Painfully Obvious: Find Links

by Kent Aitken

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At the outset of my public service career, I listened to a conference keynote entirely dedicated to networking. It was presented through the lens of career-building, and to me, sounded like sucking up and charlatanism. I switched off.

A few years later, I was at a table with a handful of municipal, provincial, and federal CIOs discussing how they handled their career evolution toward managing people with more, and more current, technical expertise. Here's the simple, but showstopping solution from one of them:

“I've spent the latter half of my career building business skills, but also building a network. I have twenty years worth of friends I can call any day to ask “Hey, can this consultant do a good job on X project?”

By that time, I understood the importance of networks (and it avoided the language of "networking" as an activity, which has negative connotations for me). So it stuck.

Yet, I've realized that the relationships we should invest in aren't always obvious. In July, a series of chance events landed me in the basement of a pub in Washington, DC. I ended up sitting next to a bright American public servant, and after talking for a few minutes we realized that we were working on exceptionally similar projects, facing many of the same challenges. So now, we're setting up videoconferences to compare notes. But, it struck me that I could have found that connection through three minutes of Googling, with plenty of context to reach out.

This is you in your career: a massive room, with a tiny flashlight.
You know there's a lot of good stuff to be found, but not what, and not where.

One of the authors of The Metropolitan Revolution, Jennifer Bradley, had this to say after interviewing a slew of city stakeholders:

"When we go around the country, whether it was all the mayors in the Denver Metropolitan Area, or the philanthropies in Northeast Ohio, they would say, "We never got together."...It’s the most simple thing, and you do feel like a dork the first few times you tell people "no really, just get everyone in a room," but over and over again we heard that that was a huge step. And I think it has to do with the fact that people are so busy doing what they think of as their day-to-day job, they forget to step back and look laterally and think about what somebody else might be doing."

That excerpt is from an article called A Lot of Civic Leaders Need to Listen to This Painfully Obvious Advice.

If you take the time to seek those who can shine light on things, suddenly it's all that much easier.

On the surface, yes, it's painfully obvious: talk to people who can help you do your job. But sometimes you won't know them yet - they'll be just outside your network. Just outside the part of the map you can see. It doesn't always seem easy to find and initiate contact with people you haven't met yet, particularly if they're experts in your field. Here's what I've been trying to remember:

1. We have policy cover to use the internet for "participating in professional associations, knowledge sharing and career development." Which is pretty broad. ("I'm writing as a X enthusiast who happens to work for Y.")
2. The world will almost certainly not end if you email a possible contact. In fact, the opportunity cost of not trying far outweighs the risk.
3. If your job is important (and it is), dedication and diligence in establishing relationships with colleagues and counterparts isn't a career move. It's just your job.

So I pushed my mind through that lens, and I'm pulling my body after.

Gov't Rock Star T-shirt (Canadian Version)

Hey All,

I've been rocking my green Govloop t-shirt for a while now (especially during presentations) and casual Fridays around the office.

It's a great conversation piece, but I wanted one that was a little more Canadian. Nothing against our cousins to the south, but I wanted one that rung a little more "true north, strong and free" if you catch my drift.

This is the prototype I put together, it's not perfect but I think it's fairly slick.

I'm looking for a Canadian t-shirt maker/distributor.
Any recommendations?

Also, please let me know if you are interested in grabbing one of these shirts. I'm on point for producing/distributing them here in Canada for my friends from Govloop.

Cheers

Motivation and Incentives in The Public Sector

Daniel Pink's TED talk on motivation is a must-watch. Watch it yourself, then send the link to your boss.

My Key Takeaways

1. Contingent motivators often do not work in complex situations because they narrow our focus
2. Solutions to complex problems are often on the periphery
3. If we want to discover those solutions we need a new approach
4. New approaches must be built on fostering intrinsic motivation which is based on three interrelated components: (a) autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives; (b) mastery: the desire to get better and better at something; and (c) purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

The Rise of Online Communities

My experience in the public sector has been that these three things are more easily achieved by participation in communities than by adherence to strict hierarchies. Community is not a new social construct; in fact it is probably one of the oldest. The difference, at least the one I see, is that the web has exponentially increased the speed at which they can form, communicate, and act (not to mention expand their reach, increase their longevity, and create digital legacy). In short, the more connected we are, the easier it is to find and share our niches and/or interests. I have a feeling that this may partially explain the popularity of professionally-focused social networks like Govloop.


The Connection Between Online Communities and Motivation

What sites like Govloop offer that the public sector organizations can't is a large pool of people who have all opted-in to the community (autonomy). Strict hierarchies, and the work we are paid to undertake within them, often fail to align well with where autonomy would take us.

For me personally, despite a significant interest and work overlap, there are many tasks that I perform in my substantive role that don't actually interest me. At a fundamental human level, I think that we are all working to bring our interests and our duties into complete congruence. While there may be other motivating factors, I would argue that joining a professional social network is a way to signal one's interest in improving one's skill set. My own experience with Govloop is that the network has expanded the pool of people from whom I can learn and has exposed me to a number of new social (free) learning opportunities. The community also reinforces my sense of purpose through encouraging comments on blog posts and interactions in discussion forums.


Online Communities: A Motivating Factor

This is incredibly important because the relationship between traditional motivators like salary, advancement opportunities and service to Canadians and autonomy, mastery and purpose is not always clear.

