Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #15: What You See Depends on Where You Are
We live in an Information Age and an Information-Based Economy. Many, if not most of us reading this blog, are considered Knowledge Workers. A Knowledge Worker is a worker whose main capital is knowledge and whose primary task is to share and disseminate information and wisdom to peers, co-workers, and customers.
A May 2016 Wall Street Journal article entitled The Rise of Knowledge Workers is Accelerating Despite the Threat of Automation and written by Josh Zumbrun, says that:
“As recently as the mid-1980s, you could categorize American workers into roughly three equal-sized groups of about 30 million people each. About 31 million people had non-routine cognitive jobs, what is often called “knowledge work,” consisting of varied intellectual tasks such as professional, managerial or technical occupations…”
In the article, Mr. Zumbrun goes on to explain, that over the past three decades, almost all job growth in the US has come from non-routine, knowledge work. The inference of such a statement is that information sharing is vital to our overall economic growth and future. I believe it is.
If information sharing is so vital to our future, then I also believe that Information Equity is equally important to our professional and leadership development and growth. By Information Equity, I mean that the way we, as Leaders, gain access to and shape and distribute information in our operating environments, also defines and develops our leadership capability and leadership strength.
Strong Point’s Leadership Methodology is inclusive by nature and promotes a servant-based, participatory, show-by-example and collaborative approach to building and executing leadership capability. In Strong Point’s work, however, it’s often found that individuals and teams horde, hide and hinder information as means to exclude, weaken or dismiss the contributions of a wide variety of perceived competitive stakeholders. Individuals and teams promote this information protectionism, so they can gain a critical or preferential advantage to executive sponsorship, support, and resources, which they believe to be in short supply. The win for them is experienced as information black-out by the other, excluded stakeholders.
Information Equity is essential to strong leadership, and there are two significant components to understanding Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #15: What You See Depends on Where You Are. The two components of Information Equity are Perspective and Inclusion.
Information Perspective – Using the Escalator Metaphor
When Strong Point colleagues are explaining or exploring what Information Perspective means to a Strong Point or Customer Solution Team, the Escalator Metaphor is used to show how information shared, is tagged with a “point-in-time” context. We, as leaders and professionals, often envision and “see” another person in terms of professional stature or height. Sometimes we perceive others who appear to be lower in stature, or higher, depending on where “we are” in our career. We often dismiss the conclusion as “solid” not realizing that our assessment of these statures, including the placement of ourselves on a professional hierarchy, is only a snapshot in time, a single picture frame in our continuously moving professional story.
If we also include the moving escalator in our vision, we can contemplate that our view may also include a leader-on-the-rise or a leader on his or her way down or completely off the career ladder we are striving to climb. Indeed, including an escalator as the foundation of any perspective reminds leaders and teams that seemingly foregone conclusions, gained at a moment-in-time, are based on unique, ever-changing, and yet not complete perspectives and views.
Transference of the concept of Information Equity to ideas vs. people enables leaders and teams to take a “four-corners” approach to gather insights and information when working to solve a complex business problem. Leaders must realize and remember that the information received is almost wholly articulated by the organizational position and the functional identity of the stakeholder’s input. Conducting deep, broad, and multi-faceted “voice of the business” discovery is so vital to the success of any critical business transformation initiative, as well as maintaining active day-to-day business operations.
One of the ways a leader can ensure Information Equity when the effectiveness of a core enterprise process is in question, for example, is to use a critical thinking adaptation of Lindsay Miller’s, Social Enterprise (or SE) Theory of Change Worksheet to seek full-bodied, multi-faceted organizational insights. Using a standard and structured form of analysis to deeply understand the many perspectives, views, and needs of stakeholders working to strengthen a business function, helps to deepen and enrich the understanding of the challenge and to enlighten the design of potential solutions. Using a Six Sigma Methodology SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, Customers) diagram and analysis tool is another way to gain a holistic view of all relevant elements of a business process before improvement work on that process begins. The Leadership Message and Method is to remember to consistently use and leverage the many perspectives of the organization when gathering and sharing information.
Information Inclusion – The Cowboy vs. the Collaborator
There’s an excellent White Paper in Volume 29 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, which was written by Susan Sturm and published in the summer of 2006. It’s called THE ARCHITECTURE OF INCLUSION: ADVANCING WORKPLACE EQUITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION, and it surveys the broad leadership discipline of inclusion and links it to how individuals participate in their workplace, and how they ultimately thrive, succeed, and advance as a result of a leader’s inclusion efforts. The second component of Information Equity is Information Inclusion. Through Strong Point’s work, I have come to realize and experience that Information Equity and mainly, Information Inclusion, is a necessary part of broader Leadership Inclusion.
The article says this:
“The pursuit of full institutional citizenship connects the project of inclusiveness to universities’ core mission of advancing knowledge and preparing the future citizens and leaders of a diverse polity to address complex problems and entrenched injustices.”
