I’ve heard that it only takes about 40% of your productive capacity to keep the boss off your back. So, if you are an employer and you want the REST of your employees’ productivity, you have to be more inspiring…like a Yahoo Community.
A couple days ago, I mentioned an HBR article that discussed the need for management theory to evolve. HBR threw down the gauntlet and made a good argument for why our concept of management needs to change, but they stopped short of suggesting exactly what to do.
Yesterday, Kris Dunn moved the ball forward a bit with a great post about “Why Your Company Needs to Think Like a Yahoo Community.” Kris suggests that we employers use less command and control management and instead think more like an online community. (Those communities get really smart people to engage and work for FREE after all). Kris advocates a more modern approach to management, a “secret sauce” of “part praise, part visible scorecard, and part future career promise” for people who make a difference. It’s a good start, a place to look for inspiration…and sadly, wholly divorced from the reality of many HR professionals and executives. A recent study by the Human Capital Institute found that “hardly any” HR professionals (2%) have a deep understanding of how social networks, you know, actually work.
What fascinates me is the wide gulf between the social media adopters and the people who are still living in “the real world.” Many “real world” people think Twitter is a waste of time, and perhaps it is. But like it or not, social media will have an increasingly powerful impact on how work gets done. Although some managers believe social interaction at work is a time waster, some studies show that social people are actually MORE productive. In fairness, the study looked at people with both digital networks and face-to-face networks (and face-to-face networkers were more productive than digital, but BOTH outperformed the anti-social hermits).
As someone who built a pretty decent network of old-school, face-to-face connections (formerly called a rolodex) I really marvel at how many digerati are not well regarded in the “real world” and how many dinosaur “real world” people are (virtually) ignored by the digital folk. Hmmm, it sounds like that (r)evolution in management theory might take a while.
