On average, Americans aged between 25 and 54 spend 26 percent of their time working, 33 percent of their time sleeping and the rest—roughly 41 percent of their time—doing anything but sleeping or working. This is according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By comparison, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates in their Better-Life Index that member countries spanning the globe spend on average 20 percent of their time working and the rest on leisure, sleeping, personal care, etc.13 So, depending on where you live and how researchers arrive at the data points, workers are spending somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of their total available time working and earning a wage to help fund those leisurely activities, life-long planning, trips to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United and so on. But when you cut the data a little differently and focus on total available waking time versus total time, it looks somewhat different. Based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 33 percent of time is spent sleeping. Each year, we all get 8,760 hours to use as we see fi t. If 33 percent of the time is spent sleeping, it leaves us with 5,869 available waking hours. Americans work on average 2,278 hours per annum, which now correlates to a hair shy of 40 percent of waking time being spent on work. Said differently, Americans spend 60 percent of their waking hours with family and leisure, household or other activities while 40 percent is spent with work colleagues, wherever that employment takes place. Now that we’re looking at data that suggests 40 percent of our waking hours are spent with work colleagues, don’t you think leaders should be spending a portion of their time clowning around? I do—it’s an important part of being a connected leader. In a world of quarterly targets, profit margin quests and cost constraints, a little levity can go a long way. How to be clowning: Business is serious but you don’t have to be all the time; ease up and smile for starters. Lighten the mood; encourage those on your team to poke a little fun at you once in a while. Don’t work till you drop; clowning can come in the form of coffees, lunches and outings. Gaming isn’t just for kids; participate in online games or outings like bowling with your team. April Fool’s is just one day of the year; clowning should become part of your regular leadership style. Jokes aren’t taboo; learn how to tell them and, even better, encourage your team to do so as well. In a 1985 paper the communication department of the University of Delaware explores patterns of humorous communication against the context of organizational culture. The research indicates humor can: manage the tension between hierarchy and egalitarianism that emerges from the group’s enactment of power structure; regulate interdependence among group members; and balance the forces of differentiation and integration in the group’s communicative enactment of cultural identity. I’m not suggesting you join the circus, but start by adding a little humor to your leadership style. Clowning around is an excellent attribute to add to your connected-leader-being repertoire. You don’t need a giant red nose or purple hair to prove it. <Adapted from Chapter 5 of my book Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization> Dan's Related Posts:Flexible Working WorksThe Social C-SuiteCoaching Should Be An Expectation Of All Connected LeadersRedefining the Social EmployeeGive Piece a Chance

The most overused yet inappropriately applied term in an organization is "coaching." There are organizational coaching models, executive coaching programs, external executive coaches, company-defined coaching steps, coaching interventions and in-house coaches too. Group coaching? Sure. Speed coaching? Why not. Virtual coaching? But of course. We see requests aplenty from keynote speakers who are so-called coaches. Not to fear, you can become a coach yourself by enrolling in an executive education program at a university that offers executive coaching certificates as well. And now, coaches are getting coaches for themselves too. Wow, I think I need a couch . . . er, coach. To be clear, it is an expectation of mine that if you want to become a connected leader, to demonstrate you are going beyond the call of leadership duty you must agree that coaching your team and others in the organization is mission critical. But what is coaching in the Flat Army paradigm? Let’s first dish up what it’s not. Coaching is not a formulaic process when demonstrating the connected leader attributes. It is not the act of hiring an external executive or otherwise coach to assist you with your team. It isn’t an intervention and should never be used as a means to solve some form of employee crisis or singular performance issue. Any of these acts runs up against our view of coaching. In a study of approximately 285,000 employees and leaders across U.K. firms, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development finds that 30 percent of leaders, with reference to whenever they meet for a one-on-one meeting with their direct reports, suggest they are—in