Wayne Turmel has an excellent post about the power of using social media for listening. The post summarizes his podcast interview with Jim Kouzes, author of several books on leadership, who says that  the intersection of social media and strong leadership lies in the opportunities for listening that social media provides: "Social media is a great opportunity to get input from your people and let them feel listened to and heard- if it’s used effectively". That effectiveness is demonstrated by not only gathering feedback, but responding to it and displaying it for all the world to see, even when it’s not flattering. Then (and here’s the hard part) taking actual action based on that feedback. The importance of listening with social media is echoed in this article on what separates social media rookies from veterans. SmartBrief and Summus Limited asked the readers of various SmartBrief newsletters to complete a survey about their businesses’ use of social media. They heard back from about 6,500 readers. One of the key findings was that veterans were more likely to listen than rookies: The rookies are about as likely to say they use social media to put out news releases (38.7% of veterans compared with 39.3% of rookies) and maintain active fan pages (39.5% of rookies compared with 36% of veterans). But when it comes to listening, engaging, soliciting feedback and other activities that involve having a more open, fluid relationship with customers, the veterans lead the way in every category. In talking to both organizations and individuals about using social media, I find that the listening component is seriously under-valued. There's a focus on what you should say, how you should say it and which channels are the most effective for getting out that message. But both leading and learning require us to listen, too. It's the listening that gives you actionable information and feedback that can help you shape your interactions. It tells you what stakeholders are worried about or find challenging or value so you can engage with them in a more authentic way. Listening helps you really understand what's going on with people and provides you with the best opportunities for bringing them value. Some Listening Resources If you want to start listening more, here are some resources to get you started: 8 Stages of Listening--this is a good first step to determine where you are in your listening behavior.  What to Listen for in Social Media--This article suggests that listening for tensions, passions and context can give you some greater insights. Social Media Listening Primer--developed by the wonderful Beth Kanter. Creating a Social Media Listening Dashboard--This is a webinar and resource page that I did for a network of organizations serving youth in Pennsylvania. It includes lots of links to other articles and presentations. How to Set Up Your Listening Dashboard--A nice step-by-step white paper.  What do you think? What role does listening play in your use of social media? What advice do you have for becoming a better listener?

Yesterday was a typical day for me as a knowledge worker--lots of unrelated problems to solve, ranging from troubleshooting an issue with a Wordpress blog I was setting up for a client to gathering information on employment statistics for people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having this kind of wide-ranging work to do. Even the specialists among us have found their job duties broadening in this tight economy. For me, solving these problems turned out to be relatively easy. I work for myself and don't have to worry about site blocking, so was able to easily access and search the blogs, social networks, videos and forums that gave me the answers I needed. If necessary, I would also have been able to access my own networks through social media. Unfortunately for the vast majority of front line workers at the organizations I work with, this would not have been the case. For them, many of these sites are blocked. If "blog" is in the title or URL, they can't go there. If the information is on a social network or forum, they can't visit it. Forget YouTube and its vast array of tutorials.  Even many basic websites are blocked. At the same time, their managers will complain that staff don't solve their own problems, that they aren't innovative or creative in their work. Well of course they aren't--they are denied basic access to the people and information that might actually help them get their jobs done! They are forced to rely on people within their own organizations--many of whom don't have the answer either--and on those websites the powers that be deem to be "acceptable." When I do trainings and presentations, participants will frequently ask me how I "know so much." It's simple. No one is blocking my access to the web, so when I have a question, I can get an answer. I'm empowered to get information and solve problems on my own. If you want people to do their best work, they need the same access.

Jane Hart writes an interesting post on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to nurturing social media in organizations, making the excellent point that bottom up support of existing social media activities will work better than imposing social media use from the top down. What I've been observing in my work with clients, though, is a tendency to use top-down strategies to support bottom-up initiatives, especially in organizations where they're just delving into social media use.  For example, one organization with which I've been working identified a project where employees had expressed interest in using Facebook as a strategy for sharing information and connecting with stakeholders. Management rightly concluded that it made sense to experiment with social media by supporting this project. However, despite my best efforts, the "support" for the project quickly devolved into conversations about who was "allowed" to post and what they were allowed to say--classic control issues that characterize the top-down approach. Reading Jane's post it occurred to me that we need to have a better understanding of the questions and strategies that will nurture bottom-up participation in social media. Nothing kills a grassroots initiative faster than "Big Brother" strategies. So, some thoughts. . . Ask  employees what they need from management to support the project. This is probably the most obvious question, but one that I think can get lost in the shuffle. If employees have shown the initiative to start using social media, then they probably have some good ideas about what would be helpful to them in keeping the initiative going. In particular, they are likely to have identified the institutional barriers that impede their ability to make full use of social media. Pay attention to what they say and use an open mind in evaluating their ideas. Do what you can to implement their strategies. Focus on removing barriers to social media use, rather than on erecting new ones. In my experience, employees who are trying to use social media for work have a wealth of ideas for moving things forward. Their major problems tend to be with the organizational barriers that stand in their way. Although it is tempting to management to want to control social media use, if they're serious about supporting bottom-up projects, they need to refrain from going down this road. They should work with the project team to remove barriers and make sure that they are not putting new ones in their place. Provide employees with resources and ideas that will help them implement their project. Keep an eye out for articles and examples you can share with the team. Share these as a way of indicating your understanding of and support for what they are doing. Highlight their successes. Recognition is always appreciated. Share the results of the social media work done by your teams with other members of the organization during meetings and through organizational newsletters and emails. Focus on what's working and share that with others. Treat mistakes as learning opportunities. Don't panic and clamp down on the team when the inevitable social media mistakes are made. Accept that someone is going to accidentally post something problematic and that this is part of the process. Use these situations as learning opportunities to determine how you can handle situations the next time they arise. These are a few of my thoughts. What do you think are the best ways to support bottom-up social media initiatives. What has/hasn't worked in your organization?

