Is It Foggy – Or Is It Just Me?

Diarist Jamie Davies, a Finance Shared Services Centre Organisational Change & Improvement Consultant for BT, is currently supporting and coaching the Global Shared Services leadership team with next generation strategy, employee engagement, branding, stakeholder engagement and enhanced people development – all in aid of developing the GSS business partnering capability. He shares trials and tribulations in his online diary... Depending on how you look at is, I was extremely fortunate to have a 3-week break from SSC life over the Christmas and New Year period – a chance to recharge myself and enjoy the very rich food and drink on offer in Budapest. The downside of a long break, though, is the adjustment back to organisational life… My first challenge was trying to remember my laptop login password and to remember why I had organised five meetings for the first day back: continuous improvement, business partnering, weekly team meeting, communication planning. It all must have seemed a great idea at the time (back in December), but now my head is foggier than the weather here in Budapest and my prime task has become one of just surviving the week without feeling completely incompetent! I’m sure I am not alone in this sinking New Year feeling…It’s a lot of pressure to take on personal resolutions, while at the same time trying to develop a strong vision of what we want to accomplish in the SSC for the year ahead. [inlinead] One of the paradoxes we face as managers is constantly shuffling our attention between the present and the future – as well as internally, within the SSC operations, and externally to our stakeholders and customers. I was humbled to be reminded by some of our very hard working operational staff that, whilst I was dreaming about the what the next two or three years held in store for our Shared Services, they were busy working over Christmas and New Year, closing the accounts, ensuring suppliers were paid etc. I felt guilty about my long Christmas break for a few minutes, before reminding myself that that I am 15 years older than they are, and have paid my penance worth of anti-social hours and holiday working when I was younger. I don’t think they bought it… Am I getting old or was organisational communication easier in the good old days? A New Year’s exchange with some of my team got me thinking about how challenging modern SSC organisational life is when it comes to communication, sense making, and trying to get engagement. We are, after all, talking about an environment where the vast majority of people are capable of holding a conversation whilst simultaneously posting an update to Facebook, sending a twitter message, and completing a transaction in Oracle. I had been considering whether or not to go ahead with a planned weekly learning and development focus bulletin. I thought I’d start by encouraging people to think about goals, ensuring they had some development plan, a mentor to help them with challenging areas, and some interesting article from the SSC community. I tested the idea with some of our younger workers and was brought down to earth with a bang when they told me that, unless there was a competition prize or a photo of one of their colleagues at a party involved, my message was likely to receive the delete treatment. When working in a large, multinational SSC environment we have to remember that what I and older generation workers might consider important and valuable may not be that high on the agenda for the generation Y crowd! We have to get creative, social media savvy and remember that people don’t just listen to the wisdom of elders anymore (assuming I have a lot of wisdom to give!), but that they value learning in a social and participative format. It has to be practical, problem-related, interactive, visual and engaging. We of the "older" generation focus communication on formal, structured activities – such as briefings, presentations, chalk and talk sessions, websites, and so forth. But we need to be thinking about communication as being effective when we engage in an informal, unstructured setting. As leaders and managers we have to consider communication as a participative act, as a sense-making process … which means getting your hands dirty at a local level. So my new year’s resolution is to remind myself of the quote by George Bernard Shaw that, "The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that is has taken place," and to ensure that we, as a leadership team, get more creative, get more local, and get more informal. Jamie Davies will be sharing his diaries regularly. Please check back.

Is It Foggy – Or Is It Just Me?

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