Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Citizen Development at Work

Alec Sprague is not an IT guy. His background is in consumer advocacy, but in his position as database developer for Work for Progress, he has instituted a culture of citizen development at the fast-growing nonprofit organization.

“Our organization is scrappy,” Sprague said. “We operate on shoestring budgets to maximize our benefit to society and our return-on-investment for our funders and donors.”

At the beginning of his tenure with Work for Progress, Sprague struggled with outdated systems and felt the organization’s issues were too important to waste time with antiquated technology. “In the past year, we’ve made a more intentional push at digital transformation, moving a lot of our data out of siloed systems and into the cloud so that we could save everyone’s time and productivity,” he told an audience at QuickBase’s #EMPOWER2016 user conference in Nashville, TN.

In the last year and a half, Work for Progress has developed 22 applications, including 12 apps that are each used by more than one department and more than 80 people. This from an organization that doesn’t even have an IT department!

App Progress at Work for Progress

One example of this citizen developer led transformation took place within Human Resources. The group was working with paper files and using a clunky database. Sprague taught a representative to build an app that would bring all of the group’s data online in one place. He followed up with weekly calls to workshop questions and problems. The whole department now uses the app, with several team members working on front-facing dashboards and workflows so that supervisors can take action on benefits and other HR-related items.

A second implementation involved grant reporting. Sprague surveyed end-users and determined that reporting grants fundraising was a complex and confusing process. He worked with the grants department on an application that could quickly and easily report grant proposals, income, and deliverables so the organization could better keep track of fundraising work and communicate with donors.

For more where this came from, please visit the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Geoffrey Moore: Models of Disruptive Innovation

In Geoffrey Moore’s words, disruptive innovation occurs when something that was previously scarce and expensive becomes cheap and can be implemented on a wider scale.

Current examples of disruptive innovations in various stages of widespread adoption are cloud computing (simultaneous delivery and automation of any service), smartphone (communication with anyone, anywhere), social networks (collaboration at any scale), data science (optimization of any digital system), and the Internet of Things (optimization of any physical system).

Moore commented that disruptive technologies leverage basic human drives. For example, people like to help each other for free, so Air BNB started as a volunteer army. It owns no property and employs no property managers. It’s a natural community that digital gave power and a voice.

Moore observed that citizen development was not yet on the list of major disruptive innovations and considered what factors would make it “go big.” He shared that social groups engage with disruptive innovations in different ways and self-segregate into five general groups that comprise the bell-curve, technology adoption lifecycle.

5 Groups of Technology Adopters

Innovators

These are the technology enthusiasts who love new stuff. They want to try everything first and they’re the only ones who will actually read the documentation. The trouble? They don’t have any money. Doc from Back to the Future is a classic example.

Early Adopters/Visionaries

These individuals recognize that an innovation could change everything. They understand the technology and support their innovative friends that make it happen. They bet big and early. Apple’s founding duo – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak – are examples of a visionary and his innovator buddy.

Early Majority/Pragmatists

Pragmatists have a list of problems to solve and they don’t know whether to believe the visionaries. They want to know if their peers are “doing it yet.” This group moves as a herd, so even if a technology isn’t perfect, the market will now grow enough to improve upon it. Suddenly, we move from nobody’s doing it, nobody’s doing it, nobody’s doing it, to EVERYONE’S doing it!

Late Majority/Conservatives

Conservatives are nervous. They ask their trusted advisors: “Tell me the truth, is it really safe?” They feel that they don’t get as much value from technology as other people and will only proceed when the market is well-established.

Laggards/Skeptics

This group will never be fully convinced that disruptive technologies are the way to go, even once they’re mainstream.

The Journey of Disruptive Innovation

In Moore’s experience, visionaries and the early market get a lot of publicity, but that publicity doesn’t necessarily help with adoption. Usually, there is a bit of a lull, which Moore called a chasm, as the early adopters struggle to gain a competitive advantage but early majority buyers insist on waiting.

As pragmatists acknowledge that an innovation can solve a business pain, a niche market emerges. Use cases pop up and word of mouth begins to spread. This is what Moore identified as the bowling pin phenomenon: one pin knocks over the rest and the market grows rapidly.

In some cases, it may even result in a tornado, when everyone suddenly proclaims: “Hang on, why aren’t we doing this everywhere?” Smartphone adoption is a good example of this trajectory. Originally, smartphones were for venture capitalists and drug dealers, but once the tornado hit, people were waiting outside Apple stores by the thousands. The market exploded and the demand for the technology vastly exceeded the supply. Today, the smartphone industry has moved into the age of the customer. Supply now exceeds demand and vendors have to up their service game.

