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Innovation. Ownership. Collaboration.

November 21, 2013 by Rosemary Leave a Comment

By Sherrie Rohde

It seems that lately the words innovation, ownership and collaboration are cycling through my daily thought process and conversations at a rate that I can barely keep up with.

Innovation

Innovation is our starting place. With social media we’ve created an outlet for emphasizing every disaster, whether it’s a true world catastrophe or lapse in judgment. Instead of looking at the world with this emphasis of pain and failure, let’s look at it through the lens of “How can we make this a better place?” I’m not saying those problems aren’t real, but it’s time we step up and take ownership to be part of the solution.

Ownership

It’s a bit difficult to separate innovation and ownership, but taking innovation to action requires owning the problem and the idea with a commitment to work towards a solution.

The world would look drastically different if we spent more time identifying a problem to own, rather than fighting for more space, more time, or more money in our own little part of the world.
—Lara Galinsky, Harvard Business Review

When we have a sense of ownership, we take pride in that thing we have owned, whether it be an idea or a project or a community. I recently made the decision to identify what I’m passionate about and to learn to say no to projects that didn’t fall under that umbrella. Not only did it make life far less stressful, but it also made it easy to focus on those problems I did choose to own.

Collaboration

There comes a point where we realize that despite our aspiration for innovation and ownership of the problem, we can’t do it by ourselves. And why should we? When we connect with the right people, those whose goals are aligned with ours, our force is stronger and our reach is further.

Let’s work together to make a difference.

Identify a problem to innovate. Take ownership. Collaborate for impact.

Solve big problems.

Author’s Bio: Sherrie Rohde writes about community management at mycmgr.com. She is passionate about community innovation in the tech space with an emphasis on user experience and e-commerce. Sherrie loves learning and is energized by helping others succeed. Recently she’s collaborated with Jennifer Shaw to solve the big problem of tech education for rural women in America through bellaminds.com. You can connect with her on Twitter as @sherrierohde or Google+.

Filed Under: Community, Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, collaboration, innovation, inspiration

Devil’s Advocate or Guardian Angel?

March 15, 2013 by Rosemary Leave a Comment

By Lindsay Bell

Why are people afraid of being challenged? I’m not talking about the “throw down the gauntlet”, back alley type of challenge, which of course would be unsettling.

I’m talking about healthy debate – defending your ideas, and being asked to think otherwise about a certain subject or path of action. Sure, I’m making a sweeping generalization, as there are loads of people who rise to a spirited exchange of ideas, but in my experience, there seem to be many these days who view it as a negative.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE OR GUARDIAN ANGEL?

Being a proud devil’s advocate myself, when I stumbled upon an old post by Liz recently, where she dissects devil’s advocates and guardian angels in the workplace, it caught my eye.

Here’s what she had to say about them both:

The position of devil’s advocate is inherently negative. The role is to find holes in the proposed idea. Arguing for the sake of arguing easily can degrade into arguing for inconsequential details or arguing to show how clever the person presenting the argument can be.

The position of guardian angel is inherently positive. The role is to find and fill holes in the proposed idea. Arguing for the possibility of what might work, while checking for risk, leads to dialogue that builds and moulds ideas into useful realities.

FACING THE CHALLENGE

Religious imagery aside, I respectfully disagree.

If the devil’s advocate is looking for holes, it’s to stick a big ol’ red flag beside them so you don’t fall in! They are brainstorming, and looking to better an idea or proposed path. They are thinking of the company’s bottom line, and are trying to avoid the cost of cleaning up after something has gone wrong.

When I’m playing devil’s advocate, I always let people know: “Just playing devil’s advocate here…” – and the reason I do is to NOT insult whoever’s idea it is that I’m challenging. It’s my way of saying “Hey, I’m not asking this to be a jerk, I respect you, but let’s look at it from the other side. I don’t find it ‘inherently negative’. And I certainly don’t “argue for the sake of arguing”.

Granted, my career for the most part has been in journalism/television production. Trust me. You don’t even know what being challenged means until you’ve had your story/idea/interview flayed from top to bottom by a TV executive! But I look back on those formative years with appreciation.

Being challenged like that – daily – teaches you to think differently, it makes you always question “what else” or “what if”, and it forces you to always look at what you’re producing through the eyes of your audience – your community.

An employee fearful of speaking up or proffering an alternative thought is not a productive employee.

Fear creates a culture of complacency within an organization and its teams, and inevitably leads to miscommunication and needless extra work being done.

And yes, both sides of the spectrum need to take responsibility for opening the lines of communication.

