My updated website is now live. Please visit me at: www.Reveln.com
Note that I also have a business site on Facebook. If you join up as a “fan” (you can “unfan” at any time) – you’ll receive periodic short updates of business related news, as well as local business reference.

Best wishes,    —Deb

“Power is what pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers.” — C.S. Lewis

Credit to www.lumaxart.com

Reveln.com, the new consulting website, launches this week. Reveln Consulting on Facebook is working towards a  goal of 100 fans.  Meanwhile, I’ve come across a familiar friend from my college days, C.S. Lewis.  I recall reveling in the richly written fiction of the Screwtape Letters and various Lewis tales and illustrations of power, intrigue, and status seeking.

Status does feels good.  Status is enticing– having staff, followers, peeps, tribes, and office perks feels great.  Your hard work pays off in having the perks of an office with a view, or enjoying the spacious “power” of the corner suite.  I remember luxuriating in travel to the latest conference to listen to great thoughts and deeds as well as to mix and mingle among the flush of the newest of the new.  Networking with others, including leaders with status, is a heady experience.  “I can get used to THIS!” Some, in leader roles, do all too well.

Yet status can be an illusion, a veneer, fleeting, a “mask.”  Two education-based examples:   one about spine and integrity of a student defined by the impassioned speech of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (PG-13 language) to the “authority” status  leader:

A second, different reminder is delivered by a little known video featuring the idealism and promise of a liberal arts college education, this one at Clemson:

Both remind us of the basic need to renew our skills in staying grounded in respecting others, rooting out our tendencies toward paternalism often tied to power and status.  Building sustainable, personal integrity helps create organizational spine that integrates, is the glue, for positive leadership at all levels of  an organization.  Power and corruption quotes are not included.  You already know them.

Finding Forrester, is a movie with a similar point on power rule.  It features the attractive Sean Connery taking on the establishment with his own fame through his writing power.   Dualing authority figures argue over what is “right action” (see the last post.) This makes for a good movie, and good workplace drama.  Sean Connery’s character is the brilliant recluse, who models the Al Pacino role in a very similar way.  Let me know if you hear applause in this version of right meets might.

Below is a list of signs of organization leadership that form spine and integrity.  I’ve observed these over the years.  They include current links to specific examples from the Best of 2009 Leadership Blogs nominees:

• Leaders at the top respect and use each other’s unique strengths within the top leadership team, and represent this to those who report to them.  Top leaders choose to speak well of each other, they choose to dispel unproductive turf competition, and model a positive “vibe” at the top.
• Leaders within groups and teams at all levels find ways to “gel” with each other to get things done across functions. They model open communication and healthy conflict management.
• Leaders make the invisible visible, and disrupt silence and “withholding” with smart questions.
• Good answers to smart questions by leaders, at all levels, create the “juice” of emotionally intelligent relationships, which empowers innovation, improves access to vision at all levels, and increases productive risk-taking, competitive creativity, and fun.
• Fun? Yes!   Here’s an example of risk-taking, being the “first” with a reluctant follower. Kudos to Thriller and M. Jackson fans.
• Layers or boundaries are permeable.  The senior leadership “bubble” (isolation) is held in check by developed, on-going, multi-layer communication and robust relationships, beyond a simple breakfast or lunch meeting with the big boss.  Authentic connection to talent is cultivated, not just scheduled for an hour or two on an Outlook calendar.
• Workloads are manageable.  Work/life balance is in tune with productive competition.  There’s still room for Jello – fun, playful, creative thought.
• Data flows.  It is not hoarded or “scrubbed” at the top.  Transparency is skewed torward trusting staff as adults with difficult information and access, rather than parental controls of what “can be handled.”
• Emotional displays, possibly tied to tenacious baggage,  are learning points and are allowed to dissipate, with patience, rather than being used for gossip fodder.

Is this a pipe-dream?  What does your workplace culture convey”?  How do the questions on your last culture – climate survey play?   Are the questions consistent with a full expression of your organization’s espoused values?

