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  Virginio Gallardo 9:00 am on May 13, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communication 2.0 ( 60 ), conversations ( 2 ), management 2.0, talent ( 7 ), talent management ( 3 )   

  Conversations 2.0: the new way of managing talent 

  Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

  Quality communication is not unidirectional, it’s the conversation that enables us to listen. Quality knowledge is not explicit, that we try to encourage through training, it’s tacit, transmitted through conversations. Innovative culture like any other type of culture is conversations that need to be guided by a new type of leader.

  Now the conversations through social technologies are promoted in organizations, in what we have called conversations 2.0. In Barcelona and Madrid, we held two events that we have called #conversaciones20 because we think we are experiencing a special moment in which reflection on some of the best business experiences of our times is needed.

  After listening to 24 participants, I’d like to share with you five trends that summarize what I have heard.

  Five trends on new ways of managing talent in new organizations:

  1. Tacit knowledge gains prominence over explicit knowledge: Information training is becoming more important than formal training, packeted contents in the form of courses and workshops loses importance to social training. Practice communities and communication generate more knowledge than ever through conversations, a knowledge that can be extremely valuable for businesses. The major issues are how to ensure quality in these new ways of generating tacit knowledge.

  2. Leadership and “trojans” driving new values: The change towards organizations 2.0. is not a technological change, it’s a cultural change. The new values and new ways of managing require both transforming leadership at top management and the complicity of informal leaders, of intra-entrepreneurs, of trojans… The drive of these new values is what transforms organizations into organizations 2.0.

  3. More social, liquid and open organizations: There is an enormous consensus that we are going towards more social organizations where the hierarchy and the functional order lose importance to communities, new more liquid organizational ways that require new ways of managing talent. But what’s more, the organizational border is broken down and the organizations are more open towards the outside: customers, suppliers, innovation managers, citizens…

  4. Talent management serving business and innovation: The new ways of managing talent and the new social technologies are at the service of efficiency, greater productivity, better customer/citizen service, sales efficiency…. The commitment, creativity, flexibility, talent are at the service of improvement and innovation focused on the business from a more strategic perspective.

  5. Digital rupture, the new organizations are the future, but the future is already here. We can already find excellent examples of organizations with best practices, whatever the size, and the sector is becoming increasingly less important, although the best practices are located in sectors where technology has more importance. However for most, this disruption is happening too fast and many companies and professionals find themselves lost, faced with new roles and organizational implications of these new technologies.

  The general impression of this conference is that many have already decided to move towards these types of new organizations and those that have already done it, despite the short journey, not only believe that organizations 2.0 are possible, but are inevitable as the only way of facing the future.

  Virginio Gallardo (@virginiog) is Director of Humannova, a HR consultancy specialized in helping lead innovation in companies and manage the organizational transformation. He is author of the book “Liderazgo transformacional” and coordinator of Liderazgo e Innovación 2.0. This post was published originally on his blog “Supervivencia Directiva”, where you can follow his thoughts.

   
   

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  Raul Gonzalez Garcia 9:00 am on May 9, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: coaching ( 11 ), leadership ( 25 ), management ( 13 ), management 2.0, organizational culture ( 13 )   

  Leadership of the Future 

  Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

  

  Five ideas to envisage leadership of the future from new leadership trends:

  1. From an individual-centered focus, we have gone towards the team, and from the team, to the network. The leadership of the future will be shared: in organizations of the future, everyone will be leaders.

  2. Leadership cannot be boiled down to a set of prefabricated formulas that are used for all organizations, it requires continuous training and the ability to adapt and improvise. Leadership will be more like dancing as a group instead of mathematics.

  3. Leading will be synonym of empowering, the best leaders will be ones who transform their followers into leaders.

  4. The traditional workplace will be transformed into a collaboration 2.0 environment and the leadership of the future will be somewhat similar to the influence that some users have in internet forums. The main leadership 2.0 competences will be the ability to generate participation and trust, micro-blogging, tolerate ambiguity, share openly, and to help achieve a ‘netarchical’ organization.

  5. If work is permeated with Social Networking values and attitudes, people will lose the fear of making mistakes, exploring, participating, sharing, making decisions, taking risks, being creative or contributing new ideas. People won’t have the usual fears found in traditional companies and won’t need to be directed, they will be used to generating collective intelligence and leadership through digital participation infrastructures.

