Self-knowledge is honestly answering the question, What you are like? Knowing what interests you, what your strengths are and what you are not satisfied with helps you adjust your personal compass and set objectives that are in keeping with who you are.
Just do it
People skills are not rocket science. The best place to polish your people skills is in the real world. Challenge yourself to step outside of your comfort zone. Developing any skill involves practicing it. Someone who is skilled in the social graces, meets every situation with poise, good manners, and elegance.
We learn social skills reflexively
Reflexive learning is navigating the circular relationships between cause and effect in rapidly changing circumstances. In this context it refers to the capacity of an individual to recognize the forces of socialization. It is a quantum reflection and you, as the observer, are part of the equation.
Where is the road map and directions for navigating
the complexities of interpersonal relationships?
Literacy is more than acquiring a set of skills. Literacy is the capability, confidence and competency we apply and evolve in a changing environment.
To use a common example. We develop the skill to understand spoken words at an early age. We develop literacy, the ability to understand and express complex ideas through language, during our school years.
In the workplace, soft skills courses attempt to address aspects of our interactions with others. Assertiveness, communication, negotiating, diversity, team building and managing conflict, are familiar course titles on offer. Each addresses an aspect of human interactions, however none address the subject comprehensively.
With regard to interpersonal relationships, hiding yourself away or being the strong silent type, is avoiding the issue. Both psychology and neuroscience have established we are social creatures. Relationships matter for our emotional well being. Interpersonal difficulties tell us there is something we don’t understand, either about relationship dynamics, or ourselves.
“The three hardest things in life are diamonds, steel and knowing yourself.”
~ Benjamin Franklin
The first relationship to attend to is our relationship with ourselves. Gaining self knowledge is an iterative process of better knowing our authentic self and expressing that self to others.
When you interact with someone, realize that person is another you. Shalom is a Hebrew greeting meaning peace, completeness, and welfare . Aloha means affection, love, peace, compassion and mercy. These are things that we also wish for ourselves. Interact with others with this in mind.
If your kindness and respect are not returned, perhaps the other person has not yet reached this level of understanding. From this perspective, we realize good interpersonal relationships are not about winning or getting our way every time. It is about treating people how you would like to be treated.
Be a diamond, make the first move, be altruistic, engage with others in a respectful and courteous matter and expect the best from others.
The way we do our work affects the way other people do their work.
As such, each person is key to the sustainability of the organization.
Twenty years ago, Peter Senge described the learning organization as a group of people who are continually enhancing their capabilities to create what they want to create. This concept has been acknowledged by organisations, and yet, is rarely invested in.
…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to
create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns
of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and
where people are continually learning to see the whole together.
The social learning theory of Albert Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Social Learning has become a contemporary label for transferring knowledge between individuals on a peer to peer basis. Social technologies provide a technological conduit for peer to peer knowledge sharing to occur.
The culture and behaviors associated with sharing knowledge through social learning are poorly developed. Social learning is done predominantly away from the machine. It takes place in the informal conversations, behaviors and activities that inform the culture. Technology supports and captures but true social learning is witnessed and adopted by human observation.
Steve Flinn is Managing Director of ManyWorlds, Inc., an intellectual capital design firm that delivers next generation strategic advice, research, content solutions, and author of the recently published ‘The Learning Layer’. Prior to founding ManyWorlds, Flinn was a Chief Information Officer, as well as a Vice President of Strategy of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, which was, at that time, the most valuable company in the world. Steve recognizes that learning to learn better is the only sustainable competitive advantage that builds the value generating the possibilities of any business.
Social awareness and learning from experience can now be built into our IT systems and evolve the knowledge within the organisation more efficiently. Engendering the emergence of an entirely new phenomenon, an evolving network of people and knowledge. The result is a system that can recommend the right individual or item of knowledge to the right person at the right time.
Harold Jarche, in his critique of Steve Flinn’s Learning Layer commented, “The key difficulty I see in the implementation of a learning layer is getting people to use it. As a layer, it is not integrated into the work tools. Even if socially aware systems collect and analyze data and feed these into the learning layer, the layer has to be used by people.”
Tools can only capture what people share. Sharing needs to be an enculturated process. If you embed learning into the organisation, people who want to do their work well, feel incentivised to participate in learning and sharing. Then, you grow a sustainable culture, with people who feel accountable about how they deliver their work.
Learning is always going to be human centric. If you are not enculturing learning in a way that is accessible, participatory, rewarding and sharable; the vision will remain a vision.
Bandura’s social cognitive theory emphasizes the role of observational learning and social experience as significant in building cultural norms. Without creating a culture where learning, sharing and mutual accountability is fundamental, and valued, how can social learning be effectively implemented, measured or sustained?