their minds—coaching their people first and foremost. Sixty-four percent of leaders feel they are actively coaching only part of the time in one-on-one meetings. Not too shabby when you think about it: a total of 94 percent of leaders believe they are coaching their team members in one-on-one meetings. Now, the flip side. Employees report that in their minds coaching only occurs 6 percent of the time at those meetings where leaders feel they are actually coaching. Where employees experience partial coaching, a measly 34 percent indicate they believe some coaching takes place. My hypothesis is that the definition of coaching is misconstrued by both sides of the equation. Leaders think they are doing it and employees think they aren’t receiving it. Ian Chisholm, Bradley Chisholm and Mark Bell penned the article "Coach vs. Mentor: Designing the Finest Meaning of Words" and it’s within this piece that a paragraph caught my attention: Coaching is the intentional positioning of others to perform at incrementally higher standards, to learn more from their experience as it emerges, and to be increasingly engaged in their endeavours. It is an approach to leadership that invites more leaders from all levels in our organizations, communities and families. I like to think that the phrase "intentional positioning" can be reflected by the terms "counsel," "feedback" and "advice." That makes sense to me. And I love how they determine the stakeholder audience as including "organizations, communities and families." Leadership isn’t a nine-to-five job; it’s communal, holistic and accretive. Coaching—in the context of Flat Army and thus going beyond a connected leader—is an ongoing informal conversation with the employee who focuses on providing the following: counsel on current objectives and actions to categorically improve the result feedback concerning their progress or improvements on Flat Army habits advice on personal or career advancement or opportunities In summary, to demonstrate the attribute of coaching is to assist your team member—and to help them improve—with issues going on at work, on the personal development front and with respect to career development. That’s it! It’s an ongoing and informal discussion with your team members, albeit individually, to help them get better. Seems simple, doesn’t it? The problem is, too many human resources professionals, consulting shops and accrediting institutions have whipped organizations into frenzies just by the mention of coaching. We must demystify the term in order to bring some sanity back into the definition of leadership and to the definition of coaching. How to be coaching: Binary is not an option: Relate to your people through a spectrum of colors, not simply black and white. It’s not a contract with your team member; it’s a relationship: Nurture it at all times and pervasively. Every minute matters: For any situation, treat it as an opportunity to counsel, advise or provide feedback that aims to improve. The ignorant and reckless command before listening: Instead, lend an ear and help bring the story to the surface before advising on anything. Your brain is not a contingency backup: Create a system in which you’re recording conversations, thoughts and ideas for each of your team members. Review these regularly. Don’t be purposeless: There should be purpose in each coaching situation, always intending to improve the employee’s overall capabilities on actions, habits or personal quests. Between 1993 and 2003, David Galloway was the vice president of customer care at Crystal Decisions—the original makers of Crystal Reports software—a company I used to work at until it was acquired by Business Objects in 2003. He continued on in his role until 2006. When I joined the company in 2002, I joined the services arm, not even in Dave’s bailiwick. But he took me under his wing, and through a series of coaching conversations over an eighteen-month period, Dave helped me in my adjustment to the new company, navigating my actions and objectives, and helped me become a better leader at the company. He was an incredible listener and an idea factory, and had at all times a genuine interest in my well-being and my success. He was (and still is) the example connected leaders should be striving for. Any time we talked, it was a coaching conversation. It’s always been there in the back of my mind as I strive to be a better leader: "Am I being like Dave?" Coaching should be an expectation of all connected leaders. That is, if the guidelines and definition above are adhered to. If all else fails, just be like Dave. <Adapted from Chapter 6 of my book Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization> Dan's Related Posts:The 20% Leadership ChallengeFive Uses for Virtual Worlds in the WorkplaceDear C-Suite: We Don’t Do Training Anymorethe FLAT ARMY cheat sheetThe Fifteen Habits of a Connected Leader