  To sum up, leadership of the future will be necessarily collective: people won’t know how to interact otherwise.

  “The best way to predict the future is to create it” – Peter Drucker

  Raúl González (@coachingcritico) is a certified coach (ICF) and holds a Master in Work and Organizational Psychology from Mälardalen University (Sweden), specialized in participation, organizational sociology, and coaching-based leadership. He has collaborated as a coach and trainer in organizations around the world, and is author of the blog coachingcritico.com, a space continuously investigating the way in which coaching and other trends are transforming learning and collaboration in all types of organizations.

   
   
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  Carlos Gonzalez Jardon 9:00 am on May 8, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaborative management ( 25 ), document management ( 12 ), enterprise social network ( 68 ), enterprise social networks ( 95 ), management 2.0, project management ( 12 ), task management ( 3 )   

  Enterprise Social Networks and Project Management 

  Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

  Editor’s note: Today we would like to welcome a new author to our blog. The clarity of his first post has surprised us, and that has made us even more delighted about him joining our group of contributors. Carlos González Jardón (@cgjardon) is consultant and trainer in project management. With more than 18 years’ experience in the IT sector, his activities revolve around IT project management and quality standards such as CMMi. He holds a computer engineering degree from the Universidad de Vigo, an Executive Master’s from ICAI/ICADE and PMP certification from the Project Management Institute. He is currently consultant in Project Management at Tecnocom. Welcome and thanks!

  We live in a society where access to information is no longer the privilege of a few and has been democratized. Nowdays, in a single click, we can access a wide range of data from multiple sources: search engines, online newspapers, blogs, social networks… The technology revolution is causing a social and professional evolution, in how we relate to our environment. Information continues to be important, but how we access/acquire that information is gaining relevance.

  In this environment, an enterprise social network can become a vital tool that enables us to strengthen some key aspects in our work:

  • Speed. Quick decision-making.
  • Reliability. Quality of the data.
  • Collaboration: Share information.
  • Acccessibility: A single data source, multiple devices to access it.

  The subject is rather extensive, but we will look briefly at how an enterprise social network can help us in executing projects.

  Projects and Enterprise Social Networks

  In project management, communication is a critical factor. But what do we understand communication to be in a project?

  According to the PMBok® Guide (project management knowledge base), one of the leading references for any project leader, managing communication involves all processes required to ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, distribution, storage, retrieval and ultimate disposition of project information.

  In other words, the project manager needs to ensure that all project stakeholders have or have access to, at the right moment, the information required using suitable and efficient means. This is extremely relevant as poor management of communication and information in a project could cause the time that the project manager devotes to communicate, distribute, share and access the information to sky-rocket, and even bring the project to the brink of disaster.

  In order for the project manager to have the right information at each stage, they need to interact with their team, the customers, suppliers, and the ‘closer’ they are to the task being done, the better the information. Basically, the project manager needs to beSOCIAL with all those stakeholders in the project. It is not enough to have social skills based on ‘face-to-face’ interaction. We need to seek support from the tools that enable us to manage online or virtually multi-disciplinary and multi-site teams.

  In this scenario, an enterprise social network can play a differential role. If we share aspects of our daily lives, why shouldn’t members of a project team share, through an enterprise social network, their problems, doubts, concerns regarding the activities being performed in the project? This activity is already being done in the corridors, on the phone, but it is difficult to have a document support with the conclusions reached. Using collaborative tools can help to flourish and document information that would be lost otherwise. In those project-focused organizations, an enterprise social network can provide major value by sharing and accessing data easily and quickly.

  Benefits of Enterprise Social Networks in Project Management

  Although I’m sure there are many more, these are some of the benefits they can provide:

  Quick access to one of the best sources of knowledge: the team’s experience.

  The senior profiles are an excellent source of knowledge and that knowledge can be used to resolve different situations that we face daily in a project. Coaching, mentoring, tutoring, training or resolving of doubts can be done dynamically through an enterprise social network.

  Repository of project information and documents.

  Although this point has already been solved by many other tools, an enterprise social network can be the main point of access to shared resources. It means converting the current static or one-directional intranet (always focused from the company to the employee) into a social and collaborative environment ‘company-employee’ and ‘employee-employee’ (beyond a simple question-response network).

  Reduce “meetingitis”.

