Kevan Hall, CEO Global Integration

Thoughts on matrix management by Kevan Hall, CEO, Global Integration

Sustained sponsorship of change is required to make any major change in an organization’s way of working. The matrix is no different.

I was working recently with a group of senior leaders who were communicating their matrix concept to a wider management population.

They spent days at round tables discussing the strategy and the structure with people who were new to the idea. For them it seemed like a tremendous investment in time. The discussions were largely repetitive, going over thinking that they had completed months before. Yet, at this stage of communicating the matrix, this is the whole point.

Senior managers tend to think because they have spent months talking about the strategy and structure, that everyone else is at the same stage in their thinking.  Yet middle management also need time to assimilate and socialise and discuss, to understand why decisions were made and to build real commitment to the communication of the new concept.

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Oct 19 2011

Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration looks at the issue of multiple personas.

A theme I found interesting at this week’s Tweetcamp London 2011 was the separation of public and personal personas.

Regular users of social media tools often distinguish between their professional and personal personalities.

Tools like LinkedIn and Twitter are often used for professional networking and/or because they are inherently public forever for their ‘public’ persona.  You have to maintain a certain discretion and consistency in the public face that you show to the outside world. On the other hand people generally seem to be using tools like Facebook to maintain a personal persona (if there is such a thing) and to keep a strict distinction and privacy between the two.

If you are in the kind of role where your personal and professional persona overlap, this may not be such an issue; but for people who are working in traditional corporations, this is likely to be an increasing trend and people need to make sure that they have set any personal media, any personal persona, behind sufficiently strict privacy controls so that it doesn’t interfere with their professional one – and vice versa.

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Oct 13 2011

Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration, follows yesterday’s post on ‘Tweetcamp and some underlying trends‘ with a question about the tools

There was an interesting discussion at this week’s Tweetcamp on whether it is enough simply to provide social media tools for communication, or whether you need to actively push the use of those tools into teams.  It seemed like the ‘techies’ were of the opinion that the tools were almost enough and that we should wait and see what emerges. Whilst this may work for earlier adopters like them, in business it could require more effort to make sure that these tools are actually being used.

Some organisations are choosing specific groups who have a compelling need for the tools, or an intact team where you can control the adoption of the tools, before rolling them out to a broader population.  It’s also received wisdom in many of our clients that you need to embed the workflow into the tool. Tools like IBM Connections are becoming the place you go to ‘do’ your work, rather than ‘additional’ social media.  The view there is, broadly, that people are already too busy to ‘do’ social media as an additional task, whereas if it becomes the place where you do your work, then people will embed it into their day-to-day operation.

So is it enough to just build something and they will come?  Or do we need to force people into using social media?

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Oct 12 2011

by Kevan Hall, CEO, Global Integration

Kevan Hall at Tweetcamp

At Tweetcamp London 2011,  I joined a number of discussions on the use of Twitter – and social media more generally –  in a wide range of contexts, with participants from education, government, industry, media and a whole other range of disciplines. The cross-disciplinary trends were interesting to observe.

1. Tools like Twitter encourage communication across the traditional silos.  When you reach out and choose to follow people you are interested in, it tends to be irrelevant to functional boundaries. Twitter and tools like it help connect across the organisation and encourage matrix working and communication.  In this environment, the internal communications role needs to be fast,  flexible and facilitate the conversation, rather than trying to control the content.  You could argue that Twitter democratises information within an organisation, in the same way as it has done outside and that is starting to become interesting. Which leads us to the second trend…

2. Social media will tend to flatten traditional hierarchies because it encourages horizontal communication.  It encourages matrix working.  It encourages people to reach out and find someone with an answer, rather than just someone with a job title.

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Oct 11 2011

Global Integration wouldn’t exist if people weren’t working globally.

Along with the opportunities and joys of international working come some challenges – working across cultures, with colleagues we may rarely meet, regular travel, working through technology and across time zones.  We help resolve these through a mix of training and consultancy.

We share many of our ideas in podcasts, blogs and videos, but now we’re laying down a challenge: create a video sharing YOUR ideas about global working. It can be the joys. The pitfalls. The complexities. The funny bits.  It’s up to you.

We’re putting $15k (or £10k/€12,000) as a competition prize for the best ones. That would pay a lot of college costs!

Of course, presentation is part of communication, but we are looking for the best ideas rather than the best production values. Anyone will be allowed to enter fro anywhere in the world – be they from a workplace, as an individual or students. (Ed: Except our own training and consultancy team, of course – that would be cheating)

We’ll be launching the competition next week, so if you want to be first with the details, sign up here: http://www.global-integration.com/video-competition/

Oct 07 2011

When Global Integration was asked to sponsor this year’s London Tweetcamp, it was an easy decision for us. We are always on the lookout for ways for our delegates to save themselves time and effort by taming technology. Having the best part of 300 Tweeters and bloggers to share with next Saturday (8 October) will be a real opportunity to learn and share.

