Tag: leadership

  • Your project failed. Now what?

    Your project failed. Now what?

    Failure in the workplace can take many shapes. The budget cycle ended, and your prized initiative was the only one on the chopping block. Or the client called and abruptly cancelled your agency’s long-term contract. Maybe the star employee you recruited into your company turned out to be less than stellar, and you participated in a string of HR discussions culminating in termination. In any of these cases and many more, you experienced a demoralizing, public failure.

    First of all, congratulations! If every single one of your projects succeeded, it would mean you were coasting. Failing once in a while is a good sign. While failure can certainly come from inattention or poor decision-making, it often is associated with experimentation and innovation. No one seeks out the sting of a failure and its repercussions, but smart professionals embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.

    Read more about how to handle failure at work over at Quartz.

  • Friday 5 — 7.29.2016

    Friday 5 — 7.29.2016

    1. Nieman Lab shares insights about the progress and user adoption of Stela, the New York Times’ in-house analytics platform. As publishers adjust to living in a world of distributed content and to using analytics data to drive decisions, there’s value in more than aggregating the data: make it approachable, simple and fun to use.
    2. Make your buttons look like buttons. Nick Babich takes a look at the evolution of the humble button user interface , and offers current best practices.
    3. I’ve tried a bunch of analog and digital to-do solutions, and last year finally swapped Evernote for Google Keep. This article makes the case for cobbling together Google products — with their killer app, reminders — to become your go-to productivity tool.
    4. As digital products proliferate in large organizations, it can be challenging to craft a cohesive design system. Nathan Curtis explains how starting with a product portfolio with a focus on flagships can set the stage for an attainable design consistency.
    5. Digital businesses require leaders with exponential mindsets, according to Mark Bonchek in HBR. When people charged with digital initiatives focus on the incremental and fear of giving up control, they are missing the opportunity for true innovation.

    Weekend fun: It was all DNC all the time this week, and Hillary Clinton’s team landed a digital hit with the “Trump Yourself” campaign. Also: David Attenborough fans might enjoy his narration of a new kind of fauna: Pokemon.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • If engineering managers should code 30% time, what’s a digital leader to do?

    If engineering managers should code 30% time, what’s a digital leader to do?

    Should engineering managers responsible for teams and deliverables still continue to code 30% of their time? Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of Mongo DB, published a persuasive argument for bucking the accepted path of coder –> dev lead –> non-coding manager.

    Why? Horowitz points out that a manager who still codes will be more skilled in ensuring accurate estimates (in my experience, highly capable development team are prone to deliver overly optimistic estimates), able to make informed decisions regarding technical debt, and have improved credibility with their teams. There are, of course, obstacles — primarily allocating the time and solving for the plague of meetings that can accompany management.

    using socialWhat does this mean for leaders responsible for digital teams, many of whom occupy a CMO or similar role? In the 1990s when mainstream digital emerged there was a complete disconnect between the entire C-suite and digital practices. Executives had little or no exposure to the day-to-day operation of the internet. Websites in large companies were the domain of someone called a Webmaster, who sat in the IT department. Marketing was busy trying to keep those ugly and irrelevant URLs out of their paid media and far from their pristine collateral.

    [tweetable]Today there is an opportunity to bridge the gap between executive experience and operational digital strategy.[/tweetable] Many still believe that promotion to manager and then director and then executive necessitate a complete remove from hands-on digital practices. While a leadership role must reflect disciplined, offline focus, something is lost when your administrative assistant is updating your LinkedIn profile. A marketing leader in 1995 could be relatively certain that best practices in existence since 1955 — brand, advertising, direct, outdoor, media relations — were not constantly being rewritten. Executives today have no such luxury.

    How can leaders responsible for digital strategy and large teams keep up? Many successful marketing and media executives allocate time to work hands-on digital into their schedules: through hacks for managing their information diet, participating in structured social channels, and setting realistic goals for C-level engagement.

    Ultimately, which will be more expensive: the time spent mastering and connecting through digital channels, or the risk of failure stemming from a knowledge gap between digital strategy and execution? Given the high value and fast pace of best-in-class digital, the cost of a personal disconnect from digital comes at a higher price for both the individual and the organization.

    Photo credit: joeshoe

  • Social media strategy for leadership

    Six social media skillsToday large organizations face a pervasive gap in social media competency among their ranks. A recent Stanford GSB report highlights that executives are aware of social media opportunities and risks, but that few have put into place the kind of systemic practices that advance an organization. As a result, there’s a lack of understanding of and preparedness for the rapidly changing terms of communications and engagement. Leadership risks being well equipped for fighting the last war.

    McKinsey Quarterly makes a similar argument, and identifies six social media skills every leader needs [free registration required]. The six skills are divided into Personal Level (Producer, Distributor, and Recipient) and Strategic/organizational Level (Adviser, Architect, Analyst.) Using GE as a case study, the article describes each role in detail and how strong execution can have an impact on culture and outcomes.

    The role of the social media leader as architect and enabler across the organization is particularly powerful. The word is out on the social media revolution: with their parents on Facebook and their kids on Snapchat, employees are by and large eager to get on board with new technologies. Leaders who develop an organizational culture that celebrates and empowers rather than censors and condones social media adoption will identify more loyal champions and idea generators among its ranks.

  • What new leadership looks like

    Last week I was lucky to hear two fascinating talks: from Bill George, HBS prof and author of True North, and Wael Ghonim, the Google employee and internet activist who energized pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt just over a year ago.

    The theme that emerged for me was distributed leadership. George spoke about IBM’s collaborative organizational structure and shifting definition of leadership. In a workforce of 440,000 employees, he described IBM as cultivating 40,000 of them for some kind of leadership role. Ghonim focused on current and future challenges for Egypt and pointed to the importance of the many “ordinary” young Egyptians in the uprising — while disavowing narratives that position him as the movement’s hierarchical leader. (Good NPR review of his book, Revolution 2.)

    The point about the death of command-and-control and emergence of new, global organizational models is not a new one. What was striking to me was two such different men with vastly different life experiences, both underscoring the imperative of reaching that conclusion.