A consistent way to succeed is also a simple one – Tell folks what you’re planning to do, do it, then let folks know what you’ve done. It’s effective and ensures nothing gets too far afield before it’s caught and corrected.

Communication is paramount. By encouraging communication, you encourage cooperation.

Basics include

• Reading and answering email
• Returning calls
• Not leaving too much detail in voice mail; noting when, where and how you can be reached and when you’ll call back

Maybe less obvious: Note how you prefer to communicate. Be flexible in considering others’ preferences.

Meeting in-person allows for nuances and serendipity. It’s the best way for new folks to learn about one another. Meetings allow for multi-party back and forth. It’s also the most time-consuming and coordination-intensive. Meetings need active management to be kept productive.

Phone calls are personal through putting voice to name. A conference call can keep a team attuned with events. A call is intimate and immediate because good phone calls are all that’s happening for the duration of a call. They take coordination, too.

Email allows for more thoughtful response. They can be written, sent, received, and read on individuals’ schedules. They can cover detailed information and provide a record for same. They miss out on personality. Beyond facts, they can be tone-deaf.

IM can be great for one-on-one and small-group communication. “Presence awareness” – who’s online and reachable – gives this mode a leg up on email and the phone. Messages can be disruptive, and the expectation that they’re responded to immediately creates pressure and difficulties for those who are in a work zone or mid-conversation with others.

Meetings are important they’re a great way to share information with a wide group, foster conversation. and speed the question and answer process. Actively managing them will improve their effectiveness.Schedule lengths; posit an agenda; request feedback before the meeting; stick to the agenda’s focus. Manage meetings to scheduled length and agenda. Recall that when five people are in an hour-long meeting, that’s five hours spent.

Communication is key to preparing your team for success. Transparency is a key part of communication.

• Share the overall vision with the team
• In smaller groups and with individuals, tailor that vision to their areas of participation
• Note where individual contributions fit into the overall strategy
• Be aware of sensitivities, yet opt for openness

Say Thank You.

• Dollars are a great way to say Thank You
• Time off is a great way to say Thank You
• Saying “Thank you” is a great way to say thank you  - This one’s no-cost and often overlooked.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Eric Ries, the driving force behind the “lean startup” movement, which encourages high efficiency and meticulous metrics tracking within entrepreneurial ventures. Ries … noticed a trend among some of the people attending his talks. Many managers from large companies were coming to his sessions to learn what they could, because, as Ries discovered, the principals of lean startups can exist within larger corporations that are attempting to innovate.

Thinking Inside the Box: Eric Ries On Creating Startups Within Large Organizations

Efficiency and metrics tracking – and you can’t achieve one without the other – shouldn’t be  solely the realm of the entrepreneur – they’re core to any successful business.

“The real value is [this] starts to catalyze change because by changing the way you work you start to accelerate that feedback loop [...] and that can become the basis for making other changes,” Ries says.
…
Companies could also benefit … by inspiring their existing employees to be innovative, instead of wrangling up entrepreneurs from a startup, which would save them money in the end.

photo credit: westpark

Paving the way for New Thinking helps

New ideas presented from within an organization can be met with derision, resentment and the entrenchment mentioned above – the reason there’s a consulting industry generally isn’t because  organizations don’t have the talent and ideas aboard already. In my experience, those things usually *are* there. The reason outsiders are brought in is to help those ideas get a foothold and succeed.

It’s almost unfortunate, but many times outsiders are brought in because insiders haven’t gotten it done. It’s not that they weren’t capable; it’s that they didn’t. Without assistance, there’s little to reason to believe this will change. So “fresh eyes” come in to help. Those new perspectives can be brought in even from other parts of the larger organization – the point of the exercise is to make time to think specifically about what your processes are, why they are that way, and what the team can do to improve them.

(Management) “have this idea that a certain alchemy will happen that ‘if I bring these special people into my organization, they will teach my regular people how to be special,’ and that’s just a formula for breeding resentment,” Ries told ReadWriteWeb. “If the people doing the acquiring had more of a theory about how entrepreneurship is supposed to work [...] they could start to think of better ways to plug an acquired company into the larger organization, taking advantage of what they’re good at without destroying it.”

Read more of Thinking Inside the Box

The bit about alchemy is mostly true – especially when a larger organization works to consume a smaller, more entrepreneurial organization in whole, it can create a lot of friction without creating the intended value: The good ideas both sides bring are lost to disdain.