Employees need to buck up, get a backbone, and not fear that their manager will think poorly of them if they bring up something that she/he doesn’t agree with. They also need to be prepared to argue their points, thoughts and ideas.

Management needs to ensure there are safe spaces where anyone can raise issues without consequences.

Let’s stop seeing devil’s advocates – who actually have the confidence, candor, and courage to speak up and challenge – as somehow negative.

They might be a little feistier and more fiery than your other employees, but if given the option, I would choose devil’s advocate over guardian angel any day.

And I sure as heck would want one on my team.

What do you think? Do you see the value in healthy debate and a good challenge, or do you immediately feel it’s a negative? Would you choose a Devil’s Advocate or a Guardian Angel? Would love to hear your comments! 

Author’s Bio: Lindsay Bell is the content director at Chicago-based strategic communications and online marketing firm Arment Dietrich, and works in Toronto. A former TV producer, she’s a strong advocate of three minutes or less of video content. She has a cool kid, a patient husband, two annoying cats, and just welcomed Hank, a Vizsla/Foxhound cross, into her home. 

Filed Under: Business Life, management, SOB Business, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, collaboration, communication, management

Top 10 Business Collaboration Tools

March 11, 2013 by Rosemary 4 Comments

By Joel Parkinson

What would the workplace be, without collaboration? Collaboration is a positive trait because it’s where people work together (even if they belong to different departments or divisions) towards achieving a common goal. Without effective business collaboration, companies would probably end up with a lot of in-fighting among co-workers, and deadlines wouldn’t be met, and a lot of money, resources and time would be lost.

What are the tools used for effective collaboration during these high-tech times? Let’s list the top 10 business collaboration tools.

Skype

Skype has been around offices and manufacturing centers, as well as at home, for quite some time. Most use Skype on a daily basis, for both official work and leisure purposes. Skype has been hailed as a “great” collaboration too because it allows for team brainstorming, and it enables workers to check on their clients quickly, as well as provide time for relaxing chat-sessions, which can add sparkle to remote workers.

Yammer

Yammer is more than just your typical company social network site. Its feeds also provide workers and managers with a constant stream of ideas, articles and more. Yammer also encourages employees to think differently, without worrying about the distractions of the wider Internet. Yammer is a service which is best-known for promoting cross-departmental collaboration.

Projectmanager.com

Projectmanager.com was founded in 2008 by four people who wanted to develop a more innovative toolset for managing projects. Today, projectmanager.com has customers in over 100 countries, and is one of the fastest project management service provides on the Internet.

Google Docs

Google Docs has been around for a long time too, and yet it continues to provide a solid platform for all types of collaboration. It perhaps provides the simplest method for having multiple individuals work on one document, and keep things organized.

Teambox

Teambox is an innovative project management system that allows everyone to piggyback on other ideas, and discuss new project ideas in real time.

Facebook Member Pages

While closed groups on Facebook are nothing new, more office or work-related communities are now shifting towards a platform, where office or work-related requests are posted around the clock, and colleagues give and receive feedback across different time zones, any time, any week or month.

Basecamp

Basecamp is now considered as the world’s number one project management software. It offers to-do lists, Wiki-type web-based text documents, file-sharing, time-tracking and a messaging system. It’s also available in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Danish, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and English versions.

Status.net

Status.net allows users to do micro-blogging, file-sharing and groups via desktop or mobile applications. It also allows people to integrate their tools into their own domain, as well as integrate with other social networks.

GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting offers more than just email or instant messaging. It allows office managers or supervisors and workers to distribute meeting invitations, audio-conference in VoIP, and even dial a toll-free number. It’s a very straightforward web-conferencing tool for small and medium-sized businesses.

Socialcast

Socialcast is a microblogging tool that fully integrates SharePoint, Outlook and others. The collaboration tool also provides a solid analytics suite, as part of its admin tools.

The new business collaboration tools are very helpful when it comes to providing a seamless, real-time and all-day, all-night system for communication, progress tracking, memo or document-sharing and much more.

Author’s Bio: Joel Parkinson is a writer for the web site projectmanager.com, where he has recently been researching online project management. In his spare time, Joel enjoys surfing and running.

Filed Under: Tools Tagged With: bc, chat, collaboration, cooperation, workplace

3 Killer Collaboration Tools

February 21, 2013 by Rosemary 2 Comments

Great collaboration is about sharing, accessibility, and trust. As more and more people are telecommuting and working with remote teams, it can be tricky trying to coordinate tasks and stay connected.

