CHAPTER 4

Never Give Up

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you experienced poor service from a company you were about to do business with—no acknowledgment, no help, no passion, just a blah presence without much personality? For most of us, that happens so often we’ve grown accustomed to it.

Now imagine someone greeting you with positive energy and enthusiasm—someone who genuinely seems to notice your needs, shows with their actions you are important, and gives you a boost from their vibe. That positive energy is usually the reflection of an amazing person who works for a terrific organization, with a strong service attitude that’s unwilling to give up.

That positive, caring, service-oriented approach is at the heart of LAZ Parking’s company culture. LAZ employees convey through their positive attitude and proactive approach that even if their clients have had a hard day, when nothing has gone right so far, they deserve to be treated with kindness and care. Hospitality goes a long way.

In 1981, LAZ Parking was founded by three childhood friends who had their share of car difficulties—and were tired of people treating cars and the people who drove them like problems, rather than as a source of hope, passion, and possibility.

Now, with hundreds of thousands of parking spaces and more than a dozen offices across the country, the LAZ culture is based on what they call their “Never Ever Give Up” philosophy, what their employees know as the “LAZ Way.” On pace to grow considerably during the next five years, adding three to four new locations per week, there are nonstop challenges, including a shortage of managers to personally connect more than 7,800 workers in 250 cities and nearly 2,000 locations across the United States.

Andi Campell, CPLP, vice president of human resources, joined when the company had no training department, an almost-completely decentralized human resources function, and no consistent strategy for developing managers—a key business imperative given the company’s rapid growth and commitment to promoting from within. People in different offices didn’t have an easy way to share what was working for them so that their colleagues could learn from their experience.

Many employees at LAZ don’t have corporate email accounts, although most have personal cell phones. Many work in relatively solitary environments, such as parking booths, and managers can often be miles from their closest peers.

Campbell knew lengthy courses and modules that make up “traditional” curricula were not going to be the right fit for this organization. She wanted a platform that enabled sharing, collaboration, and real conversations among a distributed workforce—something that would bring people together.

She put into place a social network, the LAZ Nation Online Tribe, where the company’s entire workforce can connect to discuss problems and recognize and share ideas through mobile devices no matter their location. She also launched the LAZ Parking Manager Tribe, a social network for managers, LAZ executives, and those involved in leadership development programs to drive home caring ways to work with one another.

With a single sign-on from the LAZ University Learning Center, the company’s learning management system, employees seamlessly connect into these online tribes. This approach makes it easy to navigate the portal full of mobile resources, including video, which are all part of how employees learn techniques for becoming more effective leaders and growing within the organization.

In the contours of the culture, follow the patterns.
—Karen Stephenson

Her team regularly seeks out podcasts, TED Talks, YouTube videos, and articles that demonstrate ideas and concepts that support the spirit that LAZ is working to create. These resources are complemented by internally created e-learning lessons on topics such as change management, leadership development, and business acumen. They also host monthly virtual, instructor-led classes on actionable topics, most of which are facilitated by company executives and managers.

The LAZ approach to learning goes far beyond the platform, though, as Campbell drives adoption through the use of positive language. She realizes that many of the words used to describe learning in other companies could potentially turn people off. She creates an appetite for more by using words that convey interactivity, such as saying “virtual classes,” rather than “webinars,” which can sound passive and uninteresting. Campbell says, “People have a desire to learn something new. Messages like ‘Check out this article,’ ‘Watch this video,’ or ‘Let’s interact’ create interest and excitement. ‘Watch these modules’ sounded boring and long … and that wouldn’t do.”¹

In the foundational leadership program, for instance, people are asked to search for and post in the Manager Tribe videos or online articles that are relevant to a particular topic. Participants in the track comment on the posts and engage in online discussions about the content. From these moments of talking about what resonated with them, they create a huge amount of coaching and development material, which leads to people finding and posting more relevant content, sharing what they’ve found, describing why they found it helpful, and beginning even more conversations. That can lead an up-and-comer to have a conversation with his manager about something he’d learned through a video a colleague had shared, which leads to more learning.

In two years since the launch of LAZ University, employee engagement has strengthened, manager collaboration has improved, and the company continues to build a pipeline of high-potential employees capable of helping to sustain the company’s growth. Key to that was a set of hard-and-fast rules that asked people to stop thinking of learning like school.

The talent development team at LAZ includes everyone in the organization, not just the people who are officially part of the LAZ University team. By engaging everyone in focusing on employee development, and never giving up on one another, the organization keeps pace with ever-evolving needs and business changes and offers relevant, personalized experiences for a diverse and distributed workforce.

