There Are No "Soft" Skills - There are Only Hard Skills and Harder Skills

For years, I've cringed whenever I hear some expert or another talk or write about so-called "soft skills", which are nearly always positioned as supplemental - a second tier of value after the so-called vital hard skills - in other words, a bonus!

From my perspective, there are no soft skills. There are only skills. Some skills are hard. Others are even harder. Allow me to elucidate.

First of all, I do not intend to demean the importance and difficulty of hard skills. People put years of effort and often times they invest a large amount of money into working toward and attaining specialized skill sets that are vital to fulfilling professional roles and helping organizations succeed. As Seth Godin noted in his post Let's Stop Calling Them Soft Skills, "We can agree that certain focused skills are essential. That hiring coders who can’t code, salespeople who can’t sell or architects who can’t architect is a short road to failure. These skills — let’s call them vocational skills — have become the backbone of the HR process." 

In my own hiring practice, hard skills are an important and necessary ingredient, but (and this is important) hard skills are not the deciding factor in any hire. In fact, if I take one step back: When evaluating any open position, I will work with the hiring manager to determine the basic skill set that is truly necessary for a new hire to be able to take on the responsibilities of the job. During this discussion, we must keep in mind that many hard skills can be taught - if someone is Smart and Gets Things Done, it is a relatively straightforward process to get them up to speed on a new technology, workflow, or process - even if any of those happen to be complicated and/or challenging. 

Hard skills can be achieved by diligent effort and applied practice. Hard skills - most of the time - can be measured directly by another person who already has those skills. Generally, you can't bluff your way through claiming a specific hard skill - anyone who already possesses that skill can tell almost immediately that you don't actually know what you are talking about. In terms of my hiring practice, we determine the foundational skills and then evaluate the pool of candidates fairly early on with those in mind - basically using hard skills as a screening tool to reduce our set of candidates to those who have demonstrated the necessary competencies to do the job. After that, the much more difficult process of interviewing and evaluating for Harder Skills begins. Perhaps in a future post, I'll explore methods for doing that.

One of the things that makes it very hard to know if someone has the Harder Skills is that they are extremely difficult - if not impossible - to measure in any objective manner. There are no simple ways to ascertain things such as psychological attunement or someone's capacity for cognitive synthesis (e.g., deriving a set of abstract relations from observations of conditions that seem unrelated and possibly random or chaotic to others). Furthermore, even people who have attained a level of expertise in the Harder Skills are capable of getting it all wrong, depending on a whole slew of variables (e.g., alertness, empathy, connectedness, psychological defensiveness, relatedness, emotional intelligence, situational constraints, cultural differences, the immutability of particular interpersonal ecosystems - just to name a few).

Let's hear from a couple of writers who seem to agree with me.

In Busting the "Soft Skill" Myth, Teri Lupburger writes "In many companies today all over the world, you still hear the term “soft skills” referred to by leaders, managers and HR professionals. It’s a myth that just won’t die. Actually, there is NO such thing as soft skills. The so-called “soft skills” people refer to such as the ability to communicate effectively, develop alliances, enroll others into a vision, navigate uncertainty with ease, coach team members, build trust – just to name a few – are the absolute hardest thing to do well. Sure, you can learn math or engineering or medicine or finances and become very competent at those skills, but if you can’t get others to consider your ideas or follow your lead, then these “hard” skills won’t take you or the organization very far." (emphasis is mine)

In a Calgary Herald article titled There's No Such Thing as a Soft Skill, Gerry Turcotte wrote "There is nothing soft about listening well and bringing diverse viewpoints together. And there is definitely nothing soft about an ability to think creatively and outside the box by drawing on complex philosophies, theories, theologies and cross-cultural perspectives. On the contrary, these are the hardest skills to master." (emphasis is mine)

Still, the idea persists across sectors that Hard Skills matter most and that Soft Skills are a nice little bonus when you can find them in a person.

Here is a typical chart putting Hard and Soft skills in opposition, and over-simplifying the latter. Source: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/hard-skills-vs-soft-skills-2063780

I recently came across a post by Yonatan Zunger, titled Hard and Soft Skills in Tech. He wrote "I’ve recently seen a lot of very anxious responses from people in tech at anything which suggests that their “core skills” may be devalued, especially in favor of other skills which they haven’t spent their lives on. Most importantly, this shows up in the argument over “hard” versus “soft” skills. That anxiety is itself a signal of how important this has become. But there’s a hidden assumption we’ve been making that (I suspect) has increased the anxiety far out of proportion: and maybe perversely, it comes from not taking soft skills seriously enough." Later in the post, he continues with "The fact is that the kinds of “soft skills” we’re talking about aren’t the ones that come for free to anybody; they’re not the things taught in “manners classes” or in fraternity hazings. They come from studying people, paying attention to them, and understanding what they need even when they can’t express it themselves — and as such are as brutally difficult a set of skills to acquire as any other professional expertise. Our habit of treating them like they’re not “real” skills, of trying to deprofessionalize and devalue them, does us no favors; when we’re called upon to do them ourselves, we quickly find out that they’re not trivial." (emphasis is mine)

I think that Zunger is really onto something here. First he observes the anxiety that technically competent people experience when they are confronted with a need to demonstrate a set of skills for which they have been ill-prepared. This is a natural response of course, and it's motivated by a primal fear of being asked to do something that we cannot possibly do (or at least feeling that way). Anxiety and fear lead quickly to defensive denial, avoidance and possibly de-valuation. These responses are relatively primitive ways that we as humans respond to internal discord. And more often than not our defenses become exaggerated enough to become maladaptive. Sigh.

There is another challenge in all of this, and it's another hard one: the element of insight. What I am referring to here is the ability to really look at yourself, examine your inner workings, unpack your conscious and unconscious ways of being in the world - all of which then lead to learning about yourself to create an opportunity to learn and grow. This is tough stuff. People spend years in therapy and only scratch the surface of really understanding themselves. Again: a Harder Skill.

Before I close, I want to make sure to express optimism and hope about Harder Skills. They aren't magical, and no one I've ever heard of was somehow miraculously born with a powerful set of Harder Skills. They can be learned, practiced and improved. And that can be a lifelong process. 

But how?

There are few ingredients that help. A growth mindset is a great place to start (by the way, a growth mindset may be seen as a Harder Skill in and of itself, capable of being learned). It also helps for us to be dedicated to a pursuit of lifelong learning - fed by healthy doses of curiosity and open-mindedness. Also, it helps if we see our career challenges as they evolve over time and apply ourselves to learning what we need in order to be successful (for example, and I realize this is a vast oversimplification: We often get promoted based on demonstrating our Hard Skills until one day we find ourselves in management positions - where it's not longer about finding answers, but instead it's about finding the right questions and taking care of the people who will find the answers. I hope you can see that the skills needed for the latter are quite different from those needed earlier in our careers).

So what to do?

I recommend a couple of things.

1. Stop using the phrase "soft skills", please. In and of itself, this label diminishes and disrespects the Harder Skills, which are vitally important to leadership and success. And don't let others get away with labeling things as "soft skills". 