  In many organizations, there are too many inefficient meetings. Often we finish the day with the feeling that we haven’t done anything “productive”. Simple meetings to exchange information and update everyone can be replaced by short virtual meetings (e-meetings): for example, the status of our project, clarification of doubts, etc. These e-meetings will not replace face-to-face meetings, rather they will complement them and reduce them to the essential ones, as the cost, both economically speaking and cost-opportunity (what I don’t get done) is very high.

  Simplify management in multi-site environments.

  In environments where the team is located at different sites in the company or in the client (or even in teleworking situations), the social network will help us enormously with that task of “sharing”, reducing, or even eliminating problems resulting from not all being in the one place.

  Neglected management.

  On many occasions, we experience many short interruptions that break our usual work rate. Enterprise Social Networks mean that those short interruptions can be channelled through it to be answered at a later stage; or even they could be resolved by other members of the team collaboratively, leaving evidence of their resolution in the “social environment” itself.

  Our value lies not in what we know, rather how quickly we can “update” (learn what we don’t know, acquire knowledge) and how we share it with our co-workers.

  In this scenario, an enterprise social network can become a perfect work environment where different stakeholders in our project can interact according to their role, regardless of their physical location and time zone.

  The work environment is a clearly social activity in most cases, so why not use enterprise social networks? This way sharing knowledge among the project team can be more agile, although to achieve it, a cultural change is required in organizations.

   
   
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  Bill Cushard 9:00 am on May 2, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), enterprise social network ( 68 ), human resources ( 26 ), management ( 13 ), management 2.0, team management ( 29 )   

  On-boarding New Employees on Enterprise Social Networks 

  Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

  On-boarding new employees is a major undertaking for many organizations. In fact, for most training departments, on-boarding is most of what it does. A lot of money is invested in on-boarding new employees, but there are staggering statistics that show that all of this time, energy, and effort is largely wasted.

  For example, according to the Wynhurst Group, 22% of staff turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment and the cost of losing an employee is at least three times the salary. This means that organizations are spending thousands of dollars per new employee to on-board them only to see many leave, costing the organization even more money to replace.

  These statistics alone should cause business leaders to question whether their current on-boarding efforts are effective enough to reduce these numbers. The good news is that new employees who went through a structured on-boarding program were 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years.

  So there is hope.

  Learning Job Skills is a Limited Goal of On-boarding

  The purpose of most on-boarding programs is to help new employees learn the skills they need to perform their jobs. Of course, this is important, but not enough attention is placed on other important goals of on-boarding, including socializing new employees into the culture of the organization. This limited goal of on-boarding is short-sighted because research has shown that effective on-boarding and new employee socialization can lead to positive outcomes in terms of job satisfaction, better performance, higher commitment to the organization, and reduction in intent to quit.

  Therefore, if organizations can just change how they on-board new employees by thinking about socializing new employees into the organization rather than just training them, organizations can improve performance through new employees who are more satisfied at work, perform better in their jobs, are more committed to the company, and have a lower intent to quit.

  So how do organizations socialize new hires instead of just training them? This is where enterprise social networks (ESNs) come into play.

  Where ESNs Come In

  In most cases, a new employee completes a new hire training class and then is shuffled to a desk surrounded by people in their department. Most of what a new person now learns about the company comes from their immediate surroundings, which is only a microcosm of what the company is all about.

  What if a new person ends up sitting in between the two most negative people in the company? What influence do you think they will have on the new person? Enterprise social networks open up the entire company to new employees, and empowers new people to interact with anyone in the organization no matter what department they are in or where in the world they are located.

  In the remainder of this post, I share four ideas for how to use enterprise social networks to more effectively on-board and socialize new employees into your organization.

  Four Ideas for Implementing Effective Socialization on ESNs

  1. New Employee Group: Create a group on the enterprise social network and assign all new hire employees to this group. Encourage new employees (perhaps defined as people hired within the past 0 to 12 months) to interact with each other, share stories of their on-boarding experience, and otherwise support each other.

  2. Assign New Employee Community Manager: Many companies have community managers to facilitate interactions between companies and their customers. The idea is to improve customer engagement. Why not assign a community manager to improve engagement specifically among newly hired employees?