The LAZ Nation Online Tribe has become “a lynchpin of our company culture,” says Campbell. “It’s a method that connects us all to each other, despite geographic and organizational barriers. Employees stay more engaged, and learning proliferates in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Executives can connect directly to front-line employees; front-line employees can share ideas with executives. In fact, our executives are on Tribe all the time. It’s one way that they can see what’s happening around the country. Not to mention, it’s also a lot of fun to use.”

At Times, We All Make Mistakes

As you wade deeper into creating a culture where social learning is the norm, you might make mistakes and want to give up. This demonstrates you’re pushing the limits and finding your boundaries, and that kind of change entails a range of movements both forward and back. The key is to create your own “never, ever give up” strategy and learn from your mistakes, so you can improve as you move ahead.

“Hi. I’m Kevin and I have failed: social mistakes, technology mistakes, human mistakes. At times, I want to give up.” That’s how Kevin Jones, CEO of viaPing, focused on employee engagement, begins his presentations at conferences and with his clients across the United States. He knows we’ve all felt this way, and will continue to, and figures it’s best to get that on the table right away.²

What’s key, though, is to never … ever … give up.

Jones points out, “Not all internal collaborative initiatives are successful. In fact, many fail. Yet no one talks about them. No one talks about how that feels. Why? No one wants to be labeled as the one who led to failure.”

In the end, these experiences are swept under the rug with the hope they will be mercifully forgotten by companies and innocently left off of résumés. But if we were to lift up the carpet and pull out these experiences without defaming company or person, we would find valuable insights from their failures—from the people who didn’t give up. Properly understood, these gems provide priceless clues to help us navigate the terrain of social learning while avoiding a fate similar to that suffered by those we’re learning from.

“Not all internal collaborative initiatives are successful. In fact, many fail. Yet no one talks about them. No one talks about how that feels.”

—Kevin Jones, CEO of viaPing

In this chapter, we have looked under those rugs, pulled some skeletons out of the closet, and looked at all that was allowed to bloom because people didn’t give up. We have found what we believe to be the most common 10 reasons organizations fail or give up when trying to implement internal collaborative or social initiatives. These real-life examples are pulled from many different businesses and industries—yet to honor how far they’ve come we don’t name them.

While listening to others’ problems, learning when and where to find workarounds, can prevent some mistakes and outright failures, you will still face difficulties that are new and unavoidable. Such challenges can create paralyzing fear in some of us.

There’s little progress to be made without looking at what’s not working and finding ways to turn things around. Most errors are not catastrophic. Many are small and problematic in simple ways.

Researcher Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, and whose TED Talk “The Power of Vulnerability” is one of the most popular of all time, has made a career of pointing out it’s when we understand we’re not alone in our vulnerability that progress gets made, people make deep meaningful connections, and there is hope.³

This chapter is designed to serve as a reference to every problem we know of and to provide guidance on what you can do to overcome them when you face any in your work.

The challenge here is to look at failures and realize that one organization’s flaming disaster may be another’s glorious success. We frame failure in the language of discomfort because we’re tired of the rah-rah “all-change-is-good” talk, knowing full well there are times when we feel the pain in our guts. We trust you’ll find there are truly gems of joy in these descriptions, and will recognize them as the opportunities they can be. In this spirit, we offer our List of Don’ts:

Facing impossible odds often forges the best strategy. Win some and learn some.
—Nicole Lazzaro

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Culture

The questions and comments continually came up in meetings: “Why don’t we have this social stuff at our company?” “Is this play or real work?” “We are getting a lot of pressure to do something. So what’s our move?” To figure it out, the company asked one person to look at what he might do.

A few weeks later a presentation was given on what they understood social might do for the company—charts and graphs, facts, figures, and definitions. The recommendation came at the end: Use a free version of enterprise social network software and test the waters. The risk seemed low, and the plan looked solid. Before expending any capital, the company would see if all of this was hype or serious business. The executives agreed.

Within a couple weeks they had an environment up and running, and they were promoting it in the weekly company email. The first few weekly statistical reports were impressive. Hundreds of employees joined right away. Discussions were started. Some interesting insights came out of the conversation.

After the fourth week, though, the buzz died down dramatically. It eventually slowed to a trickle. Although a thousand employees had accounts, only a small handful used the platform each day, and the conversations were not usually work related. The employees chatted about technology, the weekend, and the usual complaints about management. One particularly lively conversation had been about which was better, coffee or tea.

It was unanimous. The company’s little experiment was successful … in showing that social technologies promoted time wasting and were only a fad. Although they didn’t kill the program, no further efforts were made to increase collaboration through social technologies.

Unfortunately, what no one realized was that it wasn’t a success. It was a complete failure. They threw something at the wall, and it didn’t stick. The main reason for their failure? Culture.

Pit an internal project against the culture, and the culture will win every time, hands down. Culture is the steering wheel of the company. Culture is a powerful tide that is difficult, but not impossible, to change. You can come up with the best tool, process, or product that will save millions of dollars, but if it doesn’t fit in with the values of the culture of the organization, there is a good chance it won’t be adopted.

