Collaborative leadership starts with you !

The flow of 2.0 technologies and employees expectations in organizations, especially the younger generation, converge on Mass Collaboration. Enterprise Social Networks are just the support for this managerial (r) evolution.

Relevant response to many changes and companies transformation challenges (size companies  increase, remote locations, teleworking, team management more transversaly skills globalization, nomadism ...);  collaborative and networks tools  can reinvent digital cooperation and accelerate proximity management that 2.0 experts called  “Collaborative Leadership” ... and that, as practitioner , I try to successfully implement in large organizations.

But with the implementation of those ESN and strong challenges that they generated, like  porosity, instantaneous communication, transversality, transparency ... it is more and more obvious that these collaboration tools are a small part of the solution.

Face of substantive issues it is urgent to transform our managerial cultures and help all managers, team leaders, project managers or executives to understand their new roles and become true leaders of communities. Able to show the way for (re)mobilizing people by giving vision to the goals of the team, facilitating knowledge sharing, being exemplary to develop employee engagement.

In fact only a new dynamic management style, based on the animation, listening, and stimulating collaborative behaviors allow our employees to find new landmarks and become fully commit to the goals that has been defined jointly.

We are in an age of many cultural breaks; It’s time to implement and stimulate ourself the development of new business management mindset, most Collaborative, most Creative, and especially more efficient thanks to the animation of digital Communities. 

Otherwise our firm of the future, more agile, more innovative, more efficient and more social, will struggle to emerge.

I hope I have convinced you that new managerial Cultures and Communities Collaboration are imperative to success. 

If you want to see what the failure to collaborate will looks like, look at some of your competitors :)

If you want to see what the potential for collaborative success looks like, look in the mirror; Collaborative leadership starts with you ! 

Enterprise cultural change beyond Social Collaboration

The way we work is shifting. 

We see that in visible ways and other subtle ways. Even large companies like Atos, CEMEX, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Sanofi or Dassault, 
are strongly committed in Social Collaboration transformation, realizing that it is the best way to stay ahead of the curve. Those with a real competitive advantage intuitively understand innovation and creativity as essential to meeting market demands and crucial in facing our collective sustainability challenges. The future of work as we know it is shifting from an outdated directive approach toward collaborative frameworks that inspire us to engage in new and different ways with our work and with each other.

However, unlike other early adopters who have deployed social collaboration to address specific key business issues, Atos has deeply implemented social collaboration globally in all its operations. They focused first on business transformation addressing the collaborative and management culture.

By moving the organization towards a collaborative environment that is not primarily based on email but on Enterprise Social Network and by promoting collaborative behaviors, Atos is achieving  the following cultural shifts:

From Individuals to Communities

76,000 employees joined blueKiwi, the Atos enterprise social network, collaborating together in 7,500 communities. This strong communities landscape has removed many invisible silos and is making a global organization “closer” and “smaller”.

Also by creating open communities they enabled new transversal cultural collaboration with connected employees able to find the expert, share knowledge, work together and socialize no matter where they are based. Many people are leaving their individualism mindset to adopt the collaborative culture.

Their Zero Email ™ program is engaging all employees with a much more open and collaborative management style and ensuring everyone is well connected to goals and ambitions. It’s essential to be open and transparent, building on trust and respect if you expect to get the full support of your people to your strategy.

From Controlling to Leading: The Collaborative Leadership factor

Over the last few years a lot of effort was spent on perfecting global processes with a Lean approach; reducing costs, restructuring, enlarging offshore capabilities and integrating large acquired organizations with a global top down mindset. 

With the implementation of transversal communities in collaborative tools and new ways of leading teams based on participation, we have enabled a new collaboration mindset with engaged employees. Today experts are taking pride in sharing their expertise. People are starting up their own communities, to share interests and help each other out. Social collaboration is changing the nature of our organization into a new unique and social culture.