  3. Encourage New Employees to Reach Out (with Direction): One of the most important benefits of enterprise social networks is that they allow employees to easily communicate with people beyond their immediate network. The new hire community manager should encourage new employees to reach out to people all over the organization, which could mean reading posts of others, finding people with expertise, asking questions of people they find interesting or commenting on the posts of others.

  This reach out should be structured in order to get new hires started. One example is a scavenger hunt. All new employees could be given instructions to seek people out using the enterprise social network. Some assignments could be to 1) find three people who share a hobby or interest with you by searching employee profiles; and 2) find three people in departments or with skills and expertise you want to acquire and send them a message asking them a question about how they got started. There are many ways this can be done.

  By providing structure to early activities, it reduces the anxiety of what to look for and also gives new people the confidence to continue to reach out and build their network on the enterprise social network as they progress with the company.

  4. Provide Links to Resources Related to Their Job: As a learning and development professional, I can tell you that the worst thing you can do is cram everything people need to know about their new job into the new hire training. It is too much. New hires get overwhelmed and forget much of what was taught anyway. Enterprise social networks allow you to strip out much of the content from the new hire training, and provide it to your new people over time, and in the moment of need. Use enterprise social networks to post resources when needed and also allow users to share these resources with each other.

  A Natural Opportunity to Improve Performance

  Enterprise social networks provide a natural opportunity for vastly improving how newly hired employees are socialized into organizations. By leveraging the power of enterprise social networks, your new people can be more satisfied at work, will perform better, and will stay longer. How could you not want that? If you are not using an Enterprise Social Network yet, it’s time for you to try Zyncro for free.

  The ideas above are just the beginning of what can be accomplished on enterprise social networks. How are you using enterprise social networks to on-board and socialize new employees into your organization? Share your stories in the comments below.

  Bill Cushard (@billcush), a new author to our Zyncro Blog. Bill is writer, blogger and learning experience (LX) designer and facilitator. He has extensive, in-the-trenches experience in creating learning programs that incorporate semi face-to-face and social learning methods. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

   
   
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  Rafael Garcia-Parrado 9:00 am on April 26, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: company 2.0 ( 3 ), enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), hr ( 10 ), human resources ( 26 ), leadership ( 25 ), management 2.0, people management ( 2 ), personnel management ( 3 ), team management ( 29 )   

  The professional facilitator in organizations 

  Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

  Technological advances and growing competitiveness force companies to stay permanently up-to-date, so collaborative practices are becoming more valued as a more than profitable option.

  Here we can talk about practice communities that can enhance productivity in organizations thanks to an improvement in processes and empowering the employees who should assess, propose and solve in decision-making.

  Placing these work groups at the heart of any productive improvement involves giving them autonomy, with the result being the sum of the individual productivities and knowledge transfer.

  However a change of such dimensions in any organization used to functional or departmental structures can entail a number of problems in managing this complex change. To face it, and to ensure that projects don’t de-virtualize from their auto-da-fe, total integration is required and not just changing the structure of the departments.

  To respond to these limitations in organizations, professional facilitators or facilitator teams have emerged, which are responsible for developing strategic capacities for re-focusing the actions of the work group.

  These professionals seek to:

  • Drive innovation
  • Ensure strategic cohesion
  • De-bureaucratize the organization
  • Instill a new way of doing things (innovation requires a method)
  • Streamline the organizational change
  • Use social technologies to provide business openness

  These professionals can acquire a greater role in the classical structure, while they reduce their weight and importance. Through their interruption in the work methodology, they seek to generate wisdom across the board that enables the company to give an efficient response to the challenges.

  To sum up, I want to highlight the importance of people, as a high level of involvement and maturity is essential in order for the companies themselves to adapt to the rhythm and the quality of their employees, achieving greater flexibility and orientation on the outcome.

  Rafael García (@rafagparrado) works as a consultant at Índize and has his own blog, which at Zyncro we highly recommend: La Factoría Humana.

  
  
   
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  Eduardo Sanz 9:00 am on April 23, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: coaching ( 11 ), enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), hr ( 10 ), human resources ( 26 ), leadership ( 25 ), management 2.0, team management ( 29 )   

  Leadership in difficult times (II): Accidental leader or “what have I done to deserve this?” 

  Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

  I want to start by thanking you for the great welcome my first article on this blog got and all the comments many of you made both privately and publically. This just reinforces that the ideas I mentioned are not just my own vision of things and helps to confirm that we all have a mission to change the Spanish panorama of SMEs with quality executives and leadership.