Questions to consider:

• What type of culture does my company have?

• Are there pockets of culture that will embrace social approaches?

• What specifically can we do to help our culture be more open and transparent?

• How can we create an environment (not just technically) that makes it easy for people to embrace working in new ways?

• Because making assumptions is so automatic, how do we remind ourselves to challenge our assumptions?

• What policies or company traditions are holding us back?

Don’t Focus on the Tools

Too many times people begin their social journey by asking, “What tool should we use?” The answer should be, “To do what?” Usually, they don’t have a clear answer. They cite being more collaborative, being social, making sure they are up on the technology. But, social learning is not about technology. Don’t believe anyone who tells you it is.

Social tools are plentiful, making the landscape confusing. The shiny toys have a certain allure that calls to the IT manager, “Buy me!” “Wow!” they think. “Look at all it can do!” Then the natural next question is, “What product should we use?” But this sentence is fundamentally flawed.

Understanding technology comes from interaction through facilitation. Not through surfing and social media.
—Marc Prensky

“We want to learn more socially” is not solved by buying a tool. It can be aided, but the tool does not solve the issue. Although slight in semantics, the difference is huge in application. These organizations only want to see how they can be more social online.

Social technology can be selected when you have the other pieces in place. What business problem are you trying to solve? Remember step one in the implementation path? Revisit it now.

What are your purposes and goals? Who is asking? How are people working and learning now? What isn’t working now, and where do you want to go? Why are you not there now? What’s your culture like? What’s your people strategy?

Once you have the answers in place, how to choose social tools will be so much clearer. Technology will be a side note as you work on the real issues of your business. This isn’t about the tools.

If we forget that “social” and “collaboration” are 90 percent people and 10 percent technology, it’s easy to focus on what we can control, at the cost of what we can’t (and shouldn’t try to), sidestepping those things we need to influence most: people, culture, communication patterns, and traditions.

Social learning is about people working and learning together. Figure out the goals and the people strategy first.

Questions to consider:

• Is our plan focusing on the tool to the exclusion of the people?

• What people strategy do we have in place?

• What business problems are we trying to solve?

• Are the people who are running this people or technology focused?

Don’t Neglect to Get Leadership on Board

There are two major approaches you can use to get employees onboard. The first is to create demand from the front line. Many social-tool vendors use this tactic to their advantage. They allow employees to start an account with their company for free. The hope is that once it gains a following and enough usage, management will have no choice but to purchase an upgraded version. The second approach is introduce from the top.

Dell is a great example of this. Michael Dell, CEO and founder of the company, is an avid social-media tool user. Largely because of his example, the company is at the forefront of using social technologies to engage customers. They have an extensive training program to show their employees how to use the tool to be brand advocates. Once employees go through the needed training, they become certified to use these tools on behalf of Dell. It’s an impressive program.

The best approach, however, is using both directions, from the top and bottom, at the same time. Some executives embrace it, giving the green light to employees and middle management to embrace it as well. Other executives are dismissive, almost antagonistic, toward the tool; out of fear of retribution, employees and middle management largely stay away from using the tools. Still others are in between the two extremes. They neither promote it nor discourage it.

In this scenario, only the brave employees adopt the technology. When you don’t get management on board, you are fighting against the culture set by the executives. The more the executives advocate and use internal collaborative technology, the more it will be embraced and adopted by the employees. There is a high correlation.

21st century leaders are tasked with engineering an ecosystem of hope in the workplace and beyond.
—Salima Nathoo

In a 2012 study from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, 1,709 CEOs and leaders were asked a series of questions about internal and external collaboration.⁴ Just over half stated they were going to increase the use and promotion of internal social tools. What wasn’t asked was how these CEOs and leaders were going to actually get their people to use the tools. Several years ago, the Gartner Group predicted that “through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.”

When implementing social tools, senior leaders may require you do a return on investment analysis, but it won’t convey why your organization should adopt these tools. What will? Stories and personal experiences. Stats don’t move us to action—our emotions do. When we hear stories that resonate and when we have our own experiences, our emotions play a big part in how we will react. Shoot for the heart, not just the mind.

The transparent nature of social media makes it easier to measure what’s going on because it can be observed and tracked. For instance, you can analyze what people are searching for and map what they find. You can analyze not only where people go with their social tools but also how they get there, how long they stay, and what they do when they are there. Although this does not verify the transfer of knowledge or skills, it is a pretty good indication.

Good measures look at functional outcomes rather than simply asking, “Did they learn?” There is little value to the organization if people don’t apply what they take in. The best measures go the next step to connect using new skills and knowledge with how they affect measures such as the bottom line.