While I haven’t yet read Daniel Pink’s — the other dp — latest literary offering, "To Sell Is Human" I can glean from the chapter titles — and chapter one in particular — that he believes a) we’re all in the business of selling ourselves and/or our ideas and b) we unknowingly devote a good portion of time doing so. The first chapter is described as follows: We’re All in Sales Now - Some 1 in 9 workers still earn a living in traditional sales. The other 8 in 9 are engaged in "non-sales selling." We devote upward of 40 percent of our time on the job to moving others. Over at Google, there are ‘rumours‘ the oft described "20 percent time" of their engineers is being thrown to the bin. That particular morsel of free time was given to engineers so they could create and/or work on whatever they thought might be useful, cool, creative … even funky. Heck, they brought us AdSense. Ok, bad example, but you like your Gmail account, right? Between Google’s 20 percent time concept, Pink’s new book and my own mental musings, I’ve stumbled across a theory I’d like to test. I’ve never personally worked on my own, as a freelancer or as ‘my own boss’. I’ve always worked for ‘the organization’, be it at a high school, a higher education institution or for the past 12 years in the corporate jungle. What I’ve begun to realize (and observe) however in my time in ‘the organization’ is that employees need to be thinking of their own time management planning in a different light. I believe that in order to be successful in the organization we need to do a much better job of selling, communicating, pitching, positioning and depicting our ideas — and to a degree ourselves — inside the organization itself. The problem we all face, however, is time itself. Ever hear of the term, "we need to do more with less"? Employees may in fact need to devote 20 percent of their time to the activity of selling themselves and communicating their ideas to not only be successful but to feel good about themselves, their roles, their career and their objectives. Over at Hacker News, my thoughts seemed to magically converge when surfing the ole internet in a quest to validate my assumptions. On one hand there was debate amongst anonymous Google engineers who chimed in on the discussion forum regarding Google’s 20 percent time concept. On the other, surreptitious and unknowing discussion of Pink’s new thesis/book. One of the comments from an engineer suggested the following: However, I would agree that it <Google’s 20 percent time> is "as good as dead". What killed 20% time? Stack ranking. Google’s perf management is basically an elaborate game where using 20% time is a losing move. In my time there, this has become markedly more the case. I have done many engineering/coding 20% projects and other non-engineering projects, with probably 20-40% producing "real" results (which over 7 years I think has been more than worth it for the company). But these projects are generally not rewarded. Part of the problem is that you actually need 40% time now at Google — 20% to do stuff, then 20% to tell everyone what you did (sell it). I am a bit disappointed that relatively few of my peers will consciously make the tradeoff of accepting a slower promotion rate in return for learning new things. Promotion optimizes for depth and not breadth. Breadth — connecting disparate ideas — is almost invariably what’s needed for groundbreaking innovation. Take aside the actual point to this engineer’s post — which of course has more to do with the Jack Welch inspired stack ranking model of performance management, which I’ll deal with at another point in time in this space — and you will see a hint of what I’m trying to point out. Part of the problem is that you actually need 40% time now at Google — 20% to do stuff, then 20% to tell everyone what you did (sell it). I’ve posted it again above from the original comment and made it both bold and green for super cool special effects to solidify my point. If that doesn’t work, I swear I’ll electronically mail you a dancing baby animated gif once a day until further notice. As I only personally know an existence within ‘the organization’, I can assure you this engineer is emoting candidly about the nuances of the organization itself. It is happening to you. It is happening to me. It happens to everyone in ‘the organization’. It takes time to make change and it takes an inordinate amount of time to sell and communicate your own ideas for change. As a result, perhaps we all should be sorting through our own time management planning mechanisms and coming up with ways in which to devote 20 percent of our time to this necessary action. I’ll keep an eye out for an AdSense advertisement that might help us both. I’ll read Pink’s new book as well, where he probably has already solved my corporate anthropology nightmare. Dan's Related Posts:The 20% Leadership ChallengeRedefining the Social EmployeeFlexible Working WorksClowning Around - An Important Leadership AttributeGive Piece a Chance

Guest post by Coline Son Lee, Principal & Learning Strategist at Everest CS, Orange County, CA How Adobe has broken the entry barrier to developing eLearning with a more powerful and responsive product! As an eLearning developer, I am often asked by others considering making the leap from developing instructor-led training (ILT) to eLearning what […]