Encouraging efficiency and the importance of metrics – “data-driven decision-making” – would improve chances of an organization actually synthesizing what an acquired team had to offer. Putting a framework around how existing team members can be innovative within the organization would make any injection of new ideas that much more welcomed and effective. Then the “fresh eyes” have their best shot at ensuring everyone’s successful.

At its best IK acts like a corporate research library devoted to the policies, practices, products and history of an organization. It is accessible, germane, trusted and utilized. It is the corporate memory and a reflection of how the institution thinks and solves problems.

As a new generation of collaboration tools begins to roll-out (Google Wave , Sharepoint 2010 and others) there’s the usual buzz going around about how these tools will allow companies to better leverage IK on projects and usher in a new age of business productivity. (cue: images of sunrise, fanfare, children playing, etc.) While it’s true that these apps may represent the latest and greatest in collaboration tools the limiting factor on their benefit to your company is likely…wait for it…your company.

You see, I think IK has value only if your company is organized around some basic precepts:

• a company CAN learn from internal history
• failure has value
• success needs formal review too
• project administration is important

If your organization doesn’t share and prioritize…institutionalize…these precepts then whatever is preserved by collaboration software will likely be wasted.

These four precepts interact with IK in some very basic and important ways. Our tendency to emphasize the differences in today’s marketplace from previous ones gives no credence to the fact that consumers (i.e. the people with the money) behave very similarly today as they did 30 years ago. Good ideas need to be remembered and periodically reviewed so that when business conditions change, they can be implemented. If your company doesn’t respect the ideation of those who went before IK tools won’t likely do as much for you as they could.

Now, in my experience, when a brilliant idea fails it’s proud-parent is rarely called upon to give a formal write-up as to why everything went South – in fact the brave soul is usually shunned, marginalized, and if the flop was big enough, rapidly terminated. This is a great way to waste IK. All of the research, documentation, assumptions, presentations, etc. should be handed over to a corporate curator, packaged, cataloged and interred in a corporate archive. The key decision-makers should be interviewed and their learnings recorded. The company spent money, usually millions, on this project and it doesn’t even want to give the project a formal burial. It’s a lost opportunity.

However, what is worse in my opinion, is when a company has a breakout success, fails to understand fully why it happened, and blithely assumes that its success was due to its brilliance rather than the marketplace. If you do not capture the IK on why something worked it can be as risky as avoiding something because it failed once.

Last, project administration; the note-taking; the meetings; the emails; the documentation; more meetings; the uploading; the versioning – project administration amounts to discipline. This is vital to utilizing IK in the future and is probably the least respected component of a successful company. Don’t confuse time worked, emails sent, presentations produced, meetings scheduled, etc. with project administration, what I refer to here is the lost art of taking all the dross of a project; filtering it to understand what happened; annotating when and why decisions were made; preserving and editing the notes…and throwing the rest away. Editing is important to the successful application of IK to new situations. If someone has to sort through a mess to learn something then not only is their time wasted but so it the effort and expense that went into collecting and storing it.

With the advent of a generational shift in collaboration tools, we are undoubtedly on the verge of a new era of workplace productivity (again). This time, when you are considering new collaboration tools give some thought to the way that you collaborate.

• Does the organization have an institutionalized approach to collaboration or are you just posting individual efforts to a glorified bulletin board?
• Are you preserving the hard-fought lessons that you are learning in a rough economy or are you just filling up space on a server and calling it productivity?

Prodigy’s early effort to put their employees in charge of specific topics and give those employees the ability to “deputize” their best participants from among the crowds is still a model to be emulated.

Pioneering and unusual aspects

Prodigy pioneered the concept of Online Communities. A Content Department was responsible for creating and developing different Content Areas for specific topics. Each Content Area had a Prodigy Producer who gave contracts to Prodigy subscribers to assist in running the communities in exchange for a small stipend. Each community consisted of a Website, a Chat Area with different rooms, and a Bulletin Board.

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Prodigy: Information from Answers.com.

What are the best ways you’ve envountered to “motivate” your audience to participate?

It’s not what happens when the market sets back but what comes after that gets people thinking.

A lot’s going on in response. An interesting time to be building a business – The market’s not there to back you so you’ve got to run lean.

There are still better ways to do things.

Technology and smart people can help.

Running lean opens eyes to possibilities not considered last year, before that. People get creative and appreciate creativity from others.

Even better than people looking for a new solution is helping them find, build and use one.