One approach to consider is appealing to people’s interest in building a strong reputation. Research by Molly McLure Wasko and Samer Faraj states, “The results indicate that a significant predictor of individual knowledge contribution is the perception that participation enhances one’s professional reputation.” They go on to indicate that “cognitive social capital plays a vital role underlying knowledge contribution.”⁵

Questions to consider:

• Who is not on board that should be?

• For those who are making the financial decisions, how can we help them understand and experience this new way of working?

• What are their apprehensions?

• How should they be involved to set an example for the workforce?

Don’t Expect That Employees Will “Automagically” Engage

“Wow, this is powerful. I want my team to use this,” the director said after being shown the tool’s capabilities. “Great. One of the many things we will need to do is training around how to use the tool,” the learning manager replied.

“What? This is a social thing, right? We don’t need training. They are all on Facebook. Some of them have Twitter accounts. They’ll get how to use it. It’s simple.”

“True, but they will still need training.” “If they need training,” the director said, “it isn’t simple enough. And I don’t want something complicated for my team. But after showing me this, trust me, it’s simple enough.”

We keep trying to employ the new tools and ideas in the same old ways.
—Dion Hinchcliffe

These assumptions prevail because these social tools look just like the social tools we use every day with our family and friends. So if it looks the same, people should get how it works. They understand how to share. They understand how to click the buttons and navigate around. So why aren’t they using it? Once again, it’s because we’ve asked the wrong questions.

We need to ask, “What should they ‘get’?” The user experience (UX)? Sure, but that is secondary. The functionality? Yes, but again, that comes after. After what? After knowing why they should use it, and for what purpose. They may already understand the technical aspects, but they don’t understand how to weave it into the way they work. And it is our job to help them do that. They understand they are using email too much, but they don’t understand how to effectively replace it with something else. This may be the “something else” in many situations.

Remember, you are helping people change habits here, which is incredibly difficult—especially when everyone around you has the same habits. It is easy to transition to Facebook when your family has all gone there to communicate and post pictures and videos. It is much more difficult to change your habits in an organization when few are doing what you want to do, or there may be a fear of retaliation. Give them a purpose; help them find their “why.”

They must have a cause. It can be a simple one and doesn’t need to be a grandiose “change the company” purpose. It could be as simple as keeping others more informed of their project, or cutting back on email within a group. Try to be as specific as you can. Unless you are working toward specific business goals, you will not be successful. When a whole team is behind a purpose, they will support each other in the new habit.

When approaching the workforce from the standpoint of a business consultant, focus on integrating social technologies into their workflow, help them to transform the way they work, and when they see the benefits, it will be hard not to give it a try. This falls under what Kevin Jones calls the Umbrella Principle.

This principle states that when we focus on certain higher order things, the lower order things will take care of themselves. Social is a by-product of the work and the environment, not the product itself. Social is a lower-order principle. But if we focus on the higher order, the collaboration, and improving the way we work and communicate, the social will happen.

Here is an example of how to address a business “why.” An aerospace engineering company had a long-cherished method they used to share their knowledge of rocket engine design and manufacture. Younger engineers would send email requests to their senior counterparts, requesting information on design intent, material properties, or manufacturing techniques. The senior colleague might spend days researching and crafting an answer, which would then be sent back to the requester in an email.

The problem was that access to all this wonderfully useful information was now confined to the few people engaged in the conversation. Within a short while the information and knowledge so thoroughly and carefully created was lost; frequently even to the original person asking the question. Email systems are often purged of old email, people leave the organization and their correspondence is destroyed, or the email titles that were once so useful, no longer provide any useful pointers at all. This is far less likely to happen with an even marginally functional enterprise social system.

Eugene Eric Kim, entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of two social change consultancies, points out that “people seem to get very caught up with getting everyone engaged. If you install a wiki in your organization of 100 people and only five are actively using it, some might see that as a failure. I have never seen a great social tool go from zero to everybody overnight. With large groups, you will always see a power law of participation, where only a small percentage of people are actively contributing. And there will be plenty to learn from that participation.”⁶

Are you expecting a crowd or a community? —Sandy Carter

Success should be measured not by how many people contribute but by a more discerning, finer outcome: developing something broader, deeper, or more innovative than any individual can create alone. Value grows from the ability to handle information and create knowledge that acts alive, continuously morphing over time to represent the current state of what’s known and the status of a network of people’s capability to identify and act on what’s relevant.

Questions to consider:

• How are we approaching collaborative and social initiatives? Is it about getting work done or about being more social?

• Should we even use the word social at all?

• How should we approach this so that employees will understand this isn’t a game?

• What type of in-person, brown bag-type meetings might be helpful?

