Social Media, Adaptive Change & HR

The advent and adoption of social media tools and the rising importance of learning to communicate and network effectively, both in person and online, is reflective of the shift we have been observing towards a knowledge culture. If the extensive collection of books on change, leadership, engagement with customers and employees are any indication of the importance and complexity of this shift, we may need to rethink how we approach change. We seem to be adapting much slower than the rate of change suggests, and in part, this is because we are now needing a level of complexity in mental development greater than needed for career success in previous eras. We are essentially 'feeling' our way into a new era when traditional thinking no longer achieves the goals we set for employees and/or meets the strategic needs of the organization.

One distinction that I often make when talking about workplace skills, competencies, abilities (whatever you call them in your organization)is that technical skills are substantially different than what are often referred to as 'soft' skills.

Ronald Heifetz (1994) poses two kinds of change challenges to consider, that are relevant to this topic:

1) Technical-skill sets necessary to perform these (complicated) behaviours is well-known.

2) Adaptive-can only be met by transforming your mindset, by advancing to a more sophisticated stage of mental development.

He also suggests that "the biggest errors leaders make is when they apply technical means to solve adaptive challenges" which better describes my belief that the way we approach developing technical skills is different than the way we develop 'soft' skills.

Social Media tools perhaps often creates the need to consider both technical change challenges and adaptive change challenges as key needs when introducing, integrating, and developing skills sets to use the tools effectively. The tools are relatively easy to learn how to use from a technical aspect, and regardless of how frequently they are updated or new tools developed our previous experience with computers offers us a relatively simple learning curve. We must also consider that not everyone has the computer experience depending on the job they do but may need to learn it for the future of those jobs. The real challenge and one that is more difficult to learn is to look at how well developed the 'soft' skills are. This includes learning the differences between how we may be perceived in an online interaction and how we that may be perceived quite differently when we interact face to face.

HR practitioners must consider both the technical and adaptive needs of the people in the organization as one without the other is the reason we see the amount of public discussion on the pros and cons of social media use and the effect this has on the organization's reputation both with customers and as an employer.

What challenges are the most perplexing to resolve in your organization? What challenges are the most difficult in your own change adaption?

A Small Organization Awakening

I was having a conversation with a friend recently in which we put forth our perspectives as to whether organizational life has really changed much over the past three decades. Certainly we are easily able to read about the "rapid pace of change"-I have been known to write about it and it helped shape the way my book Change, Resilience and Organizations turned out. (http://www.amazon.ca/Change-Resilience-Organizations-Karin-Wills/dp/3639068718)

Even though there have been many changes in the way the world operates largely created by globalization and technology advances, human expression has not really changed that much. We may use email, text message and social networks to communicate more often than we use the phone, save our documents 'in the cloud', interact at work with a much more diverse work team both locally and globally than ever before, but the behaviours we exhibit are only marginally different. Which means that the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of organizational life still occur and those tasked with managing people in organizations are dealing with the same plusses and minuses that occured 20-30 years ago, perhaps at a more public and rapid rate.

When I was researching for my book A Social Media Primer: For People In Organizations, the pace of change was mind boggling as during that 18 month period social media/social networking changed dramatically. But it is important to remember that such changes are adopted by people in a range from early adopters to not there yet but all those people are still managing. It is a good reminder that social media/networks are tools and they in and of themselves don't do anything, it is the people using them that create what happens. (https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000001007/A-Social-Media-Primer.html)

I am more apt to look at what is going to happen in the future than on history, but if we consider history and systems thinking in a big picture view of organizational life we will recognize that we have been *there* before. This can be a calming perspective when change feels like too much, too soon-we have been here before and we managed and we will do so again. I tend to be an early adopter possibly because of my intense curiosity for things that are new but I often go to my friends that are late to adopt for a good dose of perspective, reality and reminders. They have their own brand of wisdom to share and it helps me stay balanced in my approach which makes a difference when you work with diverse people.

So, what is your biggest concerns about organizational life these days? What problem are you trying to solve? What helps?

Consumer Power via Social Media

Since the growth of social media tools available to post or discuss anything has been so prolific over the past few years a number of topics have become common. One of those is the use of social media tools to promote, praise or express dissatisfaction with a company or organization that we have interacted with. It is true that using social media to ‘engage’ with customers or donors was one of the original uses of many of the tools and managers in organizations are encouraged to respond to both negative and positive postings.

Have we as individuals become too quick to angrily react by posting very negative comments about an organization immediately after an interaction that did not go well? Is there a better way to resolve problems with organizations? Is it always the better choice to jump to the ‘viral’ process when attempting to resolve a problem when some other way may be more beneficial? And are we always being fair to the organization and the people who work there?

When we deal with any organization at some point in time we are likely to encounter a glitch. Organizations are made up of humans and we all make mistakes, handle things badly sometimes and take a bad day out on someone who doesn’t deserve it. So why are we so quick to slay the reputation of an entire organization based on one bad interaction? How would you feel if that was a company you worked for and either you or a co-worker had messed up?

At what point do you decide to go to your social networks to complain about a bad customer (or donor) experience? How many attempts to resolve a problem or bad experience with an organization do you make before going public with your issue?