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it. – Lord Macaulay

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me. — Simone de Beauvoir

There’s comfort in friendship and community.  There can also be  blind spots and status quo problems  inherent in comfort-based systems, sometimes tragically so, when the blind spots are very large.  Here are a few samples of some recent tweets from twitter, an on-line micro-blog community, to illustrate:

• ACouchofMyOwn: is wrestling with her blind spots; the ones she can see, the ones she’d rather not see, the ones that everyone else can see all too clearly
• WorkIntegrity:  Ethics & Morality ARE taught in some business schools, yet corp ldrs have big blind spots & don’t solicit enough fdbk.
• bsouder: Returning from LOHAS conference…. “the status quo is an opiate” we all need to take at least one action to contribute to sustainability!
• ralfcis: Innovation is a threat to the status quo and the quo don’t like to be threatened.
• m2sE: RT @ryanbrazell “Innovation that challenges the status quo usually fails.”  Isn’t that the point of innovation?

Similarly, a Corporate Leadership Council 2002 Performance Management Survey, Benchmarking the High-Performance Organization, found that the cultural traits with the most impact on employee performance are risk-taking, internal communication, and flexibility. Those traits have the potential to increase individual performance by as much as 22.9 to 39%.

In my last blog post, tucked under  the video of our three-legged, recovered cat, is a link to examples of those who “think differently” and change the world.  It’s still worth a look here, a classic 59 second clip.  How likely is it now, even now, that those who are future thinking and out-of-the box will make headway?  Entrepreneurism is good, but tends to be self-contained in start-up incubators and with groups of risk-takers and consultants who may cycle through until something hits home and finds success.  What happens with the legions of survivors in organizations that continue to come to work each day post-layoff?  What happens with those laid-off who find work in new positions in organizations in varying states of post-financial crisis recovery?

A recent article from the Harvard Business Review is titled, Why do good leaders make bad decisions?

Excerpts:  One reason major mistakes happen is self-interest. Most people don’t realize self-interest operates at a subconscious level. We’re not even aware of how self-interested we are.  [Consider] the  John Thain bonus story. Is there anyone who believes that he is not a smart enough guy to figure out that taking or giving [such large] bonuses [was not] a sensible thing to do?

A Wall Street Journal summary of the article by Erin White also highlights these three lessons:

1. People need to recognize that we are biased in every single situation. There’s no such thing as objectivity.  The first thing leaders should do to reduce their odds of making bad decisions is walk into an important decision situation saying, “Ok, I know that we are potentially biased in a variety of ways. Let’s try to identify what those are.”
2. Second is to avoid the “yes man” trap. You have to bring different people and different data sources to the table. You want to add a “no team” to argue against the proposal, and put some teeth behind that no team.
3. Another idea is around governance. I’ve studied boards for …15 or 20 years now. I’m completely convinced that the biggest differentiator between high quality boards and weaker boards is the extent to which they actually engage in real debate.

In dealing with blindspots, emotional connections that are actually damaging to organization health and growth, and using connection power inappropriately, I offer a definition of “right action,” again citing Mike Jay mentioned in an earlier post (IMULL – decision tool), a master coach who trains other business & executive coaches using powerful and elegantly simple models.  One element of Mike’s coaching approach defines “right action” as:

Doing the right thing, at the right time, with the right people, for the right reasons, in the right way, in the right place.

What I’ve experienced with management over the years, and I do mean management, not leadership, is that managers at times create bottlenecks, undermine upper management (misalignment with organization strategy and needed change) by missing one or more of the “right action” steps.  The bottlenecks can also happen below with managers becoming insular and territorial about advocating for their silo/department, without thinking of the implications of the whole.  The story of the blind men and the elephant comes to mind.   This could include doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, and seemingly getting results that at the time maintain the status quo, but long term breakdown into moderately to severely wrong actions.  Do examples in our current world state of affairs come to mind?

I will look for and share positive examples in future blog posts of  leadership alignment in  organizations where all layers are also communicating well.   I plan to help organizations and leaders find ways to build right action, to deal with status quo and blind spots.  Together with my colleagues Joan and Barb, we will be at an HRD hosted open house Tuesday, June 23rd at the League after 3:00 as UM closes the long-time consulting business to concentrate on training and conference offerings.  This blog will transition to the new Reveln.com website.