We’re hoping that there will also be some conversations happening around Twitter and HR, around teamwork using Twitter as an enabler, especially in virtual teams, and around communicating across borders – but the learning’s the important bit.

WIN A TWEETCAMP PLACE

We have a couple of spare sponsor tickets as two of our team can’t now come as they’re not in the UK. So if you don’t have one, you may be able to win one of our team places by tweeting us the answer to what global working means to you in the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. (Yes, we know there are tools that allow you more, but this challenge is 140!)

Just tweet at us @globalinteg with the hashtag #gw for a chance to win!

Tweetcamp is a free to attend, tickets only ‘unconference’ being held on October 8, 2011 in Shadwell, London, with an after party held in Bank, London. 

Oct 03 2011

After 15 years training leaders of ever more complex teams in over 300 of the world’s leading companies in 40 countries and delivering over 100,000 participant days of training, the Global Integration team  reached some startling conclusions with major implications for leadership training and development. Global Integration CEO Kevan Hall explains why the situation is still looking bleak:

At risk of repeating myself, leadership training has scarcely changed over the past two decades. If you search for leadership training programs on the websites of even some of the world’s leading business schools you will see approaches that have changed little since the ’70s and ’80s.

Yet leadership has changed radically. Leaders operate in multiple locations, across timezones, with highly diverse groups of employees and in much more complex and fast moving organizations. The gap between the new reality and the old-fashioned skills being taught on  leadership training programs not only means that much leadership training is a poor investment, it may even make things worse .

Take, for example, three key leadership myths often perpetuated within the current systems:

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Sep 30 2011

Kevan Hall offers five basic ways of dealing with the three major workday ‘interruptions’: email, people and ‘phone calls, typical of most working environments, but particularly pronounced when working in a  matrix.

(1)        Limit interruptions to specific times.

To prevent interruptions and allow you to focus, research has demonstrated that checking emails two to four times per day is optimal. Some reports have shown people checking emails obsessively,  over 150 times per day in some cases. If you work in an office, close the door, or agree some signal with your colleagues on when you do not want to be interrupted.

(2)        Be tough with yourself about dealing with interruptions.

Make a quick decision about whether to deal with it immediately or park it and return to your original task. Write it down to free your mind to let go of it.

(3)        Develop a strategy for fast re-engagement with your original task.

Leaving a document open or writing a quick post-it of where you were up to before dealing with the interruption can help you quickly pick up the task again.

(4)        Interruptions don’t need to become major distractions.

When an interruption happens, don’t allow this to drag you into two or three other tasks (which is what usually happens). If the original task was important – get straight back to it and complete it.

(5)        Have a plan.

A clear plan or prioritised action list prominently displayed at your workspace can help stop you bouncing into activity for its own sake.

Don’t forget that prevention is better than a cure: we can often prevent the interruption in the first place by not checking emails so regularly, by working from home, or putting on voicemail to screen calls.

Further information about building the people capability to make complex organizations faster, less expensive to run and more satisfying to work in can be found on the Global Integration website and blog.

Sep 26 2011

Global Integration CEO Kevan Hall’s article on trust as a barometer of management health started many conversations. Here he summarises, in ten points, the essentials of trust building within a team:

1. Demonstrate your trust in individuals, to them and also publicly  -  people need to see that you are offering trust first.

2. Reduce controls on others: this builds and demonstrates trust; it also builds their confidence (self-trust) to do things for themselves.

3. Encourage participative decision-making: allowing people to agree objectives and constraints commits them to the deliverables rather than having them imposed

4. Delegate authority  - and the responsibility that goes with it. (One without the other undermines trust.)

5. Discuss and negotiate clear mutual expectations. (Trust may be undermined by unspoken assumptions not being met.)

6. Encourage open communication.

7. Allow others to influence you as a manager.

8. Offer rewards and sanctions for trustworthy and untrustworthy actions.

9. Help people to learn new skills and capabilities: this builds trust from both sides.

10. Be accessible in a timely manner when people need you

Sep 21 2011

Acorn's pool - vital facility for sick children

Our team of elite consultants and trainers here at Global Integration can lay claim to a certain degree of sporting prowess, even boasting an ex Olympian in our midst.

So it’s not entirely surprising to learn that matrix management specialist Phil Stockbridge is taking to the streets for his latest challenge: running  a half marathon – the BUPA Great Birmingham Run – on the 23rd October (2011)  in aid of Acorns Children’s Hospice.

Hospices provide invaluable care and respite, and Acorns provides care and support specifically for children and young people who have life limiting or life threatening conditions, and provides vital support for all the family. It costs £750 per day (around $1200 at today’s rates) for each child’s care, over 70% of which comes from community initiatives like Phil’s run.

(For those of us who know and love Phil, it’s somewhat  less surprising to note that this is the chosen charity of Burton Rugby Club, to which Phil offers keen support.)

If you’d like to sponsor him for this great cause, you can do so on his Just Giving page, here: http://www.justgiving.com/PhilStockbridge

We’ll let you know how he gets on.

Sep 18 2011