The point of blogging
One of my frequent correspondents (who had better start his own blog soon!) pointed me to Cary Cooper's Blame and Shame article in the June 2006 Director Magazine.
I recently read about the increasing trend for employees to create blogs cataloguing the problems, dysfunctions and difficulties within their own companies.... So why has this form of employee blogging developed? Is it just a consequence of the technology or is it something deeper?
I didn't find anything particularly new in the article, but my friend pointed out the complete slant toward "corporate blogs are dangerous" is an overblown stance. The article was published about a year ago, and it was in response to something Cooper had read from a blogger (Scoble, perhaps?)
The unfortunate fact is that the popular conception of blogs is that they are toys of teenagers or that they will get you fired because you will say something that the company doesn't want you to say.
Sure these kinds of blogs exist, but they aren't very interesting to me as someone interested in adding value to human interactions, adding value to businesses that want to use them.
Sure, no one likes to admit things are going wrong. On the other hand, things go wrong. It's part of life. There is Murphy's Law that reflects the deep-seated truth that things can go wrong at the worst possible time. Rather than burying our heads in the sand, why not create a culture in which it's okay to say, "I'm working on X project, and Y just isn't happening." along with "I'm working on Z and it is going better than expected, here's why." It's not just blogs that can help with this -- and blogs alone won't create the culture. Cooper talks about this at the end of the piece: it's the leadership that sets the tone:
Either you create a "blame culture" or a potentially constructive "learning organisation". If we had the right leaders in our businesses, we would not need the blog, we could own up to our failures and learn from them. As Henry Ford once said, "failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently".
In my view blogging is orthogonal to having the right leaders. Having the right leaders makes all sorts of things possible. Just imagine how much better a blogging environment; or a innovation environment; or a customer-centric environment would be with the right leadership. Great. But isn't it also possible to do these things without the perfect leadership? The scale might be different or the rules around doing it might be different. But it can still work. And, in the case of blogging, a lot of value can be had.
Blog internally on sensitive matters over which employees have expertise. Blog externally to build brand and to set up a two-way street of knowledge sharing with outside experts. Just don't assume that blogs are evil and walk away.
2 Comment(s)
said:
Thanks, Duane. Nice hearing from you again.
As you and I know, blogs can serve all sorts of purposes. I suspect even the vent-your-spleen variety can serve a value beyond that of the spleen-venter. It's just that in a relatively closed environment, the venting ends up taking on a much larger nature than it was probably intended.
What's that saying? Give praise in public and criticism privately. I think that might apply here too.
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Hi Jack! Your posts often get me where I live. One of my faults is I take a lot of shots at managers and management on my blog and I admit that’s unfair. It’s a bad habit --but it’s just easy so take shots at the pointy-haired boss archetype.
My last entry on my blog degenerated into one of those unfair snipes, almost without me realizing it (until after I hit the "post" button).
I recently finished an eight month Project Management Certification course. I learned several new things and I am now in the process of reflecting on them. One was about the role of Project Managers, which are not necessarily the same people as the manager in an organization.
Then there's that ancient problem of "...working on X project, and Y just isn't happening". As far as there being a "people problem" or "teaming problem" that gets vented in a blog or two I agree it rarely helps (if at all). One thing I re-learned in this course work was that teams work when everybody wants them to work. If one person is not engaged or committed to a shared vision (as it were), the team is certainly in danger of failing.
For example, the team I was on in the course (for eight months) got along incredibly smoothly and produced an outstanding final project. In most of the teams I am on in academic settings, I have had excellent experiences. Contrasted to a project I am working on at work, we've been struggling for over year on something and still have no firm or consistent agreement of direction, consensus, or teamwork and certainly little or no confidence in leadership (what there is of it). Some people on the 22 member team are refusing to work on the project because it's seems so pointless to do so.
One of the recurring things I see in the contrast of the two situations has been that in the academic teams that do well, it seems people set aside ego and hidden agendas, the team draws together to focus on the product (or ends) to make. In the work place, such a condition is rare. The incentives are vastly different, too: in an academic setting, a team of students working on a project have a hard deadline with irreversible consequences (the grade the individual receives). In the work place, the incentives for any single team members may be at odds with any other one. And forget about getting egos to take a back seat to some common goal (my experience).
So, venting on a blog is a lot like venting in an email. They’re both tools for communication and I’ve used both for venting. In the end, such venting serves me as a cathartic mechanism but I am still left with the same problems. If such tools were used for positive ends, that is, if I took more time to think about what positive changes to make and put those ideas on my blog, that might make a difference (at least for myself). i think i'll give it a try.