That’s okay. So am I.

And here’s the secret: everyone is. You may not agree, but understanding and accepting that fact is the key to success in anything.

Everyone operates in their own self-interest. Always. Companies, too.

Whatever we do, we do for a good reason. Even if cloaked in bad behavior, we do what we do because—at some level—it does something good for us. Perhaps it makes us feel better. Perhaps it moves us forward. Perhaps it holds someone else back (thus moving us forward by default). No matter the situation, no matter the scale, scope, or location, each of us will do what (we think) serves us best.

The trick is figuring out what that is—for ourselves and those we work with and for. But it’s worth it.

If we figure out self-interest, we figure out everything.

Companies are easy: a company will always do what it (thinks it) needs to do to succeed—or stay—in business. That means companies don’t care about you as an individual…unless it helps them succeed. They don’t care about the environment…unless it helps them stay in business (or is their business). And so on.

With companies, the hard part is figuring out what drives how they stay in business, which is driven by the people who run the company.

But people are harder to figure out. You can look at Maslow’s hierarchy to figure out where someone might be at any given point, but most of us in day-to-day work life aren’t worrying about how to stay alive. What drives each of us at work is a complex blend of what drives us as people: how we define ourselves, our beliefs, our values, our goals, AND to what extent our professional selves define our personal ones.

To accurately assess someone else’s self-interest, we have to understand our own.

Why?

Self-interest is self-defined.

“Dechenes Nancy,” in a comment on my post about beliefs last week was on to something. She said:

You…have to look at what [your] beliefs lead you to expect. “I believe in fair play” doesn’t cause conflict, but when I expect others to play fair, that’s when sparks may fly.

We want people to play by our rules, and get miffed when they don’t. In other words, we assume that our self-interest is the same that drives others (a little thing I call genre bias) OR, if we’ve deduced that someone else’s self-interest isn’t the same as ours, we often sit in judgment of it, and spend all our time trying to change their motivations (rather than figuring out how to play to their self-interest to get things done).

I’ve had bosses ruled by anxiety and insecurity, coworkers ruled by power and vanity, staff ruled by self-doubt and self-importance. No matter the self-interest, I’ve had to figure out a way to get things done with and for them. So I come up with “rules,” little sayings that sum up their self-interest, that I repeat whenever I’m trying to figure out how best to handle a situation.

While the names have been changed to protect the innocent, here are some of them:

• Marie must always look good.
• Henry is the company. The company is Henry.
• Assuage Jane’s anxiety.
• Betty must be in charge.
• Mike sees positions, not people.
• Sally serves the boss.

(And the rule for Tamsen? Tamsen must be heard.)

With someone’s self-interest clearly defined in our mind, we suddenly change everything about how we interact with them. If we’re dealing with Jane, we present problems with solutions already defined and in place (and choose very carefully which, and how many, problems we present at all). If we’re dealing with Marie, we give constructive criticism in private, and position it in a way that helps her look even better. With Sally, we remember that however much she may agree with our point of view, she will do what the boss tells her to do—always.

If we ignore what drives people, or assume that our self-interest is theirs, we are closing off our most likely avenue of success: the one the other person has defined.

So how do you figure out self-interest?

Actions reveal motivations.

“It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.” Or, as my friend Julien wrote recently, “Everything’s a tell. Nothing is opaque.” Observed over time, what people do tells us what they think.

Yes, it takes patience, practice, and a willingness to change your opinion when the evidence doesn’t hold up. And no, it’s not easy (who said it would be?), mostly because it’s usually in the midst of conflict between what someone does and what we want or expect them to do that we find the answer: Did we piss someone off? Okay, why? Did something someone did piss us off? Okay, why?

If you watch long enough, you’ll see what drives those around you—and they’ll see what drives you, too.

So take a look. What do you see?

What’s your self-interest? What’s theirs?

