Social Media – Page 2 – The Lauren Klein

The Change Games

Wearables, real time insights and feedback are here to stay.

It is taking people by storm. Overwhelming, intrusive, and too much noise I’ve heard from a variety of people regarding this pivot we are all experiencing with the vast integration that technology is having in our day to day lives.

In the US, we are reminded of the familiar concept of competition with March Madness. Yet we now see these concepts sliding into our crossfit (exercise) class leaderboards our company intranets and our personal applications. I’ve see organizations taking these tournaments to new levels and allowing their divisions to compete against each other for charitable fundraising efforts or hackathons.

What I find ironic is that we have engineers leading technology programs who are great at what they do, but lack in the H2H strategy acumen. So, why doesn’t HR have a seat at the table? Why don’t the engineers invite them to the technology implementations? Perhaps because our HR leaders don’t have the business acumen. They grew up out of the transactional processing world and don’t have the field experience that allows them to truly understand what it takes to be a strategic business partner. This is what haunts many great ideas that fall flat. They lack thoughtful people strategies that look at the extrinsic and intrinsic motivators across these programs, not to mention integration into the diversity and inclusion mission.

My hope is that C Suite leaders hold their People Leaders accountable to embody this behavior themselves. We ask our People / HR organizations to move from transactional into business partners who are change junkies and realize that the new world order has changed.

Experienced designer and technologist Kristen Corpolongo stated, “From a creative technologist perspective Lauren brings up an excellent point. Have we begun to reflect on the irony that we are implementing collaborative technologies without engaging collaboration in the process?”

Perhaps our organizational design structures haven’t evolved in tandem with the times? Kristen shares that “we want our enterprise social networks to be successful, so we need to make our implementations social from day one, too. In our enterprise Change Games, we need to recognize that business is changing, the skills we need to have are changing, and that the process is more democratized than before. Innovation and creativity are not top-down cycles – they start by opening up to the diversity of thought in our organizations.”

Kristen recommends that “Engineers, designers, managers, and people leaders all belong at the forefront of social initiatives, and they need to look beyond the technology to the human factors that collaborative technology engages. Success in the Change Games begins with trust. Trust builds with consistency. Start with transparency, and coach your people leaders to share knowledge, build relationships, and honor the organic creative process in our enterprises and within themselves.”

Leadership and innovation are changing. Harvard Business Review bloggers shared a Pixar innovation use case for their collective genius. Leaders must look in the mirror to reflect on their own approaches while modeling the behavior if they expect their teams to innovate themselves. So what are they waiting for? Let the Change Games begin!

Women Collaborating with Women. Yes, More Please!

I’m raising young women to learn to collaborate with other women, not view them as a threat. This is important part of today’s society. Partnering, collaborating and aligning together in order to drive new outcomes, innovations and business in today’s society. Yet, how can I encourage this with youth of today if their mentors aren’t embodying these principles. For example, recently during a business conversation, there were several women on a call, yet one of them found the topic difficult to compete with other women during the conversation

How are you contributing to the movement? Are you spending time in your day to day lives helping your female colleagues? Do you coach / advice or mentor younger women to help them learn how to build alignment with other women with whom they study, carpool, work, or live?

It really boils down to the importance in society today to learn the fundamentals around partnering and building alignment with differences in opinion.

This isn’t about hierarchy, one being better or worse than another. It is about respect and value of one another in our schools, our communities and our workplaces. This is about helping one another through our actions and words to find ways in which we can progress, advance and live with one another.

Truly with all the psychologists, counselors, therapists, coaches and industry content this cannot be that hard. But the truth of the matter is that it really is hard. Suspending judgment, asking for candid feedback, giving candid and timely feedback all the while taking a step back to look at ourselves closely in the mirror are critical aspects to our ability as individuals to advance in our lives. Whether we are in 5^th grade or Vice Presidents in an organization. We need to make sure that every day – we are thinking about ways in which we can impact the lives and outcomes of our offspring, our communities, our teams and our teams.

Brene Brown reminds us in her latest research on vulnerability that we really must be courageous and vulnerable in how we approach our lives. Personally, I have found this is riddled with pain – yet on the other end of the spectrum – it also brings one an immense amount of peace. So, what do you say? Follow her thought leadership and try some ordinary courage the next time another female isn’t supportive or feeling threatened by you in the workplace.

Mergers, HR and Social Technologies

We are heading into another era of M&A activity. Just look at all the Big Data companies fighting for market share. For me, feels like Déjà vu from the 1990s and I hear the Pac man chomping up those little fruits, ahem, I mean companies now.