2. Work on your Harder Skills. There is no simple formula for doing this. I found some good ideas in an article by Roy Saunderson called Sharpening Soft Skills With Situational Learning. (I know, I know - "soft skills" - aargh!) Among the recommendations: mentoring, apprenticeship, group learning, and game-based learning. These are all great doorways to open as you work toward building your Harder Skills and growing your career.

Note: This post also shared via LinkedIn

The Oppressive Weight of a Meeting-Heavy Culture

According to Atlassian, US employees average 62 meetings per month, and half of those are unproductive. Anecdotally, I took at look at the last 4 weeks on my own calendar, and I count 68 meetings - and I even took one day off and my place of work was closed two days! In other words, it could have been an even higher number. So naturally I've been musing a lot on meetings. The image above represents a fairly typical week for me (aargh!).

The kind of numbers listed above illustrate a workplace dilemma that many of us face constantly: we are subsumed in a "meeting culture" that seems to devour our time and energy while at the same time stagnating our collective productivity and deflating our individual spirit. Ugh.

But wait, meetings are "work" aren't they? I suppose so, at least technically You're getting paid, and so is everyone else in the meeting. That cost can be calculated, of course. For example, if you've got 10 people in a meeting, and their pay averages $50 per hour, that's $500 spent. If it's a weekly meeting for one year (40 work weeks), that's $20k spent - now tell me, was the outcome of those meetings worth that amount? By the way, that same infographic from Atlassian mentioned above purports to measure a total salary cost of unnecessary meetings for one year in the US at $37 billion! Ouch.

Most of us do our daily work in some part of the knowledge economy - we no longer forage for nuts and berries, or till the soil, or assemble gadgets in busy factories. In fact, most of us no longer focus on much of anything physical in our daily work - we don't make stuff with our grubby little hands at all. Instead, we plant ourselves in chairs and use our minds and knowledge; we contribute ideas and strategies; we communicate and influence; we seek things like "customer engagement" or "experience design" or "marketing strategies"; we send lots of emails and try oh-so-hard not to log into our social media accounts - unless of course your daily work involves reaping and sowing on the fertile plots of social media platforms!

I do not believe that our businesses are inherently evil. I do not think that a meeting-heavy culture was concocted by an exclusive club of sadistic CEOs hell-bent on torturing employees. In fact, I'm going to assume the opposite: most of us work in places that sincerely try to succeed and really do want to employ smart and dedicated people, and to treat them well. That is, our organizations are well-intentioned, and we as staff strive for clear communication, transparency, and strong collaboration. If people are working together, well then we're on the right path, correct?

Perhaps. It's just that little part about working together: it leads to meetings, meetings and more meetings. We have to meet, how else can we know what's happening and coordinate our efforts? But, then again, most people agree that meetings suck!

Why can't we seem to stop having meetings?

Because we secretly adore them!

According to Ron Ashkenas, author of Why We Secretly Love Meetings, we find some reward in our meetings. Namely, meetings are social events where we get to interact with others, feel included, keep informed, and measure our importance (she who is invited to the most meetings is champion!). Thus meetings fulfill some of our less-rational and more-emotional or -interpersonal needs. Ashkenas writes, "... just complaining about too many meetings or poorly run meetings won’t do much good. Like moths to a flame, we’ll keep coming back, no matter what we say".

Yes, almost everyone agrees that meetings are often terrible and nonproductive. Why? Anna Johansson lays out her perspective in Why Meetings Are One of the Worst Business Rituals. Ever. Please read her article for more detail, but in essence she outlines the factors that make meetings horrible because they interrupt our workdays, often stray off-topic, include the wrong people, pull others away from their work, cost money and most-importantly are often spent talking about work instead of just doing work.

As I was reading her article, I was thinking of another factor that weighs heavily on my mind as I strive to lead a workplace that is less hierarchical: a meeting-heavy company culture may undermine each person's sense of autonomy and agency; that is, employees perceive that they are NOT empowered to make any decisions without some kind of meeting beforehand. That's precisely the opposite of what I aim to achieve with my team, so I need to be very intentional about the meetings that I call.

Psychology - my educational background - warns us of many potential paths to madness. One of the most-common ways to make people go crazy is to say one thing but do another. This happens so often with meetings. In his article The Madness of Meetings Dan Pontrefact weaves a tale about a particularly vital meeting involving "sensitive matters" that required the attendance of senior leaders who were very busy. The difficulty in scheduling this meeting, dealing with pre-meeting planning, and repeating the meeting all add up to frustration, wasted time, and perhaps most-importantly a deep suspicion that the meeting was never actually vital nor sensitive to begin with! In your organization, calling a meeting mandatory or top-priority had better actually mean something, or your staff will quickly see you as the child who cried wolf.

Maybe we could focus on simplicity a bit, and at least see some improvement?
How to Change a Bad Meeting Culture describes a number of familiar problems with meetings, and offers tips on how to correct them. My favorite from the list references Parkinson's Law of Triviality - wasting time on trivial details while the important decisions remain untouched. The author Kevin Kruse suggests opening a meeting with "quiet time" as practiced at times by Jeff Bezos of Amazon - giving people the time and space to develop ideas focused on what's important. Please read the article for the the longer list of problems and potential fixes.

Another important aspect of effective meetings is making sure that there are actions agreed upon and carried out. Read: Two Things To Do After Every Meeting

At the very least, we should all take the time and learn what is needed to get better at this meeting thing. Getting the basics down pat and using them consistently goes a long way toward success: How to Run an Effective Meeting

And we should not schedule any meetings that are not actually important and necessary. Don't meet just to meet, and don't meet just because a meeting is on your calendar! In How to Finally Kill the Useless, Recurring Meeting author Ryan Fuller writes, "We’ve all been part of a bloated weekly meeting. You know the one, with 20-plus attendees that’s been happening every week for years; where everyone attends because they’re supposed to, but no one gets much value out of it; where everyone multitasks or wishes they were somewhere else (or both) ... So how do you fix it?...The key is to engage all employees in a new way of thinking about time management and to encourage them to hold themselves and their colleagues accountable."

One final set of thoughts for today. What to do when you keep getting invited to time-wasting meetings? Author Dorie Clark tries to help in her post How to Get Out of a Meeting You Know Will Waste Your Time in which she advocates for each of us to be intentional about choosing meetings to attend. For example, she lists questions you might consider in deciding whether to attend a meeting:

• What is the exact topic?
• What is the timing and location?
• What is the duration?
• Who else will be in attendance?
• What decision needs to be made at the meeting? (This helps you easily determine whether the intended meeting is high-value.)
• Why, specifically, do you need me to be there? (This forces them to articulate a clear reason. If they say “To keep you updated,” then you can simply tell them to do this post facto by sharing the minutes with you.)