In 1973, Peter Drucker stated in his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, "Management is not culture-free, that is, part of the world of nature. It is a social function. It is, therefore, both socially accountable and culturally embedded." Some thirteen years later, Tom Peters remarked in the article Managing As Symbolic Action: "It requires us, as managers, to get people to share our sense of urgency in new priorities; to develop personal, soul-deep animus toward things as they are; to get up the nerve and energy to take on the forces of inertia that bog down any significant change program." Yet, here we are in 2013 with organizational leadership models that continue to deny the social nature of organizations and wallow in inertia. Our leadership practices remain authoritative. People are disengaged, distrusting and perhaps even disenfranchised. According to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, fewer than 20% of respondents believe leaders are actually telling the truth when confronted with a difficult issue in their organizations. Furthermore, a study conducted by the Human Capital Institute and Interaction Associates in 2013 found only 34% of organizations had high levels of trust in the places they work. And, a paltry 38% reported that their organizations had effective leadership running the show. To cap off a small sliver of dismal data points, research firm Gallup found that over a twelve-year period between 2000 and 2012, the percentage of engaged employees in the workforce has shifted between 26% and 30%. That is, roughly 70% of employees in today’s organizations have spent more than a decade essentially collecting a pay check, an almost Shakespearean spectacle of tragic ambivalence. What if our approach to leadership was to evolve into Drucker’s vision of "socially accountable and culturally embedded" management? Cam Crosbie is the CIO of Equitable Life Insurance Company of Canada, represented by more than 10,000 independent producers across Canada and Bermuda. Cam completely understands the need to "lead without authority." He does so, quite simply, by asking questions rather than barking orders. Before moving forward with a big decision or a large project, Cam makes a practice of asking lots of questions, including, as he says, "even the so called ‘dumb ones’". As a CIO, Cam believes it’s important to reach out to others and inquire before pushing ahead. Cam said, "I hope that in some small way if people see the CIO unashamedly asking the simple questions, it clears the way for clearer and more meaningful discussion." Perhaps the first step toward a better future for your organization is to acknowledge that you don’t necessarily know the way there — and, just as important, to understand that by asking questions, you not only awaken and engage people, you stand to collect more valuable perspective and ideas than you would by starting from a position of authority. Leadership isn’t a 9-5 job — it’s communal, it’s holistic and it’s accretive. It’s time to abandon the long-held notion that the "leader" knows all and should decide everything. A fancy title doesn’t put you above others — it puts you in their service. TELUS, a national telecommunications company in Canada, with $11 billion of annual revenue and more than 40,000 employees worldwide (and where I am head of learning and collaboration), has worked incredibly hard over the past five years to raise employee engagement from 53% to 80%. It did so through myriad actions including the launch of the TELUS Leadership Philosophy. The TLP is an enterprise-wide leadership framework that cultivates a collaborative, social, open and engaging mindset among all employees regardless of rank or title. It encourages all employees to "engage and explore" with one another before "executing." It defines key behavioral attributes such as communicating, collaborating, learning, deciding and adapting such that everyone can speak the same leadership language. In mid-2010, an internal program was born at TELUS entitled Customers First. The overarching goal of the program was to improve the likelihood that TELUS customers would recommend the company. As the program began to gain traction, another idea surfaced: Customer Commitments. Think of the commitments as customer promises — specific actions that any TELUS team member would carry out to help a customer regardless of role. Instead of locking its most senior executives in a room to decide what the Customer Commitments were going to be for the organization, we designed a collaborative process that involved the entire organization. Over 1,000 different examples surfaced over a two-month period. Through focus groups, interactive online polling and voting, the 1,000 were whittled down to a final four. If the culture at TELUS was one that relied on authoritative leadership, the Customer Commitments would have been created in a couple of hours by a few authoritative leaders. Because the culture was healthy, open and participative as opposed to dogmatic and ruthlessly hierarchical, the organization collaborated without authority. This is the work of leadership today: asking questions, involving people, connecting them to each other, creating a platform for their insights and ideas to make a real impact — in other words, unleashing leadership behavior everywhere. In this moment of reflection, as we seek to redefine the work of leadership, let us remember the words of Nelson Mandela: "[Ubuntu is] the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others." If you’re lonely at the top, it’s time to start recognizing and amplifying the contribution of those around you. <originally published to Harvard Business Review blog> Dan's Related Posts:The Social C-SuiteAfter Five Years In My Role We’re Hiring My Replacement. Are You Interested?Future Of Work: A Flat Army Of Open Leadership via A.G. LafleyThe Organization Needs to Ask Itself Tough Questions to SurviveFavourite Posts of 2013 That I Wrote & Published

