning with Web 2.0). That’s in part because many of the technologies that gave Obama’s campaign momentum and transition visibility, such as YouTube or Facebook, were not available or well-known in previous elections. Obama seems to not only have surrounded himself with people who know how to leverage current technology to reach supporters and constituents, but he also has a good understanding of the potential benefits and drawbacks of that technology. Obama’s use of technology offers some insights and lessons to leading virtually, both in teams and organizations. Although most virtual leaders are not undertaking a task as huge as running for President or running the country, some of Obama’s use of technology can be adapted to the needs of other leaders.

1. Reach Out
Obama’s campaign was masterful in reaching out to millions of Americans to garner support and funding. He was able to raise record amounts of funding through millions of small donations through reaching out over web sites and email and encouraging people to leverage their personal networks to support his campaign. After the election, Obama continued to use the Internet to reach out to Americans on the change.gov website to gather opinions and concerns of citizens. The new whitehouse.gov site, launched almost at the instant Obama was sworn in, has already posted a blog relating the administrations intentions to use the site to stay connected to Americans. The insight here is that people outside of the team or organization can be reached, and in many cases are willing to help. Tools such as blogs, wikis, or Web sites can help teams and organizations reach out to others and gather ideas for creative solutions or problem solving. Blogs can be a place to start conversations with people interested in the same topic which can stimulate team member thinking.

2. Mix it Up
Obama’s campaign used a mix of media and technologies effectively to reach as many people as possible. He raised a majority of his money online and used it to buy airtime on network television for his final infomercial. The insight for virtual leaders is that the appropriate technology to reach and work with people may differ depending on the individuals involved and the context. Betsy’s post, Freeing Yourself from E-mail and Surinder’s post on emergent collaboration offer some good advice on when certain technologies might be useful and in what context.

3. Personalize the Message
During his campaign, Obama sent out a text message to supporters when he decided who his running mate would be. Many receivers of the message, who learned the news before most of the rest of the country, took the text as a personalized message, strengthening a sense of connection with the candidate. The Obama team plans to use the email addresses it collected during the days of the campaign to stay in touch with citizens and rally them to support Obama’s initiatives. Virtual leaders could take a cue from this and the importance of personalizing messages, even when addressing a group of people. Adding personal touches or proactively contacting team members to clarify information or send encouragement can help strengthen interpersonal relationships necessary for working effectively together.

4. Keep Boundaries
Obama is refusing to give up his Blackberry despite security and legal concerns. He is determined to find a way to keep it during his tenure at the White House. He sees the Blackberry as a way to escape from the Presidential bubble and to maintain some contact with the ‘outside world’, helping him keep perspective and get information from people other than those directly related to the White House. Keeping boundaries and separate spaces for work and personal communication may be harder to do in the days of instant access to everyone, but Obama’s point is well-taken. It’s not a bad idea to have separate business and personal email accounts and pay attention to those privacy settings on social networking sites.

5. Expect the Unexpected
Obama is aware that with the freedom of new media, comes some unexpected results. Rather than shy away from the technology, he seems to understand the results and takes them into consideration. For instance he has mentioned that he is aware that anything that he writes in a text message could end up on the Internet so he is careful to check before he presses send. This is a key point for anyone working and communicating with technology. With almost equal access to technology and adding information on outlets like the Web, virtual leaders and team members should remember that, along with the benefit of a record of events and project progress, comes the possibility of that record becoming public. On the other hand, the unexpected can lead to delightful results as the trend of re-mixing, re-using, mashups and viral video grows. For example, the spontaneous community that sprang up around an Obama campaign sign or the Super Obama World online video game are things that could not have happened without the connectivity and reach of the Internet.

Conclusion
Obama’s use of technology, however, would not have been as successful had his message and vision not resonated with people. After all, John McCain had a web site and a video game, too, but the impact was little compared to Obama’s. Effective use of technology is not enough. A leader’s desire and ability to connect to people and welcome new possibilities is important. When these qualities are present, along with integrity and sincerity, then technology will be useful.

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So Far And Yet So Near

Betsy Carroll — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:10:41 +0000

This week I read an interesting research article (Perceived Proximity in Virtual Work: Explaining the Paradox of Far-but-Close) that talked about perceived proximity. The authors (Wilson, O’Leary, Metiu, and Jett) define perceived proximity as two or more individuals having the feeling of being close, regardless of physical distance between them. Often, one assumes that physical proximity and perceived proximity are highly correlated, but the authors of this article investigate why actual geographic proximity doesn’t always coincide with a feeling of closeness.