Today’s tip includes three of my favorite remote collaboration tools that I use every single day.

Flow by MetaLabs

Flow app

You know how, when you’re doing something you love, time just slips away unnoticed? They call that the state of flow, and this app is appropriately named. It’s available as a web interface as well as an iPhone app, and it keeps the whole team together.

I get notifications when someone posts to a Flow task, it kills the whole chain-of-emails torture, and everything syncs up nicely. It’s so easy and fast, I have been able to provide input on an urgent Flow task while standing in line at Disneyland.

HipChat by Atlassian

HipChat

When you’re working in the same office, you can yell through the wall when you have quick questions (or if you want to talk about the latest Survivor episode). HipChat gives you the same immediacy, with public and private text chat rooms, notifications, and file sharing. It’s totally cross-platform on mobile, and available as a web client or desktop app.

Picture this scenario…you are on the phone with a client and they ask a question you can’t answer. You pop into HipChat, and get the answer from another member of your team, without skipping a beat. You look like a genius.

Google+ Hangouts

Google+ Hangout

Sometimes text just isn’t enough. If you really want to build strong team relationships, there’s no substitute for face-to-face. Google+ Hangouts are a wonderful solution for remote teams to share project information and — hangout. They are so simple to set up and use that there’s no excuse for not trying it yet. How else are you going to bust that colleague you suspect is working in their pajamas?

How do you collaborate with remote colleagues? Share your favorite tools in the comments.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Filed Under: P2020, teamwork Tagged With: bc, collaborate, collaboration, Productivity, team, telecommute, tools

The Difference Between Wrong and Different

July 16, 2012 by Liz 2 Comments

Learning, Innovation, Collaboration

They Weren’t Wrong

cooltext443809602_strategy

When I first became an editorial manager, it took me a while to realize that if I asked 25 people to revise a paragraph I would get back 25 versions, each version uniquely worded by the unique editor who did the work. I even did a test.

Not one of the edited paragraphs were exactly as I would’ve done it.

They weren’t wrong. They were different.

Difference Between Wrong and Different


BigStock: How do you make a pbj?

Ask 4 people how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and you might be surprised to find that three of them make a pbj quite differently from the way you do. It’s true. People have at least four ways to make something as simple as that.

Even more interesting is that most people have never considered another way to do it.
And when you suggest a different way, you might hear, “That’s just wrong!”
But every way works. Every way brings about a positive outcome — something great to eat.

For the record, I like my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches grilled.

Rules of how we learned tend to tell us that another way — an other way — is wrong.

Check the etymology, wrong comes from words that mean …
“not right, bad, immoral, unjust”
“crooked, twisted, ”
“that which is improper or unjust.”

The sandwich making method that’s not mine results in the desired outcome without being bad, immoral, unjust. It’s not really crooked or twisted in the true sense of the words. So, other methods aren’t really wrong — they are just different from how I do it.

What about the Rules?

I suppose you could argue that a sandwich “rules” dictate bread and filling.
I have trouble with dictates and the dictators who dictate them.
It’s easy to close our minds and our thinking by sticking too tightly to traditional rules.

Every creative person, every jazz musician understands the value of tradition, but also understands when to stretch to innovate or invent something new.


BigStock: How could an
ice-cream sandwich be wrong?

Then would an ice-cream sandwich — cookies with ice-cream between — be wrong?

I don’t mind if you say it is.
But I won’t agree with that premise.
To me, it’s just different.

Wrong needs more than different to be wrong.
Different isn’t wrong.
It’s just not the same.

Learning, Innovation, Collaboration Thrive on Different

In fact, different is where learning, innovation and collaboration begin. Learning, innovation, and collaboration, thrive on different. They wither when held to the binary judgment of right or wrong. When we begin to see different as neither good or bad, we can get to seeing new ideas, trying new ways of doing what we’ve always done, finding new ways that old things fit together to make new things.

What makes us valuable is our differences — the different ways we think and do things. Celebrate, welcome, and explore the differences we bring to the table. Bring your differences gently and with respect, but please bring your differences. We need them.

Different can be irresistible in the way it pushes us to rethink, rebuild, and grow.
Without different, an ice cream sandwich would never have happened.

We’re all the same in the fact that we’re all different. Don’t hide your difference. Different is not the same as wrong. Different is a value of it’s own. Find the thoughts behind different and get the learning, innovation, and collaboration going. Make a sandwich in a new way.

What’s the most innovative sandwich you’ve ever made?