  Another reason that reinforces that we have “hit the nail on the head” is that all of you who gave your feedback are people that have experienced pseudoleaders. So they are not an urban legend that no one has seen after all and they do really exist. It’s no use thinking that they are just from the older generations, and those that have replaced them are “cut from the same cloth.”

  Curiously, none of these pseudoleaders have written to me publically or privately to say “Hello, my name is X. I’m a pseudoleader and I want to change. How do I do that?” So I ask myself, where is that self-criticism?

  An accidental leader could be any of you; a committed person with a restlessness, who collaborates and has always worked hard thinking that some day their chance to lead a project due to their own merits would come.

  Normally, accidental leaders find themselves with their boss’s job overnight because the company had thought that it could save expenses that way and that they would accept the position without questioning why or how and would limit themselves to doing what they are told.

  It is communicated to them with no mincing of words. “Hello, we have decided to make a change in Sales Management and after assessing several options, we think you are the person for the job. We have good reports from your boss, you’ve been with us for a while and you know the company. So do the visits you have planned and in 15 days’ time we’ll meet here to talk about how we are going to work.”

  You get excited and you follow your work plan and visits. At night in the hotel, you work on a detailed business plan in line with what the company needs and the market demands.

  When the day arrives, the message you receive is “We hope this changes quickly and you limit yourself to doing what we tell you, don’t forget that you’re here because of us” or “What you need to do is sell, stop giving excuses and sell. Your previous boss spent all day getting data on the competition and saying that we had to change things and analyze prices, but what you need to do is sell. We’re here to think, so less PowerPoint and more selling.”

  You’ll leave the meeting completely demotivated but you tell yourself that gradually changes and improvements will be made. The months go by and things stay the same, they didn’t want a leader and you realize that you haven’t worked or endeavoured so long to do that.

  You try to give your team training and the response is “Training is an expense, less training and more selling”. You start to notice that they don’t include you in the decisions and when the time comes, you ask yourself the question do you really want to continue or not?

  You know your potential, you know your areas for improvement and you want to work on them. What’s more, you have ideas to drive and help the company.

  I’ve discovered I’m an accidental leader. What do I do?

  If after reading this you can identify with this, don’t lose hope. Don’t worry, there is a path to solve it. You have several options and, although there is no good or bad one, I’ll give you a few. But remember, the right one will be the one you decide to take.

  Option 1: Accept it and resign yourself to the fact. If that role is enough for you and you are only looking for a title on your business card, it’s as respectable a decision as any other. Many people spend their lives doing something they don’t like and passing the hours, waiting for their day to end. If you are one of them, you still have time to change it some day. If you don’t want to, good luck in your job. I don’t envy you.

  Option 2: You’re restless and you can see that this is not the future you envisaged.

  • To start, don’t lose hope.
  • Be positive, maybe you will manage to make them change the way of doing things.
  • Seek allies that can help to change things for better step by step.
  • Relish those small successes, from a new customer to a sales rep that you have trained. Give yourself those moments of self-motivation.
  • Don’t stop learningand build up your network of contacts in case an opportunity arises.
  • While you are with the project, always give your 110% so they can never say you “didn’t do it” and if the results don’t come, you can be sure that you gave your all.
  • Trust yourself and your values.
  • You have talent, success requires training .
  • Never rush into making a decision that affects your future. As the song goes “you’ll never walk alone”. “When you walk through a storm. Hold your head up high. And don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm is a golden sky”

  In the next article with which I will close this trilogy, I’ll talk about new leaders: Leader-Coaches, the seed of the Sustainable Leader.

  Like always, I’ve written about my own opinion of things, but I’d love to know what you think. Feel free to comment!

  Eduardo Sanz (@esanzm) is entrepreneur, coach and founder of Directivos en Acción.

   
   
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  Juan Ignacio Barenys 9:00 am on April 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: continuous training, human resources ( 26 ), management 2.0, people management ( 2 ), talent management ( 3 ), team management ( 29 ), training ( 5 ), trends ( 9 )   

  The People Manager as a Trainer 

  Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

  In this blog, I highlighted a few weeks ago how positive it is that the expression “human resources management” is being replaced by “people management”. It’s not something trivial. The temptation to treat people exclusively as resources has been enticing and has brought with it attitudes that are not favorable for their overall management, beyond the mere administration.