In this article I cover the following:

What influences perceived proximity,
Perceived & physical proximity matrix,
Suggestions for moving a team from low perceived proximity to high perceived proximity, and
Suggestions for maintaining a positive situation of high perceived proximity.

What influences perceived proximity?

The authors argue that within a team, actual physical proximity, level of communication, and level of identification with other members are the main influences on perceived proximity. For instance, in a previous post Surinder talked about the outpouring of emotion that fans of Ms. Nielson’s blog offered when she was seriously injured in an accident. We can see from the reaction of her fans, who were located all over the world, that they felt very close to her. This feeling of proximity arose from Ms. Nielson’s frequent communication and her fans identifying strongly with the content of her blog.

Individual characteristics such as openness to experience and level of experience with dispersed work can influence this equation as well, as can socio-organizational factors. One example of a socio-organizational factor might be the collaboration technology employed by an organization – if it works, it helps team members to feel closer; if it doesn’t work well, it might make team members feel distant.

Perceived & physical proximity matrix

Perhaps the most useful part of this article for practitioners is a matrix the authors include, placing teams into one of four quadrants. The axes are based on two dimensions: physical proximity and perceived proximity of members. Generally, quadrants 1 and 2 are more desirable than quadrants 3 and 4 for the positive effect on productivity and team effectiveness.

Consider which quadrant your team is currently in. We offer some suggestions for what a team leader can do to help teams in quadrants 3 and 4 move towards quadrants 1 and 2. Similarly, we suggest things to look out for when your team is in quadrant 1 or 2 and you wish to stay there.

Low physical proximity

High physical proximity

High perceived

proximity

2. Far, but feel close

1. Close, and feel close

Low perceived

proximity

3. Far, and feel far

4. Close, but feel far

Moving from low perceived proximity to high perceived proximity

In most work situations, teams are more productive and effective when they have higher perceived proximity. Chances are there is little to be done about physical proximity in the near future. However, it is possible to lead a team from quadrant 3 to quadrant 2, or from quadrant 4 to quadrant 1.

Quadrant 3 – far, and feel far

This quadrant can be disastrous for virtual teams. The authors cite that teams with half of their members in one country and half in another often experience this lack of perceived proximity. Based on the examples they give, it seems that a lack of common goal is the most pervasive problem here. Leaders should be sure that all team members are dedicated to the same goal, and have similar ideas of how to get it done.

Be sure that no unit feels isolated, or like they are overlooked. The authors indicate that frequent, high-quality communication can help remedy this problem.
Develop a team compact to reduce uncertainty about the team’s goals and how it will accomplish its goals.
Support the move towards a shared team goal by showing individualized consideration to members in all locations, for the sake of the team as well as individual development.

Quadrant 4 – close, but feel far

Based on the article’s explanation, lack of perceived proximity for a geographically co-located might be based on individual differences, such as introverted team members. Also, it may occur because team members are not highly interdependent during completion of the task (for example, team members do separate work and compile it for a final report).

A team leader should first consider how important it is to achieve perceived proximity before dedicating resources to attempting a change.
You should also look for sources of dysfunctional conflict within the team – perhaps team members don’t particularly like one another on a personal level. In that case, find ways to increase the positive, task-related interactions while reducing dysfunctional conflict.
Perhaps the use of collaboration technologies could help team members to share necessary information without irritating one another.

Maintaining a positive situation of high perceived proximity

Higher perceived proximity is generally a good thing. However, even teams in quadrants 1 and 2 should monitor for some potential pitfalls.

Quadrant 1 – close, and feel close

This may sound ideal, and it can mean the team is high-performing. However, this quadrant is where groupthink can commonly occur. Be sure the team is not cohesive to the point of disregarding dissenting ideas. Also, a group in this quadrant might be in danger of excluding others. The dark side of having a cohesive in-group is excluding those who feel like part of the out-group, even other teams and units within the organization.

Utilize a little functional conflict to keep ideas flowing. This can include something as simple as assigning a devil’s advocate during brainstorming or decision making sessions.
Make sure team members can keep their focus on organizational goals in addition to team goals if their focus is becoming too narrow.
Provide reminders of the relationships and dependencies with other org members who are outside your team. Keeping those relationships salient to your team will counteract a dysfunctional out-group mentality.

