Banning social sites at work is for wimps – real managers have conversations with their time wasters about wasting time.

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This year I have had the honour of sitting on the board of trustees for Homeless Link, a membership organisation of groups helping homeless people in the UK. I have rarely come across an organisation with so many smart, nice people working really hard to do something so worthwhile. They have produced a video review of some of the things they have been involved in over the past year which will give you a flavour of the important work they do.

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It is interesting how often in my work with clients our conversations turn to the words we use. Words to describe the business benefits of what we are doing. Words to make using the tools attractive to colleagues. Words to clarify what they expect from vendors and to help see the wood for the trees. We invariably agree that we don’t yet have the right words for any of it!

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I remember so well the feeling of being stuck at work. Having the trappings of status as a line manager in a big organisation but feeling powerless. Being unable to change things. Knowing that the system doesn’t work but feeling that you have no power to improve it. Having to face people who also know that it doesn’t work and who hold you responsible. I see the feeling of frustration in the eyes of so many people I deal with in all sorts of organisations. Some have given up, and some are still fighting, but most have to just go along with things the way they are.

But do they? Are we really so powerless? I used to get very frustrated at many of the changes John Birt made during his time as Director General at the BBC. Like most people I went into victim mode and complained to anyone who would listen about how wrong things were. But I did little to offer alternatives. I didn’t commit to trying to change things. Then I remember one day realising that the only reason that the BBC had ended up the way John Birt thought it should was because he articulated it. He laid out what he wanted and persuaded enough people that it was the right thing to do. He had to start somewhere. He had to express an idea and keep expressing it until it came into being. There was nothing stopping me doing the same thing …

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Bonnie Cheuk responded to my post about hierarchies with a couple of very revealing stories about the challenges and risks of saying what you think in a conventional, hierarchical culture. I cover these challenges in my book from which I have lifted this paragraph:

Maybe your boss is nervous because he understands the potential of social media all too well. Once people learn that they can find each other, share their knowledge and work together the roles of many managers will change if not disappear. This is frightening. However the good managers will make the effort to adapt and will continue to add value in the more networked world we are moving into.  Many of them will be old enough to have children active on the web and may not be comfortable talking to them about it. Or they may get the point of social tools outside work but not see how to map them to the business context. Why not help them? Why not help your boss to understand the benefits for their business and them as individuals of getting to grips with the social network world? There is a real danger that we assume that our boss knows everything. Often they don’t and may be embarrassed about admitting this. Make it easy for them to do so.

I don’t underestimate the challenges in doing this but if you can’t even broach the subject with your boss then your problems go much deeper than social media.

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A tweet yesterday prompted me to remember sage advice from Dave Snowden which I took to heart in my work with social tools at the BBC. “You can’t manage knowledge but you can create a knowledge ecology”. I thought it might be useful to others to list the ten most important things I learned about doing this.

1, Have a variety of tools rather than a single system. Not everyone sees the world the same way or has the same needs so mixing up different tools with different strengths allows people to find one that works for them. Avoid single platforms like the plague.

2. Don’t have a clear idea where you are headed. The more fixed you are in your aspirations for your ecology the less likely you are to achieve them. Be prepared to go where people’s use of the tools takes you and enjoy the ride.

3. Follow the energy. Watch where the energy in the system is and try to copy the factors that generated it. Get others interested in why energy emerges and they will want some of it themselves.

4. Be strategically tactical. You can have an overall strategy of behaving in certain ways depending on how your ecology develops. It is possible to sell this as a strategy to those who need strategies.

5. Keep moving, stay in touch, and head for the high ground. Keep doing things, keep talking about what you are doing and why, and have a rough idea of where the high ground is.

6. Build networks of people who care. Don’t try to manage your ecology by committee but cultivate communication and trust between those who care that it works and have the commitment to do something about it – whoever they are and whatever their role.

7. Be obsessively interested. Notice everything that happens and consider why. Tell great stories about what you are observing.

8. Use the tools to manage the tools. Blog about what is going on with your corporate blogging, ask questions in your forum about security, tweet when something is changing in your ecology and ask people why it is interesting.

9. Laugh when things go wrong. If you are pushing limits and exploring new territory things will occasionally blow up in your face. Having a sense of humour and enjoyment of the absurd will help you stay sane.