For the rest of this post live from the QuickBase #EMPOWER conference, head over to the Fast Track blog.

Microfeedback: The Future of Management

A few months ago, I attended an employee engagement workshop. The facilitator suggested that millennials require performance feedback more than once a year. “Maybe once a quarter,” she said.

More like once a day!” I couldn’t resist calling out.

I wasn’t kidding. For the 80 million millennials who now make up a majority of the workforce, no news is bad news. If they don’t hear from their managers frequently, they think they’re doing something wrong and quickly grow disillusioned.

Nevertheless, an open door policy in which employees are invited to stop by a manager’s office for extended feedback sessions multiple times a day simply isn’t practical. So what’s the solution?

The innovative concept of microfeedback originated in the consumer space and consisted of collecting a small amount of information from customers at key moments in their shopping experience. The goal was to gather relevant customer feedback for a more accurate assessment of their satisfaction.

Think about this, though. Why can’t the idea of microfeedback be extended to performance management? We certainly have the technology. Intra-company messaging systems like Yammer, Skype for business, and Slack are growing exponentially and with some groups (like millennials), are even  more popular than email.

Imagine that your direct report gives a status update in the departmental meeting for the first time. You think she did an exceptional job, but instead of noting it in her file to be reviewed in six months (or worse, forgetting about it completely), you send her a “thumbs up” emoticon via Slack. The action takes you less than 30 seconds, and yet your employee has a piece of encouraging feedback that will make her day.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Whose Responsibility is Employer Branding?

A recent article from my friends at Recruiter.com asks an intriguing question: who exactly owns the employer brand?

In 2015, employer branding firm Universum released a four-part study, “2020 Outlook: the Future of Employer Branding.” Based on a survey of more than 2000 HR professionals and CEOs from around the world, the study examined where employer branding is today and how employer branding may evolve over the next five years.

Interestingly, the results illustrate that HR and the C-suite can’t seem to agree on who should own employer branding, with 60 percent of CEOs saying it’s their job and 58 percent of HR executives saying it’s theirs.  Uh oh.

This situation rather reminds me of the bystander effect – a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. That’s because every individual assumes that someone else will call for help.

The researchers believe that employer branding efforts are stalemated at many organizations precisely because no one is sure who should be issuing calls to action.  “Since there seems to be a misalignment on who is accountable on both a strategic and operative level, no one has a good answer on how to increase internal engagement on the employer branding topic,” says Jonna Sjövall, vice president of talent strategy and employer branding for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at Universum.

For more insights, check out the SilkRoad blog.

 

Build a Team of Business Olympians

With the summer Olympics saturating every social media site, news outlet and water cooler conversation, there’s one thing every business leader is wondering: “How do we create Olympic-level teams in our company?” Andrew Neitlich, the founder and director of the Center for Executive Coaching and author of the new book, Coach! The Crucial, Deceptively Simple Leadership Skill for Breakaway Performance, offers these eight strategies for leaders:

Understand the type of team that’s right for you

Many leaders talk in vague terms about teams, when sometimes they don’t want a team at all. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith’s book The Wisdom of Teams notes the huge differences between a working group and a team. In a working group, people come to work, do their jobs, and go home. They don’t go out of their way for their colleagues, and basically want to get the job done and be left alone.

A team can increase performance exponentially compared to a working group, but it takes a lot more time, commitment, and effort to become a true team. In a team, people care about each other, go the extra mile, and figure out how to work closely together to perform at the highest levels. Many leaders set up incentives and structures for people to come together as working groups, yet they talk as if they really have a team.

At the same time, there are many different types of teams. In a symphony, everyone works together in perfect synchronicity, following the exact score. Contrast this to a jazz band, which encourages improvisation and creativity and sometimes creates the music on the spot. Getting back to the sports analogy, a winning basketball team has specialized roles for each player, and works fluidly to find openings, pass the ball, and make baskets.

At the other end of the spectrum in terms of coordination, there is the swim team or track team, in which players compete more or less individually in order to help the overall team win. If you don’t define what kind of team you expect, and support people to create that type of team, you won’t get the kinds of results you need.

Ask yourself: “What changes do we need to make in order to attract Olympic-level talent?”