  People management is not solely the responsibility of the departments created for such purpose in organizations. It is the asset and unavoidable obligation of those professionals who are responsible for managing others in their organization. It includes diverse functions, however today I would like to highlight one in particular, perhaps the one most forgotten: continuous training. And never a word better used than continuous, meaning: without interruption, without need for prior planning and without resorting to the well-known liturgy of classrooms, audiovisual media and reserved timetables. All the above is not strictly necessary for training people, although obviously it helps.

  Has anyone ever told, for example, a sales director to not provide training in sales techniques himself whenever the opportunity arises with his agents? Has any ever stopped a production manager from continuously transmitting his experience to the engineers under his command? Of course not. There is no people management or human resources (or however you want to call it) department that can regulate substitutes, more or less dressed up as academics, that highly personalized, enormously practical and directly focused training for the organization’s benefit. Training that is given in the day-to-day, in the work meetings, in the individual conversations and in any act that includes the slightest touch of communication.

  However, on many occasions it happens like that. Managers omit with excessive frequency and ease the responsibility of giving that ideal training and clumsily resort to the cruddy “you’ll have such and such training program” or “they give me people that don’t need training”, unacceptable clichés in a modern idea of people management.

  We shouldn’t manage, at a level, without explicit desire to train the people managed. And that should not sound like out-dated altruism, please. On the contrary, it is not just the most noble of the acts in management, but also the most profitable, in terms of benefit for the people, without a doubt, but also for the organization that houses them.

  To train people, not resources, first we need to know what their learning processes are. This way, the corresponding teaching procedures can be adapted. Not everyone learns in the same way; as a result, you can’t teach them in the same way. In formal education of groups, it is difficult to individualize those procedures, but when it is daily training from management, it can be done. It’s often enough to want to do it and to provide the personal means to do it.

  There are five learning processes that we people use: stimulus association, consequence association, imitation, peer mediation, and reflection. A combination of these can occur, and in fact, it almost always does. In each person, there is a dominant process and the other that accompany it. These five processes have another number of procedures for teaching associated: adapting the practice conditions, increase feedback, show, provide guidelines, and invite reflection. Also here “each teacher has their own book”, i.e. there is a dominant procedure. From conjunction between them, that training to which I refer will emerge spontaneously, and the figure of the manager as a people trainer will be recovered.

  Juan Ignacio Barenys de Lacha is Director at Odati and Eskpe Consulting. Member of AEDIPE, creator of the Odati Method for training executives and managers, ex-CEO of Olivetti Information Systems Spain and of Sligos Systems and chairman of the World Forum Congress in Washington in 1990.

  
  
   
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  Jeroen Sangers 9:00 am on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: company ( 12 ), enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), management 2.0, productivity ( 22 ), team management ( 29 )   

  2 keys for group productivity 

  Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

  Editor’s note: Today we would like to welcome a new author to our blog. Jeroen Sangers (@JeroenSangers) is personal productivity consultant and author of the blog El Canasto. He specializes in modern techniques to manage time, actions and attention, and provides training, consulting and keynotes on a more intelligent way to work and live.

  Any trainer of a sports team knows it: although the players may be stars, that does not guarantee that the team will win. You have surely seen how the biggest football teams that have spent millions of dollars to get the best players often finish the season with the worst results. In order for a team to work, more than just good individual results are needed.

  Personal productivity

  No one works alone. Although we try to do all our tasks as best as possible and with maximum efficiency, for many things we depend on our co-workers. The web developer needs the texts of the copywriter, the sales rep needs the brochures of the marketing department, the marketing director needs the production status of the new products, etc.

  We may work efficiently, but if our co-workers are chaotic, we can’t be productive.

  The truth is that personal productivity cannot be extrapolated to the efficiency of teams. What are the two keys for group productivity?

  1. Roles and responsibilities

  In my opinion, the most important thing for building a productive team is to know the other members of the group well. Each person is different and has their strong points, their weaknesses and their own manner. Like in the different positions in a football team, a team works better if there are various profiles of people. Each team needs a leader, a creative person, someone who looks after relations, someone who gets to work straight away, etc.

  In the 1970s, Dr. Meredith Belbin developed a model with 9 essential roles for each team. We can use this model to identify the roles of each member and find the skills that we are missing in our team.