For Atos, a collaborative culture requires a new management style and they invested first in change management and support to Top and middle managers: 5,000 Senior staff trained on how to lead in a Zero Email company (LITZEC modules) and  senior executives realized the benefits early by  leading by example in their respective online communities

Enterprise Communities Management had a pioneering role for managers and team leaders. In large communities this helped manage the cultural shift for their landscape and collect business outcomes through their complementary communities.

From Experts to Ambassadors

Another great lesson from this Zero email ™ initiative is to be systematic with the adoption program. Atos has thousands of ambassadors (3,500 in February 2014) and champions training their peers and socializing the tools internally. This is key to driving fast adoption.

Another key was creating communities for experts to answer questions raised by colleagues, customers, and partners instead of using classic workforce management strategies to assign employees to tasks.

By engaging volunteers and strengthening communities with ambassadors, digital networks generate great benefits that we see through success stories. Many communities are now reinforced by voluntary ambassadors and experts. As an example, an open French community “IT & Process” is a great success with adoption of volunteers where engaging contributors really helps the IT department to improve project implementation, documentation or solving incidents. IT Management France improved awareness and understanding of local IT support to all employees by sharing real time information, best practices and tips in their open community.

From Information overload to time for business

Atos recognize that email is a key hurdle for collaborative transformation. And the replacement of email with collaborative technologies has resulted in a profound cultural shift at Atos. The working culture has evolved from one based on hierarchies and command-and-control to a more open environment in which employees and leaders can engage with each other more quickly and easily.

Emails assigning employees to tasks are being replaced by discussions in online communities where managers and employees can communicate with each other, generate new ideas, and share best practices.

Every day Atos sees that collaborative operations contribute to more efficient team work. They measured that 25% of work time previously spent every day on email activities, is now spent on business activities for pilot project communities.

It is also Interesting to see that for some project works they move from traditional resource allocation to open co-creation, from a classic teaming approach to a scalable work flow. In summary from emails to Collaboration.

Key Atos results are: also visible in this infographic here

• Reducing internals email disruption and overload by 60% : from 100 to 40 email per week/per employee
• Multiplying by 20 our collaborative contributions: 2M views were performed during December 2013 with more than 300k contributions posted in a month.
• Certifying more than 220 business processes to be zero email^TM certified

Today teams and communities who have made the change by implementing collaborative habits in addition to our Enterprise Social Network are seeing progressively that their employees’ collaboration has a tremendous value for our customers, projects and services. And many employee testimonies explain their key benefits of their social collaboration journey in term of Innovation, bid and employee support, time saving, networking and communication, knowledge sharing, for greater well-being at work.

In conclusion

Why do you need to achieve these large-scale cultural changes in your business?

• So that your Enterprise Social Network implementation will not fail
• To promote smart methods of collaborative working: promoting good collaborative behaviors and  tools for good business practices
• To accelerate new solutions / offerings: and the opportunities to create new ideas, products, and services with crowd-innovation communities
• To remain competitive and productive: knowledge is your greatest asset; it grows when it is shared
• To meet the employees needs with interest communities and by sharing knowledge and best practices, interest or passions.

And a last lesson learnt from the Zero Email Atos experiences: be patient!

You’re not going to turn into a social business just in few months. They set a long term timetable to get to Social Collaboration objectives and decrease internal email, and it will still take more time before achieving their final goal.

Social Collaboration implementation is a marathon, not a sprint. Its transformation begins in the inside of our organization and gradually grows out to become a real social business ecosystem with employees, partners and customers.

5 Resolutions to becoming a Collaborative Leader in 2014

“Collaborative Leadership” is a very particular type of working together and it’s this essence or practice of "true Collaboration" that should not be confused with other Social trends.
Mc Kinsey Global Institute find that Social technologies, when used within and across enterprises, have the potential to raise productivity of high-skill knowledge workers that are critical to performance and growth in the 21st century by 20 to 25 %. However, realizing such gains will require significant transformations in management practices and organizational behaviors.