She urges us to push back on a meeting-heavy culture, to protect our valuable time, because "Meetings are the scourge of modern business life ... Many professionals attempt to cope in a passive-aggressive way, showing up late to meetings or fiddling with their gadgets instead of listening. But that may be the worst choice of all, because it perpetuates an office culture where it’s OK to tune out your colleagues and disrespect others’ time" - while sitting in yet another meeting!

Bottom line: we need meetings, but it's crucial that we make them purposeful, useful and - for goodness' sake - SHORT!

Organizational Structures: Time for Some Change

In his post Toward a More Human-Centered Museum: Part 1, Rethinking Hierarchies my colleague and friend Mike Murawski writes "In order to become social organizations that achieve positive impact in their communities, museums need to be rethinking their internal organization structures. Most museums rely on deeply ingrained, top-down structures that rely on territorial thinking, defined protocols, and traditional reporting structures based on academic degrees, power, silos, division, and oppression".

Powerful stuff. And topics that I've been thinking about for some time as I've worked hard to evolve my own leadership practice. I think that Mike and I agree on the human-centered part - in fact I've built my nonprofit career on working hard to find the best ways to bring people and digital together within our sector to drive positive change, reach more audience, open the doors to our institutions, increase transparency and ultimately help cultural heritage thrive. I've had ups and downs for sure, but my commitment to people will never waver. Every day I apply all that I absorbed during my graduate studies in clinical psychology to recognize people as individuals and help them apply their talents and hard work in the most-effective ways.

In this post, I'd like to zero in on organizational structures. It's a topic that I often address when I'm speaking in public about leadership and innovation. As a connection to my long-ago clinical training, there is a sort of "physician heal thyself" theme here. That is, "The moral of the proverb is counsel to attend to one's own defects rather than criticizing defects in others" credited to Hirsch, Kett, Trefil (2002). The hard work of becoming a social organization connected to our communities must begin with a hard look in the mirror and new ways to imagine ourselves as a type of collaborative community. And a community is built on connections.

So let's examine connections. A critical success factor for museums might be conceived of as “… a networked org structure in which flexible, multidisciplinary teams work together toward shared objectives”  (from Museum Transformation Strategies in the Digital Age, Tasich, 2014). The term for such a networked structure is small world network. These arise organically in any connected system, and are seen by many as the next step in the evolution of business structure - it empowers all individuals to be in-the-know and to work together as needed. What matters most in this model are clustering (small groups of individuals working together closely and focused on a goal) and path length (the distance, or number of links, between clusters). Shorter path length increases communication and enables alignment and productivity across an organization. Thus, a small world network enables success.

Source: https://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume6/TsvetovatCarley/net50_6.jpg

Yet, traditional leadership models have been extremely hard to shake. Even where I work, at Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), we’ve got one of these diagrams (your place of work probably has something similar).

As you can see, there's clearly a boss at the top, then a few silos have been set up, each with its own senior manager, then a list of functions that must be staffed. Pretty standard stuff. But I have a question to ask: what’s the difference between the diagram above and the one below?

I mean, really, what's the difference? Aside from titles and the number of boxes and other picayune details. Both of these so-called "rake" diagrams represent the detailed version of the old, classic pyramid structure. This way of conceptually an organization expresses a clear power relationship and specifies centralized control. Tradition!

Then again, let's just admit that our traditional model of “leadership” is thousands of years old!

So, my next question: is this really what we need in our organizations? Do we think of our staff as unruly peasants who must be dominated and controlled by vigilant stewards who answer only to nobles and royals? In fact, there is plenty of research and writing that this kind of structure has proven to be counter-productive in today's era of the knowledge worker.

We don't have any peasants! We do have extremely smart and dedicated staff, all of whom have ideas about how we could best be providing delight to our customers. We take the time to hire the best people we can find - but then we express in our structures that they are of lesser value than anyone else. Ugh.

Museums and other cultural heritage organizations can evolve. To be honest, the small world networks already exist, the challenge for leadership is to encourage, support and activate that network.  Here is a very simplified but real-world example of our most vital resource: our PEOPLE. People are the network nodes, and people often work on more than one team. Those people – and the connections between teams – create a small world network. The closer the connections, the higher the effectiveness of the entire organization.

Small world networks matter, in practical and realistic ways. Let's examine this from one particular angle: who in your organization is best-positioned to make change?

In a traditional pyramid structure, power is concentrated at the top (in the example below, culled from the Harvard Business Review, that would be Lukas). In comparison, people at the bottom of the stack like Jack or Sofia are each just one of the minions. The organization in this case would expect Lukas to be the agent of change. After all, he's got the responsibility and the power, so he must be able to push for change. Everyone else should just fall in line - they report to him!

But if we were to take a deeper look at the organization's actual small world network, our perspective would change drastically. In the example below, looking at the informal network shows us that someone named Josh is critically important to the entire operation - even from his lowly perch on the traditional org chart. A lot of people work closely with Josh, they depend on him, they TRUST him. If we simply recognize this and empower Josh to be the person to lead transformational change, we will be much more likely to succeed. The organization ends up with people thinking "Hey, Josh thinks this change is a good thing, Josh is smart, maybe we should give it a try!", as opposed to people instinctively rebelling against the perceived unfair power of "Lukas and his senior management cronies who have no idea what we go through day after day!"

So where does this lead us? I'd like to share a bit about some of the ways that we've been re-conceptualizing our org structures here at Mia, specifically for the Media and Technology Division (for which I am held responsible). We've got our standard rake diagram, which shows who's in which department and who reports to whom. Pretty standard HR stuff, right. But it also conveys a number of the issues that Mike Murawski explored in his post: explicit and implicit power relationships, hierarchy, silos, value, etc. Clearly, as you can see:

I am the lord of all I survey - you shall obey!

But wait, I don't think of myself as a lord at all. And the staff within the MAT division is outstanding - dedicated, smart, capable, and each with specific knowledge that I simply do not possess. They know far more about their specific jobs and how to do them than I ever will. Why would I ever even attempt to demand obedience? We are going to be so much more successful when they set their own goals, their own working methods and establish their priorities - and do so with one another through conversation and consensus based on the mission and strategic plan. My real job is to foster that conversation, not to bark out orders. So if this diagram is not an accurate depiction of how it all works, I've been trying to think of other ways to describe MAT and the way we work.

One version is this set of concentric circles (below). Now we see the focus on our core strategy, which has two key principles: Delight Customers and Help People. Everything that we do aligns with those core principles. Then as we move outward, we can see how we deliver on those core strategies, what we actually deliver (sorry about some internal lingo in that ring), and finally the names of people lined up with their primary areas of focus.

By using this concentric ring approach, we've begun removing the hierarchy (akin to the "flower" diagram from Oakland Museum of California described in Mike's post). The MAT division appears to be one team, all working toward shared goals. No single person is indicated as more important or more powerful than another - all have value, all have important contributions to make.

But still there's something missing. Like the small world network - the connections between people and projects, the impact they have on each other. And then there is an element of reality that gets swept under the rug with this diagram: no matter how we wish we could deny it, power is a real thing, it exists in every group of people, and it is formalized in titles, supervisory relationships, years of experience, etc. To pretend that everyone is somehow exactly the same on every measure is to be naive, or worse yet delusional. Hmm.