So the question I’m asking myself is, “How many of your People organizations are leveraging the insights from their tools? How many are taking the talent analytics, performance data and collaboration metrics?”

According to Talent Management Magazine, “Successful companies begin by recognizing that people-related decisions present the most difficult variables in almost any transaction and pose the greatest risks, such as turnover up to 60 percent, or lingering cultural issues that cripple productivity. They beat the odds by carefully managing human capital to transform two groups of people into one functioning company.”

I’ve seen some progressive organizations taking the data from their enterprise systems to help them identify hi potential talent, which is laudable. Why not take it a step further and allow these same individuals the opportunity to innovate on the merger and acquisition. It becomes more about mentorship and learning than it is transactional. Yes, there are financial and transactional tasks that need to be completed, of course. But with all the human capital work streams and risk, why not invite new thinking to the process versus hiring an external consulting firm for all roles relating to the acquisition? Fresh approaches can feel risky, but they could also reap big rewards.

At a minimum, we can find ways to incorporate employees with strong relationships to help request feedback and spread information throughout an organization.

Declarative Statements as Game Changers

Ken Pearlman, engagement manager at Kotter International shared an article in Forbes that inspired us to write more about simple statements that we could make to change the game or create conditions. He highlighted how when one person stated that we are going to “be doing business differently.” That alone gave people permission to consider thinking differently, acting differently and being open to new ways of working.

Sometimes you just need a little affirmation that taking a new road is okay.

I’ve often found in teams that most people really do want to make a difference, but they are simply bogged down in all the corporate policy and politics. What people often want is to be heard, be respected and be given the green light to create something innovative and powerful.

Of course, it takes more than just words. It requires courageous leaders who are willing to fund, advocate or move barriers in order to drive something across a finish line. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that we as community leaders in our own words can create new conditions.

In particular, we want to speak to the community leader. Why? Because they have learned leadership lessons from playing with Legos, they are tenacious and they know how to be game changers. All of which are vital to being a strong and successful leader.

Passion, creativity and tenacity are attributes of great community leaders, and what brought you to this extraordinary role in the first place. You’re in this role because you have an innate ability to connect with people and build relationships that are meaningful to your brand. Your teams want your input, ideas, and creativity. If you have a great idea that you believe will have an impact on the company’s’ business goals, you should share it.

But before you do, be sure you have thought about it thoroughly, from inception to how you will measure its success, so that when you present your idea you’re able to show that not only are you dreaming up great ideas, but how you will go about launching and moving the needle to support the company’s business goals with your new idea.

These days and ages, being bold and brave is what the world needs – and is attracted to. While not every idea will move the needle, I can promise you that one idea will lead to another brainstorm, individually and together as a team, that will move the needle. So dare to dream big and share your ideas.

Lauren Klein and Jenny Berthiaume

Talent Mobility Summer Checklist

I recently experienced a massive failure in a global talent mobility program. How can this be true you ask when we live in a world where great talent is critical to business success? Because we get comfortable. Which is why I encourage fellow talent professionals to consider adding a review of your talent mobility program to your summer checklist?

Often we put away our winter clothes and pull out summer clothes this time of year. Which is why we absolutely should take the time to pull out all the vendors in our ecosystem to review them as we would our summer wardrobes?

Ask ourselves the difficult questions:

Do they still fit my talent acquisition objectives?

Are they current with the times?

Do they allow me to realize goals?

I know, I know. You are thinking, oh no, I’ve invested countless hours to establish these relationships, these rates and the overwhelming task of re-establishing them sounds daunting. Don’t fear. It may not be necessary to re-establish vendors. In many cases, it may just require re-negotiations or real time adjustments and feedback sessions that are in alignment with your talent management programs.

Talent Mobility Checklist

Review quantitative surveys from past 12-18 months from vendors
Review qualitative data
Check in with current mobility clients and ask them about from past 12-18 months from vendors
Reach out to employees who have left the organization in the past 6 months who had mobility packages and interview them yourself or a trusted delegate
Call your mobility coordinators yourself to assess if they pick up the phone and/or how long they take to respond back to you? their experiences to better understand any areas they have opportunities for process or vendor refinement
Review the approach your vendors are taking with issues and their resolution
Check in with spouses or domestic partners of a cohort of recent mobility clients to gather spousal feedback on the programs
Look at industry data and compare against your programs to assess gaps and/or opportunity areas
Review financials with your vendors for the past few years to bench against industry rates to ensure you are in alignment and/or where you see opportunities
Test out a mobility experience yourself from start to finish to live the entire experience as if you were your own talent

Diversity in Social Business Programs and Authentic Leadership

I’ve seen some great traction over the years to harness the power of new technologies. Every day I learn about countless new software solutions that my clients can add onto their environment. Which is why I’m posting this blog, it is time for us in Social to look beyond the tool. It is time to invest in our people commensurate with our tool development investments. Chief HR Officer, Douglas Reid has advised me that issues in HR have been fundamentally the same throughout his entire career. I thought to myself that cannot be? For we have new generations of talent and tools, right? This just doesn’t compute for me as I know countless consultants who are brilliant in the areas of Diversity and Inclusion, Change Management, Talent Management, Learning, Human Resources and Organizational Design and Social Business.