One of the most compelling new features in Adobe Captivate 8 is the ability to create location based learning, thanks to the added support for Geolocation. In this article I’ll describe my most recent adventure creating a simple location based learning example at the Australia Zoo, just outside of Brisbane. I spent the last week […]

I hope the sun’s rays are delightfully breezing across the soft pigment of your face on this fine Fall day and that you pause — just for a fleeting moment — to reflect on the beauty that is the changing of the guard on our treasured Canadian arbors. ‘Tis a season that smacks of irony; how can something so lovely simply fall to the ground. Ah, but it is life, no? We must fall in order to spring again. How are we to stand tall — like the arbors — if we don’t at times fall? And that rise — like that of the sun — is powerful. It reminds us not to harbor ill-will or a concentrated chagrin. It encourages us to be tall. For every fall there is a spring in our step. And the sun will once again delightfully breeze across your face.   A tree right outside my front window … inspired me to write the prose above. Dan's Related Posts:Which Type of Stonemason Are You?The Mysterium Tremendum LeaderThe Fifteen Habits of a Connected LeaderInterlocutors of 2012 (the goats are better for it)Amidst Uncertainty the Inuksuk Surfaces

Adobe Presenter 10 is an eLearning authoring toolkit that helps you create show and tell video lessons for classroom teaching, distance learning, flipped learning and MOOC sessions. Using Adobe Presenter 10 you can simultaneously capture your screen content and your webcam video. On Windows, Adobe Presenter 10 acts as a plugin to Microsoft PowerPoint. The […]

On New Year’s Eve, 2012, the organization where I ply my trade during the day made a decision to move forward with a deployment of SuccessFactors (an SAP company) and alongside the cloud-based talent applications such as learning, succession planning, compensation, performance amongst others, we decided to also implement Jam - their online collaboration tool. SAP describes Jam as follows: SAP Jam delivers social collaboration where you work, connecting customers, partners, and colleagues with information, applications, and processes to solve business-critical problems and to drive results - all in your business applications, on your mobile device, or in SAP Jam. The description is a bit clumsy and could use some work but if you haven’t used Jam before or seen it in action, I thought I’d take this opportunity to provide a review. Data Points to Date We went live with Jam in late summer of 2013, and thus far I’d say we are relatively satisfied with what it can do, and where we’re at as an organization in terms of adoption and usage. Of those who are part of the first deployment — namely Canadian-based full-time team members — roughly 55% of the organization has visited Jam. From there, we’ve seen the following interactions and contributions occur: Comments - 1861 Groups created - 361 Wiki pages created - 2455 Videos created - 248 Photos added - 1196 We already were a somewhat social savvy organization, so the participation rate thus far isn’t surprising … although I still believe it could be much better. Deployment For those concerned about the USA Patriot Act — and perhaps recent NSA discoveries — our instance of Jam is hosted in the Netherlands, not in the USA. This was an important issue for us, and was accommodated by SAP and their European data center. As Jam is cloud-based — and thus customers can benefit from quarterly enhancements and outsourced hosting responsibilities — the level of customization is minimal. A logo, background colour scheme, and a few other UI changes can be made. To be clear, this isn’t a criticism … it’s simply pointing out the degree of customization should not be an expectation. Jam can be deployed separate or stand-alone to the SuccessFactors suite, so there are some deployment considerations to be careful about. Jam can be populated with users directly — if used standalone — or users can be sourced from the BizX user tables that feed the rest of the SuccessFactors suite. This caused an issue during the alpha and beta testing stages for us as we had Jam deployed first and then the rest of the BizX / SuccessFactors pieces we were launching in stage one. The hurdle was overcome well before we went live to the organization, but the lesson for others is to ensure you sort through the relationship of Jam to