Thanks so much to my friend, Jay Fichialos, now on Ma.gnolia and sending me awesome links like this one that say things like:
…the one thing I have been able to extract as the core and essential principle is the fact that people are the singlemost important elements in a company. When you think about it, “company” implies that one person is in the company of another. Or an “organization” is a system of people, and certainly not a bunch of computers or other inanimate objects. Human resources are the critical factor to winning a game of basketball (not the basketball itself), to taking a company public (lawyers are people too), to fixing a great bowl of chicken soup (the ingredients do help, but it takes a person to collect those ingredients), and so forth.
This reminded me of frustrations I had a couple of years back and an equivalent frustration I experienced lately when a dear friend told me she couldn’t attend this amazing conference on Customer Service/Satisfaction (by the good folks at Satisfaction), which would not only be an excellent boon for her knowledge on the subject, it would also benefit her employer greatly because they would have an incredibly plugged-in, cutting edge thinker on the team. This is not to mention that the customer service executives from every cool company in North America will be hungrily networking there to meet those plugged-in, cutting edge thinkers like my friend.
My frustrations occurred in a couple of different marketing positions I held at various companies, where, even though I was in charge of building community in one particular case, I was expected to hold regular office hours with the rest of the staff. Ducking out for an afternoon meetup or other community-type event was seen as ‘frivolous’ and something I should do on ‘my time’. This was an absurd idea to me and I continued to defy the notion that I should be sitting at a desk creating marketing plans rather than actually going out and meeting people face to face who are part of the community I wished to reach.
Compound this with a very astute tweet by my friend Chris Heuer (another budding author) a couple of weeks back:
Companies don’t really have conversations with customers, their employees do. People talking to people is real, beyond marketing and spin... 10:56 AM November 01, 2007
…and something really profound occurred to me: A Company is the Sum of the Social Capital of its People.
When I think about the really ‘cool’ brands out there there is always at least one person who we know and admire…who has influence and who has reams of Social Capital. You dig deeper into the company employees and you see that really dynamic and growing companies have loads of employees with smaller, but strong networks they influence. Apple, of course is a really great example of this. Who doesn’t want to be Steve Jobs, really? I mean, he even has someone who IS his fake self. But there are Apple employees who are influencers everywhere, even if they don’t appear in an official capacity all of the time. And how about the influence of the Geniuses and other Apple Store employees on people’s interaction with the brand? HUGE. [hat tip to Lloyd for that great link] I would take a leap and attribute a good portion of Apple’s fantastic growth in the past couple of years to that one-on-one interaction between employees and customers.
Of course, none of this is news or anything. It’s been pretty obvious to many people for a long time that sending your employees out into the world to build relationships with customers and potential customers is really good for your brand. D’uh.
So, why is it that my friend and many others are still expected to clock in at 8:00 a.m. and clock out at 5:00 p.m.? Why aren’t social gatherings, community involvement, courses, conferences and events and general networking encouraged more? Why isn’t everyone encouraged to blog, be on IM, have Facebook profiles and post their running commentary on Twitter? Why aren’t we encouraging every one of our employees to go out there and build the hell out of their Social Capital?
I have a theory. Tell me if I’m wrong.
We don’t value non-crappy, paper-heavy, numbers-driven work. As soon as we see someone enjoying their work, we accuse it of not being work at all. If someone takes an extra long lunch to go to a social event where they are meeting industry peers, we say things like, “Must be nice to be able to take such a long lunch break” as if that person’s extra 1/2 hour should have been spent sitting in front of their computers, working on some spreadsheet or something that would have been actual work.
Now, OF COURSE there should be some sort of definition of activities and measurements in place to ensure that everyone is accountable. I like to trust my coworkers as much as the next person, but I’ve worked with enough people to realize that loose, under-defined goals like, “Build Social Capital” are bound to lead to equally under-defined actions. If I used this new structure to hang with my same friends each and every day, it ceases being useful Capital.
According to theorists, Social Capital comes in two forms: Bonding and Bridging Capital. Bonding Capital is what we do with good friends and family: we build deep relationships of trust and care. We can count on those we have Bonding Capital with for our survival. Bonding Capital is essential to our individual survival (so these days when my 14 year old is rude to me, I tell him that he is threatening his survival by testing our Bonding Capital - works like a charm) and is what emotionally fulfills us.
Bridging Capital, on the hand, is the type of Social Capital that helps us grow and builds our careers and businesses. Bridging Capital is what you are building when you go outside of your normal group of friends and meet new people. It’s what you do when you go to conferences that have people you don’t always hang out with there. It’s what you do when you leave your office and meet others in your industry. According to Robert Putnum (Bowling Alone):
(Bridging connections) are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion…(and provide a)…sociological WD-40…(that can)…generate broader identities and reciprocity. (Putnum 2000: 22-23)
But even though these definitions and measurements are not currently in place, businesses can start by recognizing that a certain amount of bridging activity is necessary to encourage for all of their employees - not just those in sales and marketing. Benefits?
- The creation of Bridging Capital that will positively effect the influence of your company
- This puts your employees in the perfectly right position for coming up with awesome ideas to please your customers
- The flipside of that, which is the ability of your employees to recognize potential problems and be proactive in averting them
- The creation of plugged-in, cutting edge employees in general
- A happier, more fulfilled group of employees who feel part of their company’s growth (which they are)
I really hope that my unnamed friend shows this article to her employer and is able to attend said conference and that it resonates as well with many others. I look forward to your feedback and stories.
