Diverse Leadership roles in Effective Virtual Teams

A very interesting paper on the "Importance of Diversified Leadership Roles in Improving Team Effectiveness in a Virtual Collaboration Learning Environment".

By Chen, C. C., Wu, J., Yang, S. C., & Tsou, H.-Y. from the Journal of Educational Technology & Society (2008)

The authors used Quinn’s (1984) Model of Leadership Roles which has eight leadership different roles along two dimensions (Innovator, Broker, Producer, Director, Coordinator, Monitor, Facilitator, Mentor).

"The Abstract

Virtual teams enabled by information and communications technologies (ICT) are increasingly being adopted not only by for-profit organizations but also by education institutions as well. This study investigates what contributes to the success of virtual learning teams. Specifically, we examine the issue of leadership in virtual learning teams.

The study first reviews the current literature on teams, leadership, and trust then proposes a framework of team effectiveness of virtual learning teams. A field study is conducted to investigate the influence of several independent variables including diversified leadership roles, leadership effectiveness, team trust, and propensity to trust.

It is found that diversified leadership roles influences both leadership effectiveness and team trust; both leadership effectiveness and propensity to trust influence team trust, and team trust in turn directly impacts team effectiveness.

In addition, team trust mediates the relationship between leadership effectiveness and team effectiveness. Some practical implications of the results are discussed as well."

Put this another way, in my opinion the paper provides solid evidence that a distributed approach to Leadership is a powerful way to build team effectiveness and results.

Leaders must play different roles to get the best out of their teams, yet we all have particular strengths and weaknesses - and indeed preferences for personal style and behaviour. By distributing Leadership roles and responsibilities across different people, depending on the need, a more effective team result ensues.

See the full paper at www.ifets.info/index.php?http://www.ifets.info/abstract.php?art_id=832

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

From Fast Company, by Clive Thompson

"Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") began wearing the shoes.

These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.

Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims "E-Fluentials" can "make or break a brand." According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That's on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.

Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.

In the past few years, Watts - a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo - has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."

Read the rest of the article ...

Customer Relationships are Recession Busters

From Kevin Eikenberry's blog ...

This post is about two things: recessions and a solution to them.

Don't worry this is not an economic treatise about the definitions and causes of economic downturns sometimes called recessions. Rather, it is an explanation of how we can think about these events differently and, when these circumstances surround us, how we can improve our results regardless of what the media tells us.

While regional, national or global level economic indicators can show that an economy is slowing down, that people are losing their jobs and the like, I believe that for individuals, a recession is little more than a change in circumstances that we can choose to participate in or not. I would argue that recessions don't even exist for us as individuals, unless we allow them to.

Recessions and Our Response

First, if you are reading this and have lost your job or are facing significant changes in your situation due to the events being labeled "recession", please don't get angry with my comments, but continue reading with an open mind. Use these ideas to be proactive in dealing with the opportunity you are now facing.

The media and/or politicians may say we are in a recession. And yet, businesses are still buying products and services (though perhaps a bit less than 'normal') and businesses are still hiring employees and moving forward.

The key for you and your business is to be the one who gets a larger percentage of the orders or the interviews or job offers that are available. In this proactive way you can choose to recognize that recessions are macro not micro events. You have a choice about how you will view the event the media calls "recession."

What I'm saying is that times might be a little tougher and that it might not be as easy as it used to be (or will be again), but so what? You can succeed through a better plan and a bit of persistence. When things are a little tougher, it simply separates out those who are prepared to work harder and more creatively.

Read the rest of the article ...

Leadership while in the line of fire

From the Financial Times, by Stefan Stern

When the markets turn nasty, a pseudo-military cry of “tin hats on!” goes up. But this is just a joke. Livelihoods may be at stake in business but not, usually, life itself.

The young men and women training to become British army officers at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) in Surrey, south-west of London, do not take matters of life and death so lightly. They are learning what it means to lead people in perilous situations. They may be only weeks away, some of them, from a posting to Helmand province in Afghanistan. This concentrates the mind.

The military and commercial worlds are different, and do not on the face of it have a lot in common. But perhaps it would be useful for business people to hear a bit more about the Sandhurst view on leadership, these being serious times, even if the lazy metaphors of the business world – “cut-throat competition” or “nuking the enemy”– should still be avoided.

In an understated way, Sandhurst can offer some radical and surprisingly progressive thoughts on leadership. “The reason we focus so much on leadership is because we have no choice,” says Major General David Rutherford-Jones, commandant at RMAS. The stakes are high. “The fundamental difference between what my brother-in-law, who works at Schroders, does and what we do is that ultimately an army’s purpose is to fight, if that is what the nation requires of it.

“We are by implication putting people’s lives at risk. They are in harm’s way. We ask people potentially to put their life on the line for a greater cause, and this is fundamentally against [the] human psyche. And that’s the bottom line for our business.”

Read the rest of the article ...

Successfully Leading People Through Services Globalization

From HRO Magazine, by Atul Vashistha

The six secrets of change management will help you tackle fear head-on and produce the kind of results you’re looking for in service globalization.

The greatest challenge in services globalization comes from people.” That’s what an HR executive told me the other day about her experience managing change in services globalization. Because most people are afraid of change, managing your employees’ relationships to the changes that come with services globalization is key to the success of your initiative.

Quality pioneer W. Edwards Deming said, “An organizational culture dominated by fear is incapable of serious change.”

There are six steps to creating an organizational culture that is not dominated by fear and is capable of successfully working through serious change.

