The Buy-In From Top-Managment

Yesterday the time had come - I had a meeting with our business unit's top level executive to share my thoughts on enterprise 2.0. To make it short: I have his buy-in!! So what are the facts and learnings? Before the meeting I was preparing a lot of slides to capture the key ideas and learnings I achieved so far and come up with benefits for our company when using web2.0 technologies and leadership 2.0. From a structural point of view, the presentation slides were clustered in "getting attention", "stimulating desire", "re-inforce with reason" via springboard stories and "impact of change" (according Denning). In parallel spreading my idea about the need for social collaboration, I identified a couple people I could inspire. We had a first meeting and talked about how to approach the topic and via IT identified the right tool. And just a couple days before the meeting with my business unit manager - the breakdown: In the second meeting of our small group one person participated, who was not able to join the first time. He was told by his boss to come, who shared our enthousiasm. Unfortunately this was not the case for his underling. We were arguing and discussing nearly one hour about the necessity and added value of social collaboration tools. After a short disappointment, I already applied the learnings from my softskills and leadership qualities class of my MBA studies: I realized that I was on the judger path and by asking myself what I could learn about it, I instantly moved to learner and felt a relief. Wasn't that the perfect trial run for the meeting coming up next? I even went a step further as I was able to calm down one of the others favoring social collaboration and attacking this guy. And when trying to listen to all his negative appearing thoughts, we managed to bring out some important possible roadblocks we have to address in order to be successful in implementing social collaboration tools in our company. First of all, contribution has to be on a voluntary basis. Of course multiplier and leverage effects only come up to speed when wikis and blogs have relevant content, but forcing (even when it is gently) to contribute - e.g. from top level - does not work. But how do you get content in? Questions posed by critics or change resistive people will be: what added value is there? We already have knowlegde management systems in place! It was tried before and did not prevail! Review of content to prevent uncontrolled growth causes additional effort! Who should do that?

After this breakdown I showed the slides I was preparing to one of the people supporting me with that topic and the feedback was that business impact should be worked out more clearly. My original goal was just to raise awareness for the need of enterprise 2.0, but after these talks I learned that I have to work over my presentation.
In the next leadership class, I got very good inputs from our instructor, incorporating the business impact. But still the presentation was very high level, focusing on the ideas. This was also the biggest weakness of my presenation: the missing level of detail. As a learning from that I took with me that even when creating awareness for a topic in a presenation it is crucial to make up one's mind about the background on the topic at the listener's side. All the benefits and requirements for knowledge sharing and social collaboration were obvious for him. I got no resistance on that. And according him I would not get from any or at least any good manager. I wonder if he is right :) Anyhow, it was good, he shares this opinion! But what did work was the use of powerful questions and the approach of Denning to imagine the recipients being safe and then getting attention via showing issues with the current situation. That were the moments where he was attracted and starting to ask questions.
As mentioned, all in all he did like my presentation, shares my ideas but what he was really interested in was how to cope with the challenges mentioned above in my "mini breakdown", as he also was part of a community trying to build up a collaboration platform 10 years ago. It did not work out because no added value could be reached for the most part due to lack in content and missing ideas on how to address this issue. How can people be motivated and inspired permanently? How can uncontrolled growth be prevented? What are the best approaches to introduce a social collaboration plattform?

He liked my rough ideas to cope with that very much and gave me his support on that topic. As soon as I have identified a core team, set-up a rough project outline and inputs for best practice approaches on how to cope with the challenges, he is even willing to promote the idea on even higher company level. Besides that the positive feedback about thinking out of the box was highly appreciated!!

Bottomline: the start is done!! I got my mini-breakthrough and I am really excited where it will take us!


P.S.: when showing the slides to two of my backer (who are non-executives), my presentation worked! They were completely energized which shows that for that auditorium (with their background / knowledge level on that topic) the outline would have been perfect ;)