14 Comments
Tremendous stuff, Tara. I think you’re right about companies being suspicious of employees who are enjoying themselves, but beyond that I think that “hard”-oriented managers who have succeeded by hewing to the strait and narrow, driving the numbers, etc. are suspicious of those who succeed in “soft” customer-facing endeavors. The “soft” stuff isn’t immediately quantifiable in terms they know, they didn’t learn about it in business school, they can’t outline it like they can the steps in the sales process or in ISO certification . . . and so it’s less real.
The trick is to use some of that “bridging capital” to build bridges *within* the organization, too — so that “hard”-leaning managers come to understand the merits of employees’ “soft” activities.
Tara, not only do we not value “non-crappy, paper-heavy, numbers-driven work”, many businesses’ vision of what they do is embodied in it. It’s the whole busy vs bursty dichotomy I discussed earlier this year several times and that I spoke about in part at Office 2.0.
When a business fails to value the building of social capital and the activity going on inside the heads of its employees as work with a real payoff, they set themselves up to remain in a world modeled after the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution rather than the Enlightenment of the Information Revolution we’re living through now.
They will be left behind as their reactive nature sees them acting only after the fact, rather than being responsive in seeing the changes around them and acting to work with change as a catalyst for innovation.
Actually, I think a successful company is greater than the sum of its people. If you can get a team to function smoothly and happily together, you can achieve wonders.
That said, I don’t know about the Apple analogy. For some reason I always think of Apple as more style than substance, and Steve Jobs as a bright, but totally self-centered and arrogant fellow I never want to emulate. I’d rather be Bill Gates Mk II, you know the one who wants to eradicate malaria (no I don’t hate Apple. Quite like their stuff, just think that people are completely blinded by the worlds best marketing machine)
Now the people who work on the Linux kernel … those people I admire.
Hi,
I think what´s missing is TRUST. I have the perfect example from just two hours ago. I went back to my office at 8:30 pm. When I told security that my badge gave me a green light but couldn´t open the door to my work area, they said they would only open the door to me if my supervisor! called and said it was ok. I had to leave frustrated as you can imagine, because I couldn´t contact her. I had to find out this way that my company has restricted the hours in which I am allowed into my cubicle to WORK FOR THEM!! How in the world is this company ever going to understand that I am one of the addends of that sum? How would this company think of innovative ways of me going the extra mile to achieve common goals? 20th century companies like putting systems in place that substitute trust and human relationships for ¨levels of approvals¨ tied to ¨corporate titles¨. Will these organizations ever understand that markets are conversations? They don´t even trust you going in after hours to do more work, how will they trust you talking to the market directly
(…ooops, I just did, but then again…)
Yeah, I agree…TRUST is a BIG one. It holds alot of our progress back.
Linux++
Personally, I think Apple is pretty good at delivering, but I’m biased. All of their products make me incredibly happy (and productive).
I agree about Steve, but I don’t know about Bill…I mean, yes, he’s giving alot of money to good causes these days, but who did he have to walk over to have that money to give away? He isn’t a lamb, either.
Absolutely! Burstyness is a great way to talk about it. I loved Anne’s stuff.
That’s interesting…bridging capital within the organization…you are right, though. Some of the least aligned values are within organizations themselves…and bridging could go a long way in leading towards change.
So true. I once was the head marketing person for a healthcare organization. When I would go out and represent the company at events (such as the 2 hour lunch — or breakfast), there would be some comments directed at me when I came back into the office similar to what you said.
Sometimes it’s the management and sometimes it’s the rank&file that have these opinions. It’s totally dependant upon the environment that THEY are most productive in. If management is giddy about spreadsheets and numbers, then they feel you should be too. If other workers are tied down in mundane tasks, then they feel you should be too.
The big problem in most companies is that no one understands the big picture of marketing except the marketing department. (and sometimes they don’t!)
Trust is big, but a huge reason trust gets stepped on is from insecurity of someone “wanting to be in charge.”
The NextNY listserve recently had a thread on whether titles were necessary. Many self-proclaimed CEO’s of four-person startups said, “Of course titles aren’t necessary for CIO’s and CTO’s, but when I’m talking with someone outside my company, they need to see ‘CEO’ so they know to whom to give money.” Other CEO’s said, “I need to call myself CEO so people at my company know who’s in charge.”
This steps on the value of trust. It stops other folks at the company from raising money. It stops other folks at the company from working after 8:30pm because they don’t have a “superior” to keycard them in.
“Being in charge” can be through influence and setting positive examples, not through micromanaging and peacocking.
It’s gonna take a whole lot of education, isn’t it? Have you read the Fifth Discipline? The systems thinking idea is so near and dear to my heart…
Very good example and point. Titles are so meaningless…so is rank…so extrinsic, yet, people cling to them. “Sorry, you can’t make a decision because I’m the boss.” (even though it is the best decision, it gets ousted because it wasn’t delivered by someone with a title).
Arg and double arg. It denotes that those with rank are to be trusted and those without are not.
Great blog entry Tara. And very true. I made similar mention in my blog here.
Tara, you are right on target. I have so much to say that I can’t even begin to say it here, but I think most of our businesses are still in “factory” mode, expecting us to clock in and clock out as if we were assembling widgets instead of working with people and ideas.
From a work/life balance and even an environmental perspective, I think our corporations need to embrace new forms of work, including telecommuting, but as you and others have commented, most businesses don’t trust their employees.
I’m heading out for a lunch meeting today where I’m hoping to learn from someone wiser and bring this knowledge to bear on my work. But why do I feel guilty if the lunch goes longer than an hour? It’s ridiculous.
The same thing happened a few years ago when my company wouldn’t pay for me to attend the SXSW Interactive conference. My response? If you pay, I’m there to represent you and the company. If you don’t, I’m there strictly for my own benefit. As you can imagine, I’m no longer working for that company.
Thanks for posting about this!
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