I was offline most of yesterday, so didn't get the bad news until the evening when I saw a Facebook friend was looking for an alternative. It seems that one of my most-used, least lauded social media tools, Delicious, is about to go down the tubes. Although I rarely am conscious of it, Delicious has probably been one of my most valuable resources. I've been using it since 2006, which feels like an eternity.  It's safe to say that every day I'm on my laptop (which is most days), I tag and bookmark at least one item into it--which is why I currently have 7,000 items saved. Aside from the items I tag for myself, I also use it as a way to point clients to information that they might find useful, doing this long after my contract with a client has ended because it's so easy to do. The ability to add notes, although I don't use it all the time, has also been helpful. I even used Delicious to create my own online portfolio.  And Delicious has made it easy for me to access my bookmarks from any computer, helpful during presentations or if I'm working onsite for a client. It's the social arena where it has really shined for me, though. My Delicious network is filled with great people who tag with the same fervor I do. They are often the source of articles I might otherwise not have found. Checking out what other people have bookmarked under the same tags has also been a tremendous resource. In many ways, Delicious has represented for me the very best of social media. It solved several problems I had with the old way of doing work. Bookmarking, tagging and annotating items were easy to do, so I could easily adapt my work habits to incorporate it. The social aspects consistently brought me value. And all of it was free. Which, of course, is what has spelled its demise. So today, I'm in mourning. Also in search of other options. At least I'm not alone--Marshall Kirkpatrick is also feeling down and his post makes me feel even worse as he describes some ways he used Delicious I'd never even considered. In RIP Delicious,  Beth Kanter shares my sadness and also offers some alternatives, including Diigo, where I have an account but haven't been active for awhile. (Here's another article with some alternatives.) In considering these, I'm going to have to think about what is most valuable to me in social bookmarking. If it's primarily about the tagging and saving of my own materials, something like Evernote could be my best bet. I've used the free version and it's really powerful, including providing the ability to read items offline. But it lacks the essential social element that is part of what made Delicious so useful to me. For the social piece, I might be better off with Diigo. We shall have to see. In the meantime, I will be raising a glass to my dear departed friend, Delicious. If you're a Delicious fan, let me know what you're planning to do in the future. Would love to hear thoughts on other tools. I'm particularly interested in options that will allow me to import my Delicious items so I don't lose what I've already done.

For one of my clients, I'm developing an online community of practitioners working for a variety of nonprofit, government and for-profit entitities in New Jersey. We wanted to treat the process of forming and nurturing this community as a learning project so we could share our "lessons learned" with others who are doing this kind of work. Our intent is to write an Issues Brief at the end of the project ot share with others. A few days ago I ran across an excellent post from the Harvard Business Review, The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Day. It suggests ending each day with three questions: How did the day go? What successes did I experience? What challenges did I endure? What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do--differently or the same-tomorrow? Who did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?  Although intended for individual practice (and I may use them that way), these seemed like the perfect questions for continuous reflection on our project. I've now set up a Google doc that I've shared with other leaders on the team and we're recording our responses each day so that we'll have a record of our work and can also respond to what we're learning. I'm seeing particular value in the third question-who did I interact with and what do I need to do?--for this project, as it's very much about nurturing relationships and forming connections. That question forces us to think each day about how we are connecting with people and what we need to do to keep those connections going. I'll keep you posted on our progress, but wanted to share a little of the process, as I think these are great questions to apply to both projects and individual improvement.