Olympic-level teams have Olympic-level talent. If you want to attract Olympic-level talent to your organization, you need to be the type of organization – and have the type of leaders — where Olympic-level talent would want to work. For instance, hospitals strive towards the designation of Nurse Magnet by putting in place systems and structures that attract the best nursing talent. Every year certain companies make the ‘Best Companies to Work For’ list – and some of them make the list every single year without fail. Whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a smaller business, you can put in place the kinds of incentives, career paths, management team, and culture that encourage people to do their best and also tell others about how great it is to work with you.

For the rest of the post, check out QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

How to Recruit For A Small Business

In a recent Monster survey, 46 percent of respondents "indicated they would actually prefer to work at a business with between six and 100 employees." But despite the desirability, small businesses are at a disadvantage, as many may not have HR departments. They may have a harder time at each stage of the hiring process and have to be creative when it comes to recruiting new employees in particular.

I sought insight from three successful small-business owners who have mastered the recruiting process: Derek Capo, CEO of Next Step China, a study abroad program in Beijing; Erica Douglass, co-CEO of computer repair shop 1Up Repairs in Austin, Texas; and Phillip Oakley, founder and CEO of branding agency Common Giant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

What Business Owners Consider When Recruiting New Employees

Do you have a recruitment strategy? How did you come up with it?

Derek Capo: Our recruitment strategy consists of reaching out to people who are the most passionate about our industry and mission. We reach out to our community, LinkedIn, current employees or online networks on financial websites.

Erica Douglass: We've hired seven people now, all through word of mouth. Some are college graduates, some aren't. Only one of our previous employees was in a technical position before we hired him. We prefer to hire people who are trustworthy and loyal—our two key values—and train them technically. Our employees have diverse experiences and backgrounds, from a restaurant manager to a veteran to a former security guard.

Phillip Oakley: Common Giant's recruitment strategy is almost completely a byproduct of our brand and culture. The agency world can become a revolving door of talent, which we try to avoid. At Common Giant, we care less about agency pedigree and more about your life experiences and how you learn and adapt from them. I personally decided on this strategy years ago after being in the agency world and seeing incredible talent and humans overlooked. We have found the best employees to be ones that reach out to me personally and are direct with their intentions to work with us.

Where have you found your best employees?

Oakley: Most of our employees have come from internal referrals, but some have reached out without job postings to share interest in our culture. We build relationships through our social media, partners, vendors and networking. Our talent pool has spanned from Chicago to as far as the Philippines.

Douglass: We look for people who are willing to learn and will stick with us for the long term. We've found employees from playing video games and belonging to a car club. It's pretty diverse, but the key for us has been getting out of industry meetups and being willing to train people who want to learn what we do.

Capo: We have found the best employees to be ones that reach out to me personally and are direct with their intentions to work with us. This may seem aggressive, but I think it shows motivation and passion.

For the rest of the interview, check out the AMEX Open Forum.

How to Network to Find New Customers

According to the 2015 U.S. Bank Small Business Annual Survey, "67 percent of small-business owners reported that they maintain a social media presence for networking and marketing purposes." But in-person activities, such as belonging to and attending community or Chamber of Commerce events, were less common, despite the fact that using both may help answer the age-old question of how to find new customers.

I tapped three small-business owners—Sunny Bonnell, co-founder of branding agency Motto in Dallas, Texas; Blake George, founder of design firm BMG Media Group in Detroit, Michigan; and Matthew Manos, founder of business consultancy verynice in Los Angeles—to find out how small-business owners can use networking to find new customers.

Why is networking important for small-business owners?

Sunny Bonnell: I've always believed that the best relationships come from exploration and experiences. Networking is imperative as a small-business owner because it forces you to get out and interact with people who can help grow your business.

Blake George: Networking is a great way to expand your sales team without carrying the overhead. More than likely, the individual you talk to may not need your service in the short term. You may think it’s a dead lead, but ultimately the goal is to get that individual educated on your product or service enough to remember you in the future.

Matthew Manos: Many small-business owners have unrealistic expectations when it comes to networking. The thought often is, “Oh, cool, I’m going to go to this event, and then I’ll get a new client tomorrow.” Immediate satisfaction or return on effort is not the point of networking, and frankly rarely happens. Networking is a valuable tool for small-business owners because it allows them to showcase their skills by being of service to others, developing their network’s network and becoming a friendly and familiar face.

What activities do you engage in to keep a continuous pipeline of new customers?

