Why People Are Not Your Greatest Asset

Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Many of us in business have heard the popular aphorism, “People are your greatest asset.” Some of us may even believe it. But is this sentiment reflected in our corporate cultures and the way our leaders lead? For the most part, no — and there’s a reason for that.

People are not your greatest asset. Even great people are not your greatest asset. In fact, great people can be your greatest liability. If Enron wasn’t enough evidence of this, the 2008 financial crisis has now given us plenty more. What about Lehman Brothers, AIG and Countrywide? Arguably, these companies employed some of the smartest business people not only in the room but in the world, and yet those same folks took their firms to ruin (or near it) and came close to causing a collapse of the U.S. economy.

So if it’s not people, what is your greatest asset?

It’s how you empower your people. Think about it. What is the primary purpose of a business organization? To assemble a group of people, who previously may have had no association, and empower them to accomplish productive work toward the organization’s objectives. More effective empowerment typically equals more productive work. As leaders and managers, we are familiar with empowering people. We organize them into divisions, units, groups and teams. We provide goals and incentives to motivate them. And we enable them with authority, tools, resources and processes.

Social media ushers in new ways to enhance your greatest asset, because it is about empowering people to collaborate at unprecedented scale. With powerful implementations of social media, we motivate people to form communities around a meaningful and common purpose . We enable them with new technology, seed content, and guidance on desired participation. The aim is to facilitate “mass collaboration” and its accompanying behaviors.

For our book on the social organization, we studied hundreds of social media implementations and identified a set of key mass collaboration behaviors. Understanding them is critical to successfully engaging and empowering people.

[Here are the first three of six behaviors. To read the complete article, please click here.]

1. Collective Intelligence: Collective intelligence is the meaningful assembly of relatively small and incremental community contributions into a larger and coherent accumulation of knowledge. Collective intelligence is not new, but the mass collaboration enabled by social media provides it at scales never before possible. Even the most modest individual contributions can be tremendously valuable when meaningfully combined at scale. Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr are all social Web examples of collective intelligence. Each Wikipedia article by itself is relatively insignificant, but a million articles collected and linked together is highly powerful.

2. Expertise Location: Expertise location involves seeking and finding specific expertise in the masses of people and the often-staggering amount of available content. One view of expertise location is almost the opposite of collective intelligence. It is “selective intelligence,” where the goal is not to collect numerous small contributions from many, but to find just what is needed. Crowdsourcing is a well-known example of expertise location.

3. Emergent Structures: Emergent structures are structures such as processes, content categorization, organizational networks and hidden virtual teams that are unknown or unplanned prior to social interactions, but that form naturally as activity progresses. The goal of emergent structures is to gain a better understanding of the true “nature of things” to more effectively organize, guide or interact with a community or its efforts. Social media, applied with transparency, can surface these structures.

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Examine these behaviors in the context of your business goals, major collaboration challenges, core business practices, etc., to determine where and how mass collaboration might empower your people to deliver strategic value to your organization and enhance what is truly your greatest asset.

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To read other blog posts by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald, please click here.

Anthony J. Bradley, group vice president, Gartner Research, and Mark P. McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, Gartner Executive Programs, are co-authors of The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees. You can follow them on Twitter at @BradleyAnthonyJ and @markpmcdonald.

 

Are We a Nation Walking On Egg Shells? (At Work – and Everywhere Else?)

Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless they were cold.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

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There are some “impressions” that seem to be obvious everywhere you look.  Here is one of mine:  it feels like the whole country is walking on egg shells.

People with a job are worried about the health of their company or organization.  And even entire industries are worried about the health of their industry.  (Would you like to be an airline executive at the moment?  Or a coach on the Dallas Cowboys?)  And when a person is worried – when a company or organization is in a fragile state, or even an entire industry – then a person knows that his or her own job is in a fragile state, and that certain self-assuredness, that confidence, that “mojo” is lessened, and threatened.

So many people are walking on egg shells.

And these egg shells represent so much.  We have to please our boss, but our boss is worried about pleasing the next person up the chain.  And, as one person put it, the job of every boss these days seems to be the job of getting more work out of each worker, even finding ways to get more work out of fewer workers, so that the work force can be reduced.

Such a boss seems practically impossible to please.  And people don’t flourish with an “impossible to please” boss.

It is tough to feel secure in such an environment.

I don’t have any solutions.  But I think this:  if the people in your company are walking on egg shells all the time, they can’t do their best work.

Somebody needs to sweep up all these eggshells.