One day when thinking about the mutual impact we all have on each other in the workplace, I started thinking about power as a kind of gravity. Everyone in the workplace has some degree of power. That power might come from obvious variables I listed in the paragraph above. Or it could be related to any number of other variables, some potentially unconscious: gender, height, accent, background, race, age, attractiveness, extroversion/introversion, role, knowledge, etc. The bottom line is that we all size each other up all the time, and we make snap judgements about power, with and without even knowing it. Power has a kind of gravity, in each of us.

Please bear with me here, I realize this is a bit of a reach and the analogy isn't perfect - but I ended up thinking about asteroids

Asteroids are bodies, in motion. They have direction, but they are also pulled and pushed by the gravity of other bodies. The sun sits at the center of the solar system, and the asteroids orbit around it. There are planets that are also in orbit, and the gravity of the planets influences the path and movement of each and every asteroid, as well as that of other planets. Finally, asteroids influence each other. They pass by, rotate around each other, they even collide sometimes. Bigger asteroids exert more influence, but even a smaller asteroid can subtly re-direct a bigger one. Of course, proximity plays a part, the closer one body is to another, the more intense the influence.

I think this can work, at least to some degree, as a way to see our work places. The sun is the mission and vision, the planets are the ambitious activities we take on, and we are all asteroids, dancing around and bouncing off one another while we speed around trying to stay on course.  

 Seen from this lens, even a short conversation with an intern might actually steer me in an entirely new way that I would never have considered on my own. And vice versa. That indicates mutual influence, while recognizing that each individual has unique characteristics, including power.

I recognize that there is so much more that could be explored on this topic. For instance:

• How to diagram the small world networks? 
• How to conceptualize the ebb and flow of those networks and their multiple relationships?
• How to think about the Butterfly Effect - the idea that even very small events can lead to large and unanticipated outcomes? 
• and more ...

I'm no expert. I consider myself an avid student of leadership, of how people interact, of how organizations array themselves in an attempt to be successful. I aim to keep learning. Thanks Mike for helping me challenge several assumptions and think of new ways to demonstrate the respect, admiration and shared power that I strive to show as a leader. It's a work in progress, as am I. 

Group, Team or Ensemble?

I attended the Premier CIO Forum in the Twin Cities last week. Among the many speakers during the day was Kimi Hirotsu Ziemski, of KSP Partnership She and her firm seem to be focused on helping organizations work more effectively. Kimi shared an intriguing take on teams (among other topics, including workplace culture and more - but today I'm just going to ruminate on her little aside about teams vs. ensembles).

To set the context, let's consider four ways that we humans organize ourselves and perform actions:

1. Individual
2. Group
3. Team
4. Ensemble 

Individual

Perhaps this term is self-explanatory? You, me, anybody capable of independent thought or action - we are individuals. I realize that no one (except maybe for a few hermits) actually lives a life that is entirely "individual", but I would argue that even the most group-oriented person still exists as an entity, an individual, with unique experiences, emotions, thoughts and actions. In the workplace, the individual manifests in, well, gettin' assignments done! Head down, focused, putting in the effort needed to succeed. Haven't we all experienced something like this: I'm at my desk, up against deadline, hammering away on a document or other content, intently focused ... at some point I finally take a breath and look up, only to realize that everyone in the office has left for the day and I'm here all alone!

Group

A group is more than one individual, together making up some kind of identifiable unit. In the workplace, that might be a department, division, or even the entire enterprise. Groups are simply people who have been put together - and the fact is that they may or may not really work well together at all. If I understand the distinction, people may belong to a group but still generally work independently of one another (e.g, you do your stuff, I'll do mine). Sometimes a group is a long-term arrangement (in your workplace, your activities may vary, but you generally don't switch departments very often - if at all); other times a group may be formed for a limited time or focused campaign, especially when individual tasks - while important - may not have much impact on each other. If you dig around the available information about groups, you'll find that most researchers agree that a group is generally in need of supervision, or else it can veer off-course quickly. Groups are also most-effective when individual goals are clear to each person.

Source: http://bit.ly/2yf6Nyn

 

Team

Let's move on to teams. Again, a team is made up of more than one individual, but the distinctions are: everyone on the team has shared goals and works together to achieve them - the old "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" paradigm. Historically, teams were formed to focus on a short-term deliverable, although in today's workplace I am increasingly seeing "team" thought of as a longer-term commitment to strong collaboration, particularly when the work is cross-functional - bringing talents together from across an organization's departments. Ideally each person on a team recognizes the expertise and talents of the others. A strong team is reactive and capable. It is assembles the talent needed to gets things done efficiently. A team probably need less supervision than a group, especially if the team is clearly high-performing.

For most us, the idea of a well-formed and high-functioning team is the pinnacle of workplace dynamics. Hooray!

Interestingly, Kimi took a different tone. She mentioned teams, but saved her reverence for ensembles.

Ensemble

As I understood Kimi, she was referencing an Ensemble as a sort of elevated form of Team.
Dictionary.com says that Ensemble is a noun, with several related meanings. I'll pick and choose a couple to support the concept here:
1. All the parts of a thing taken together, so that each part is considered only in relation to the whole.
2. In music - the united performance of an entire group of singers, musicians, etc.

Kimi talked about an ensemble as a unit that seemed to have a natural and almost effortless collaboration. She noted that people in an ensemble have a full and deep commitment to one another and are mutually supportive - they know that they need each other, they anticipate needs (proactive), and they achieve top performance. She even implied that an ensemble has an intuitive dynamic, where the people seem to sense where they are going next even if it's a new direction. That made me think about music and Jazz Ensembles - sometimes the ensemble is just jamming away, riffing on themes but essentially making it up as they go along - and yet to the audience it all seems flawless. I think that's the kind of ensemble performance she was thinking about in a workplace.

As I was listening to her, I was associating her ideas of the ensemble to two different concepts that I've thought a lot about over the years: self-organizing teams, and Tuckman's ideas on how teams form and perform.

Self-organizing Teams

• A group of motivated people working together toward a goal (sounds familiar).
• Have the ability and authority to make decisions (wait, that's different).
• Manage their own work as a group.
• Don't wait for a leader to assign work.
• Have a stronger sense of ownership and commitment.
• Communicate with each other, and make commitments to the team.

The modern-day workforce is very different than preceding generations. We tend to be knowledge workers, not drones doing repetitive tasks. And knowledge workers expect—fairly, in my opinion—to have a say in what they are focused on (initiatives) and how they do their work (methods). That attitude requires flatter, non-siloed structures and cross-functional collaboration the likes of which organizations have never really seen before. Effective leadership in this environment is fundamentally different—it is no longer about being “in charge” and much more about empowerment and transparency - movement toward lean and agile practices—an evolution that will continue to be a challenge for the next few years.