10. Unleash Trojan Mice. Don’t do big things or spend loads of money. Set small, nimble things running and see where they head.

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When I first left the BBC and was considering whether to have a fancy corporate sounding name for my business, or to pretend that there was a whole team of people rather than just little old me, I decided to be up front and not pretend. I also chatted to my former boss about whether to adopt the dispassionate, third person tone of much consultancy and he said “Why be like everyone else. Be yourself. That is what people are buying”

Most of my work comes through referrals, speaking gigs or my blog and twitter. As those of you reading this will know I am reasonably forthright and open about what I think in each of those spaces. As a result people who I work with know what they are getting in advance. The advantage of this is that I get to work with those who I consider really, really nice, smart people!

Do your clients, or indeed your boss, know what they are getting up front?

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This may seem like a contradictory post given my continued belief that social tools will revolutionise the workplace but I do get frustrated at a common naivety about what this will take.

There are many aspects of organisational life and the work of managers that is tough, really tough. Grappling with the human condition in hand to hand fighting is the lot of many a middle manager and there are some things that are painful and difficult to do – no matter how much you blog or tweet about them. I have had to face grown men, old enough to be my father, in tears about what their organisation was doing to them. I have had to cope with staff involved in industrial tribunals who stretched the line between them and their employers. These things are scary and managers have to deal with them. This is why they get jumpy about suddenly being expected to open up and blog about everything – it is isn’t going to happen.

At least not in the short term.

This is where the real work is. Getting away from the superficial “new shiny thing” characteristic of much thinking about social media and helping it finds its place in the real world. Finding a way through the tough stuff of making things happen and helping the workplace move out of the industrial era into something a whole lot more sophisticated and productive.

This isn’t going to happen over night but it is bloody exciting!

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I am finally getting around to writing a book. It is going to be called Corporations Don’t Tweet – People Do – possibly with the tag line “50 ideas to make the web work at work”. My hope is that it will be the sort of book that people can read a chunk at a time on a flight, on a train journey or even during a visit to the loo!

Each short chapter will contain an idea to make you think “Aha – so that’s what the point of that is” or “Now I get it why that would make sense for us to do” and to give you the confidence, and some reasons, to help the social web happen in your organisation. You could buy it for yourself or buy copies to put in colleagues’ or managers’ pigeon holes to spread the word and hopefully prompt a shift in the corporate culture.

I have agreed with my publisher, John Wiley & Son, that I can get the book written by mid July in order to hit a target publication date of November so wish me luck! I will keep you posted about when it is available on Amazon etc.

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It has been fascinating watching events unfold in Egypt and of all the quotes this one from The Guardian summed up best, for me, what was remarkable:

“For 18 days we have withstood teargas, rubber bullets, live ammunition, Molotov cocktails, thugs on horseback, the scepticism and fear of our loved ones, and the worst sort of ambivalence from an international community that claims to care about democracy,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a protester with tears in his eyes. “But we held our ground. We did it”

One of the most interesting things about Egypt was what can be achieved by vast numbers of people with no overt leadership or common ideology if they get hacked off enough with the status quo. The arguments as to how much impact the web and Twitter had on events will run and run. For me it is not so much that the tools brought about these changes but that they were happening anyway and we have tools that maybe made them happen a little bit faster and easier.

The issue of control, or rather perceived loss of it, is one that comes up all the time in talking about enterprise use of social tools. It fascinates me that those asking the question feel so apprehensive. What are they so afraid of? Will their employees really run amuck if given access to Facebook at work? Do people only put in productive days’ work because management are keeping them under control? And anyway – do those “in charge” of organisations really have that much control – or do they just have the outward appearance of it?

Control is diffucult to maintain if enough people want things to change – even if you resort to the threat of violence. Authority on other hand can be earned and enhanced through influence. How about trying to increase your influence through the use of social tools rather than banning them? If you are worried about security why not start blogging about why security matters and how to be secure? If you are concerned about time wasting start a forum discussion on productivity and what it looks and feels like?

Mubarak faced an apparently unstoppable desire for change. I believe that many businesses will face the same desire over the next few years. Not caused by social tools but enhanced by them. Maybe Mubarak might have lasted longer if he had had a better social media policy – maybe you will too?

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