For higher education clients, I can continue to be contacted at:  dnrevel@umich.edu I’m also now most easily reached at DebNystrom@reveln.com. If you have a need for facilitation, data gathering from an objective perspective, consultation, business/leader development coaching, or if you need a referral, I’m happy to talk with you.  This includes those situations where the status quo just isn’t going to be good enough.  For many or most of us, flexing, adapting to change to stay up to date, adapting to

Joan Curran, Deb Nystrom (Reveln blogger), and Barb Mulay

add in new processes and approaches is not just a nice idea, but a necessary one for sustaining your business.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. — John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963)

I could wax forth on a recent faculty group’s success this month with SWOT analysis (see Tools.)  I could mention the success and angst of retreat design (see Tools, retreat process.)   Instead, here’s a somewhat sentimental blog post on the positive aspects of the pain of change, at times overwhelming,

Pearl, our cancer survivor, 5-2009

full of sighs, groans, and fearsome ambiguity.  I witnessed several flavors in recent weeks when Pearl, one of our two cats, the one with an indomitable, feisty spirit, suffered through two rounds of a potent kitty depression including listlessness, not eating or drinking for days, requiring vet consults and drugs to reclaim her.  (Don’t worry, a human example completes the end of this post.)

Pearl was diagnosed with cancer in one leg in mid-April.  The recovery period after the initial surgery to remove the cancer was more tenuous than the follow-up surgery in early May to remove an entire hind leg so that the cancer would not return.

Pearl is fully recovered now, back to her normal, demanding, indomitable self after the life-saving surgery.  We learned that dealing with something unknown, ambiguous, and difficult tested our judgment, adaptabilty and resilience.  The Mayo Clinic defines resilience as the ability to adapt well to stress, adversity, trauma or tragedy.

[Resilience] means that, overall, you remain stable and maintain healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning in the face of disruption or chaos.   If you have resilience, you may experience temporary disruptions in your life when faced with challenges. For instance, you may have a few weeks when you don’t sleep as well as you typically do. But you’re able to continue on with daily tasks, remain generally optimistic about life and rebound quickly. (Full post here.)

We needed to help Pearl along a little to find her resilience.  Life layers happened in parallel — children’s needs, elder care, work demands.  This seemed an apt place to explore the status of the university developed competency of  Flexibilty, Adapting to Change.

From a 2007 written definition: Flexibilty, Adapting to Change…

Responds positively to and champions change to others; demonstrates an ability to incorporate innovative practices into the workplace to enhance effectiveness and efficiency.

The Professional levels of the change competency includes:

• Understands and accepts the need for change
  • Cat has cancer.  Leg must go. We exhausted all other viable options
  • Reorganizations and mergers happen.  Staff configurations change based on knowledge and/or goals at hand.

• Deals with others’ resistance to change with tact and understanding.
  • Adult daughter is upset.  Family is upset.  Daughter repeatedly questions the diagnosis of amputation.  Many phone conversations.
  • Organization change usually involves a meeting, emails, followed by assortments of Facebook chats, hallway conversations, grapevine, etc. followed by a key email memo chaser  and hopefully two aspirin:  e.g. crucial conversations that help things look better in the morning.

• Cooperates in the implementation of change.
  • Parents, e.g. mom, drops off the cat for the amputation surgery. Hopes for the best. Trusts the medical team.
  • If loss is experienced, a change/grief process cycle may kick in.  It is easier and faster if the change is accepted as positive and needed, similar to this positive change cycle model here.)

Flexibility/Adaptability to Change: Management
Level 1 – initiates and implements change that positively impacts a department or workgroup

• Champions change by articulating its positive effect
  • Parents, e.g. mom, update daughter & family on cat improvements on phone & Google chat.  Recovery time is less and no drugs needed  this round.  Personality is returning to cat within a few days of surgery.
  • A new vision that incorporates facts and solid data helps move things along.

Level 2 – initiates and implements change that positively impacts a unit

• Articulates a compelling vision to the members of the organization.
  • One healthy cat video is worth a 1000 words, 23 seconds and MC Hammer.  (Part of son’s spanish class project.)
  • A classic video about those who change the world, 59 seconds here.

There are some missing descriptors from this competency including the learning and developmental benefit of the struggle.  Struggle earns its place in development, both personally as well as in leadership development.  As this is a personally focused entry, I offer a frequently cited internet story of cocoon to butterfly mortality (or at least interrupted development) described here.  At times, it is important to NOT intervene, lest we stunt the growth of the very person we aim to help, even killing the object of our assistance (or affection) with uninformed kindness.

For the human example, I offer the story of Nick Vuijicic, a man born without limbs. Excerpted from the video below:

Do you think you have hope?  I’m face down.  It should be impossible for me to get back up…If I fail 100 times, do you think I’ll give up?  I just want you to know it is not the end.  It matters how you finish.  Are you going to finish strong?  You’ll find the strength to get back up.  Like this:

Nick Vujicic, speaking to high school students in a brief 2 min. clip here.