Bruce Tuckman on Team Formation

All the way back in the 1960s, Bruce Tuckman was conceptualizing stages of team building. I'd wager at some point along the way you've encountered the famous forming-storming-norming-performing paradigm

Source: https://performancelifestyle.com/2017/04/25/tuckmans-four-stages-of-team-development/

I think it's interesting to compare this to Kimi's hierarchy. Is it possible that - in her estimation - a Team is essentially in the Norming phase, while an Ensemble has reached the Performing stage?  There does seem to be overlap, particularly in the language that each is using to describe their framework. I think the two points of view are actually mutually reinforcing.

So where does this get us? I'm not entirely sure, because honestly this post is more of a rumination than some kind of a lesson. I think we can observe that leaders and researchers have been thinking and writing about people working in groups for a long time, and (at least in my view) have come to rather similar conclusions. It takes more than just putting people together to make a high-functioning team. However, when you select the right individuals, put them in a group, establish clear goals that everyone buys into, give that team the autonomy and responsibility to organize and complete their work, then we observe the best performance.

I hope to help form many ensembles before I ride off into the sunset!

Further Reading
Differences Between Groups and Teams
Tuckman's Stages of Group Development
Self-organizing Teams

The Familiar Psychology of Workplace Conflict

Over the years,  I have come to appreciate and understand that I have benefited throughout my career from the training and knowledge I gained while in graduate school - when I was on track to become a psychologist. While I never managed to complete my Ph.D. (I am classified as "ABD" in academic jargon), the years I spent learning from wise professors, experienced clinicians and my peers in the program have provided me with skills that I use every day in navigating the turbulent waters of the workplace.

As always, my perspective focuses on people. In this case, people as they interact in the workplace. I have been thinking recently about the false frameworks we (western-capitalist society in general) place around the workplace. We tend to believe that somehow a place of work is inherently more fair and rules-bound than the spaces and relationships in the other parts of our lives; that people are on their best behavior during their time "in the office", and that they adhere to norms that should prevent conflict and messiness. A place of work is thus seen as a sort of homogenized and purified space where the foibles of human irrationality and emotionality are kept outside, allowing us to drive the engine of commerce!

Yeah, right.

What we learn from even a cursory study of psychology would go something like this: Put more than one person in a shared space for any significant period of time, and eventually they will disagree about something. It's inevitable. Then let's add duration to the mix - force those people to spend a lot of time with each other, and maybe we'll sprinkle in some ambition, some ambiguous situations, a bit of personal history, a large helping of interpersonal politics, and implicit bias and power dynamics ... I think you see where I'm going with this. From a psychologist's perspective, a place of work is essentially guaranteed to be a hot bed of conflict and strife. It's just obvious. Denying it thus seems a bit silly. Ask anyone who's ever held a job: True or False - Conflict can happen at work. Do any of us really think that there is a single person who would answer "false"?

So, then, why do conflicts in the workplace seem so often to catch us off-guard and unprepared?

Here is an illustrative passage from one of my favorite authors, Alain De Botton, writing in his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work:

" ... workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues". p. 246







That's a rather dense paragraph, and yet it reads also almost like poetry, at least to an almost-psychologist like me.

If we unpack this a bit: Workplace dynamics are complicated and intense, and so are family dynamics - but because we EXPECT the latter (or at least most people will admit that conflict within families is rather inevitable) we are in some ways better prepared to handle it.

I would like to point out that I am focusing on so-called run-of-the-mill family stuff, and NOT on truly toxic, violent or abusive families. In other words, I am focusing on high-functioning families, and I believe that the author is doing so as well. To dive into the depths of deeply disturbed families and individuals is beyond the scope of this blog post, and an area for which I lack sufficient knowledge to be able to contribute meaningfully.

By the way, just because we might expect conflicts within families, we are still not protected from the emotions, the hurt, the seething resentments, the accusations. But somehow because it's expected within families, there is a different mindset around it than there is in the workplace.

De Botton is illuminating the facade of "shallow cheerfulness" that we allow to be painted onto our work environments. Somehow, we all suffer this kind of mass blindness, because - despite countless experiences to the contrary - we stumble into the office every day somehow continuing to believe that conflicts just shouldn't happen at work. Is that reasonable?

I want to focus on shallow cheerfulness just a bit more. It resonates with me that De Botton would modify with the word "shallow". Not only does it imply that the veneer is thin, but also that the underlying nature of the environment is likely to be quite the opposite of "cheery". And yet we gird ourselves daily, paint the smile on our faces, and continue to pretend. To a psychologist, this is kind of formula for craziness. In my view, a central core of psychological health is the capacity to be honest: to see things for what they are, to see yourself in an unbiased light, and to share a rational perception of self and experience with others. In the simplest example, this allows us to connect with each other in a shared reality - like "how about this weather?" responded to with "sure is hot!" The world tips on its side when the same comment is met with "bananas cannot make a salad" or just about any other strange or disconnected response. Resolved: the shallow cheerfulness of the workplace contributes to personal stress.

Now let's hone in on the phrase "grievously unprepared". Not being prepared isn't a perilous thing all of the time. For example, walking into your own surprise party is fairly unlikely to smash your psychological well-being. But I think we are looking at something deeper in this case, where unprepared is a state but within a mindset that is opposite. That is, most of us operate under the illusion that we are perfectly prepared to deal with the workplace, for the reasons I've referenced above. But expecting illusions to carry the day is another recipe for craziness. We are inevitably disappointed when what we are prepared for simply does not happen, thus that feeling of being taken off-guard by that snarky comment from your co-worker, or that sudden reprimand from a manager you didn't even know was angry. To work toward psychological health, we all need to disentangle our wishful thinking from practical reality.

The hard truth is that your colleagues will annoy you sometimes, and please you at other times. They'll hurt your feelings and ignore your needs - sometimes on purpose, other times with no clue. They will act selfishly, and they will blame you when you were not even involved. This list could go on and on, of course.

So what to do?

I will not pretend to have all of the answers to this dilemma. I've got a few suggestions, take them or leave them as you see fit. Add your own in the comments, or please point me to great resources. At any rate, here are a few things I've tried that seemed to work to some degree:

1. Prepare; that is, arrive at work each day knowing that real people with real imperfections and misconceptions will now be mixed together in an artificial environment for several hours - again - and that some strange things are to be expected. Simply having a mindset that recognizes this actually calms me and prevents me from being surprised when things get messy.
2. Name it. Workplace conflict. It exists. When you observe it, classify it. Wow, Jane really lit into John for that low-importance error he made, they must be some workplace conflict going on there!
3. Practice emotional intelligence, process your feelings before acting on them. One easy rule of thumb is that every time you begin to feel furious do all you can to remain curious. Next time you really want to say "Oh, yeah, well scr*w you!" to a colleague, try instead "Hmm. Tell me more about that" then listen carefully and see what happens.
4. We all make a common error of personalizing our experience. We tend to believe that others' actions in our presence are pre-meditated and specifically designed to elicit our response. This error of self-importance and self-absorption is almost comical when you step back and observe it - we all seem to believe that we are each the lead actor in our own movies called "life", and that everyone else is just supporting cast. Then we freak out when they don't follow the script! We need to let go of that mindset, and really ask ourselves if that is possible: does every person in our presence carefully consider their actions taking into account our likely response before they act? Sorry, man, not true, and probably only very rarely actually happens at all.
5. Choose your workplace carefully and intentionally. If you work in an environment that is truly toxic, you need to find a way out. If you work in a place that is not great, but okay - you might consider ways in which you can improve the culture. But the best position to be in is to work in place that is honest, practical and rational. If you are considering a job, ask if you can just sit and observe the workplace, try to perceive the workplace culture, how colleagues treat each other, how stress accumulates or not. Ask about how errors are dealt with. Ask them to describe their ideal employee and ideal day. Ask how conflicts are resolved. Do all you can to find out if the workplace is for you.