Companies that understood this challenge and have implemented collaborative habits in addition to their Enterprise Social Network are seeing progressively that their employees’ collaboration has a tremendous value for their customers. Their employees are able to give the best support experience if they have the information, resources and experience of internal experts. A employee may not always have the reply the customer needs, but they will have access to the knowledge of the entire organization to resolve the problem, issue or win a bid.

Other analysts predicted that "Mass Collaboration" will be a huge step forward for mankind in general. It will shape the workplace in the decades to come... We know the theory and their vision, but for Leaders and Business man; how it’s work?

Why Should You Be a Collaborative Leader?

The key benefit of being a Collaborative leader is that your colleagues will enjoy working together within your team. Also your prospects/customers/stakeholders will seek out your expertise and benefits' behaviors. If you’re not a Collaborative leader in your field, someone else will be, so step in and start becoming one today!

Collaborative leader is a powerful network commodity. Doors that were once closed are now open, people listen you and will thank for sharing your knowledge; in brief your business will grow organically thanks to the following resolutions.

5 Resolutions to becoming a Collaborative leader: 

1- Be a Facilitator.

The first resolution to being a Collaborative Leader is thinking like a facilitator rather than an authority figure. This means Collaborative Leaders don’t tell their team what to do, instead they ask themselves, “How can I bring my team what is necessary to get the job done?” This question implies an open and trusting attitude towards others on the team.

Collaborative Leaders believe in their team’s abilities, value their ideas and allow them to make decisions in order to get the job done.

2- Share your Knowledge.

The Collaborative leader you want to be is one who wants to share knowledge and help people be more successful. Ask yourself if you genuinely care and continuously demonstrate a strong purpose to help others? If not, you need to!

If you believe that your knowledge is valuable to others and you have the passion to share it, then you are on the right path.

3- Inspire others and help peers

It’s important to think about finding the message/post that will resonate in your community/audience—the one that will inspire action and motivation. Make sure that your message is not too constrained by your corporate culture and adversity to risk. 

Concretely; write a post/ blog about the topic you are an expert in and share it. To be a Collaborative leader, you must recognize that what you have to say (i.e., your knowledge and expertise is valued by others)

Also find peers and friends within other Communities in your domain. Repost their Post or tweets, comment on their blogs, do them favors and help you each other’s.

4- Empower, understand and trust your people

Leader who are becoming Collaborative are daily investing to:

• Empower people; by creating new production lines of innovation fueled by the collective knowledge of the workplace and their community.

• Understand people; by leveraging the human face of data based on a fundamentally new source of behavioral and sentimental insights. If you are going to talk about Collaboration, it is important you involve your employees from the start. Listen to their ideas, needs, suggestions and incorporate their feedbacks in your strategy.

• Trust people by deploying new organizational designs and processes which optimize workplace talent and open up agile marketplace engagement. 

• Reward your people collectively; If your organization focuses on rewarding employees for individual contributions as the driver of success, it will be quite hard to encourage employees to share and communicate with each other. There is nothing wrong with rewarding your employees for personal results, but it is equally important to recognize and reward Collaboration and teamwork (eg. Communities KPIs will have more impact than individual monitoring for adoption)

5-Be committed to your Community

As a Community leader, you have to be visible and accessible, to spend time online and offline (informal team meeting), to celebrate business successes or personal event, to appreciate and say thank you and of course by responding promptly.

People are more important than technology. You need to hire people who care about people. If you hire timid people in your teams, it doesn’t matter what you social network strategy is if your company is full of withdrawn or grumpy colleagues !

Also ensure the development of your community members; give them greater autonomy in expressing their genius, creativity, energy. You task is to support and motivate them!

In conclusion to become a Collaborative leader in 2014, you need talents, perseverance, transparency, networking, listening, exemplarity and always taking decision after collaborative discussions.

"It's not about you know anymore, it's about what you share with transparency to your colleagues" Quote from Anthony Bradley (Social Organization book author)

Author note :

“I wish all of you a wonderful and a Collaborative 2014. I hope this new year will bring lots of opportunities to innovate, change, explore and transform together our business life to the Collaborative Leadership”