Quadrant 2 – far, but feel close

Leaders of geographically dispersed teams are often aiming for this quadrant. Team leaders in this quadrant should make sure that team members not only feel close, but are also productive and effective. Feeling close is an antecedent of team productivity, but not necessarily a guarantee. In this quadrant, a team leader can probably relax a bit on monitoring perceived proximity and focus the team’s attention on high performance.

This means making sure that collaboration technologies employed work for the team, and that team members have access to information they need without being bogged down with information that is unorganized and overwhelming.
If you have a team compact, focus on milestones and how well they are being achieved. After Action Reviews are a simple and short, but effective, way to assess goal achievement.
In this quadrant, teams are in a great position to focus on individual development and self-actualization.

This article has much content that is useful to practitioners, and we have inferred some recommendations from their theory. Perhaps most important, though, is that it encourages us to question the assumption that physical or geographical proximity necessarily leads to a feeling of closeness among members. There are a number of other factors that can influence a team’s sense of proximity, which is good news to teams whose members are far from one another, and fair warning to those teams whose members are near.

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Emergent Collaboration: The Reason Why Email Should Not Be Used for Collaboration

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:55:27 +0000

In one of her recent posts, Betsy Carroll blogged about alternatives to email. Email tends to be misused because of its accessibility and convenience. People end up using it in situations where alternatives would be more suitable. While stressing that email is great for communication but not for collaboration, Betsy discussed alternatives to email and the situations where they would be more suitable. I want to extend her blog post by focusing on emergent collaboration, which I believe is going to be a significant way in which organizations will collaborate (or will need to collaborate) going forward. The idea of emergent collaboration is relevant to our blog because emergent collaboration relies on virtual groups or teams getting formed and accomplishing a task on the fly.

I will discuss the following in this post:

What is emergent collaboration?
Why is emergent collaboration relevant to businesses today?
What facilitates emergent collaboration?
Tools for emergent collaboration; specifically, why blogs and wikis are more suitable than email for emergent collaboration.

What is emergent collaboration?

The best way to learn about emergent collaboration is through an example. Visit the initial part of a Harvard Business Review article titled “Collaboration Rules” to get an idea of emergent collaboration. The example under the heading “Tuesday, December 2, 2003” illustrates the emergence of collaboration among individuals after a systems administrator at a university discovered a hacker attack on his university’s server and traced it to rsync, a synchronization tool for Unix/Linux machines. As you read through the example, you will notice a few things. While the goal of collaboration was known from the beginning, there was no prior determination of who the collaborators will be or the collaboration process itself. Nor was there a leader who guided the whole process. The collaboration evolved from a single person’s problem and relevant individuals were engaged when their expertise was needed. The next steps were determined just prior to their execution, taking into account whatever that had happened till then. In a nutshell, emergent collaboration is organic; while the goal of collaboration may be known, there is no prior determination of who the collaborators will be or of the collaboration process. Also, in emergent collaboration, the involvement of individuals and the collaboration processes are adaptive in that they evolve in response to the situation at any point of time. There is no one in particular who directs the whole process as it evolves.

Why is emergent collaboration relevant?

Today, businesses are facing greater uncertainty and complexity. Competition is emerging from industries and regions of the world that were not competing before (e.g., cable companies are now competing with telephone companies). Due to the Internet, business stakeholders (e.g., customers) have a louder and a far-reaching voice. Consequently, issues that any businesses need to address are emerging from unexpected quarters and with greater uncertainty. How can businesses respond to such pressures? When faced with a highly complex issue, a business needs to make sure that it enables collaboration among individuals who can cover the many different aspects of the issue. However, due to the uncertainty with which the business issues arise, it is not possible for a business to plan beforehand who should collaborate and how. Nor is it possible for a business to develop a clear idea of how the collaboration should evolve once an issue is right in front of it. Relevant collaboration will have to emerge on its own and at the right time to enable an effective response. The key thing that a business will have to do is to make sure that it puts into place a system that enables emergent collaboration.

What facilitates emergent collaboration?

An important requirement for emergent collaboration is a shared workspace that is accessible to all collaborators. Ideally, this workspace should include all the important transactions that have taken place among business workers. In addition to helping a group of collaborators learn from past transactions and take the best step forward, such a workspace facilitates stigmergy, i.e., it enables a worker’s contribution to stimulate others to build on that contribution without any direct communication between the workers. Stigmergy facilitates emergent collaboration by not requiring a single person or a leader with a top level view to coordinate the actions of others. According to Francis Heylighen, an example of stigmergy is seen in the Open Source community when a contributor uploads a piece of code to a community site. This posting invites examination from others interested in using that code. If they discover any problems with the software, they either fix the problem themselves or alert the community about the problem, thereby encouraging others to work on the problem. There is no direct communication from one worker to another – the openness or accessibility of all the critical actions by community members enables work to be coordinated among “undesignated” community members who, at a particular moment, happen to have the resources (time and capability) needed to advance the community’s work.

