by Charles Plant | Sep 24, 2013 | Leadership Development
Dear Social Media
I’ve been meaning to ask you a few questions about networking. Thing is, I’m a bit confused about social media as a way to network.
It’s like I’ve entered a big room where I know a few people and now I have to meet the rest.
This big huge room seems to be mostly full of people who are talking at me, not with me. Can you imagine walking into this big room and finding that:
- Lots of people want to tell you stories about their cats.
- Others are trying to impress you about what they had read recently.
- Some are trying to drag you outside to sell you something.
- Many are just sitting there watching everyone else.
Come to think of it, you, my dear Social Media are coming to resemble a high school dance with the show offs, jocks, socialites, dweebs, nerds and wallflowers all playing their prescribed roles.
With all this noise going on in the dance hall, how do you find someone new with whom you want to have conversation? How do you network in a world where everyone’s talking and few are listening?
Best regards
Charles
by Charles Plant | Sep 23, 2013 | Leadership Development
I had lunch with an old friend on Friday and I realized this morning that getting together for lunch qualified as networking. I hate networking but really enjoyed lunch. What’s up with that?
Until today I thought of networking as attending events and wandering around talking to people but what I realized is that I’ve been thinking of it all wrong.
I hadn’t realized that having lunch with old friends and spring-boarding from there to meet new friends is actually more what it is all about.
This has forced me to re-examine the whole nature of networking. What is the purpose of networking? Is social networking really networking? What’s the best way of doing it? Are you always networking?
One thing at a time. Perhaps first I better figure out the purpose of networking. I trolled a few sites to figure out what other people were saying. For some reason much of what I read came down to using networks to find a job or find a customer. That seems rather crass doesn’t it?
I would prefer to think of it as building relationships and learning. Over the past two years I’ve learned an incredible amount from the people with whom I’ve networked. Along the way, I’ve met new people, some of whom I’ve done business with.
In Seth Godin parlance, I’ve been finding my tribe. Maybe if I see networking in this new way, as a way of building relationships, I won’t hate it quite as much.
by Charles Plant | Sep 20, 2013 | Leadership Development
I’m back fretting about this issue of leadership again given some of the research that we’ve done recently. You might have noticed from the most recent research that lots of people pick ‘Management’ as the thing they like least about their job.
At the same time, less than 1% say that ‘Management’ is what they like most. Maybe leadership is like politics. We’re rarely inspired by good leaders but easily fed up with incompetent ones.
If political leadership is OK, then people put up with it and it’s hard for the opposing party to beat them in an election. The incumbent doesn’t have to be great, just OK. On the other hand, if the incumbent is bad, they can easily be beaten.
This gives rise to the adage, elections are lost, they’re not won.
Same thing with products or services you buy. You stick with them if they’re OK and it’s really hard to unseat a supplier with a ‘Great’ competitive product. But you will switch if you start to have problems.
Maybe it’s the same for leaders. You don’t have to be great to get what you want done, you just can’t suck. People disengage from lousy leaders but there isn’t much engagement difference between an OK leader and a great leader.
Should the purpose of all leadership training then be just to make sure leaders don’t suck at it? That’s a much simpler challenge than trying to turn out great leaders.
Perhaps all we really need is leaders that don’t suck.
by Charles Plant | Sep 17, 2013 | Leadership Development, Research
One of the responses to our recent survey that surprised me was how many people mentioned ‘flexibility’ as one of the things they liked about where they work. It was only 12 percent of respondents but when paired with ‘location’ represented a total of 20%.
‘Flexibility’ isn’t normally thought of as a motivator and may be difficult to define. What makes this intriguing is that flexibility came back in two recent company surveys I completed as something that employees wanted to see more of from their employer.
I suspect that the move away from the assembly line towards a knowledge economy has made employees question why they need to be at work exactly at nine and until five, and why they need to wear certain clothes at work. It’s made them question why they can’t work at home now and then, and why they can’t wear more casual attire.
We’re making the shift to a knowledge economy but are slow to lose the rigid trappings of an industrial economy and it is showing in employee attitudes.
If this is the flexibility that employees like and desire then it becomes very simple to implement in order to keep people longer or make them happier at work. After all, there is no assembly line that requires strict attendance or a uniform. Without it, what an employer should really care about is results.
It makes one question what employees are being paid to do. If they are paid just to show up, that’s all they’ll do. If they are paid to produce results and their employer can be a little flexible, then maybe work will produce better results.
by Charles Plant | Sep 16, 2013 | Leadership Development, Research
For this month’s research, we wanted to find out what things people like and dislike about work so we asked 500 people what they thought about their jobs. And the results are surprising.
Managers and employees like pretty much the same things. This means the two groups have pretty much the same motivators. The list of the three things they like most are as follows:
- Type of work 28%
- Co-workers 22%
- Flexibility/Location 20%
In terms of what they don’t like, there are substantial differences between the two groups though. Managers are much more inclined to dislike the workload than employees are. Employees on the other hand, are much more inclined to dislike management. In total, their top three dislikes are:
- Workload 19%
- Management 17%
- Compensation 16%
You can get more details from the study here.