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Narcissus at work

Today, we’ll kick off a series on Internal Social Media, talking about why it can be valuable, and some of the ways to make it happen. Stay tuned for more posts in the series, culminating with some thoughts from the trenches.

When we talk social media, we often focus on the relationship between business and its external audiences or communities, and how technology can impact communication within them. However, there’s a very real case to be made for why social media can and should be used inside the walls of your company, even before you consider an external strategy: as a testing ground for ideas, as a mechanism for improving internal communication, and as a diagnostic tool.

Cultural Assessment

As I’m fond of saying, social media adoption and implementation in companies is often more of a cultural shift than an operational one. It touches on issues of role and responsibility change, skills evolution, communication style, risk tolerance, and trust that have sometimes rested very comfortably inside an organization for some time.

Leading with social media internally can highlight some of the potential cultural shifts and obstacles that might impede broader strategies. Whether it’s fears over criticism, uncertainty over productivity issues, or breakdowns in communication or information flow inside the company, setting up social media tactics on the inside can bring them to the forefront and increase the likelihood that you can address them within your walls first.

Risk Discussion

Implementing social media programs internally can help spur discussion about some of the biggest barriers to broadscale adoption: risk assessment. Considering the implications of opening up communication channels, allowing feedback and commentary, flattening hierarchies or dedicating time to new strategies can lead to discussions about potential risks: cost, productivity, confidentiality, accountability, technology access.

Having these discussions first and in the relatively confined walls of your own company can mean laying out a plan to mitigate and address those risks in a manageable timeframe, and with the ability to test solutions before making them externally visible.

Internal Branding

Companies sometimes do a weak job of translating their brand internally, and social strategies can improve that. Internal social networks can encourage broader discussion of company goals, purpose, and vision, and can allow those conversations to happen within levels and across silos in the company (instead of the typical top-down approach).

Employees and team members can gain a greater understanding of larger company strategy through information sharing and dialogue, and executive and management teams can garner feedback and input on the brand and its presentation from the point of view of the workforce. Broader understanding of company purpose can often uncover better and more effective ways for departments and teams to work together toward common goals.

Idea Generation

Ideas – and great ones – can come from all parts of a company. Small changes or transformational shifts in thinking can be found right in our own backyards. What often keeps those ideas hidden, however, is the lack of a mechanism to share them, and the sense of permission to do so (especially for those that may be outside one’s functional area of expertise).

Social technologies – wikis, forums, idea sharing tools like UserVoice, or simple suggestion boxes in the form of blogs or message boards with comments – can provide ample opportunities to share, generate, and build on ideas in a collaborative, open format that has visibility across the organization.

Network Building

At our core, humans crave connections and affinities with others like us. In companies, however, organizational design sorts us by our skillsets and functions and geography, not typically our interests, personalities, or ancillary talents and skills.

Giving employees the opportunity to gather around points of common interest – whether they be personal or professional – online and outside the bounds of physical location can unlock collaborations powered by complimentary skills, friendships, and stronger working relationships. What can all of that lead to? Morale improvements and an increased sense of collective purpose, for starters. Companies earn reputations for empowering and connecting their team members, and retention, recruitment, and even alumni networks can see an uptick.

Knowledge And Information Sharing

Spock didn’t say it exactly, but the knowledge of the many can far outweigh the knowledge of the individual. Collective and collaborative knowledge bases can be rich stores of information, taking tribal knowledge and the information that lives in people’s heads and giving it a tangible, searchable, annotated and permanent (editable) home.

Having central and accessible knowledge could perhaps have a positive impact on training and onboarding programs, as well as continuing education initiatives and cross-functional information sharing within companies to help people do their jobs more efficiently, more thoroughly, and even more creatively.

These are just a few of the ideas, of course, to get started thinking about social media inside business. What other purposes can you see? What are the benefits, and potential reasons why internal deployment can help pave the way for other things? Let’s have your ideas in the comments?