Somewhere at the nexus of employees and managers lies the responsibility to motivate. If participation in online communities does in fact motivate people the way I think they do, an argument could be made that they are the newest tool at the disposal of organizations looking to improve the motivation of their people.

However, this is deeply at odds with standard operating procedure in many public sector agencies. If we agree that participation in online communities can plug motivational gaps within the organization than we should be acting in a way that reduces the barriers to participation for those people in the organization who want to participate.

Why is it then that our organizations block access to these types of networks in the workplace? From where I sit, I see them filling a gap, and doing it at no additional cost to the organization, save some of the employees' time. What people need to understand is that a little time away from the desk now may actually mean a more effective use of the remaining time spent at it.


Plugging the Holes

Perhaps we need to start to rethink the public sector's relationship with social networking sites, maybe they aren't the productivity sink holes many people deem them to be, maybe they could actually be used to fill not only motivational gaps, but learning gaps, expertise gaps, and thereby perhaps even budgetary shortfalls (depending of course on how they are used).

Shouldn't managers then be looking to connect their staff to their communities of interest in a way that creates value for the organization?

If I had to wager a guess, I'd say that the ability to do this effectively is about to become one of the most important competencies for leadership.

Column: From Practice to Practitioner

It is funny that a friend and colleague just blogged that she finished reading Bob Chartier's book, Bureaucratically Incorrect: Letters to a Young Public Servant.

You see, I met Bob about a year ago and, although we haven't been in direct communication much, we always get along smashingly - which is one of the reasons why I was very excited to open for him on the last day of the 2009 Alberta Managers' Learning and Development Forum in Calgary a couple of weeks ago. The other reason I was glad to speak ahead of him is that he is an impossible act to follow. If you have ever seen him speak, you know what I am talking about. In short, he is awesome and I consider it an honour to be able to speak on the same bill as him. What really did it for me was when he suggested (to the crowd) that he and I should embark on a speaking tour, which he affectionately dubbed "The Geezer and the Grasshopper".

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of the wisdom that Bob shared with the group in Calgary, blended with some of my own thoughts.


Moving from 10% to %100

At one point, Bob asked us to envision a public service where we each devoted only 10% of our time to "do our practice", whatever that practice is. We all have varying interests and skills, many of which are lost when we simply do what our job requires us to do. He asked what we thought the public service would look like if we all embraced our practice as an integral part of doing our job? If my interest is public service renewal, then shouldn’t I be encouraged to make contributions to it when I can? If your interest/expertise is in alternative dispute resolution, but you are an auditor (the example Bob used), you should be able to take some time to participate in the communities that practice your practice, that practice your passion. There are a lot of spectacular learning opportunities for public servants right here at home - within the public service - but the dominant mental model isn't one that recognizes the opportunity as an opportunity but rather paints the opportunity as a cost: the cost of not doing one's job for that period of time.

Bob went on to explain that if we were all able to move from investing 10% of our time in our practice to 100%, we would become practitioners. In doing so, we would all become more connected with our work. We would be more passionate about it. We would be at the place that David Irvine describes as the "sweet spot" - where our interests and our responsibilities to the organization overlap (Side note: I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking after David Irvine at the Alberta Human Resources Conference in Red Deer a couple of weeks ago). This is exactly what I mean when I show this picture in my presentations and tell people that this is how I feel about my job.



Career Evolution

Looking at the evolution of my career in the public service thus far, I can say with great certitude, that I have made the shift from practice to practitioner, I have found the sweet spot that Irvine refers to and I have to tell you it wasn't easy, but being there now is pretty f***ing awesome. The other thing I can say with certitude is that the time I have invested in my practice (prior to becoming a practitioner) has done at least as much, if not more, for my career than my substantive work. My practice delivered new opportunities that would otherwise be outside the purview of my substantive role. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that I haven’t learned anything on the job, because I have. What I am saying is that the daily tasks of one’s substantive position are generally more static and (so the theory goes) you have already demonstrated that you can do them (by winning a competition based on the skill set/expertise to actually do the work). Practice on the other hand is considerably more dynamic and has no preordained areas of responsibility. Practice can shift with your interests and as you discover other things, people and passions through the serendipitous nature of that discovery.

But making the transition from practice to practitioner is difficult (it took me over 3 years), but the work is worth the reward. In order to achieve that transformation, the first thing you need to do is realize that your practice is in fact not a cost but a contribution, a contribution that, in some non-traditional or currently immeasurable way helps improve your organization. The second thing you need to do is start to convince others of this very same thing. Start a conversation with your manager. Ask them how you can better align your passions with what the organization asks of you. Public servants, Bob says, are not only dying for this conversation, but also for the more genuine relationships that this conversation engenders. I think that this is why Bob sees communities of practice as the most powerful/transformational tool at the disposal of the public service. He sees them as a tool that grows sustainable leadership within the public service.


Why We Do What We Do

This is why I think that you are so important - that the community that has formed around this blog and the blogs of my fellow public servants, on twitter, LinkedIn, Govloop, GCPEDIA or GCConnex are so important.

What we are doing with all of these social media tools is having the conversations we were dying to have; connecting communities looking to forge better relationships and in so doing, growing more sustainable leadership.

What we need to do now is rally more people into these conversations, increase the number and quality of these relationships, and uncover more of the leaders buried under the weight of the bureaucracy.

Are you with me?