Don’t Make Social Learning an Extra Thing to Do

You’re asked to create a blog for a sales group. The sales director wants more training for her team. You come up with a model you believe would work. She will post one situation per week on the blog, asking everyone to comment how they would handle the situation. They would then learn from each other’s approaches, ask questions, and get answers. Then she would come in and comment on those approaches, giving pros and cons.

This worked. For week one. After that, participation tapered off very quickly. Not only did the sales team stop commenting, but the director often forgot to publish the initial post. After that, it was all over. It took a while to figure out why it didn’t work. In the end, it came down to one small fact: It was an extra thing to do.

One more task to add to the sales team’s already overloaded schedule. Plus, it was not directly related to selling more product, so it took a back seat. The number one key to implementing any internal social learning initiative is to integrate it into the workflow.

Laurie Buczek at Intel wrote on her blog, “Culture will change as a result of the pervasive use of social tools. Lack of cultural change is not social learning’s biggest failure. The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.”⁷ Not only is her observation spot on, but her example is perfect. (Make sure you read the comments as well.) If you don’t integrate social into the way you work, it won’t become a part of the way you work, and it won’t be used.

Dan Pontefract at TELUS points out, “We’re all busy. The 1 percent of people who are power contributors on social platforms have already built the behavior of being social through the use of collaboration tools into their own workflow and time management plan. But, there are literally millions of employees who can’t figure out how to be social, so perhaps the simple solution is to help them begin their transformation and development by a recommendation to allocate 30 minutes per day—booked in their calendar—to participate with the internal collaboration tools and communities that are at their fingertips. It’s not a mandate, rather a recommended new habit or practice.”

Questions to consider:

• What elements of your plan make this an extra task?

• How can this be integrated into their work?

• What processes or communications are broken or are severely crippled today?

• How can we use messaging to demonstrate this is not going to be an extra task?

Don’t Be Mistrustful of Your People

The LAZ social platforms allow employees to post without receiving administrative approval. This initially raised some concerns with their executives. “What if employees post inappropriate content?” they asked.

As we pointed out earlier, Andi Campbell’s response was simple, “If we don’t trust our employees, we have a much larger issue here.”

As a result, the engagement they’re seeing on the Tribe is far greater than expected. In the Manager Tribe, participation was initially mandated as part of a curriculum; however, it has grown well beyond any required engagement. Since the Manager Tribe is accessible only by those who have been part of LAZ University’s leadership development programs, managers feel safe to truly engage with one another. What follows is a real, genuine exchange of learning. It’s part of what allows the LAZ culture to truly take root, and helps managers connect to tribal knowledge in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

Not everyone must participate, but everyone must believe that if they participate it will be valued.
—Henry Jenkins

The LAZ Nation Tribe has become a big part of their company culture. Employees post pictures, share stories, share learning. The LAZ Nation Tribe allows employees to connect with other members of the LAZ Family in a way they simply wouldn’t be able to otherwise. “If you’re sitting alone in a parking booth, it’s a way that you can still feel connected to other people who are doing similar work,” says Campbell.

“Lack of cultural change is not social learning’s biggest failure. The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.”

—Laurie Buczek

People are social animals and they need and seek out connection with others. With the proliferation of smartphones and other devices that facilitate connection, they will form their own communities with or without organizational support. If you create a space for people to work in, learn from, and engage with, you provide them a viable way to work that doesn’t involve going around the system.

Many organizational leaders we spoke with said their employees became more efficient and easier to monitor (and influence) when there was a private forum for sharing ideas, information, and work tasks. These spaces brought people together, and they began to work more as a unit without any suggestive pushing from management.

Most companies track how many people use the communities and how often and which sub-sites and topics get the most traffic. This allows site managers to make improvements based on real behavior. At the Intercontinental Hotel Group, for example, the Leaders Lounge is constantly fine tuned—based on actual usage—to replace content created by the learning team with content generated by the managers using the site.

In most social systems, all posts are attributed to the person who makes them. They are more discoverable than emails or a bulletin board where rumors or innuendo can circulate forever without attribution. This transparency makes it a lot easier to spot people who are posting things they shouldn’t and address their comments or inappropriate behavior quickly.

Perhaps more important, contributors can actually build a reputation on the site. This becomes an incentive for some to adopt the tools, actively participate, and publish high-quality content, knowing they may gain the attention of leaders and others working in complementary roles throughout the organization.

Stories can affect change. —Jeff Gomez

It was important at LAZ to also trust people as learners. If you create all learning content to first tell people what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them, you likely lost them after the first telling. Modern media tools are faster and more to the point.

Step back from traditional instructional design rules to create fast and captivating lessons that will be remembered because they can be put into use. Try to mirror how people learn in real life now. Ask how would people learn this in real life and mirror that, because they already know how to work in that way.