In addition to a shared and open workspace, emergent collaboration requires meta-level information that highlights the significance of the transactions that are occurring or have occurred within a group of collaborators. Since many workers may be making their contributions at any point in time, which of these many contributions should other members be focusing on and building on at that time? How should they prioritize their effort? Meta-level information that indicates the significance of transactions within a group can help a group determine which issues it should tackle first and which contributions should be given more weight than others.

Tools for emergent collaboration

The above discussion provides reasons for why businesses should move away from email as a platform for collaboration. To respond to increasing uncertainty and complexity, businesses will have to put into place systems that facilitate emergent collaboration. Email is not likely to facilitate emergent collaboration. It does not provide a shared and open workspace, nor does it provide the meta-level information I refer to above – at least not without loading it up with additional tools.

On the other hand, blogs and wikis, two prominent Web 2.0 tools, provide the shared and open workspace needed for emergent collaboration. They can also be set up to provide the meta-level information needed to facilitate emergent collaboration. Specifically, blogs and wikis have the linking and tagging features which make them suitable for generating the meta-level information that indicates the significance of transactions among a group of workers. You can see examples of this meta-level information by visiting Wikipedia and clicking on Special pages under toolbox on the left. Under Special pages, you will see a variety of links, many of which provide meta-level information about the Wikipedia community. For instance, New Pages and Recent Changes tell you what the community members are most interested in now; “Pages with the most revisions” indicate what is popular and/or controversial; “Most linked-to pages” show you the ideas or topics that have had the most impact on the community. In a blogging system, a tag cloud indicates the relative popularity of different topics among bloggers. Linking among bloggers indicates who carries weight for a particular topic. With the help of such meta-level information, blogs and wikis can facilitate emergent collaboration among a group of workers by helping them determine if there are topics or events that need their attention and if there is anybody in particular who should be engaged for addressing those topics or events.

A brief example of the usefulness of blogs and wikis for emergent collaboration can be seen in a New York Times article titled Open Source Spying. In this article, which discusses the use of blogs and wikis by US Intelligence Agencies to counter the threat posed by terrorists, the author gives the following example of how Intellipedia, a wiki used by US Intelligence agencies, enabled emergent collaboration in the Fall of 2006:

…the usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist act.

In this post, I have briefly touched upon some of the things that are required for emergent collaboration. Besides the right technology, one needs the right mix of leadership, culture, rewards, and policies for emergent collaboration to occur. It is certainly a challenge for a business to figure of what this right mix is and we hope to cover more on this topic in our future posts. What makes it even more challenging for a business to create conditions that facilitate emergent collaboration is that it also needs to enable structured or planned collaboration along with emergent collaboration. How a business can put into place a system that enables both structured and emergent collaboration is still a wide open question with no simple answer.

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Freeing Yourself from Email

Betsy Carroll — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:46:59 +0000

A common problem that office workers face today is email overload. For some, email has taken over their work life and it is damaging, rather than improving, their productivity. In our Leading Virtually Digest of June 20th, we point to an article that reports how the onslaught of email or webmail is hurting productivity. A major reason for email’s negative effect on productivity is its injudicious use. Because of its accessibility and convenience, email tends to get used for purposes it was not designed or best suited for. In this post, I cover the following:

The story of someone who freed himself from email’s grip;
Responses to the story;
Alternatives to email; and
What is needed for those alternatives to succeed.

Last week, I saw an article in New York Times about an IBM employee, Luis Suarez, who has freed himself from email’s grip. Suarez was tired of spending hours catching up on email every morning. In order to take control of his productivity, he started using other communication methods, both computer-based (e.g., instant messaging, blogs, wikis, RSS, and social networking) and traditional (phone and face-to-face meetings). Suarez prefers to use instant messaging (IM) because it enables real-time interaction. But anytime an instant-message exchange goes beyond three minutes, he moves the discussion to the telephone. He posts answers to common questions on a blog. Suarez says that he still helps people, but in a more open and collaborative way so that others can join in the discussions and, perhaps, offer a better idea than his. He shares and updates big files with a file sharing system rather than engaging in a back-and-forth exchange via email. To receive notifications of relevant content, Suarez subscribes to RSS/Atom feeds. He was able to cut down the incoming emails by 80% in a single week. Suarez still uses email but he uses it judiciously, such as when he has to discuss private and confidential matters.