Jointly Identify Business Problems and Solutions. Let employees at all levels get involved in identifying business problems. Educate them about the competitive pressures of your industry and the state of the company’s affairs. Then let your employees be part of a collaborative effort to create a solution to those business problems.If your employees are engaged in the process of identifying a solution, they will be less likely to resist it. They will more likely recognize how necessary services globalization is for the future health of the company. And your initiative will more likely be successful.

Develop a Shared Change Vision, and Communicate Relentlessly. Allow your employees to be involved in defining your company’s future. Once you’ve created a vision for the future, communicate it relentlessly. Educating your employees about your initiative through relentless communication is your biggest chance at winning them over. To do that:

• Specify the nature of the change initiative. Tell your employees what they can expect to happen to them and to their peers during the globalization initiative.
• Be honest about the scope of the change. Explain how it will affect your employees. If your employees believe that you’re being honest, even if you’re relaying news about job losses, they’ll be less likely to engage in fearful speculation.
• Explain and measure success. Set clear expectations for the results of each stage of your initiative, and celebrate when you meet those expectations. Offer incentives for your employees to help the initiative succeed.
• Use different communication styles. E-mails, events, newsletters, employee meetings, interactive presentations, and floor announcements are all ways to communicate with your employees. Use them all. Also, mix in communication from employees’ direct managers with communication from the change management team leaders and C-level executives.
• Deliver a consistent message. With communication coming from managers, team leaders, and C-level executives, make sure that the communication is consistent. Repeat the message of how the change will affect your employees and why the change is necessary.

Read the rest of the article ...

New Commandments for Leaders

From Jim Murray's new blog ... Jim is an longstanding net-acquaintance, and his words always contain much truth and helpful advice.

"If I were to suggest ten commandments to guide today’s chief executives in the task of building innovative, resilient, high-performance teams, my initial list would probably look something like this.

THOU SHALT:

1. Have a vision for change and "connect" it to your employees’ reality
Don’t expect your organization to change if employees do not know where you want to go. Don’t assume that they know what the intended change means for their day-to-day job. Explain exactly how their role and performance is crucial in fulfilling your vision.

2. Remove the barriers that impede or retard progress towards the goal
Things always stand in the way of change. As the chief executive, you have the power and ability to remove or alter those things. Your employees may not. It can be as simple as giving explicit permission to do things differently or being more tolerant of the inevitable "productivity dip" as people develop new competencies.

3. Remember that the primary objective is progress not perfection
Change requires courage and patience. Rome was not built in a day. Reward success and see failure as part of the learning process. Give constructive feedback by pointing the way, not the finger. Nurture intellectual capital, don’t intimidate and alienate it.

4. Ensure your senior managers emulate the desired change
Actions always speak louder than words. The objective is not to tell but to show, dramatically and empathically, how the new way of doing things will start at the top. Senior management buy-in must be unequivocal, whole-hearted and openly demonstrated. Words become meaningless when behaviours tell a different story.

Read the rest of the article ...

Leadership lesson from T5

Well, I guess we have all been reading about the unfortunate and embarassing debut of Heathrow's T5.

Just opened as the "jewel in the crown" for the world's busiest international airport and one of the most succesful airlines around, British Airways, it has led to recriminations and accusations of all kinds. Poor staff readiness seems to be part of it, but what can we all learn from this mess?

I do not want to get into blame games (not least as I have to fly from T5 on Monday to Canada, so I hope it is all working well by then!).

But we can draw a leadership lesson - that of fully understanding where the customer leverage really is, and acting accordingly.

What do I mean? Well, we all assume that planes will take off and land, and airlines fight hard to gain our loyalty - with very cheap flights, expensive cabin equipment, pleasant terminals, friendly staff, great lounges, or good wines. etc.

But, when is the customer REALLY won over? Yes, all the things above count, and we all have our favourite and disliked airlines as a result. But, no matter what happens in the air, if we get messed around on the ground with lost luggage, delays or just incompetence we all "loose it".

Customer loyalty is won or lost at the leverage points - and in an airline's case that is often on the ground not in the air ....

BA chief executive Willie Walsh said he accepted the chaos "was not our finest hour". But is he drawing the leadership lesson?

And is everyone else in the services business wondering what their "customer leverage point" really is?

Interesting sessions on the future of life and the Net

From Jerry Michalski's Sociate blog ... interesting to think about how mass communication is about the approaches we take to it rather than the "segments" of people we are trying to reach.

"I’m at the Stanford Legal Futures Conference, which today adopted a FOO Camp approach that, in truth, isn’t that FOOish. Last night they posted the schedule, which has multiple panels with five or six smart people on each. OK.

But that doesn’t mean the sessions aren’t full of great stuff.

One small snippet: Jay Rosen quoted Raymond Williams saying “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” Then he proceeded to draw a distinction between inferring consumer behavior and following people’s actions, where action is what people do when they exercise their freedom.

It’ll take me a while to digest this, but it gives me a useful way to explain a trend I’m seeing, which is the slow death of traditional market segment analysis and the inference of behaviors in order to run marketing campaigns.

What replaces it? Good listening, fast following, smart adaptation. Segments vanish because their assumptions break all the time. Micro-niches emerge as people from different segments act in similar ways. Some grow really large; most stay small."

Mick's response?

Jerry - nice quote from Raymond Williams. In my experience, the “marketer’s trick” is to use the understanding of behaviors to create manageable segements. The aim is to create some form of critical mass of understanding to take action on.

Micro-niches are interesting but not very useful to act upon. Traditional socio-economic segmentations are virtually useless. Actual behaviors (”you are what you buy”) are more useful.