Manos: At verynice, our approach to engaging an audience and keeping a continuous pipeline of new customers and opportunities comes down to creating value, helping others and being present.

George: Engaging current customers is key because the best leads are referrals—your customer base provides credibility on your behalf. Additionally, targeted advertisements on social networks are a great way to advertise to your perfect customer at the budget you can afford with no monthly commitments. 

Bonnell: At Motto, we are incredibly socially minded and PR driven. We are hyperactive on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat and love sharing our work. Small-business owners need to understand what they are trying to achieve and what avenues they must travel to get there. For example, we’re in the early stages of our first book, and a strategic roadmap will be an essential tool to support that initiative.

How do you find time for proactive outreach when you’re incredibly busy?

George: Just like anything else, you make time! Maintaining priorities and efficiency on your current tasks is a game changer. Fine tuning the perfect amount of task delegation to your employees or automated software will help lighten your schedule. Most importantly, don’t procrastinate.

Manos:  As the founder of our organization, a major part of my role [and] job description is to serve as the face for our company. As a result, I speak at an average of 100 events per year. That sounds like a lot, but in reality, this takes up about four hours of my time every week. Those 300 hours per year generate 75 percent of our business leads, but only add up to about two months of full-time effort.

Bonnell: You have to be mindful that work can never be taken for granted and branding, outreach and creating awareness for your business is a labor of love. Sometimes I get up an hour earlier. If I have a little downtime, I'll jot notes down or use Anchor to capture my ideas.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.

Debunking Age-Old Millennial Stereotypes

According to the Pew Research Center and the U.S. Census Bureau, in mid-2015, the millennial generation (comprising those born from 1980 to 1995) became the largest cohort in the workforce.

By now, millennials have been in the professional world since the early 00s. The oldest ones turn 36 this year and have progressed substantially in their careers. A 2014 Deloitte millennial leadership study illustrated that due to demographic shifts, the millennials are entering leadership positions an average of 10 years earlier than prior generations. In fact, at the time of the study, half of all global millennial respondents self-identified as leaders, meaning they had decision-making authority and direct reports.

Although millennials have had sufficient time to prove themselves, negative stereotypes persist. And if organizations want to grow and support multi-generational teams, we must dispose of these myths and treat millennials as smart, innovative and conscientious individuals who are dedicated to changing business for the better.

Stereotype #1: They’re entitled.

One of the most frustrating misconceptions of all is that millennials are lazy and expect to be handed a career without paying their dues. In a 2015 article, the New York Post cited a recent study finding that 71 percent of American adults consider millennials selfish, and 65 percent find them entitled.

“Millennials seem to have helped themselves to an extra portion at the entitlement buffet (which is all-you-can-eat, obviously, because it’s their right),” wrote Post columnist Mackenzie Dawson.

The truth is that millennials are eager to work hard, as long as they are empowered to do so efficiently and on their own terms. They may eschew bureaucracy and the status quo, but a 2014 Bentley Universityfound that 77 percent of millennials believe flexible hours are the key to better productivity and 89 percent regularly check work email outside normal work hours.

“I recognize that hard work will get me far in my career, but I understand the importance of balance and moderation that will lead to a happy life,” said millennial writer Erin Heilman in a recent op-ed for the Baltimore Sun.

Stereotype #2: They lack critical skills.

Many supervisors believe that the lack of basic skills is killing America’s young professionals. “The more I interact with millennials -- whether I'm interviewing them, overseeing internships or giving speeches to rooms of them -- the more I see it.  It's an entire generation that doesn't know how to communicate,” proclaimed theSilent Partner Marketing blog.

“Little emperor syndrome is one of the primary reasons millennials lack soft skills. Adults have catered to their needs their entire lives,” explained Heather Anderson in the Credit Union Times Magazine. Nobody locked them out of the house and forced them to entertain themselves, building imagination, curiosity and trial-by-error decision making skills.”

But, according to 2015 research conducted by DeVry University’sCareer Advisory Board, the skills gap for entry and junior-level professionals is narrowing. Hiring managers are increasingly finding desirable skills like flexibility, business acumen, problem-solving and communication skills in millennial candidates.

Millennials also bring innovation expertise, which is critical for organizations to remain competitive in the 21st century business world.  And, as businesses rely more and more on technology, millennial digital natives help companies navigate the space.

For the rest of this article, a collaboration between Yarden Tadmor of SwitchApp and myself, head over to Entrepreneur.com.