Finally, we must never forget that all people - including you and me - are likely to be both fabulous AND utter disasters! Just depends on the day and time and situation. It's the enigma present in all human beings - we are wonderful but irrational, intelligent but emotional, we share values but are inconsistent and we are social beings but also frequently self-centered. Somehow, as long as you understand those ambiguities, you can remain relatively well-adjusted in a world that often seems pretty nutty.

What and Where is Digital?

It's been way too long since I've posted here. Life gets busy. Sigh.

Luckily, I've been working on a conversational style post with my colleague and friend Brad Dunn from the The Field Museum in Chicago. I'd like to share that here.

This back and forth originated via the Strategy Special Interest Group of the Museum Computer Network. That group had been discussing the various ways that the cultural heritage sector was dealing with digital technology - comparing across organizations things like reporting structures, job titles and even how each institution conceptualized "digital". In response to that expressed interest, Brad and I conducted a discussion over the course of a few days, working asynchronously via a shared document. I think there are some interesting tidbits in here about digital, org structure, collaboration and strategy. See if you agree:

Conversation: What and Where is Digital? 

Context

Museums and cultural heritage organizations, just like companies and institutions across many other sectors, have gone through transformative changes during the internet era. Some of those changes are directly attributable to the impact of digital, others have more to do with changing workforce demographics and shifting customer preferences. As museums make these structural and philosophical adjustments, an important question becomes “What exactly is digital? Is it websites, or is it IT, or is it both? What about content and marketing? How does this all fit together?”

Because digital can mean different things to different museums, we wanted to dive into a discussion about just that, and to investigate which operational units make up digital in our museums. In addition, we wanted to understand where the digital technology staff report and why. For example, we’ve heard of museum departments that include some or all of this rather long list of operational units:

• Marketing and Communications
• Website and mobile apps
• Information Technology (IT)
• Exhibitions Interactives & Media
• Social Media
• Photo Studio
• Video Production, multimedia production
• Customer Relationship Management, Analytics & Marketing Insights
• Ticketing
• Ecommerce
• Editorial
• Design
• Digital artwork installation and maintenance
• Software development and QA
• Project management and business analysis

Whew! So let’s talk. What and where is digital in your organization?

Douglas Hegley, Chief Digital Officer, Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)
Digital is an essential and core aspect of the entire business of museums. It cannot and must not be separated from the rest of the organization, but instead permeates and supports all operations. In addition, digital is an innovation-driven strategic partner, bringing new ideas and initiatives to the table for consideration. Therefore, digital is both service-oriented (reactive) and strategically-aligned (proactive).

Brad Dunn, Web and Digital Communications Director, The Field Museum, Chicago
Like most institutions, information technology systems and support have existed at the The Field Museum for many years. Within that group, the effort evolved to include the collections database and then the website. Over the years, a parallel effort in exhibitions led to the buildout of their capacity to produce video and interactive for exhibitions. In short, digital was located all over the building, and only in some instances different parties were collaborating. As of 2017, our efforts to remove silos continues. The disciplines we would normally think of as “digital” are still structurally disparate, and though there are definite challenges to collaboration, there is a very genuine belief in the importance of cross-discipline collaboration, and in many instances it’s starting to work very well.

Douglas:
I’m always struck by how different museums structure the work of digital. I’m not surprised that you describe a situation of organic growth - digital popping up where it’s needed, and at different moments in the organization’s timeline. It’s also fascinating to see the many different approaches to organizational structure.

Brad:
So let’s talk about that topic: organizational structure. Where does digital sit at Mia?

Douglas:
At Mia, digital sits within a division called Media and Technology (MAT). That division is made up of five departments:

1. Interactive Media (digital media production, video, in-gallery interactives, time-based media art installation and maintenance)
2. Visual Resources (photo studio, digital photography, photogrammetry, post-production, cataloguing, digital asset management, rights and reproductions)
3. Software development (web, mobile, apps, business systems, APIs)
4. Digital Strategy Implementation (project management, administration)
5. Information Systems (traditional IT, telecomm, systems and networking, tech support)

In addition, two unique skillsets sit within MAT, not as departments but as individual staff:

1. Content databases: collections management, standards and cataloguing of the museum collection, enterprise content planning & management
2. CRM (Customer Relationship Management system - salesforce): constituent (customer, member, donor, volunteer, vendor, etc.) data collection and maintenance, customer/member validation, activity tracking, and analytics

MAT is led by me as the Chief Digital Officer. I sit on the museum’s executive leadership team, reporting to the Director/President. In that regard, digital does not sit within another department such as Marketing or IT, but is instead its own, top-level division - collaborating with all other divisions, and at the table for every major executive-level discussion and decision. In addition, IT is actually a department underneath digital, which was a strategic decision - we see digital and user engagement as the leading principles here, not technology per se.

What about at the Field Museum? How are you structured?

Brad:
The digital team is located within the Marketing and Public Engagement division, and includes the website, digital content creation, and social media and digital engagement. This team reports to me as the Web and Digital Communications Director, and I report to the Chief Marketing Officer.

This team is charged with engaging the public in science storytelling across digital channels, supporting marketing efforts, and collaborating with exhibitions to surface digital engagement opportunities in-gallery. Overall, the digital layer is used to give our audience access to science they can’t see when they visit: our collection of 30 million specimens and artifacts, and our research and conservation work. This group also ensures the website expresses the brand values, conveys the experience, and performs the duties of connecting education, institutional advancement, and other departments with their constituents, and gives them tools to transact.

Douglas:
What do you think about reporting into the Marketing and Public Engagement division? It must have some advantages and perhaps some challenges too? And I’m also curious if the Chief Marketing Officer is under yet another VP-level, or reports to the top.