Attitude, feeling, and belief systems are powerful, and transcendent.  They are built from many sources, and are responsive to confident, wise leadership.  There’s really no ideal wrap-up to the on-going story of managing change beyond Nick’s demonstrated resilency.  As for the point of the struggle, I offer this quote:

“And the day came when the risk it took to remain closed in a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anais Nin

NOTE:  HRD will having an open house sometime in June 2009 to honor the efforts of the organization development consulting staff over the years as we transition to new roles and jobs.  Invitations will be coming out soon.

As for this blog, it will continue.  Happy Memorial Day and weekend–remembering our veterans.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,

Mayor John Hieftje & his Festifools character by Phil Dokas on Flickr.com

And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…

–E.M. Forster, Howards End

Forster characters illustrate the tensions and challenge of making connections among different social classes in the period that preceded the First World War.  A simple tie-in is the anticipation of April and spring, while also dealing with a surprising late, heavy snow and tax time.  Some staff and their families are reporting lower, or

Late snow tulip, by Bill Merrill 4-6-09

much lower income tax figures than last year.  Anxiety and fears will be with us for some time, along with, fortunately, the enduring stories of how people dealt with tough times in the past.

One positive story example is from Peter G. Holden, 92, (looks 62) who grew up in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression.  Mr. Holden was interviewed by the New York Times and is featured in a short video, The New Hard Times (Holden, others in a series of videos), as he talks with his daughter and granddaughter about how communities pull together during hard times, across racial and/or class lines.  “Times are tight,” was the common greeting.  The project also invites videos upload submissions for the New Hard Times. 

Along with the Peter Holden’s hopeful view from hard times of the past, there is the local flavor and the idea of being visibly “present” via a few photos of Ann Arbor’s Festifools events  from this past Sunday.  Below are strategies for leaders at all levels to help you consider how to be present and connected to your staff during hard times.  The first examples are from the “Inside Training” Business Intelligence report – thanks to Jan Katz at UM and author Bill Treasurer, management specialist and author of “Courage Goes to Work: How to Build Backbones, Boost Performance, and Get Results.”.

• Be straight. “In good times and bad, workers want—and deserve—the truth. Avoid tiptoeing around tough issues and give it to them straight, no spinning or sugarcoating,” Treasurer emphasizes.

• Be gutsy. “Fear can play to your base nature. …Stop talking to employees about what keeps you awake at night, and start acting on what gets you up in the morning—the results you can make happen together.”

• Be hopeful. This isn’t the time for revealing your glass half-empty mentality, says Treasurer. “No downplaying the economy or giving false reassurances, but choose optimism over pessimism, encouragement over discouragement,” he recommends. …[Face] the challenges head-on with hope and determination.”

The full story is here.

To add to this, here are few excerpts from a Tom Peters’ theme blog -  Leading in Freaked-out Times:

• Leaders give respect. … Care. Respect. Leaders care about connecting — because it moves mountains.”

• Leaders love the mess. …” There’s no mess — and no creativity, no energy, no inspired leadership.”

• The leader is rarely — possibly never? — the best performer. … Leaders get their kicks from orchestrating the work of others — not from doing it themselves.”

• Leaders groove on ambiguity. …The next five years are going to be an economic roller-coaster ride. That means that business leaders are going to be challenged repeatedly not just to make fact-based decisions, but also to make some sense out of all of the conflicting and hard-to-detect signals that come through the fog and the noise. Leaders are the ones who can handle [lots] of ambiguity.”

• Leaders wear their passion on their sleeve. …Leaders emote, they erupt, they flame, and they have boundless (nutty) enthusiasm. And why shouldn’t they? …If you do not love what you’re doing, …then why in the world are you doing what you’re doing? And why in the world would you expect anybody to follow you?”

• Leaders know: Energy begets energy. Every successful company, every successful team, and every successful project runs on one thing: energy. It’s the leader’s job to be the energy source that others feed from… Benjamin Zander said it best: “The job of the leader is to be a ‘dispenser of enthusiasm.”

Last, but not least, are a couple examples from the April leadership carnival newsletter by Dan McCarthy:

• Moments of truth. Every decision you make in tough times has an emotional impact that lasts far beyond the moment. Every one is a moment of truth [including] the way you treat people.  Layoffs are when [the organization] proves its mettle and its worth, demonstrating whether a company really cares about its people.” “What do you want to be remembered for?”   More in the specific post here.