Allyson Kapin, co-founder of  the Rad Campaign, and I had the opportunity to record a Social Good podcast with Allison Fine for the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the demise of Delicious and the issues that arise when free tools disappear. In the podcast, Allyson Kapin makes some excellent points about the need to not put all your eggs in one social media basket and makes a plug for open source options, which are probably the most sustainable way to maintain free tools--unless you're Google. We also discuss the characteristics of social tools like Delicious that make them most attractive to people. You can listen to the podcast here.

My older daughter graduated from college in May and has been working at her new job since June. Last night we had a conversation that got me thinking about how school does a really terrible job of preparing our young people for "the real world" by setting up some seriously unrealistic expectations. In school, we teach kids that: Life happens in a series of connected, time-delineated steps (courses, semesters) so there's always "light at the end of the tunnel" and its clear what the next step will be. If you follow the rules--of an individual teacher, of the school--you will be rewarded. If you work hard, you will be rewarded. There are always "right" answers to questions and problems. Problems are well-defined and if you don't get the "right" answer, it's because you didn't work hard enough.  Ironically, those kids who take these lessons of school most seriously--who try hard to do what we ask them to do in school--end up being the most disillusioned and ill-prepared for what happens when they graduate. Further, these rules are hidden, making their impact more insidious and talking about the problems they cause more difficult. What we really need to be teaching young people, if we truly want to prepare them for the "real world," is that: Work and its problems are really ill-defined. Rarely are there "right" answers. More often than not we are having to make trade-offs that force us to choose between "bad" and "worse" or at least between "OK" and "less OK." There are always going to be extenuating factors and issues that impede our ability to achieve the ideal, even in those situations that seem the most clear-cut. Sometimes hard work is rewarded. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes following the rules is rewarded. Sometimes it is not. The challenge is learning when to stop beating our heads against a particular brick wall where our hard work and rule-following is not working. When do we need to break the rules? When do we need to work hard at something else or somewhere else? Related to this, working harder isn't always the answer. Sometimes we are in situations where problems go unsolved and issues are unresolved because of things that are entirely outside of our control. Sometimes there is no answer and we have to learn the lessons of patience and of moving to a new situation, rather than just buckling down and trying to make the best of what we have. There is no "light at the end of the tunnel." There is just more tunnel. Some parts of the tunnel are darker and some have more light flickering in. But there is always tunnel and we are never sure what lies at the other end. I remember graduating from college and facing many of the same issues my daughter is now facing. I was so used to a world where everything had been so clearly defined for me, where if you just went with the program you would get where you needed to go. But that's not how the real world operates. It seems like we should be preparing our kids for that.

Yesterday I read a wonderful Change This Manifesto on The Zen of Business: 7 Habits of the Highly Creative by Matthew May. I'm currently in what I'm referring to as "creative recovery" (otherwise known as AA for creatives) so these habits really struck a chord with me. One of my favorites on the list is the habit of "Seijaku" or stillness, solitude, quietude. It is the habit of learning to quiet your mind, designating a place and time for creative solitude. In other words, "stand still when the hippos charge," advice from National Geographic journalist Boyd Matson. As luck would have it, when I opened up Typepad to start this post, I saw that someone had visited a post I wrote a few years ago about The Tyranny of Now. In it, I lamented the fact that I was responding to the "nowness" set for me by my email and my ringing phone and the clamor of unread items in my feed reader. In other words, the hippos were charging around me and I was running for my life. This is an issue that has plagued me off and on for awhile now, so lately I've been trying to create for myself moments of creative solitude. I start my day with Morning Pages, a practice of writing 3 pages of stream of consciousness, just to empty your brain. What I've found is that each morning, as soon as I open my eyes, I'm flooded with the things I didn't complete the day before and the things I MUST do today. By emptying my brain of these worries, I create in myself a stillness that allows me to get to my "to do's" with less anxiety and more focus. I have also designated another room in my house--NOT my home office--as the place to go when I need to get some space from my work. This quite literally changes the dynamic for me as it is a room that's off limits to my laptop and phone. When I enter it, it says that I'm setting a boundary between me and technology that I will not violate while I'm in there. It's helped tremendously in getting my brain to shift from the Tyranny of Now when I need it to. The other practice I'm working on happens to be one that is in May's Manifesto--the idea of "Datsuzoku" or taking a break from routine. May points out that our bodies and brains work in 90-minute "pulses" or rhythms: When we're awake, we move from higher to lower alertness every 90 minutes. And here's the thing: our bodies clearly signal that rhythm in the form of restlessness, hunger, drowsiness and loss of focus. Generally we either ignore or overrride these signals, because we have a lot to do and many ways to artificially pump up our energy with various supplements. The problem is that after working at high intensity for more than 90 minutes, our brains begin to shut down. We become more reactive and less capable of thinking clearly, creatively and reflectively or seeing the big picture. I've most definitely noticed this in myself and have been trying to pay closer attention to the signals my brain and body give me that it's time for a break. This isn't always easy--I have to fight with myself to NOT keep going. There's something that says I'm being "weak" or "unproductive" if I don't push through. But in reality when I honor what my brain and body are telling me, I'm actually MORE productive. It's funny what can happen if we just stop and listen. So what do you do when the hippos charge? Do you stand still? And how do you do that?

