014 This month’s tip:

People need people time.

The meeting is the fundamental element of the work team: the core event in which the team comes together to share ideas, report progress and otherwise interact as a group.

As noted elsewhere in this issue of Directions, teams can't work effectively without developing the necessary level of trust. And that's something best generated by being sure the team members have the opportunity to present themselves as individuals. So while it may seem like a waste of time, meetings should include space for people to be just people -- to talk about the weather, or their dogs, or their plans for the weekend.

This may seem like a good way to start a meeting, but it's actually better at the end. As a facilitator, you want to start on time, focus the team's attention on the business at hand and generate some energy to keep things moving. But don't be so focused on clearing the action items that people feel personally disenfranchised.

People need people time.

 

October 2004 - Volume 2, Issue 10

Rock and Roll Never Forgets

What can Rock and Roll possibly have to do with Knowledge Management & Communications? That's a pretty good question...

The answer is probably not much. But if you're reading this, you have personally witnessed the power of a good title. This is the third issue of Directions to be published with eZine Director, and this particular article is both an object lesson and an experiment. Now that we can measure our click-through rates (CTR), we're interested in how we might increase them. We'll let you know the results next month, and promise not to tease you in the future.

All of us are communicators to one degree or another, and we probably depend more and more on email as a form of communication. Unfortunately, its effectiveness is eroding, even while it's replacing other modes of contact. Once upon a time, you'd send an email and follow up with a phone call to be sure it got through. Then came the days when you'd snicker about folks who "didn't get the email," since the lameness of the excuse revealed their basic cluelessness. Now, with automated spam filters and junk mail agents and the general flood of electronic correspondence, we're returning to the days when the mail doesn’t always get through.

A good subject line can help your message get read. Just be careful about using words or phrases that will drop you in the spam bin.

Virtual Teams, Real Challanges

These days, almost every team is virtual to some degree (an observation we made in The Well Tempered Meeting, in the March 2004 issue of Directions). That means people have to find ways to work well together with minimal face time, overcoming challenges that are interpersonal, logistical and technical in nature.

Most of the activity seems to be on the technical front, and there are lots of things worth trying. Instant Messaging offers a more immediate and persistent connection than the telephone, while webcasting gives you a way to present that picture that might be worth a thousand words. Web-based collaboration tools can help reach across time zones, with an asynchronous link that at least theoretically pushes back against the tyranny of distance. Unfortunately, the technology is the easy part.

In research sponsored by the Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC), M. Lynne Markus examined the available technologies for global collaboration, and explored the problems people had in making them work. She looked at 31 teams from 27 companies, with a mix of product and service focus, and found that technology did improve the quality of collaboration. Most of the teams were using more than one tool to stay in synch.

When asked to rank the problem areas, her survey group produced a kind of layered result. Two interpersonal issues came at the bottom of the list -- language and culture were considered the least problematic. Infrastructure issues were next, with problems of general network connectivity. At the top of the list were problems with time zones and time management, as well as coping with the multiplicity of tools required. But the biggest problem was interpersonal: Trust was cited as the number one obstacle to virtual collaboration.

Building a virtual team is perhaps not so different from building a more traditional one. If the team members can establish a high level of trust, they can sort out the rest.

The implication for team leaders is that while it's important to make the most of the technology, it's critically important to recognize that technology is not the answer. Leaders must also be alert to areas where the technology might actually undermine a team's ability to develop the trust that will make it truly effective.

Effective, or Simply Busy

We've previously recommended Gerry McGovern's newsletter as one we find worth reading, and he ran a commentary on this topic in late September. He observed that many people (including himself) like to tell you how busy they are, even though this word reflects a view that has more to do with manual labor than knowledge work. All it really means is that you're doing a lot of stuff. You can be busy whether you're working well or badly, whether you're doing the right stuff or the wrong stuff.

Being busy is also a common excuse for not doing things you should be doing, like learning from a mistake or planning for a better outcome. Being proud of the number of hours worked last week is perhaps missing the point. McGovern's advice is stop using the word busy, and start thinking in terms of effectiveness. Don't think about how many hours you worked, but about how much you actually accomplished.

Wiki-What-E-Ya?

Speaking of virtual teams, one of the most interesting artifacts you'll find on the web is the Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia built entirely from user contributions. It's being developed collaboratively, under the management of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, and is named for the underlying software:  "Wiki" is a generic moniker for software that lets users publish web content which can then be edited by others. The word itself is Hawaiian, and is defined (by the Wikipedia) as "super fast."

If you're used to the ideas of content management and feel most comfortable in a well-controlled environment, the Wikipedia requires some suspension of disbelief. In fact, you might think it's absolutely nuts. Any visitor can edit any page (except a few that are protected), and all comers are encouraged to do so. Wikipedia visitors correct typos and syntax, add additional hyperlinks, and pretty much do what they like. There's an acknowledged danger of vandalism, and the potential that the site could be taken over by cranks of many colors. In fact, neither has been a serious problem.

So you may have to step back and revisit your assumptions. The Wikipedia represents the output of thousands of volunteers, most of whom have never met, working away to build a written compendium of human knowledge. There are no paid employees. There is no editor in chief. In late September, the Wikipedia reached the one million article mark, with content in 100 languages. A very hopeful phenomena, all things considered.

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