Brad:
The CMO reports directly to the President. In our structure the person closest to digital at the executive level is the Chief Technology Officer - he’s on the same level as my direct supervisor, the CMO. He and his team oversee IT, security, ticketing, and the collections database. My digital team is firmly focused on design, content, and digital engagement. So it’s good to be in public engagement as it’s easier to align with those who work directly with our visitors (exhibitions and guest relations). There are some obvious challenges with trying to integrate the collections microsites, ticketing, and other types of work into the main website. So for users, the ecosystem is fragmented. As well, we’re the only team in the building with a UX designer, so not all of the platforms the institution uses have someone overseeing UX concerns. The good news is we have a great relationship with IT and they’re very supportive. The CTO and I meet regularly and are making good progress to align things for users’ sake. And I’m also fortunate in that my boss likes for me to meet with the President monthly to give him updates on our part of the digital world. That’s rare as a director-level person at the Museum, so I’m grateful for that.

Douglas:
That’s great to hear, and I believe it can inspire others. It’s certainly possible to do really great digital work through strong collaboration with the rest of the organization. Leadership is not always about titles and hierarchy or about which department head you report to, but instead can be about effective contributions and working well across the enterprise - sharing the expertise you have with the entire organization for mutual benefit.

Brad:
You and I have had great discussions about strategy - both at the institutional level and within digital. I’m curious about how Mia aligns staff and projects with strategy - how does that unfold at Mia?

Douglas:
Digital at Mia is driven by two very simple yet powerful core strategies: (1) Delight Customers and (2) Help People. Seriously - everything we do has to be fulfilling one (or ideally both) of those elements. Delighting customers applies both to excellence in satisfying internal staff needs and providing top-notch digital experiences for museum audiences. Helping people is likewise both internal and external, from help desk to digital interfaces designed to engage and support visitors as they participate with the museum. In both cases, people are considered primary, not the technology. MAT is dedicated to making sure that people are able to accomplish their goals and have wonderful experiences. By putting people first, all staff in MAT know exactly how to prioritize their work.

This approach aligns well with the museum’s mission and its current strategic plan. We simply do not - ever - chase technology or digital projects unless they are clearly in support of both.

As I recall, you’ve developed clear guiding principles for your team at the Field, right?

Brad:
We have. But first, I have to tell you how much I’ve always loved your two core ideas of delighting customers and helping people. That needs to be a book. The idea of “delight” is so often absent from conversations, but it is an essential part of creating an environment where people can learn and feel inspired.

Douglas:
I should be totally honest here and say that the concept of first-and-foremost delighting customers isn’t my original idea - it’s attributed to Warren Buffett. He once said he’s not likely to remember the price of the car he bought a few years ago, but he is likely to remember the experience he had with the person who sold it to him. I think that lesson applies equally in our sector. Sorry to interrupt! Let’s go back to your guiding principles.

Brad:
No problem! Yes, our Guiding Principles exist to keep the team oriented and keep projects on the rails. We like to test them frequently. They evolve at the behest of changing business or audience needs, and only with specific intention. We shouldn’t be afraid to say ‘no’ to some projects or ideas. We should be flexible enough to see a good new opportunity but we should say yes to projects and ideas for the right reasons.

• The Museum mission, position, and values inform everything we do
• Objects are objects; only their stories are interesting to real, living, breathing people. When we share objects with our audience, always bring them the story. Show them why this matters
• Vigorously defend science and the scientific process; earnestly believe in the importance of museums
• Balance the need to support digital and traditional advertising and public awareness needs, and the need to proactively, relentlessly innovate in the digital space
• Back decisions with data; prioritize audience needs
• All efforts meet minimum accessibility requirements and to the greatest extent possible, exceed those expectations to create experiences that are open and available to audiences with a broad array of accessibility challenges
• Efforts aimed at visit and logistics planning are inclusive of the needs of individuals from a broad variety of spoken languages and socio-economic backgrounds

Let’s talk about the concept of digital strategy. When you feel your ear tingling, that’s me talking to my colleagues about your framework of digital being a horizontal, not a vertical.

Do you have a specific digital strategy at Mia?

Douglas:
At Mia, digital is simply part of the fabric of the organization. That’s the essence of me describing what we do as a horizontal and not a vertical. To that end, there is no stand-alone digital strategy, neither as a document nor as a set of practices. There is a museum strategy, and digital permeates that to the extent that it will delight customers; of course, there are plenty of museum activities that are non-digital, and at Mia this presents no conflict whatsoever. As long as we can show that customers are delighted, any initiative will move forward, digital or not.

This philosophy has a major impact on talent strategy within MAT and across Mia. For the Media and Technology division, it is critical to hire and retain staff who see the bigger picture and apply their digital and technical talents to support the overall strategic plan and the two core strategies of MAT. Across the museum, it is vital to hire and retain staff who embrace digital as one of the effective tools to use to delight customers. Cross-functional teams can then make the best decisions on what projects or products move forward.

Do you maintain a specific digital strategy at the Field?

Brad:
To be transparent (and in doing so hopefully helpful to others), it’s a work-in-progress. The Museum began a strategic planning process several years before I arrived. My position did not exist and as a result there’s some mentions of technology, but not of a user-driven approach to using digital (tech, channels, content creation methods) to engage our audience during their visit or otherwise, other than a mobile tour app which was already being produced, itself the mandate of a financial gift. I’m in the process of articulating and refining my vision for digital with my boss. Once we feel good about it, I will collaborate with others in the Museum, namely the CTO, to refine and ensure a holistic approach. From there, for the areas I manage, I will take this to my staff and as a team we will discuss and put some stakes in the ground around digital strategy. I want my team to co-write it with me have true ownership. In the next iteration of the Museum’s strategic planning process I aspire to what you describe as not having a document or set of practices, rather to have full integration, permeating the institution.

Douglas:
I realize that you touched on this a bit earlier, but I’d like to follow up a bit. Are you responsible for the full range of digital at the Field?

Brad:
Not exactly. Below are the other departments in the institution that house some form of digital discipline.

Information Technology, which is separate from the digital team, supports the technology infrastructure of the institution including the network, point-of-sale, data security, the enterprise resource management system, online ticketing, and maintains and continually builds out the collections database. This group reports to the Chief Technology Officer, who sits on the executive team. The opportunities for collaboration between digital and IT exist mainly around the integration of the collections database into the primary website, and with the online ticketing system.

The Exhibitions department is similar to the digital team in that both are designing for the general public. They have the same end-user. They design and build the interactives that live in-gallery, as well as the digital wayfinding stations. This group also produces other media elements for exhibitions including video and sound design.

Other Digital Efforts at the Field include

• Digital Learning Manager in the Learning Center
• Staff Photographer located in Science & Education

Douglas:
You also spoke earlier about collaboration between those areas. How do you work together effectively? Are there tips and tricks for doing that really well?

Brad:
It’s been important for us to empower and connect individuals below director level so they have autonomy and decision-making ability. It’s been tricky to navigate because not all directors will send their people to meetings instead of themselves, so I have to manage that. But I find there is so much knowledge and smart thinking by the mid- and junior-level staff—and often deeper insights into problems—that to the extent we can empower and unleash them, it benefits the Museum.

Douglas:
I agree whole-heartedly about the (usually untapped) knowledge and skills that exist in the staff across all hierarchical levels of an organization. Unleashing that potential can be a path to success, especially when we enable people to work together.