Suarez’s article has attracted a fair amount of responses from readers. But it seems to me that a significant number of those who commented missed Suarez’s main point. Suarez suggests that people have an array of technologies available for communication and collaboration, and that those options should be chosen depending on how well they are suited to the task at hand. Suarez uses wikis, instant messaging, emails, phone calls, blogs, and social networking each for different purposes. Here we outline the situations or purposes for which the technologies that Suarez is using are likely to be suitable.

Email

Suarez points out that email is good for communication (one-to-one interaction) but not very effective for collaboration (many-to-many interaction). If you simply need to send something, such as a report, document, or simple message, email is well-suited. Also, if you have something sensitive or private to distribute, email is more appropriate than many other forms of communication.

Email is not ideal for collaboration (such as brainstorming, resolving complex issues, or making multi-person decisions) because the time in between messages makes it difficult to stay focused on the task. Email is just too cumbersome for collaboration that has any complexity to it. It’s not that people couldn’t possibly do this kind of work via email, but Suarez is making the point that there are more effective alternatives.

Instant messaging

Instant messaging is, of course, only useful if your organization supports it – in some organizations IM is forbidden. This form of communication is very useful for collaboration that isn’t too long in duration. Two (or sometimes more) people can have a coherent, uninterrupted back and forth of ideas quickly and easily with this medium. There is the option to save the transcript of the conversation for later with a simple copy and paste function.

IM can seem a little impersonal to those who are not accustomed to using it, but many people are comfortable with this very convenient medium.

Wikis

Wikis are extremely useful for disseminating information that is needed by a lot of people; for example, this is a great tool to use for answering questions that are asked by a lot of your colleagues. This can even be an effective tool for collaboration, since wiki owners can allow others to contribute to the posted material. Also, since people can access a wiki at any time, they are useful for providing information for people in different parts of the world on different schedules than your own. Wikis also have the benefit of tracking changes so a previous draft or revision can be looked at or reverted to if necessary.

Depending on comfort level of users, wikis can even be effective for synchronous work where several people are contributing simultaneously. But it’s probably not the most effective tool for collaboration such as brainstorming or group decision making, and is only appropriate for sensitive information if you have a reliable password protection system.

Phone calls

The effectiveness of using the telephone seems to be largely a question of personal preference. Judging from the responses to Suarez’s article, some readers find phone calls personal and useful, while others find themselves getting caught in longer exchanges than if they email. Suarez suggests using telephone calls for complex multi-person tasks (brainstorming, decision making) that can’t be finished quickly. He switches from IM to phone if a conversation is taking more than 3 minutes. It seems that the personal nature can be a strong benefit of making a phone call, particularly in this age of impersonal emails, but again, this is personal preference.

Remember that phone calls leave no record of the conversation, unlike IM or wikis. Long distance calls can quickly grow expensive for longer collaborative processes, so telephone may not be a cost effective method if you collaborate with people around the globe. Also, if you collaborate with people in different time zones, it might be hard to plan a time to meet, making asynchronous document sharing more effective.

Blogs

People tend to think of blogs either as a news source or a nightmare of personal gushing, but they can be used in the workplace as well. Within an intranet, workers can post information about what they are currently working on for others to see, saving a phone call or email. This is particularly useful when one employee’s output is another’s input. Since they are inexpensive and easy to use, any time saved by implementing a blog represents a benefit.

One downside is that blogs are largely one-sided (even if comments can be posted, it’s not truly collaborative). Also, it may require some discretion to make sure the posted material is relevant and appropriate to those who would view it.

Social networking

Social networking has proved to be a great way to stay connected with people, and the sites available to anyone seem to be very flexible. Suarez talks about using a social networking application within IBM that was developed to help people connect with others who have needed skills or expertise. This requires investment on the organizational level (providing a platform), but seems very useful when employees require the input of others. Especially if workers might have to search the company to find specific knowledge, social networking is a great way to connect individuals.

The main downside seems to be that the company itself has to decide to invest in this networking. Also, social networking may be less relevant in organizations where this collaboration of far-flung experts rarely happens.