• Leadership with Survivors. The workers who remain to pick up the pieces…are often ignored after downsizing, to the detriment of the organization, and i4cp’s Reduction in Force survey has found that few companies have any strategies in place to help survivors.  Not preparing a plan for managing remaining staff can have dire consequences for an organization that’s probably already in trouble.  Strategies and suggestions are listed in the specific post here.

The full carnival blog post is here with thanks to Dan McCarthy.

Did one of these items strike up a drumbeat with you?  Have you noticed a particular leader behavior that is helpful in moving ahead with energy, hope, and renewed enthusiasm?   Is there leadership at any level  that is making a positive difference ?  Comments are encouraged!

Later in the novel, Howards End, we read:

“In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect — connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.”
– Chapter 33 –E.M. Forster

Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let’s love turbulence and use it for change. –  Ramsay Clark

I’m involved in coaching engagements with several leaders who are managing large workloads, leadership team pressures, and complexity.  I’m also finding I must take care to manage turbulence and complexity in my own work day.

Mike Jay, whose work I’m currently following on the coaching circuit, has written extensively about leadership including helping leaders respond to situations that are difficult and complex.  Rob Pasick, well known locally and nationally, also has a new book out, Balanced Leadership in Unbalanced Times, a helpful book for leaders dealing with work/life balance and leadership stress.  It features practical suggestions including an extensive “Coaches Clipboard.”

For this post, I’m featuring a leadership focus tool from Mike Jay.  Mike suggests that any leader can focus on 5 things and be successful in trying circumstances, no matter what the situation. His Big Five use acronym IMULL:

• Importance
• Motivation
• Urgency
• Leverage
• Low-Hanging Fruit

Mike cautions that IMULL is more difficult than it looks because there are “layers” of complexity within each item that must be viewed simultaneously.

Importance: What really matters?

Are you working on what is really important?  This first one might be the most challenging.  Mike suggests another model, Rubik’s Cube Analogy Protocol (RCAP) featuring a way to look at what is Integral.  The model is  here: http://www.leadu.com/RCAP.   If that is a bit more than you bargained for (this is about complexity) then also consider the work of Ian Clarkson who writes about Mobility across Detail, that is, when a manager is faced with a variety of details, mobility across detail helps the manager sort through these choices to select the ones most relevant to a given situation.  It is also about prioritizing efforts to ensure that they focus on both the short-term an the long-term, on the important and the really important, including all those who have a stake in and can make a contribution to improving and sustaining performance.  Clarkson says that achieving high levels of mobility across detail will assure that the right actions are being taken by the right people at the right time.

Motivation: Where’s the energy?

Motivation is about using what gives you energy and your willingness to turn that free energy into productive results.  A leader may have identified what is importance and urgent, but without motivation–energy to get things moving, the Ferrari is sitting at the start line and nothing happens.   Mike checks for importance, urgency and motivation in coaching leaders.

Urgency: What has to get done now?

Distinguish urgency opposed to crisis.  If crisis is caused by ineffective planning (urgency untended), than the leader has fallen victim to creating a tyranny of urgent.  Avoid the mistake of confusing the two, plan for the urgent to avoid the crisis.

Leverage: Where is the most to be gained?

To get the most out of those resources requires leverage.  What can you, as a leader, apply energy to get the most return?  Where can your energy make the most difference?  This also relates to the Mobility across Detail listed above.

Low-hanging Fruit

I’ve heard very senior people talk about many programs and initiatives this way during early implementation.  Where can I get the most success with an economy of energy?

Ferrari-by-Marcomagrini - Flickr

Low-hanging fruit that is important, urgent, motivating, with leverage speeds that Ferrari , with skill, to the finish line.  Of course there are boundaries:  moral, ethical and legal.  These will test and tempt leaders (and those who really aren’t leaders) to take short-cuts which are inappropriate.  We’ve seen this on display with some of our local, large corporate and national leaders.

As I am transitioning from my HRD role to Reveln Consulting (note the blog name change), I’ve also found IMULL personally helpful in sorting through the mountains of decisions and details to be managed. Let me know if IMULL resonates with you, from your own leader experiences, and…Happy Spring!