Brad:
From my outsider’s perspective, you have the opportunity to create collaboration differently, by virtue of how Mia - and your team specifically - are structured. Can you talk about how collaboration works at Mia?

Douglas:
At Mia, we believe that collaboration is vital to the success of modern organizations. Let me take a step back and set some context. I think two things laid the groundwork for challenging the traditional, siloed organizational structures of museums: digital transformation and changing workforce expectations. Digital was perhaps the first externally-driven force that had a significant impact on all of the museum silos. As we are discussing here, museums are still struggling with where to “put” digital, and most tried to make it just another silo - but the very nature of technology has been to permeate every aspect of organizations and institutions. To the second point, the modern day workforce is very different than preceding generations. We are all knowledge workers, not drones doing repetitive tasks. And knowledge workers expect to have a say in what they focus on (initiatives) and how they do their work (methods). That requires a flatter, non-siloed org structure and cross-functional collaboration the likes of which museums have never really seen before.

At Mia, we have a disciplined approach to collaboration, so that projects get done quickly and effectively. It starts with leadership commitment to a collaborative work environment where staff work together toward common goals that are aligned with the strategic plan. We strive for these teams to be self-organized and to have decision-making authority. Of course, not every effort requires a cross-functional team. We look at the following factors to see when a cross-functional team will succeed:

• Team is responsible for a specific task or deliverable.
• The goal needs different perspectives in order to be achieved.
• Staff with different expertise are needed to work together toward a common goal.
• We can disregard hierarchical level within the organization - get the skills needed, period.

Every cross-functional team has an Executive Sponsor, and the core team is purposefully kept small, ideally around 5 individuals. The team works best if there is in addition a single “initiative owner”, who has the knowledge, authority and availability to support the team’s work.

I don’t intend to make this sound easy or simple. It’s admittedly a work in progress that requires continual review and improvement. Cross-functional teams face plenty of challenges, including:

• Transforming diverse input into one cohesive final output.
• Competing demands may seem contradictory. To reduce this risk, it is important to define roles and expectations for team members and their managers from the very beginning.
• Prioritization conflicts: team goals versus usual day-to-day work tasks.
• Coping with staff who don’t buy into the model 100% — especially unit-level managers who may resent having “their people” pulled onto projects that they don’t “own”

I feel like I’ve gone down the rabbit hole a bit there, but I thought it might be informative.

Let’s see if we can wrap this up - what do you see as the future of digital in our sector - or, to put it another way, if we were to have this conversation a few years from now, how would it be different?

Brad:
I love these types of questions. I’m fascinated with how much more digital is naturally integrated into the lives of workers coming into the workforce now than it was for us. It’s natural and goes without saying. I think this is a huge advantage in our field. I regularly try to be aware of blind spots I may have and ensure I’m open to, and hearing what my team has to say about the use and consumptions patterns of people today. So to that end, what effect will this have when our younger workers are themselves the leaders of institutions? I think your notion of digital thinking being woven into the fabric of the entire institution will be more likely to naturally occur. I think a result of that might likely be a workforce that more readily implements or adapts workflow solutions that are more efficient, fast-moving, and flexible than in the past. Leadership may be more able to step aside in some ways that right now feel unnatural or threatening.

Douglas:
I think we are on a similar wavelength. I have been known to joke that one of my goals is to eliminate my position. I realize that’s a bit of provocation and an oversimplification; what I’m really getting at is my hope that “digital” isn’t really a “thing” in the near future. Organizations won’t have to discuss where to put it because it won’t be seen as an “it” - digital will simply be a given part of all activities. I don’t deny that there will be a need for software developers and technicians, because there will be a need to make new things and to maintain existing things. Perhaps the analogy would be electricity (and credit goes to colleague and friend Koven Smith, who uses this same analogy and probably more effectively than I do here). There was once a time when organizations were adopting electricity, and they probably needed a Department of Electricity and a Chief Electricity Officer to oversee it. But over time electricity became such a norm that today we basically take it for granted. We still need electricians, we still need electrical engineers, and there is still innovation going on around all things electrical, but it’s not a mysterious or magical thing anymore. It just is. That’s my hope for digital, plain and simple. So in a few years we basically wouldn’t have this conversation at all! However, it is my hope that we will have other conversations in it’s place.

Brad Dunn tweets as @badunn
Douglas Hegley tweets as @dhegley

Interested in sharing your own perspectives on these topics? Please tweet at us, or post in the comments below. Thanks!

Reading List: January-February 2017

Here is a sampling of articles and posts I have recently read, each of which sparked a moment of thought-provoking consideration. None of these are overly-long, hopefully one or more will be useful to you.

Empathy

Six Habits of Highly Empathic People
Main point: Empathy is a habit that we can cultivate, nurture and grow. This article gives you some ways to practice and improve.

Five Ways Museums Can Increase Empathy in the World
Main point: Empathy can be taught. Contact with people who are different from us in a safe, empathetic way is a first step toward reducing prejudice. Museums are safe and informal learning platforms, uniquely equipped to encourage visitors to imagine, explore, and experience our rich human heritage and our natural world firsthand. They have the capability to bring together arts, technology, sciences, and literature to show how all living things are interconnected.

Teams and Team-Building

Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills
Main point: Psychological factors are the main determinants of whether people work together well. Creating a team based only on skill level while ignoring personality and roles rarely leads to success. This article provides one lens through which to view the various psychological roles that people might play when collaborating.

Belbin Team Roles
Main point: Another take on the roles that people assume when working together. One intriguing takeaway is that one individual might play multiple roles on a particular team, at particular moments.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence: Do You Have It?
Main point: Emotional intelligence is a powerful predictor of success, but measuring it can be hard. This article uses a very practical approach, by listing out some characteristic behaviors of people who *lack* emotional intelligence. Recognize anyone?

Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Competencies: Which Do You Need to Work On?
Main point: Many people define emotional intelligence too narrowly, focusing on things like sociability, sensitivity and likeability. The authors argue that emotional intelligence is made up of 4 domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Nested within each domain are twelve competencies. Understanding which competencies are your strengths and which could stand for some improvement will increase your overall emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence Competencies 
Main point: A list of the 12 competencies referred to above, fleshed out just a bit more.

Nonprofit Trends and Forecasts

40 Nonprofit Trends for 2017
Main point: A list of predicted trends in the nonprofit sector for the coming year, broken into 5 categories: Big Ideas; Fundraising and Marketing; Tech, Online and Digital; Giving Trends and Donor Relations; and Leadership. I don't necessarily agree with everything listed here, but it's certainly thought-provoking


Philanthropy Forecast, 2017: Trends and Issues to Watch
Main point: Inside Philanthropy shares its "second annual tour of how philanthropy may affect America and the world in the year ahead". For example, in my little corner of the nonprofit world, they predict that wealthy art collectors will continue to establish their own museums, arguing that "top existing museums have far more art than they can exhibit and no one wants their precious pieces sitting in storage". Intriguing, and an uncomfortable vision for collecting institutions.