Lately I've found myself counseling a number of professionals I know to give up the "permanent full-time employment" option (a myth, anyway) in favor of working for themselves. Some of the reasons are pretty obvious, but some are less so. Below are the reasons I've been sharing with people in favor of working for themselves: 1. You Diversify Your Funding Stream.  Would you rely on a single company's stock for your retirement fund? Why, then, do you rely on a single organization for your salary? Particularly in this economy where cutting jobs is the first thing companies do in response to downturns. Strength and security is found in diversity, not homogeneity.  2. You Can Tell The Truth More Often. Many of the professionals I know just really want to do a great job without getting bogged down in company politics. This often means that they want to voice unpleasant truths their organizations are unable or unwilling to hear. Oddly, companies and organizations seem much more open to constructive feedback when it comes from the outside. (The reasons why could take up an entire blog post of their own). They may not actually DO anything with this external advice, but at least you were able to stay true to your own sense of how the work could/should be done.  3. You Can Focus on Work that Plays to Your Strengths Most organizations aren't particularly good at knowing employee strengths and leveraging those strengths. They may THINK they're good at it, but most people know this isn't true.  When you work for yourself, you can go after the projects that play to what you're good at. This has the added benefit of making you look like a superstar because you can become known for the areas in which you excel.  When you work for someone else, it's likely that you'll end up in the dreaded "other duties as assigned" part of the job description that tends to play to your weaknesses. Some companies have a particular genius for this; they are the cause of the Peter Principle.   4. You Will Be Valued More It's crazy, but for some reason, many companies and organizations value advice and resources they get from the outside more than the knowledge that can be found on the inside. When you are an external contractor, that fact alone will add value to the work you do for many people.  Combine that fact with Item 3 above on playing to your strengths, and you are definitely going to be feeling better about what you do. 5. You Can Have More Control Over Your Work Environment When I worked for someone else, two things drove me crazy--people dropping into my office just to "chat," (I'm an introvert) and having to attend useless meetings. Both of these items have virtually disappeared from my life since I began working for myself.  I also have the added benefit of being able to make my own schedule and decorate my office any way I want. No one cares what screensaver I use and no one blocks my access to social media!  6. You Can Be on the Leading Edge of the Next Industrial Revolution Freelancing is our "back to the future" industrial revolution of the 21st century. Those who are on the crest of that wave are most likely to benefit from it.  7. You Get Variety Without Having to Change "Jobs" Most of the professionals I'm connected to love to experiment and try new things. Generally it's easier to have this kind of variety in your work life as a contractor than it is when you work for someone else. You have control over the projects you will do and can choose those that give you a better mix of activities and opportunities.  Of course, working for yourself may not be the best option for everyone. But more and more I believe that for those professionals that really care about what they do and want to have more control over how they do it, contract work may be the best choice.   ________________________________________________________________________________________ Want priority registration for events, special discounts and other goodies? Then sign up for The Bamboo Project newsletter! If you sign up before January, 2012, you'll get my free "Looking Back/Looking Ahead" activities. Each day for 15 days, you'll receive an email with a specific question that can help you reflect on what you've learned in 2011 and get you started planning for 2012. It's a great way to jumpstart your career for the New Year!

I've observed that when it comes to change of any kind--personal or professional--the impetus for action only comes when we are finally able to observe and accept the reality of our current situation. In fact, one of the ways we most consistently try to maintain the status quo is by denying reality, saying that things are better than we know they are.  I've watched this dynamic at work in many situations. I've done it myself. Denying reality is one of my favorite ways to keep myself stuck. I will convince myself that work situations or relationships are "not that bad," which keeps me mired in a netherworld where I'm clearly unhappy, but feeling powerless to do much to change it. Sometimes I will allow myself a glimpse of reality, but then quickly I can talk myself out of it. When you deny reality, though--when you refuse to accept a situation as it REALLY is--then you deprive yourself of the necessary creative energy to make changes. You will keep telling yourself that things are "good enough" or "not that bad" and then you will continue to stay stuck.  One of the most important things you can do when you want to make a change is to take a scrupulous and honest inventory of your situation and of yourself in the situation. Paint a picture of reality that doesn't try to gloss over the painful or difficult parts. Be clear about what is and isn't working. The more honest you can be, the more you can clearly see reality, the more energy you will have to start making changes.  Denying reality is one of the easiest and most reliable ways we use to stay stuck. When we're really ready for change, we need to give up this reliance on fairy tales and start taking a cold, hard look at what we're dealing with.