David Skyrme is best known today as a leading authority on knowledge management, including being featured as a ‘guru’ by Information Age. He is a strategic analyst and management consultant with extensive knowledge and experience of information and knowledge management.
His book ‘Knowledge Networking: Creating the Collaborative Enterprise is acknowledge by Dave Snowden as ‘One of the best collations of knowledge management practice available in one place. David has been present at the birth of knowledge management, has witnessed much of the early experiments and knows most of the early pioneers ‘.
In this article he observes the critical elements of trust from a knowledge management perspective and gives a list of prerequisites to enable trust to develop.
“The largest challenge is our culture. People are protective of their departmental boundaries.”
“How do you shift from a position of ‘knowledge is power’ to ‘knowledge sharing is power’?”
“Why should I give freely of my hard won knowledge? What do I get in return?”
All are typical comments I hear from people in companies trying to improve their knowledge sharing. In general, people like helping other people. It makes them feel good and allows them to demonstrate their expertise. Why is it then, that there is this reluctance when the same individuals are in a corporate setting? One of the underlying reasons is a certain lack of trust:
Do I trust that this knowledge will used properly?
Do I trust the recipient not to grab it and use it as his/her own?
Do I trust the organization to recognize and reward me for my contribution to the corporate good?
The following list represents ideal behaviours to fostering trust:
1. Communicate, communicate, communicate – short and frequent communications help the process of dialogue and trust building.
2. Offer some knowledge freely and without strings – give away some knowledge that has some value to you, and will be of significant benefit to the recipient, such as some key contact names or key source material (after all, by sharing you have not lost this knowledge, you have just made it less exclusive).
3. Make a small commitment and meet it – if you say “OK, I’ll send that on to you”, do so. Its amazing with busy professionals how many small things fall through the cracks, whether through lack of time or disorganization. Better not make a commitment at all than make one and miss it.
4. Don’t over commit – a frequent problem of the professional perfectionist. I’d rather hear “no” from a colleague, rather than “yes”, followed by repeated missed deadlines.
5. Disclose your values in carefully managed phases – you don’t want to give somebody your life’s history or prejudices, but you do need to make clear what is driving you to behave in certain ways.
6. Make your expectations clear – if you are seeking specific knowledge or help on a problem, be as explicit as you can. That helps the other party the ability to give a definitive response.
7. Remind colleagues gently if they have not met their obligations or your trust – don’t make a big deal out of it, but don’t ignore it either; use it as a signal to show that you care, and to help them gauge their behaviour to you.
8. Be prolific with your thanks and praise – people appreciate recognition, even if they are only doing their job. Recognition is in short supply in many workplaces.
9. Socialise – even informally by email over the network. Informal conversation and identification of shared interests beyond the immediate business tasks, helps builds closer bonds.
10. Demonstrate interest and commitment to the other person. Do things for them that will help them succeed.
Sunday, January 11, 2009Categorized under Articles
Is the prime motivation of social networking behavior an attempt reduce risk when making those important decisions that affect our lives? Success in professional services depends on developing and retaining the highest quality relationships. Having a benchmark for what qualitative exchanges look like, is where we are today, in so far as each of us seems to be learning more about.
Reaching out to trusted friends or peers for guidance, information or recommendations around topics that bring confirmation and confidence, such as someone you might need to build a website or provide a service, has been generally restricted to people we have known or met socially. However, since the exponential expansion of virtual socialisation, it is now commonplace to solicit the opinions of those who exist within your extended network despite the fact you might barely know them. If you are lucky enough to get worthwhile responses from people who take the time to reply and guide you to some valuable providers or some new opportune connection, this is the genesis of a trusted relationship. They have stepped up and generated some ‘relationship capital’ with you.
It is important to understand how relationship capital is developed because it is along the same lines as Keith Ferazzi’s clear vision of enterprises as networks. It is a daily practice of providing a goodwill gesture to someone who maybe a friend or a complete stranger, a sort of ‘pay it forward’ philosophy at work. Trust is a beautiful yet fragile creation. Guard it well by only commiting to that which you truly believe you can execute or recommending an excellent service, person, business. This is what makes the world a better place and restores our confidence in one another against a tide of lies and corruption that have driven us to the brink of cynicism.
Trust-based NetworksIn this first of four segments, Myra Gorman, President and CEO of Community Analytics, explains how trust plays a role inside networks. You can find all the videos in this series on the same Blip TV link.
s] adjective: of the nature of or resembling glass, as in transparency, brittleness, hardness, glossiness, etc.: vitreous china.
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