Social media is generally self-policing. If someone posts something inappropriate, the next person to see it has something to say about it. Sharing is successful in part because of employee feedback and because so many other people will be watching. Trusting your people also means being open to whatever feedback they have to offer, whether it’s good or bad. As Trisha Liu, former enterprise community manager at HP ArcSite points out, “Negative feedback is a gift. Don’t put a muzzle on the gift horse.”⁸

Organizations often want to offer their employees a community or social media toolset but don’t want the conversations to wander off specific business themes. As social creatures, people thrive on meaningful connections with other people. Although most conversations should have a professional focus, connections across topics build relationships and trust sometimes more effectively than sticking solely to job-related areas.

Jamie Pappas from Akamai shares, “In my experience, the social conversations serve as excellent ice breakers and provide a way for people to connect on a topic that is not intimidating. Sharing ideas such as restaurant recommendations, or allowing employees to create book clubs, motorcycle clubs, and all sorts of other affinity groups allows people to begin their relationship with other colleagues sharing something that doesn’t require expertise, just a common passion. It facilitates their ability to learn about other perspectives and talents across the organization, and it gives them common ground from which to build business relationships.”

Although some organizations formally ban these tools, doing so leaves them out of an important loop encompassing customers, partner networks, and even families.

Time spent in online communities needs to be managed, but the same could be said about time on the telephone, using email, or in meetings. The challenge may be more about how to address some people’s compulsion to constantly look busy rather than get their work done.

Although many enterprises today constrain employee access to social media on the Internet at work, there are few ways to block all social media use by employees, unless they are forbidden from using their personal smartphones entirely. Foster instead good practices and educated decision making for a longer-term solution.

The other side of the coin, however, just might be trusting a little too much. “Let’s ask everybody what they think.” That phrase is probably said somewhere in the world every second. Oftentimes, the people asking get perspective they wouldn’t have heard without asking. But organizations can also easily fall into the trap of only hearing from the same people, not getting fresh perspectives, and believing that’s good enough.

There are some added and unexpected powers of groups that aren’t always used, though, and that should be factored in as well.

A group can help keep its members on track through constant reinforcement of good practices, building and communicating guidelines, removing inappropriate material, and having continual social dialogue about the right balance. On rare occasions, organizations need to take action, but those are few and far between and usually, in the end, reflect more positively than negatively because they demonstrate the power of peers managing one another.

Questions to consider:

• How trusting is your culture?

• If people aren’t trusted is it because they aren’t trustworthy or for some reason?

• Which policies and practices inhibit people wanting to work in trustworthy ways?

Don’t Structure Information Flows to Model Your Org Chart

“This is going to change my organization? I didn’t sign up for that!” The business unit manager who was enthusiastic about the social initiative is changing his tune.

It’s not just that change can be hard; people taking control of their work lives by reaching around bureaucratic policies themselves can be scary to those who actually believe hierarchy charts represent how organizations function and whose perceived power is dependent on hierarchy. For many, the way things have always been has served them well. Why would they wish to see it change?

When you build your systems and practices to mirror your hierarchy, as if that’s truly how information flows in your organization today, you miss the opportunity for people to make connections and learn from others they weren’t learning from before. If, for instance, you provide social venues restricted to people at a certain level of the organization, allowing communities and groups to be started only by senior leaders, or create tools only for people on the front line with no channels of interchange from people at various levels, you are restricting the natural flow of information and knowledge that social technologies are designed to encourage and facilitate.

Joe Sullivan, an extreme problem solver in the corporate scientific community, finds that organizations lull themselves into a false sense of safety with their hierarchies, rather than recognize the danger of discouraging information flow, keeping data out of the minds of people who need it.⁹ When information only flows in one direction, it can easily become diluted or ambiguous, filtered and repackaged or, in the worst case—much like the inevitable errors introduced in a childhood game of telephone—completely incorrect. It can be difficult to meet the fast-changing needs of the marketplace if you are hierarchically challenged because it takes precious time for critical information to move up and down the chain of command (if it’s even possible). Lateral relations are needed to develop relevant relationships or access vital information. Many of the best ideas come through serendipitous interactions.¹⁰

Social tools present an opportunity to replace old, time-consuming processes with faster ones. You might believe you are too busy to learn a new tool or to deposit information in more than one place, but replacing your current processes with new, more efficient ones is not adding more duties.

When working in a collaborative system, people are encouraged to work with the broadest audience possible, which runs counter to many organizations’ prevailing culture of specialization and the inevitable restrictions implied by need to know.

Without collaborative alternatives, people frequently duplicate work because information is lost in shared drives and old emails. It can be eye-opening to participate in a virtual community and realize you’re not the only ones doing particular work or who have the information and insights others need.

