Robert Brook writes an impassioned post about his distaste for artificial games and the overuse of competition as a motivator. I’ll write more on that later, but I wanted to pick up on one thing that Robert says at the bottom of his post:

Lindsay Marshall, of Bifurcated Rivets fame – I’m a long-time reader – reminds me of another grim manifestation: team building. Real teams come together organically, or emerge – they are rarely, if ever, built. That false application and bonhomie is dreadfully thin stuff, especially in comparison to emergent groups.

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine once told me about how he was chastised by his boss for not being a ‘team player’ because he didn’t join in office conversations about football.

Team building is not about creating groupthink. The kind of mutual respect and understanding that underpins the best teams is something that can’t be forced.

So here’s a thought: How about we use social media to build internal communities from which teams emerge spontaneously? How about providing people with the means and opportunity to get to know each other, understand each others’ skills and ways of working, and then let teams coalesce around projects? Turn Google’s 20% Time on its head: Instead of giving staff one day a week to work on whatever project they want, give them four days to work on projects that they get to choose from a list of things that the business needs doing (which they also get to contribute to), and one day where everyone has to do unavoidable unpopular tasks. If you share the good, you have to share the bad, after all!

What kind of company might that create? I would hazard a guess that it would be highly creative, innovative, productive and successful. It would be a company that retained its best staff because they are happier there than they could ever be in a traditional management structure. And if you only have one day to do chores, then the needless administrivia that gets created out of nowhere and which serves no purpose other than to feed the bureaucracy will just die off.

Who’s going to give it a go, then?

First we caused the twin evils of poor communication and inability to learn from each other through our systematisation and bureaucratisation of the world of work. We devalued relationships and trust as twin pillars of human endeavour. Then we made it worse by sticking plaster on the wound, adding layers of “professional” intervention on top in the form of “internal communicators” and “knowledge managers” in our attempts to make things better. We buried the people trying to do things under increasingly collusive layers of “grown ups” pretending that this is the way things have to be.

And then… (Euan is a great read – if you’re not already subscribed, he’s well worth it.)

Professionalism is, at best, a veneer of objectivity. At worst is a false persona that distances us from our colleagues, complicates collaboration and erodes trust. Social media turns all this on its head – instead of being “professional” we can be ourselves, we can have genuine relationships with colleagues that promote trust and understanding. We can finally acknowledge that we are real people with real emotions and that those emotions matter.

There’s a great interview with digital anthropologist danah boyd in The Guardian. I love danah’s work. We so desperately need more people like danah who take a calm and evidence-based view of the way the internet and social tools are changing society (or not, in some cases). She proved to be an essential source for my work on digital natives earlier this year, and her work should be essential reading for everyone in recruitment and HR.

The article says:

Lately, [boyd’s] work has been about explaining new ways of interpreting the behaviour we see online, and understanding that the context of online activity is often more subtle – and more familiar – than we first imagine.

Last week she outlined some examples at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, including the case of a young man from one of the poorest districts of Los Angeles who was applying to a prestigious American college. The applicant said he wanted to escape the influence of gangs and violence, but the admissions officer was appalled when he discovered that the boy’s MySpace page was plastered with precisely the violent language and gang imagery he claimed to abhor. Why was he lying about his motivations, asked the university? He wasn’t, says Boyd: in his world, showing the right images online was a key part of surviving daily life.

This is possibly an extreme case, but an important illustration. There are so many examples of people who have been fired or had job/univiersity offers withdrawn because of their behaviour on social tools. As a society we need to be really careful about how we handle the occasional mismatch between what we see and what we want to see. Sometimes it’s just more complicated than it seems and people deserve to have that complexity examined before people leap to a conclusion.

Social tools bring into the light behaviours that were previously hidden and we risk making very poor HR decisions if we don’t examine the nuance of each scenario individually. Is it right that employers expect a potential hire’s Facebook page to reflect the employers’ values rather than the reality of the new hire’s life? How long do youthful transgressions linger? After all, how many managers making hiring decisions have an entirely unblemished past? The fact that their mistakes are buried in the mists of pre-technological history doesn’t mean that they didn’t make the same ones that we witness young people making online now.

What are the implications of reducing bureaucracy? Bill Vlasic of the New York Times asked that question in his piece about how General Motors is trying to get rid of needless form-filling and shed its “hidebound, command-and-control corporate culture”. GM is trying to shift from a company where dissent was marginalised to a culture of openness and honesty.

I agree wholeheartedly with Johnnie Moore, when he says:

My feeling is that what appears to be happening at GM needs to happen in a lot more places. It often seems to me that everytime we experience a crisis, the solution is to write more rules. […]

The intention is good, but the practical effect is to engulf people in explicit, complicated systems and reduce their freedom – based on an unconscious assumption that everyone is not to be trusted. We give ascendancy to people who are really great at theory and effectively degrade practice. I think its rooted in the idea that one person or a group of people can effectively oversee a system and control how it works with written instructions.

In order to get things done people have to find elaborate work arounds for the rules, often with anxiety. The result: it’s actually harder to create real trust the human way, using our judgement and instincts.

This reminds me of theories of management that I stumbled once on Wikipedia, Theory X and Theory Y, which were proposed by Douglas McGregor in the 60s. In Theory X, management assume that employees are “inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can”. In Theory Y, managers assume that employes “may be ambitious and self-motivated” and enjoy their work.

Whilst reality tends not to fall into two neatly opposing mindsets, the framework is still useful, especially when think about how social media fits into a corporate culture. One could extend the theories thus:

Theory X companies are inimical to social tools, because they simply do not trust staff. Concern that people will ‘abuse’ the tools in some way leads to attempts to control employees’ access to them. The company’s public blog winds up with an editorial committee, only approved managers are allowed an internal blog, and access to sites like Wikipedia or services like Twitter are curtailed. Social media projects generally fail in these cultures, if they are ever started in the first place.

Theory Y companies, on the other hand, are ready to trust their staff to do the right thing. Social software is made available to all, small talk and social uses of the tools are allowed (sometimes even encouraged), and people build stronger relationships with colleagues which increases trust and ability to collaborate. Departmental silos are broken down, communication across time zones and locations improves, duplication of effort is reduced. Social media projects generally succeed in these cultures.

Of course, in reality, corporate cultures are not homogeneous. One department may have a much more open, collaborative and sharing culture than another. The question is whether Theory Y cultures are nurtured and growing within a wider Theory X company, or are they seen as aliens to be disposed of?

(The other Two Cultures, in case you’re wondering, are CP Snow’s.)