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about addressing some of the fears and hesitation that social networking brings to the forefront.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Internal Social Media: Building A Case

Especially if you’re planning long term and expecting that social media will become part of your business model, not just a channel (and I sure hope you are), you’re going to need the help and involvement from the people around you, and outside of your department.

Getting their commitment and building their enthusiasm is key. It’s not just about a mandate. It’s about helping them understand what social media is, how it works, and why it can help them do their jobs better.

Communication

Good internal communication is really hard. But it’s critical for ANY larger scale initiative to succeed, but especially for something that may be as unfamiliar as social media.

Designate point people on your social media team to act as information stewards. They should be folks with good relationships throughout your organization, and they need to connect with point people in other departments that may be affected – now or later – by social media endeavors.

Ask them to keep these folks posted on a regular basis about your plans and initiatives – both the ones being implemented for sure, and the ones you’re tossing around. Ask for their feedback. Let them air their interest and concerns, and ask lots of questions. Put the responses somewhere for everyone to find and see. That can be a weekly email update, a Google Doc that all can access, your corporate intranet, a wiki, whatever works for you.

People are remarkably comforted by the availability of information, even if they don’t always use it.

Training

Please, please spend the time educating your teams as you go along. You don’t have to have it all perfect (and you probably never will). But be willing to SHARE how you do what you do, down to the details. It’s surprising how enlightening it can be for people to understand what you do by seeing it in action. And if you want people to adopt social media as part of their business practices, you need to make them comfortable with it.

Simple is okay, too. Some ideas:

• Setting up social media profiles
• Social media culture and philosophies (the fluffy stuff, yes, but still important)
• Engaging 101: What to say, when to say it, and what to avoid
• What to listen for and why, relative to their jobs
• Case studies on social media gone right (or wrong), and how that relates to your work
• Real examples of how they can be using social media in their focus area (customer service, business development/sales, HR, internal communications, product management, etc.)
• Measuring social media – what you track, why, and how

Spend an hour over lunch. Order pizza. Skip the PowerPoints. Have a practical discussion that’s open to lots of dialogue, questions, and airing of concerns or doubts. Ask them what THEY want to learn about (versus what you think you need to teach). Training is as much about asking and answering practical, real questions as it is about lecturing.

Empowerment

If you’re opening lines of communication and training folks to get them immersed in social media, you have to let them do it. And they need to believe that you trust their judgment as professionals and colleagues to do it well.

Not everyone is going to do things the way YOU would do them personally. Mistakes will be made, and there will be plenty of learning opportunities for how to do something different or better.

Your feedback should be as much on the side of encouragement and positivity as it is about criticism or pointing out mistakes. Social media is still a BIG area of discomfort and misunderstanding for people, especially those who didn’t come up through their professional careers with digital media at the center. And it’s intimidating as all get out for some. Not everyone gets this naturally.

Being a good steward of social media internally means being coach, cheerleader, and psychologist as well as teacher and expert. It means speaking in plain English, not jargon and buzzwords and kumbaya, and putting things in business perspective for the people you’re talking to. Think practical.

Remember that this is a culture shift. It’s not just about the what and how. Be a resource to your teams as much as you can while they get acclimated.

Don’t Be A Perfectionist

Truth: I’m still working with all of my Radian6 colleagues to perfect this inside our own organization, so please don’t think you need to nail it out of the gate. We’re figuring out what questions people have. Finding ways to share information faster and better. Offering insights about what’s working and what’s not and where we’re hoping to head.

Just DO IT. Get started, somewhere. Waiting until you have all the details hammered out isn’t realistic, because they’ll always be shifting (and that’s not unique to this, either). Move past the “wow, nifty” part of social media, and get started talking about how it really matters to your work.

So how about you? What challenges are you facing getting your colleagues to understand and embrace social media? Are they on board with the idea, but lost about how to apply it? Have you considered your internal implications?

The comments belong to you.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Getting Your Colleagues in the Game