The best way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the supply side.
—Jay Cross

In the CIA’s Wikipedia-like Intellipedia, participants can create links among environments, creating breadcrumbs, leading from where you came to where you’re going. The network can then control access. If people have access, they will be able to follow the link. If they don’t, they at least know that more information exists, and they can begin following the breadcrumbs, seeking access if necessary and their need to know can be established.

Work to gain both grassroots and top-down sponsorship. Begin at whatever level works for your organization’s culture. Some organizations respond best when people on the front line participate first. Others only get involved when they see senior leaders contributing. If you have early conversations with people from both groups, as well as those in the middle, you’re more likely to garner the attention and participation of those who are curious, yet a little timid about jumping in.

Questions to consider:

• How hierarchical is your organization? Are people afraid to reach across lines on the organization chart?

• Where in the organization do people naturally work together across silos? Are there sports teams or a shared cafeteria? Are there challenges for people from various divisions to contribute to?

• What might you do in your online space to bring people together who wouldn’t know one another otherwise? How can you do of that?

Don’t Choose Just Any Tool

While this effort to implement social learning might not be all about the tools, it’s still important to consider the tools that will be used. Too often we try to jump in with a tool first. Resist that temptation. But when it is time to choose a tool, it is a very important decision, one not to be taken lightly. Although social is not about the tool, the tool is a heavy component and careful scrutiny of its capabilities and workings should not be discounted.

For example, some of the features most often overlooked by a novice when choosing a tool are the number of clicks it takes to get information, the flow in which that happens, and the ways users are notified of new or changed content.

Many attributes have a hidden importance and, until you understand the social element, you very well may not uncover those needed features. So what to do? Make sure the person who evaluates potential tools has experience in this. (There are enough people out there, finding someone should not be a problem anymore.) Listen to them and weigh their advice. And then know this: No tool or set of tools will give you everything you need and want.

Companies are constantly looking to cut corners. When we choose cheap approaches to social tools, we might look for the cheapest, or even free, software. Maybe we don’t put the technical resources behind it to make sure it runs well, or we fail to hire someone who knows how to help a company adopt it, hoping the “build it and they will come” strategy might work. If you decide to jump into social learning, do it right. Hire good people. Buy the right software. Put it on the right hardware. Give the team the time and resources they require. You don’t have to be extravagant, but put in the commitment that will lead to success.

There is a tendency to go with the cheaper solution. Yet often that solution does not have what is needed. Although being social is not about the technology, the wrong technology will cripple any initiative.

There are gives and takes, many of which won’t be discovered until you have purchased and implemented the tool in production. Just go with it and enjoy the journey! The tool should make your job easier. No tool is perfect, and you will never get 100 percent of what you think you need. At the same time, don’t settle for just getting by. Make sure the tool works for you—not you for the tool.

Questions to consider:

• Will the tool we have chosen be able to give us 90 percent of what we need?

• As we look to contain costs, are we sacrificing needed functionality for cost savings?

• After this is launched, are we giving enough resources to build this initiative or only maintain?

• In what ways might we be trying to cut corners and can we justify those?

Don’t Aim for Perfection

At EMC, work-in-progress content was viewed as more valuable than finished content because it showed how the organization had arrived at where it was—often a key element that employees, customers, partners, prospects, and even the media are keenly interested in.

There is a spectrum of knowledge that goes from the most nascent, early stages of information up to polished, presentable, deliverable content—in the form of reports, presentations, web pages, and more. If your organization relies on the sale or distribution of products that capture a situation on a certain date, consider the content created in a living tool such as a wiki as complementary rather than competing.

“Our works in progress also showed stakeholders that there was room for improvement and room for commentary, and, in fact, both were welcomed,” says Jamie Pappas, who worked at EMC prior to joining Akamai. “This exposure makes the organization more vulnerable, yet also seem more human because not everything that comes out is polished and professional. It provides insight into the organization that might not have otherwise been gleaned and, in turn, offers stakeholders more reason to trust the organization because it has shown how it works.”

Collaborative spaces are where people in your organization can synthesize issues, ideas, arguments, and actions into coherent, meaningful messages and learn from one another as they produce a product for a customer at a particular moment. These spaces become a venue for enhancing the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of the product.

Questions to consider:

• What are the advantages of working out loud, showing work in progress, and bringing people into the conversation before our ideas are fully baked?

• Who are the people already working in this way?

• How can you amplify their practices so others can learn from them?

Don’t Be Too Timid

The aerospace industry is widely known for being cautious, conservative, and risk averse. Having joined the Space Shuttle Main Engine program shortly after the Challenger disaster, Rick Ladd was well aware of the reasons behind the caution. Regardless, he could see there was room for improvement in how information and knowledge were created and shared. He also knew that NASA and the company he worked for, Rocketdyne, had engaged in many attempts to codify and preserve their hard-won knowledge of rocket engines and the technologies that went into successful launches.