Although Susan Sturm’s work speaks to the university environment and to identifying and removing institutional barriers that thwart the participation, success, and advancement of women and people of color, I believe Ms. Sturm’s findings apply to all kinds of organizations (corporate and not-for-profit, for example) and a wide variety of “other” excluded groups. When we fail to equitably share information in our cooperative work with others, either intentionally or unintentionally, the result is the same: people are less likely and less able to powerfully contribute to their own and their organization’s advancement. If individuals cannot understand and advance a core process, as an example, then teams within a company fail to thoroughly understand the complex business challenges it faces, or holistically and inclusively innovate solutions and advance operational capability. The foundation of advancement and innovation is shared understanding and shared knowledge. Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #12: Study Learning in the Operating Environment shows that learning, continuous learning, is the key to innovation. Information Equity is also fundamental to building and nurturing a learning culture. Leaders who enable and foster Information Equity and Inclusion in their operating environments, work to improve and advance individual, team-based and organizational leadership capability.
Another White Paper called Maximizing Millennials in the Workplace, published by the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and co-written by Jessica Brack, the Executive Vice President & General Manager 2U Inc. & Kip Kelly, the Director of UNC’s Executive Development, discusses the clash between Information Cowboys and Collaborators in the workplace. I like how they explain stark contrasts in beliefs about information sharing…
“cowboy generations” take an individualistic approach to life and work, Millennials crave collaboration, team-based work projects and an unstructured flow of information at all levels.
How then, can a leader recognize the hierarchical or protectionist nature of the information flows they are generating or perpetuating? Further, how can they work to improve and advance Information Equity? Susan Sturm would suggest the creation of a team of organizational catalysts who can act as information entrepreneurs and work as bridge builders who gather and share deep and dimensional insights at critical pivot points in business operations. Strong Point, through its focused work supporting customer business transformations, can attest to the need for these information entrepreneurs, and to the meaningful work involved in persistently seeking a wide variety of informed perspectives and enacting information inclusion.
Chris Fussell, in a July 2015 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article entitled Make Your Team Less Hierarchical, suggests that leaders must first recognize that an operational shift in information sharing is necessary.
“Instead of leading a top-down, highly efficient bureaucracy, we began to lead ourselves as a network. Our mandate was to scale the effectiveness of small, elite teams onto the enterprise level. Instead of many individual leaders running many individual teams, we began to connect ourselves as a broad network of units (or a team of teams, as we liked to call ourselves).”
In my view, Chris Fussell is showing us how Information Equity can be accomplished in the person-to-person common language of inclusion. If individuals and teams focus on building shared understanding and shared knowledge and define and use common language and tools, then Information Equity and Inclusion is achieved in every single person-to-person and point-to-point communication and interaction that the individual and the team endeavors to complete. Those barriers that prevent professionals and partners from fully participating and contributing to business advancement, that Susan Sturm talked about in her Architecture of Inclusion white paper, are broken down. Information becomes both the individual and collective power behind the purposeful work of advancing operational and leadership capability.
Strong Point Solution teams work to support and enable Information Equity in customer operating environments in these ways:
Consistently Include a Wide Variety of Perspectives
Strong Point Solutions teams bring, nurture and develop active listening, facilitation and collaboration methods and tools to standard business development endeavors. Business-as-Usual technology implementations and process upgrades, for instance, always and readily include core, extended and sphere of influence stakeholders involved in an innovation project. Detailed stakeholder maps and engagement plans ensure that “Day-in-the-Life” voices of the business are captured, kept forefront, and continue to be heard throughout the duration of a transformation initiative. Communication elements such as video talking-heads, narrated and animated quick visuals, and in-person or online collaborative working-sessions are used as Strong Point’s common ways of working to promote Inclusion and Information Equity.
Promote Inclusion through Open Access to Information
After detailed discovery of organizational points of view is completed, Strong Point’s organizational, communication and creative experts and team leaders work to stand-up digital communication engines and channels and build core messages in visual, audio and graphic formats so that all participants can absorb and understand the information necessary for leaders to impart the vision and purpose behind work. Strong Point’s support of Iterative Working Sessions, Operational Innovation Labs, and Regular “Open Microphone” communication hours, are components of methods used to enable open access to organizational information. Strong Point works to support the continuous person-to-person and point-to-point communication and dialog that is so vital to executing and realizing operational and leadership advancement.
Create and Maintain a Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Media Communication Engine
Strong Point’s Solution Teams are also experts in Adult Learning, and they understand that: adult attention span is 8 minutes; adults learn more successfully through repetitive and multi-media means; and that regular reinforcement of concepts and ideas through iterative and interactive working-sessions promotes shared learning in a fun, flexible and adaptive work environment.
Strong Point’s Leadership Rule #15: What You See Depends on Where You Are