  2. Internal communication

  The second key point for a team to be efficient is internal communication.

  The dilemma is that we want to know all our co-workers’ actions, projects, ideas and concerns, yet we don’t want to waste time with useless information.

  To do this, we need to establish the best way of communicating in each case. In many offices, when we have to ask a co-worker something, we usually get up and go to their desk. Obviously we are causing a major interruption.

  It is better to use a less intrusive communication medium, like for example, email, the intranet or an enterprise social network. Then we can agree on exceptions for specific situations: How do we communicate if we need an instant response? What communication medium do we have to talk about sensitive issues or emotions?

  There is no one solution. The key is knowing which communication media are available, knowing the benefits and the problems of each way of communicating, and establishing an internal communication protocol with the other members of the team.

  If you want to be part of a productive team and win the league, you need to know your team well and have a top-quality communication channel.
   
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  Virginio Gallardo 9:00 am on April 10, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaborative work ( 14 ), learning ( 4 ), management 2.0, social training, team management ( 29 ), teamwork ( 23 ), training ( 5 ), virtual communities ( 5 )   

  The future of training will be social in communities 

  Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

  Editor’s note: Virginio Gallardo has let us post this article from his blog where he talks about what the new social learning environments in communities will be like. At Zyncro we are prepared for this revolution, what about you?

  We create much knowledge with a high expiration and this forces companies and professionals to reinvent knowledge management, training and business development processes.

  There are things from the past that we should bury in the past forever, because they block new ways of seeing the future. This is especially true in all things associated with what we know of education and training.

  We must learn to live with new concepts like personal learning environments, “gamification”, socialization of learning… although for many these terms are strange and unknown.

  However from all these new ways of learning, I suggest you reflect on the role of Communities, new organizational structures that are not mostly created with educational purposes, but that are the major source of learning in our professional future.

  Social learning, in communities

  In the company, learning in classrooms, memoristic, conceptual, separated from the reality, cognitive, disciplined learning… is disappearing. However, the classroom continues as the basis of business training. We must make the effort to forget this way of undersating education in companies, as the future has little to do with this reality.

  The new ways of learning will be often informal, outside the classroom, without programs, “serendipity”, ubiquitous (in any time and space), cooperative (social, in groups via conversations), participative or inclusive, where we are not just recipients, but also creators of content and ideas (prosumidors).

  Learning will be integrated in our company’s behavior and values as an on-going and collective phenomenon that will affect all us professionals constantly. For this reason, from the company we must ask and help our professionals to create their own personal social learning environments, which in some cases will be closely connected with the company, but on other occasions will be connected with external professionals or systems and educational institutions. The professionals that survive in the future will be socialnetworkers, experts in developing themselves in networks.

  Of all these new phenomena, the most revolutionary way of learning is that you learn with others in collaborative work environments: communities. Usually in technological environments where you connect, share, analyze, question, apply, share, analyze…

  The communities designed for learning are the so-called communities of practice. They are the most well-known: groups created with the purpose of developing a specialized knowledge, sharing learning based on the reflection on practical experiences. This type of community will be created in all companies and in all business environments (commercial, production, management, etc.)

  Many workers will be present in external communities of practice. Faced with the complexity and specificity of the knowledge of many of their workers, they will be trained with external resources, resulting in socially intelligent workers. And this will be done with external academic institutions and platforms, many on the Internet or in external informal groups. Many employees will create their own social learning space on which their professional success will depend.

  However, intelligent organizations will create, above all, another type of community. Communities that are not just used to share internal knowledge, but to resolve business problems, with the knowledge of employees being used to do this. Intelligent organizations will ensure their employees are connected in the network with other professionals, especially within the company.

  More efficient social environments for learning are not environments created to learn

  The most relevent learning theory for the digital era is connectivism, which according to George Siemens establishes that learning starts from the diversity that emerges from connecting people (nodes) and the quality of their connections, where decision-making is itself a learning process.

  The new ways of learning give increasing importance to action and real or simulated decision-making within the network learning process. The communities designed to improve processes, to reduce costs, to increase sales, to analyze new products, will be the communities where the professionals learn the most.

