Permission to Speak – Leadership Blog – Kelly Vandever Interviews Lauren Maxwell on Social Business Adoption & Results
Permission to Speak
Video Blog & Podcast
Hosted by Leadership Communications Expert Kelly Vandever
Permission to Speak is the video blog and podcast that loiters at the intersections of leaders who want their people to speak up, technology that facilitates connections, and results that serve an organization’s higher purpose.
Our guest for this episode: Lauren Maxwell
Topics discussed:
Empower people in organizations to voice their creative thoughts & take a seat at the table
Social media & social tools
Marketing
Social collaboration
Social business
Culture change
Stories
Social business adoption
Social cloud
Innovation
Speed and Agility
Efficiency
Employee engagement
Client experience
IBM Supply Chain example – Proposal Center of Competence – 600 hours of active collaboration – emphasis, reverse mentoring and flattening the organization – saw a 10% increase in wins
Focus on outcomes – think about the outcomes first
2014 – IBM the first company to surpass 7,000 patents in one year
2014 – 2-year IBM study of collaboration projects found that inventors who worked socially, who worked out in the open and shared their knowledge, were 120% more likely to drive measurable innovation.
Sharing expertise – key practice
Let employees know it’s OK to make a mistake – one of the hesitations of working on a social platform is admitting on a public forum that they don’t know or that they need help. Making that OK in an organization has been very valuable.
Keep the outcomes in mind FIRST.
Top down leadership has to model the behaviors – important piece
Enablement – developing materials to help people with engrained habits experiment with new ones – try something new in their workflow. Need to tell them the benefits and that’s part of the power of the storytelling.
Give them “how to’s” related to their job roles or their particular organization
IBM Verse
Move fast, fail quickly
Being open with how things are going – the value of vulnerability
Begin social adoption with outcomes in mind
Brought 40 new deals into the pipeline representing $1M in revenue
Reduced development time by 50% through collaborating on the platform
Bottom line results that encourage people to take action and to change behaviors
Multiple approaches for adoption – campaign, educational pieces, what’s in it for the individual, the value of sharing knowledge widely and becoming known
People speaking up when they don’t agree with top management
Empowering people to be able to disagree
Letting them know they’ve been heard
Importance of leadership in flattening an organization – and walking the talk
Benefits on the individual level – work flow, eminence, career progression, sense of belonging
Traveling to distant locations – meeting up with local IBMers, ask for recommendations on where to eat and what to see
Learning about projects outside your role
Innovations
Working transparently
Working out in the open
Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager
Ed Brill