This is not an exhaustive list of options, but gives you an idea what Suarez meant by suggesting that workers use communication tools to do what they are best at. But a few caveats apply as well.

First, the effectiveness of using these tools may depend somewhat on the openness of your colleagues. This seems to be a generational difference, based on level of comfort and experience using some of these tools. The workers joining today’s workforce are not as reliant on email as the older generation of workers, but are adept at using social networking tools to communicate and carry out their activities. Surinder was recently telling me how much his son relied on social networking tools. His son, who recently graduated from high school, sent out the invitation to his graduation party via Facebook. When he got a new cell phone number, he did not send an email to those he thought should know his new number – he simply put the new number on Facebook. When Surinder asked him a while back to conduct some of his duties as Class President via email, he said that the other students (e.g., secretary, treasurer) he was working with did not use email! Moving to email alternatives may make sense if you are trying to engage younger workers in the workplace.
Support of management is another crucial factor in escaping email for other collaboration tools. Suarez seems to have strong support in IBM for shifting away from email; in other organizations this may not be a welcome change. If the organization is not supportive and others are not interested in using other tools, email will probably remain the primary medium of communication no matter how much you try to utilize other tools.
Lastly, don’t forget to consider your own work habits. Try to use not only the strengths of each communication tool, but also the ones you will keep up with. For example, it’s not useful to have a blog that you only remember to update once every few weeks. Be a little bit strict with yourself – if making a phone call is most effective but you don’t like getting caught in idle conversation for 60 seconds, you might need to make that call anyway. In other words, don’t use alternative forms of communication as a crutch for avoidance. Try to focus on what helps get your tasks accomplished in an effective way. There are so many inexpensive options these days, it should be possible to make a few of them work for you and your collaborators.

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Building Trust in Virtual Teams

Betsy Carroll — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:34:24 +0000

People in organizations have known for a long time that trust is an important antecedent of effective teamwork. So it would make sense for this to hold true not only in face to face groups, but also for virtual teams. This week the Leading Virtually team came across a posting by Bridge the Distance offering help in building trust in virtual teams. Reading through this website drove home for me the subtle, but important, difference between what practitioners are saying about trust in virtual teams and what early research is showing. Everyone’s first instinct seems to be that trust is hard to build in virtual teams – in face to face teams it comes largely from the informal, everyday interactions between team members. In F2F groups, trust is buttressed by talking about the weekend’s big game, sharing stories about the kids, or recommending a great restaurant. We know that trust in F2F teams depends largely on liking and familiarity. But informal interactions are far less common (or feasible) among virtual team members.

So how can trust develop in virtual teams? Researchers have found something interesting – it may not be that trust is harder to build in virtual teams. It may be that trust is simply built via different mechanisms in virtual teams. After a few studies on this issue, research suggests that trust in virtual teams depends largely upon reliability. When virtual team members feel they can count on one another to do what they say they will do, trust builds quickly. Surely this is influential among F2F team members as well, but researchers believe it may be the crucial factor in virtual teams. This makes sense when you consider that virtual teams tend to work together for limited amounts of time, while F2F teams are often longer term. From the start, a virtual team has some expectation of a limited length of interaction, so how someone gets the work done is salient to team members.

So what should team leaders do to build trust in virtual teams? Early in the team’s lifecycle, there are several critical things team leaders can do to set the stage for trust. First, leaders have to create opportunities for social interaction, since they don’t happen when team members are dispersed. Provide opportunities for team members to get to know one another – both their work-related skills and their personal interests should be included. Ice breaker exercises can be adapted for a conference call or web meeting so that people can learn more about one another. Leaders should also know that uncertainty is a common barrier to trust in the early stages of a virtual team. Virtual teams have uncertainty about roles within the group, how tasks will be delegated and accomplished, and how to use technology – these are just a few common examples. Since this scenario provides great potential for misunderstanding, virtual team leaders must do all they can to clarify task responsibilities, roles, processes, and other sources of uncertainty.

As the team develops, members themselves can also do quite a bit to build trust. First, team members should do all they can to send signals that they are engaged and listening whenever communication happens. It’s important to be on time for meetings or conference calls, and warn teammates ahead of time of absences. Responding to communications (voicemail messages, emails) promptly ensures that teammates know the message was received and the content is being attended to. Also important, part or all of the leadership role can be rotated among members, depending on the specifics of the team. Each member has a turn to demonstrate that they can be fair and reliable even when asked to play a prominent role. As virtual team members see that each of their colleagues is reliable and capable, trust develops quickly.

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