Humanize

Discipline is not just about making people tough or instilling obedience. Discipline is about knowing that “good enough” is not good enough. Discipline is about higher standards. Discipline is about not falling down when it comes to what is valued. Discipline is really ultimately about clarity. As long as you keep things fuzzy, then discipline is easy. If your values stop at “be good,” then just about anything you do is going to qualify. But the sharper you draw the lines, the more true discipline is required to keep you on track.

I think that’s a good thing. I think we need more discipline in our organizations. Not in the sense of forced compliance or identity-less conformity, but in the sense of clarity and higher standards. In the sense of not letting us settle for weak strategies and ineffective processes. In the sense of not backing down when there is conflict between departments, but stepping up to the plate and resolving it. In the sense of not accepting age-old performance metrics that don’t work any more, simply because we’ve always done it that way.

Human organizations embrace discipline.

The choice of change management is not a yes/no choice. It is a conscious evaluation of the road we want to travel: authority, behavior or identity.

Remember the good old days when change management was explained as the only alternative to murder in the first degree? There was no doubt about what one was supposed to think: either you are a saint caring for your people, or you are a jerk pushing everything down their throats. The choice was really obvious and the drawing to explain it was simple.

Crowdsourcing your strategy may sound crazy. But a few pioneering companies are starting to do just that, boosting organizational alignment in the process. Should you join them? 

Like many of you, I’ve signed up to get the latest blog posts of different writers. I recently received one telling me about a new book called Humanize: how people-centric organizations succeed in a social world. I thought it sounded interesting, I clicked on the link and realized immediately that I needed to buy this book. I invite you to check it out here: http://www.humanizebook.com/

This is not a book on how to implement social media in your organizations. Rather, it’s a book that uses the explosion of social media as an example of how deeply people are looking for real human interaction. This means real conversations, and not just at home, but at work too. Employees are not looking for another e-mail, or another power-point presentation, or another meeting where you are talked to, but real conversation. Humanize says, “We all want power to be closer to us and trust to be present in our relationships. It’s part of being human. Now thanks to social media, it is becoming part of business.” Social media allows everyone that chooses to use it to have a voice. And not just to have a voice, but to be heard. Companies that use social media well will respond to their customers’ questions and concerns.

Modern management practices fail because organizations have grown too infused with machine-like thinking. Meanwhile, social media has garnered success for a simple but oft-overlooked reason: it plays to some of our most basic needs as people. So why not bridge the two to fix the shortcomings of modern-day management practices?

This question was asked by Jamie Notter, the co-author of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, who spoke Tuesday to a packed ballroom of HR professionals at the IHRIM HRMS Strategies Conference & Expo in Chicago.

Notter delved into a variety of topics during his near 60-minute keynote speech to kick off the conference. But the heart of his message was clear: Management as we know it is failing us, and organizations need to start being more human in how they organize and manage people.

“Management has not seen innovation like the rest of the world has in the last 50 or 100 years,” Notter said.

Hire for passion and commitment first, experience second, and credentials third. You don’t want to be simply a stepping stone on an employee’s journey toward their own passion.

Let's humanize management.

The social revolution is just getting underway in the corridors of power among the global elite, but the first shots in this battle are unleashing Fun rather than Fear. The new 21st Century management ethos is much more about liberating the workforce to create vast improvements in productivity, innovation, and agility. New leaderships books such as, “Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World” by Jamie Notter and Maggie Grant are replacing the 90s command and control canons on the executive bookshelf. The entire management philosophy of how to produce results is pivoting from a dependence on software to suppress creativity to software that unleashes it. The surge in mobile connectivity and external social sharing only accelerates this trend.
One manager of a leading manufacturer confided anonymously that that success lies somewhere between the old regime and the newer, more social approach. “Companies are realizing Six Sigma isn’t enough,” he said. “It’s time to balance the Quality yang with the Social yin.”

Does your team and/or coworkers know they are important to the organization? How do they know they are important? Did someone tell them?

It was a valuable lesson. Both for my friend and for myself. Leaders should focus on the outcome, not on the methods to get there. The people closest to any problem are usually better at determining what the right solution is. Outsiders--and sometimes the volunteer leader is an outsider--can't fix it, because they exist outside the system that makes the organization work. Their job is not to impose solutions from above, but to help the organization develop the systems and resources to adequately address the problems that are holding it back.