Yet we continue to see pieces like Coffee VLOG which have amazing storytelling potential come across as ethnocentric because the leaders lack authenticity. I was inspired by the idea; I was inspired by the real people on the video talking to one another. Many of us working in market know about their organizational acumen. Yet when the Vice President enunciated poorly CEMEX and interviewees names, I was disappointed. The Vice President highlighted herself and her degree from Harvard during the piece. I felt we lost focus on the interviewees and their story. To be customer centric, we must have that in our titles and in our thoughts throughout the day. Why not focus entirely on the customer story? I was inspired enough to share it on my social networks and was surprised to see that the Vice Presidents avatar was featured as the #1 thumbnail when posting the url on Facebook? I was left wondering why IBM didn’t recognize CEMEX content in the thumbnail.

Don’t get me wrong – right social storytelling concept. It simply lacked in diversity and inclusive execution and authentic leadership.

Why does this happen? We need to focus more on creating great organizations, as described in the May HBR article by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. We don’t have cross organizational alignment and engagement with our People programs. We still cannot seem to interlock the People programs with the technology solutions in ways that allow us to harness the talented people’s gifts they have within organizations to allow both parties to ‘sing’. Although we may have amazing talent, we often can’t figure out how to harness their potential without courageous conversations, courageous conversations, open leadership models and alignment between marketing and technology organizations.

Change Management, a required work stream in Social Business

Break through results can only be realized in Communities if your social business strategy approach includes this work stream. Often the time and resources needed to do this right are overlooked or perhaps simply nebulous because we have to deliver on today’s results. It is so hard to insert the argument if your company views the effort as another tool rollout. So, just a few thoughts this morning around key activities in the change management work stream:

1. Do engage with HR to create the conditions or the environment for your program or organization to achieve results. Call it culture change or innovation – but do engage with HR.

2. Share key industry research, white papers or blogs with leadership over time so that they can learn from their peers outside of your organization.

3. Do what your mother told you when you were young – LEAD BY EXAMPLE. Requires a lot of effort, but do work across the organization and departments to encourage cross pollination.

4. Document, post, comment and work out loud in an open forum so that anyone in the organization can find your work at their moment of need. Yes, work out loud.

5. Invite, extend, flex and don’t let the trolls get you down.

As leaders of change programs, we must be continuous learners ourselves. What this means is that we should always ask for feedback, modify, pivot and adjust and adapt along the way. We extend invitations for new conversations and possibilities along the way, while making sure we don’t let any turkeys get us down. Most importantly, work across the organization with your approach so that this new social business program encompasses people, process and technology. If you hire vendors, encourage them to partner alongside the strategy, design, build and engagement work stream so that you can create the conditions that will allow you to realize the business objectives outlined as a part of your effort. And yes do consider thinking about Digital Disruption and Leapfrogging as concepts in your approaches.

HAT Trick for Social Business Strategy

I grew up in Michigan where hockey dominated every day conversation. It snowed most of the year and as soon as the ice froze, skates were pulled out. Which is why I have drawn the parallel for scoring in social business strategy with hockey?
Certainly being persistent, repeating you and being resilient are characteristics we understand. But what I believe we must embody in our actions and words are:

Honest conversation. From strategy model development conversations to actual community conversation. We look in the mirror through social every day and we must be honest with ourselves, with our words, with our actions and our approaches.

Authenticity. We approach our strategy development and social business validation process with authenticity with our peers, our clients and our ecosystem with that top of mind. A shout out to many great thinkers in this area, including: Joe Pine, Brene Brown, Marcia Reynolds and Sally Helgesen.

Trust. If we do the H and A well in our work, the trust comes later. But it is paramount to successful dialogue, strategy development and conversation to establish trust. By the way, it isn’t monetized yet although people are trying to do so. Trust to me is something that is hard to achieve but easily lost.
Just thought I would take a few moments out of a busy day to share some secret sauce.

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