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Tag: work in the 21st century

What about your work is important, valuable and innovative?

Day One at Xoozya (cont’d)

“So what is my first goal”, I said to the HR Director.  “The amount of work on my desk is expanding exponentially and I’ve only been here a few hours.  I must find an avatar, explore the communication system, and map my skills set.”

What are your priorities?  I know you will say get settled, but all employers say that, and they don’t mean it.  What do you want done by when?”

Kick the habit of looking to managers for goals

“Well, Goal One” Peter said, “is to kick the habit of looking to managers for goals.  We are not here to set goals. We provide an arena or framework for you to work, alone if you like and with other people if you wish.  We are a huge company and you can work with whomever you choose and with whomever chooses to work with you.”

Acknowledge your own judgment

“That’s stressful at first because it feels as if you have no boundaries.  And to feel oriented, we all need boundaries.”

“But you do have boundaries.  You’ve made choices all your life.  You’ve attended to some things and ignored others.  In your judg                    ment, some things are important and command your attention.”

“We will ask you to do a third task.  We will leaving your avatar to the end of the month.  In addition to exploring the communication system and thinking about your skill set, you have a third task, which is this.

What it important, valuable and innovative about your current project?

“Write down what you are working on now.  And then tell me

  • Why this project is important to you
  • Why you think is is valuable
  • Why you think it is innovative.

Why do you feel vital and alive when you are working on this project and why do you believe it adds vitality and quality to the way we live?”

“Let me give you an example.

Today, a young post-graduate in Sydney, Marsha Gittens,  published a post in Brazen Careerist on what she wants from work– her career must-haves.  She wants money, good leadership, perks, etc.  We all want the same things but right now the financial benefits of the corporate world are uppermost in her mind because she is making the change from being a student, with all that entails, to being a member of the corporate world, and all that entails.

But financial rewards are not her project.  The move from the student world to the corporate world is her project and we are all better off if we acknowledge that openly.  She will spend the next year or two finding out where she fits into the corporate world and she wants to know how roles are structured, what these roles involve, and how important they are to other people.  At the end of the year she will have done well if she has gained this knowledge that she does not have now.  Much of this knowledge can only be gained from the inside.  From being in a company. From working on a team.  From doing a job and getting her hands dirty.

“So she will not move as a spectator.  She moves as a player and she is looking for assignments that will give her the combination of overall understanding and hands-on experience consistent with her skills.

“You sought membership of Xoozya for reasons you told us when we recruited you, and for reasons you’ll have kept to yourself.  Whatever has been put on the table, at this juncture in your life, there is something you want to achieve and you believe that we are the tool for you to achieve it.  There are resources you expect to find here and that you will look for.

The young Australian post-graduate wants to find her toe hole in the corporate world.  To do that she needs to understand the corporate world.”

“You are mid-career and you want . .  . what?  Describe what you came here to achieve.  What are you working on and why did you believe that we have the resources you need.”

“What we suggest you do is write down your current project and answer those three questions.

  • What about the project is important to you?
  • Why do you believe it is valuable?
  • What about the project is truly innovative?  Why is it so important to be doing this work now and what about it is so special that it cannot be ignored?

Then we’ll talk again.  How about this time next Friday?”

And if you are enjoying this series, please do feel free to join in!

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And PS, if you are new to this blog, Xoozya is an utterly fictitious organization. This series began on the spur of the moment as I started to explored the principles of games design and Ned Lawrence of Church of Ned mentioned how much time people put into designing their avatars, or online identities. Xoozya is an attempt to imagine what an organization would look, sound and feel like if it were run along lines recommended by contemporary management theorists.

And PPS Ned is an online writing coach and is available for hire.

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Conversations don’t scale: pick my team

Day One at Xoozya (cont’d)

Exploring my dashboard

The HR body went about her business, leaving me with my pencil & pad and flask of coffee to spend the next two hours before lunch exploring my dashboard.  378 hits on my CV already.  I started to look.

Open “CV”

Yes, the CEO has looked at my CV and is interested in a project I did, wow, almost 20 year’s ago.  And he is not the only one.  Ah, but this guy is interested in something else.  And this one in something else.  I might be hard pressed to find two people interested in the same thing.  So what do I do?  How do I respond?  What do I say?  What is expected of me?  What is my objective? Let me look closer.

Dashboards as open as Twitter

Well, other people can see my dashboard and I can see thei’s.  Let me look at the CEO’s profile.  Oh, how interesting.  He is following 3452 people.  He must follow everyone.  But he only as 26 followers.  Hmmph – Twitter wouldn’t like that.