  The learning that will extend in the future will not separate learning and work, it will not separate theoretical learning and real decision-making, it will not separate between communities to learn and those used for decision-making. Communities where the most will be learned, those that will be most used in the future are the communities whose goals are associated with business: communities for improvement, innovation, creation, systemized…

  The goal of these communities is not to develop applied knowledge; the goal is change, the transformation or achievement of goals. They will be created to innovate, although they will be the greatest source of learning for new workers in the digital era.

  These communities will have many characteristics of the communities of practice, but proactivity and distributed leadership and the creation process of ideas to implementation (the so-called idea trip) will be the new bases of success. These communities will be the most mutable and flexible organizational structures, in which there will be roles and decision-making that require the management of complex knowledge thanks to the participation of diverse specialists.

  No, we won’t separate work from learning again. And this will make us think that perhaps there are memories from our childhood that we should not bury in the past forever and that we should remember school and how we learnt there… in the school yard. We will learn like we learnt when we were kids, experimenting, sharing and creating collaboratively, making mistakes and correcting ourselves, to achieve goals.

  Virginio Gallardo is Director of Humannova, a HR consultancy specialized in helping lead innovation in companies and manage the organizational transformation. He is author of the book “Liderazgo transformacional” and coordinator of “Liderazgo e Innovación 2.0”. This post was originally published on “Supervivencia Directiva“, where you can follow his thoughts.
   
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  Sonia Ruiz 9:00 am on March 22, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaborative work ( 14 ), enterprise 2.0 ( 90 ), enterprise social network ( 68 ), enterprise social networks ( 95 ), internal communication ( 23 ), Intranet 2.0 ( 18 ), management 2.0, social intranet ( 19 ), whitepaper ( 4 )   

  [Whitepaper] Keys to convincing your director to implement an enterprise social network 

  Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

  You know all the benefits of implementing an Enterprise Social Network in your company…

  but you’re not sure how to convince your boss?

  Well, you’re in luck! Because today we are delighted to present the collaborative whitepaper by PrideCom and Zyncro with the key arguments for convincing management to incorporate an enterprise social network.

  This methodology is the first in a full series of reports that we will present over the coming months from Zyncro, your Enterprise Social Network, and PrideCom, the first Internal Communication 2.0 agency in Spain and one of the pioneers worldwide.

  In this whitepaper, you will find:

  1. Tips for approaching the internal sale phase of the project, with a special focus on how to argument the strategic objectives and benefits that it will bring the organization
  2. An exhaustive TO-DO list so nothing is left out
  3. A list of the myths that you will have to face, as well as their counter-arguments so that you leave no room for doubt.

  If you follow the steps we give you, we’re sure your boss will end up saying: When do we start?

  Download the whitepaper and become one of the first to get the best tool for selling a social project internally: Zyncro & PrideCom Thinking about implementing an enterprise social network, but not sure how to convince your boss?

  If after reading it you think you need some support in building arguments adapted to your organization, don’t hesitate to contact us and we will help you to make your internal sale a success. Write to us at: fans (@) pridecom.es and we will look at your case in more detail.

  Thanks to Zyncro’s experience with its customers and PrideCom’s expertise in cultural transformation, we will publish the essential methodological guidelines to make implementation of your Enterprise Social Network a complete success.

  Start by downloading the whitepaper and continue by putting your ideas into practice. You’ll soon see the results

  “Social attitude has an impact on your income statement”. So we need to present the impact that a digitalization project can have on business to management if we want them to buy in. This way, if you are thinking about embarking on a digital transformation initiative in your company, this whitepaper is perfect for you. It contains practical advice to approach the influence phase with management, an exhaustive TO-DO list so that nothing is left out, and a list of myths that we usually find in companies that will help you to structure your own arguments for internal sale.

  With this document, you will save the first stage in adopting a social project… and in a second stage you’ll have the challenge of converting your boss into a SuperCo leader, but more about that in another episode.

  What are you waiting for? Click here to download the whitepaper: Thinking about implementing an enterprise social network, but not sure how to convince your boss?

  Sonia Ruiz Moreno (@soniaruizmoreno) has more than 12 years’ experience in Corporate Communication in multinational environments. She is founder of PrideCom, the first Internal Communication 2.0 agency. Master’s in Corporate Communication from the Université de Lille III in France, degree in Journalism from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and member of the Internal Communication Board of DIRCOM. Speaker and lecturer at several business schools on Internal Communication 2.0