We need a “commons” where people who feel part of community can discuss and argue vexed issues in serious ways.
—Cathy Davidson

As the lead for the Space Shuttle Main Engine team’s knowledge management efforts, he’d heard all the arguments against what he was doing, which early on wasn’t thought of as social learning. There was a well-worn saying offered as proof it was a waste of effort: “Every time we design a new engine, we have to blow it up at least once.”

While it was true that rocket engine programs were long lived and, frequently, by the end of an engine’s service life the people who had worked on its early design and seen its failures were frequently retired or had moved on, he was convinced there was a way to ensure that knowledge was passed down to the next generation of rocket scientists, engineers, mechanics, and everyone else responsible for those engines.

Shortly after the installation of a tool originally thought of as a knowledge management system—an expertise locator—Ladd realized they had actually brought in a social learning tool. The problem became, then, how to get people to use it the way it was intended. Although the company from which they purchased the tool had created a method for helping people complete their profiles, he found it was still difficult to get the engineers and scientists to pay much attention to it.

Although neither an engineer, nor a scientist by training, Ladd knew this was the right thing to do. Despite numerous objections, ranging from the fear that a janitor might hold himself out as a physicist, or that someone would unwittingly share sensitive information, he consistently pointed out the tool’s superior features and continuously demonstrated to company executives how the system’s benefits far outweighed the negatives some were so eager to point out. By sticking to his guns, Ladd was able to see the tool enjoy acceptance and growth.

Such is the job of the person who leads social initiatives. She or he must lead people into unfamiliar territory, frequently against their wishes. The challenge is to help people become comfortable when they’re being asked to do something they resist.

Some people won’t do the right thing because they fear personal backlash. Trust, openness, and transparency are bedrock ideals of social learning—yet too many company cultures avoid them. For organizations to enter into the next phase of economics and be successful, this must change.

We cannot expect to experience progress without change. What we need are those who will be bold; who are willing to take risks. Will there be times when they get slapped down? You bet. Times when the consequences will be unfair? Without a doubt. Times when they say what everyone else wanted to say, yet no one will back them up? Count on it. Stand strong. Be bold.

Questions to consider:

• Who are we scared to approach?

• What issues have been glossed over but should rather have been brought up?

• Who can we count on to be bold?

• Will they, at the same time, have the necessary tact and will they refrain from being overbearing? But if not you, who?

Don’t Allow Failures to Define You and Your Work

We hope that you have learned from these 10 examples of how others have strayed from their path so you won’t repeat the same mistakes. Never ever give up. With all this talk of failure, you may be apprehensive as you start out on your social learning journey. If so, good for you! You might not have a large, crashing failure, but you will fail in smaller ways. This is part of being social. There is not one right way to do this; if there was, we would all be doing it. Because every business culture is different, because each project has different needs, how we engage employees with collaborative technologies can be very different.

The best way to fail at social learning is to learn from it, and to allow others to learn from you. Failure will happen. Don’t be afraid to show that you have failed. By showing your vulnerability, you also show your strength. At the same time, as others fail, cheer them on. Help them learn, learn from them, and do better next time.

One of the largest roadblocks to getting started on any new initiative is having the courage to face those who think what you’re doing is dangerous or dumb—or who spend all their time picking at your failures. Maybe they have heard a story of someone doing something that scares them. Perhaps it’s the unknown itself. That may be defining them, but it doesn’t need to define you.

Now that you have learned, go and do your best. If it works, do it again and make it better. If it fails, don’t do it, or do it differently. Set the expectation that you will experience failure. Then, when (not if) you do, you won’t have to try to cover it up with obscure statistics. You can change on the fly and do better next time. The extent to which you fear failure is often the extent to which you inadvertently fear success. Learn from failure—even embrace it. Make it a strength instead of a weakness. By doing so, you will gain more trust from those you work with and who work around you. This leads to more chances to succeed. Study the failures of others, not to condemn, but to learn and grow.

Social learning is inherently innovative. The more innovation an initiative demands, the more tolerant of failure we will need to be. It comes with the territory. So our success depends not upon whether we only do things right, but rather how we handle failure when it happens.

Questions to consider:

• When failure happens, how will you deal with it and what attitude will you have?

• How can you help others to have a more iterative mindset?

• What’s required for you to openly have a conversation about a project’s faults?

• What steps can you take yourself to ask a question of anyone, showing you don’t know all the answers (even when maybe you think you ought to)?

• How can you create an environment where people feel safe to bring up topics without fear of retribution?

• In your organization, what could be done so that anyone can point out a mistake another has made (with tact and in private), even if that person has more seniority?

• What mechanisms can you introduce to alert you to roadblocks, even if it might mean political backlash?

• How might you lead the way so that people can say what needs to be said, not only what others want to hear?