Be different. Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Filed Under: Inside-Out Thinking, management, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, be different, be irresistible, collaboration, innnovation, Learning, LinkedIn, right or wrong, wrong, wrong versus different

Hierarchy of Influence: What Achieves the Results You Need?

February 15, 2011 by Liz 15 Comments

Six Ways to Influence and Their Outcomes

cooltext443794242_influence

When our son was barely five years old, he was a shy child who lived by his own timetable. He had his own ways of doing things. If you wanted his attention, your best bet was to make eye contact and simply explain what you what you had to say.

It was during that year, that his grandparents came to visit us in Austin. Together as a family, we planned several outings to enjoy the city and our favorite restaurants. One evening, the whole group was getting ready to go dinner and our son was still playing — not getting ready. This circumstance stressed out three of four adults in his company. Suddenly one, then two, then all three of them were using loud firm voices to tell a child, half their size, to “Get upstairs to change in to clean clothes, immediately!!”

The child froze like a deer in the headlights.

The mom in me responded with like to like. In firm and loud voice, I said, “Who are you to gang up on a little kid like that? Get away from here!”

The three adults moved into the kitchen and spoke quietly to each other.
I took the little boy by the hand. “I said let’s go upstairs and find what you’ll wear to dinner.”

When we came downstairs ready to go to dinner, I walked into the kitchen and apologized for my outburst. In return I got three calm apologies that also said I was right to intervene on the child’s behalf.

Not every attempt at influence gets the outcome we’re going for.

Which Actions Achieve the Outcomes You Seek?

If we can agree that influence is some word or deed that changes behavior. Then plenty of influence occurred in the story I just related. I suspect that had I been privy to the whole scene in the kitchen I would have found that that single story included examples of confrontation, persuasion, conversion, participation, and collaboration. The only thing missing in this family scene would be true antagonism. Six different approaches to influence which lead to entirely different outcomes.

I’ve been reading about, thinking about, and talking to people about influence for months, because influence and trust are integral understanding to loyalty relationships. Let’s take a look at six of the usual forms of influence and the outcomes that result from them.

  1. Antagonism – provokes thought Your values are everything I believe is wrong with the world. You can’t stomach anything that I stand for. We are not competitors. We are enemies at war. Your words and actions might provoke thoughts and deeds, but what I’m thinking is how wrong you are, how to thwart you, or if I have no power, how to hide my true thoughts and feelings. An order from an enemy can influence a behavior but won’t change my thinking.
  2. Confrontation – causes a reaction You say it’s black. I know it’s white. I respond in some way — I fight back. I run away. I consciously ignore you. My response will probably change based who is more powerful. You might overpower me. I might stop responding, but it’s unlikely that you will actually change my thinking. Confrontation leads people to build a defense, to strength their own arguments.
  3. Persuasion – changes thinking You look at me and think about how what you want might benefit me. Rather than telling me, you show me how easy, fast, or meaningful it is go along with you. You’ve changed my about what you’re doing. I now see your actions from a new point of view.
  4. Conversion – moves to an action Your invitation to action is so convincing and beneficial to my own goals that I do what you ask. You’ve influenced my behavior to meet your goal. You have won my trust and commitment to an action. It’s not certain I’ll stay converted.
  5. Participation – attracts heroes, ideas, and sharing You reach out with conversation. We find that we are intrigued by the same ideas, believe in the same values, and share the same goals. Your investment in the relationship builds my trust and return investment. You invite me to join you in something you’re building. My limited participation raises my investment, gives me a feeling of partial ownership, and moves me to talk about you, your goals, and what we’re doing together.
  6. Collaboration – builds loyalty relationships We develop a working relationship in which you rely on my viewpoint. We share ideas and align our goals to build something together that we can’t build alone. You believe in my value to your project. I believe in the value of what you’re building. You have gained my loyalty and commitment. I feel a partnership that leads me to protect and evangelize the joint venture. I bring my friends to help.
Strauss_Hierarchy_of_Influence
Strauss Hierarchy of Influence

Not every campaign or customer situation will need to move to collaboration. But understanding each level will help us manage expectations allowing us to move naturally and predictably from confrontation to persuasion, so that we don’t expect the loyalty of collaboration from a momentary conversion.

Could be useful when looking to connect with that special valentine too.

How might you use the hierarchy to change the way you manage your business, your brand, your community, and your new business initiatives?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: antagonism, bc, collaboration, confrontation, conversion, influence, influencing outcomes, LinkedIn, loyalty relationships, participation, persuasion, small business

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