Who is following the CEO and more importantly why isn’t everyone else?

I’m looking down his list of followers now.  That seems to be the PA.  That seems to be the communications secretary.  Wow, that’s his wife, and his daughter.  The Financial Director, the Chairman of the Board, the Marketing Director, the odd intern.

Why don’t other people follow him?

Follow Town Hall rather than CEO

Let me look at someone else.  Let me look for a well know name. This will do.  Hmm, quite a few followers and byt not following many people.  Ah, the CEO conundrum explained.  Following “Town Hall” – and yes 3725 people follow Town Hall.  Let’s put that on a To Do list.  Follow Town Hall because everyone follows Town Hall.

  • OK I think I am getting this.  I need to follow people whose movements I need to know about.
  • Then I probably need a sprinkling of people throughout the company to give me some idea of what is happening across the piece.

That’s enough learning for the moment.

Conversations don’t scale

  1. How do you decide who fits into your ‘Dunbar’ groups?  Who are your intimates (who probably are not part of your work group)?
  2. Who is in your hunting band of 30 and how do you know where they are and what they are doing?
  3. Who is in your tribe of around 150 and how do you know enough about what they are doing without being overwhelmed by detail?
  4. And how do you keep abreast of the greater mass of of army and world around you?

I would love feedback on this post.  If you liked it, would you do 1 of these 5 things, please?

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“Open CV” and Friending at Work

Day One at Xoozya (cont’d)

Choosing an avatar to show my noobe status

The HR person was as good as her word.  My first task was to choose an avatar.  I thought for moment that I should choose carefully.

Then I realized that I had been so focused on finding out what the company wanted from me, I hadn’t been thinking about what I brought to the company and I couldn’t express my identity quickly.  So in the interests of time, I picked randomly.  I’m going to change the avatar later anyway.

It was a good choice.  When we looked at the ‘dashboard’ I would use, all the ten basic avatars have ‘noobe’ under each.  Good, so everyone knows I am a noobe.

Breakfast was good and very welcome as I had a long commute and had left home early to allow for delays.  Real coffee, fruit, fresh croissant.  And it goes down on the tab too.  So no need to fuss with cash or card.

Dashboard

After breakfast, we had a look at the standard dashboard that is at the heart of Xoozya’s communication system.

My avatar was already up, waiting for me.  So was my full name.  What I needed to do was choose a screen name, which I could also change later, and choose a strong password.  And the HR Advisor thoughtfully provided a little A6 ring bound notebook for me to keep notes.

The main tabs on the dashboard are similar to Facebook.  Home page which had a heap of stuff already on it, email, and profile.  And three more tabs: blog, CV, status.

Blog, I know – and there was a basic post saying “Hello, World”. Status was obvious at at glance.  It said April 1: Noobe Day 1.

CV was unexpected.  The CV I had used when I applied for the job was loaded up.  At the top of the page were links to my Linkedin Profile, Xing Profile, external blog, Facebook page with links for 30 external sources in all.

Down the right hand side was something more unexpected.   Nope, not adverts, but lists for “friend requests”.

Each request look like a tweet starting like @ceo Saw you facilitated a corporate strategy 10 years ago.  Can you make a note to tell me about it next time you see me?

There were dozens of these.  People all over the company had been going through my CV before I arrived!

What’s more, when I followed the tweet, I went through to their dasboard and their CV.

It seems I had 378 hits on my dashboard before I started work and people spent a total of 85 hours checking me out – and that’s before they followed the links outside.

Well that’s a heap of messages to answer.

And with that the HR body, put a flask of coffee, a clean A4 pad and a pencil pen on the desk and left with a few words of advice.  “Look around until I come back to find you for lunch at noon and maybe delay replying to anyone till you have a picture of who is who and what is what.”

Open CV and Friending People at Work

1   Would you like it if people knew you were coming and had looked through your CV carefully before you arrived?

2   Would you like it if people had sent you tweet-like messages pointing out which aspects of your previous work are interesting to them?

3  Do you like the idea of looking freely at other people’s CV’s (including the CEO’s)?

I would love feedback on this post.  If you liked it, would you do 1 of these 5 things, please?

  • Comment
  • Bookmark the article with DeliciousStumble, Digg or any other service
  • Subscribe using the RSS feed (top right)
  • Subscribe to me in your feedreeder
  • Blog about the post and give me some ‘link love’ by attach this url to the words Xoozya OR Jo Jordan OR flowingmotion

WordPress kindly tells me when you have done that and I’ll be over to read what you have written!

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