BizX if you are launching other SuccessFactors modules at the same time. Overall, Jam deployed to the organization easier than some of the other SuccessFactors modules. (I can report back on that another day) Jam User Experience One of the reasons we did decide to deploy (and purchase) Jam was to begin the process of consolidating some of our existing social tools - and of course to fully embrace the cloud/mobile experience that Jam does provide. Thus far, the user experience within Jam is allowing us to achieve this stated goal. The product itself does accomplish what it purports to do … through the use of micro-blogging, blogging, groups, polls, tasks, photos, videos, wiki’s, bookmarks, tagging, links and the directory … it unifies a collaboration experience and creates an environment of mutual interactions. I can’t possibly go into all the user experience features that are hitting the mark, but I can show a few screen shots to demonstrate my thoughts: The Stream Easily comment, like, add a photo or video, discussion, task, whatever … it’s Twitter on steroids or perhaps more like Google+ but in a more accessible way (see pic) Blogs You can easily scan all blog posts at the company, their level of engagement, etc. (see pic) Groups Dead simple to create, and even easier to scan/browse all of them across your org (see pic) Wikis They can be as colourful and engaging as you like while plugging in to the other collaboration tools within Jam seamlessly (see pic) Notifications Whether through the red bell at the top of the screen or — dependent on how you personally want to set it up — through email notifications, you really can feel synchronously plugged in (see pic) User Empowered Jam truly is user focused; it removes the need for administrators and librarians to carry on the conversation. (eg. someone even created a Flat Army group - see pic - cool!) Improvements I’d Like To See In full transparency, I’ve already relayed these improvements to Sameer Patel — a collaboration colleague of mine if ever there was one — so let’s hope the development and product management teams continue to improve upon its most excellent base. Bi-lateral communication/connectivity between SharePoint and Jam There is a connector available today, but it is one-way only Skills & Projects There is great opportunity for Jam — as it plugs into the Career, Learning and Performance modules of SF — to create the coolest and most useful skills & projects tracking piece possible Photos There must be a way to delineate between photos in the master view that are profile, wiki-based and knowledge/learning related Videos Similarly, videos are an important part of learning, sharing and communicating but there needs to be a better way to categorize and display the videos Learning Module Integration A greater degree of integration with the Learning module is still necessary SAP Stack Integration Imagine having Jam inside the SAP Financials stack when employees are doing their expense reports? This could be a huge win for the traditional SAP ERP stack and its UI unfriendly modules Profile RSS I’d like to be able to add my personal blog’s RSS feed to my personal JAM profile … and more can be brought over from the master record kept within the Employee Profile module of SuccessFactors Full mobile experience The Android and iOS apps are fantastic, and our team members who use these devices are in heaven. BlackBerry 10 and Windows apps are also a need though … and I suspect other large sized organizations will want apps for all device types particularly with BYOD gaining steam Final Thoughts As someone who crossed the chasm of high-tech gadgetry when Atari first came out, SAP Jam is a keeper. It creates a sticky, collaboration layer of communication and knowledge sharing for employees … while not being overly obnoxious with unnecessary features. Its mobile experience is superb — aside from the points of improvement above — and the desktop web-version is intuitive and lush with ways in which to collaborate and gets things done. (the real bottom line of a business) We’re just beginning our journey with SAP Jam, but thus far it’s doing what we wanted it to and we hear of users beginning to push it more and more.  That’s ultimately what you want to see; a user base taking it in directions you never even expected. Post Script Alan Lepofsky did a great job writing about the potential of SuccessFactors two years ago - I wonder what he thinks now? You may also be interested in this article from SAP Insider entitled, "How TELUS Communications Benefits from SAP Jam" Dan's Related Posts:5 Use Cases for a Corporate YouTube in Organizations16 Months of Social Learning Platform Insanity: A RecapThe Social C-Suite5 Use Cases for Badges in the EnterpriseThe Hare, the Tortoise and the Jackass of Social HR

Topic: Optimal Design For Multiple Devices using Adobe Captivate Date and time: Thursday, July 10, 2014 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM US/Pacific Description: In 2013, the sale of smartphones exceeded the sale of traditional phones while the sale of tablets exceeded those of standard PCs. This trend has lead to more clients who want online courses that can […]