Making budget decisions  is definer of organizational identity in both flush and lean times.  By one classic model referenced below, organizations have hard and soft structures.  During lean times, soft and more difficult to define structures of organization tend to become more evident, sometimes uncomfortably so.  There’s nothing like a crises or simply a good, healthy conflict for exposing what really matters in an organization and to leaders making decisions.  Peter Drucker once stated, “Only three things happen naturally in organizations – friction, confusion and underperformance.  Everything else requires leadership.” Questions that may arise during budget reductions,  may include:

• What are the core set of skills, knowledge and attributes that most valued for who we are now?
• Is job security a top concern?   If so, who stays and who goes and why?
• Do the organization values, if defined, hold true?  Do they exists in action?  Are we managing to the values?
• Is the mission of the organization intact, changing, strengthening or weakening?

A classic and proven model that is a handy reference when reviewing organization impacts of budget decisions is the 7-S model by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman.  The model includes budget-relevant soft structures such as staffing, skills, as well as intangibles of shared values, and style.   Behaviors related to UM’s organizational competencies (skills, style) are listed here for UM staff with a kerberos password.  The January 28th blog post also lists other competencies references.   For an synopsis page of the 7S model, it is listed here (Tools tab.)  Photos and examples of the 7S in action at the university and elsewhere will be featured in future posts.

A practical example of soft structures is highlighted in a blog post here about advertising agencies.  Advertising is a field heavily impacted by the changes in technology and the advent of the force of Web 2.0 and social media.  Note the soft structures in the post that features such gems as:

• “Culture” is part of the promise that an agency makes to its clients. If that culture is not clearly understood internally, agency employees will not be able to fulfill that promise.

As leaders work through various budget models for 2009 and 2010, consider what the budget actions, and examples mean for testing the soundness of both the hard and soft structures of your organization.  Are current leadership actions and behaviors good examples of values in action?  Or are the values hollow words, like those of the now  defunct Enron?  A great illustration of values in action are listed in this PR release available here which describes:

• Actions are what count – not what’s on paper. –  If there’s a disconnect between what you say is important and what people do, you need to fix that right away. Rather than building a series of rules, build a series of examples. People learn from examples and role models – not from a list of words.  –from Can You Pass “The Enron Value Test?”

Organizational stories are powerful.  They are a helpful cross reference for what may be in the process of being redefined by budget impacts.  Values, organizational and leadership competencies, and any agreed upon communication procedures and principles are one of many “soft” checkpoints as budget decisions are being made.  Test them by looking at prevalent, and well known organizational stories.

And for all the decision makers and those in transition, it may be useful to remember the optimistically bent, master story teller and legendary syndicated commentator, Paul Harvey who passed away this Sunday.  One of  his quotes: “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”

Uniting the different Brazilian tribes is a clear objective for the breakdance group, AfroBreak.

A new book is out.  A new-old idea akin with chaos theory and self-organizing systems is captured in some strikingly-named chapters described here, from:   Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization.  In the continuing froth of social media evolution, consider the voice of the individual student, staff or faculty member in the context of:

• the dominant, conservative culture of universities as mentioned in a current Wired article from the Chronicle of Higher Education available here

• a current article about social media described here as a pure mess, a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie (add plants, flair, karma, cocktails, etc. if you’ve visited Facebook.)  Quoting the author:  “People will be looking to get tangible and relevant value out of their social experience; they’ll be looking for meaning and for order.”

As an example, I was pulled into my first multi-user Facebook chat-fest this past Friday on my MacBookPro with windows popping up and buttons turning red.  Used to a quiet Facebook chat with my daughter in Ecuador, this was a bit of a unexpected chaos.  As 20 minutes ticked away, I wondered what social media was doing for me lately.  Stepping back from it, I can match it to the intensity of it to a few engaging meetings or lunch gatherings where everyone appeared determined to evolve an idea or to help solve a problem, or both.  Balancing high and low talkers is part of the fray in these types of face to face meetings.  On chat, wikis, blogs, etc. everyone who can type has voice. (Typing fast helps, but on-line longer and louder doesn’t mean much.)

In such situations, it seems we are drawn to or sense a common set of values that create meaning.   If a group somehow agrees upon a values set, a community or group may form and something is produced.  The challenge?  It may be PR, control, and quality of what is produced.  Add the context of higher education, as mentioned above, which is seen as the most static of institutions.  However, consider the academy’s space for voice expression based on this fact:

• The academy…has also encouraged the notion that the Internet could be a change agent (from the Wired article referenced above.)

Yes, “change agent” was paired with university and that may be enough, by simply allowing an emerging community a chance to grow and show evidence of producing helpful, substantive results.  Two examples:

RAIN A UM community of practice and networking, supported by DRDA in partnership with unit administrators to support Research Administrators at UM

VOICES of the STAFF Tim Slottow commented on the  “the mother of all cross functional teams” as producing solid results.  VOICES is  a volunteer-based program offering UM staff members an opportunity to share ideas and define the campus community issues that matter most to them.  Note the video of what is being talking about, some old, some new, including yours truely reporting out from table 3 this past week.  Laurita Thomas in University HR is sponsoring this effort.

As for  that chaotic and enegetic Facebook chat I mentioned?   It was with several fitness and weight loss buddies who share a fitness set of goals with me.  I’ll let you know after we survive our first weigh in!  After all, Active U is underweigh (bad puns will not be edited out on this blog, today anyway.)

The newly added Current Reads tab on this website/blog will connect you to several current books and articles in the vein of this blog post along with the MCG model about group development in the Tools tab.  As always, your comments are most welcome!

COMPETENCIES are...

“Competencies and leadership development are the top two ways to have a business impact with training.”  — Tom Hood, CPA, blog post 2- 29-08

“My current thinking on competency models is to consider them more as an ‘intermediate stage’ in the evolution (of capability building efforts) rather than as the final stage.” — Prasad Kurian’s blog post, and Alltop HR blog on HR, OD and Personal Effectiveness

Competency programs and models seem to be picking up speed in higher education – which may be connected with the impact of social media and the career development aspects of competencies.  UM, as some of you know, launched a performance management site this year that features UM’s organizational competencies and several examples of technical/functional competency models.

Also of note, Google is approaching the 1/2 million mark for search results with the key words:

• competencies
• blog
• universities

The fact that word “blog” even shows up with “university,” is intriguing, as social media is slow to come to higher education among the workforce, especially as a part of leadership and management communication strategies, as opposed to the digital natives – including university students, who write blogs freely about almost anything.

Here are three diverse examples and resources regarding competencies in both university and business settings.

• Basic Competencies of a 2.0 Librarian (as in Web 2.0 – a personal blog entry on tech/functional competencies focused)  Nice examples of a self-developing competency list for a profession, with a focus in the blog post on technical skills, knowledge, abilities.

• Competencies Top Their List for Making an Impact CPA career progression model

• Student Health Professionals: Selected Competencies      References a framework and guidance for 28 functional areas in student affairs (Miller et al, 2003). Each functional area has a list of competencies which guide student affairs professionals in all aspects of student life.   Post is about student health professionals.

Feel free to comment below on what you think of the conversation on competencies, as well as the resources that exist and are emerging from various sources.

UM References:  The main UM competencies page is here.

UM unique name holders, download the UM Org. Competencies report here.

–Deb

We are now in the 44th administration in our government.  CNN feeds today, January 20th, were ramped up and active in offices and in group settings.   The challenges ahead in organizations are layers down from what we hear and read on the global news scale, yet a common message thread is there having to do with taking risks, developing and supporting leaders at all levels, and creating and implementing ethical standards.  You can see this in the blogosphere, in other social media (FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Workforce.com, etc.) , in the news, and in current office conversation.

New RSS feeds (short for real simple syndication) are now featured on the right hand column of this blog/twog featuring an organization & leadership development focus.  Here’s a relevant organizational focused excerpt from a current talent management post from one of the better known executive coaches in Ann Arbor.

…research, entitled “The State of Talent Management: Today’s Challenges, Tomorrow’s Opportunities” included input from 700 senior-level talent leaders across a wide spectrum of companies.  Among the findings:

• Only 7 percent of organizations consistently hold managers accountable for developing their direct reports through performance management processes.  (This is consistent with the earlier top successful leaders post below)
• Just 17 percent of respondents indicate their workforce strategy is consistently aligned with their business strategy across the organization.
• Only 10 percent of companies consistently measure the effectiveness of talent management programs.

This is from a new study by Hewitt Associates and the Human Capital Institute.  However, very few of the companies cited are executing the strategy successfully.  In short, plans on paper don’t translate to reality in the workplace regarding retention and recruiting.  The full blog post here.

Let me know if these short posts and references to the longer studies are helpful to you as you consider your role, work plan, risks decisions and results.  As always, feel free to comment below.