courage | Ian M Rountree

Setting Expectations

May 12, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

If you’re serious about keeping your business human in the face of social media, you need to set expectations.

Not just for yourself – but also for your clients, employees, and employers. Everyone functions better with expectations set.

Your clients need to know when you’re available – and when you’re not. This one’s easy; hours of operation are almost universally respected. Put them on your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter profile – anywhere they might be helpful.

Your employers need to know that when you’re at work, you’re at work. No personal Facebook or Twitter time, unless your personal brand is part of your job description. Your boss has a reasonable expectation that you’ll be mentally and emotionally invested wherever you’re physically located. Conversely, if you workshift, you need to keep your employer apprised of things that limit your working hours. Just because you’re on your computer doesn’t mean you’re working, ready to work, capable of working,or willing to work.

Where this gets complicated is as a leader.

Leadership – yes, you, you’re a leader somewhere – needs to be responsive to the needs of client and employee alike. Leaders need to know when their people can work, and when they cannot. We get that, right? But what about the subtle problems of being a leader who perhaps works more than their troops?

Leadership needs to not set the bar at 2am email flurries.

Leadership needs to not set the bar at retroactive enforcement.

Leadership needs to live by the same rules of engagement that everyone else does.

Even if you tell your people you don’t expect them to work as hard as you do, they’re going to try. They’re going to feel like they’re inadequate sometimes when they can’t spend sixteen hours on a project in one sitting.

Until they understand that their work habits are theirs, and your work habits are yours, your excellence has the hidden opportunity to make people feel like they are less.

And that’s a bad situation to be in. So, please, ask for an end of day response with that 2am email. Tell your people to go home on the weekends. If there’s a shower in your office, turn off the water on holidays. Convince your people that you expect them to take care of themselves.

Or not. Maybe your people work harder than you do. Do they? You’re so lucky. Oh man are you ever.

Unless they worry that they’re working harder than you, and you’re slacking off like a boss. That’s not a good place to be in. Do something about that.

Being awesome has a lot of requirements. One of them is making sure people know when and how they can be awesome too.

Let’s all be awesome together. Who’s with me?

The Assumption of Witness

May 9, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Two situations. You tell me which one is more confusing.

1. You, and two colleagues are at a baseball game.

Halfway through the game, your chatter turns to work. One of your colleagues makes a comment to your other colleague that makes you intensely uncomfortable – perhaps it’s an attack on the second person, perhaps it’s a sexual slight against a fellow colleague not at the event. Either way, if it were in a workplace, it would be harrassment.

But you’re at a baseball game – a social event. Is it harrassment?

2. You post something on a colleague’s Facebook wall.

You intend it as a joke – but a third party, who is Friends with both of you, makes a complaint to HR, and all of the associated fun with a harrassment suit begins.

The comment was made off work hours, on your home computer – indeed, Facebook is blacklisted on the company network, and it’s impossible to make this kind of joke at work. But still, the complaint has been made.

Which one of these is the bigger problem?

This is an issue fundamental to the problem businesses have with social media; despite all sanctions, we’re still running into many of the same problems. In either of these situations, the trouble a business faces is whether or not these work-related comments are under their purview of care for their employees. Where does work end, and casual relationship begin?

We thought blacklists and policy would declaw the cat as far as social media goes, but people keep ending up with scratch marks.

This specific hypothetical came out of the #QNet2011 conference panels, where (Modern Earth client) Jeff Couture of The Proactive Circle spoke up during a question about harrassment and cyber wellness; his scenarios (the ones above) touch on this conundrum quite well.

Here’s the crux of it; there’s an assumption that people witness what we do in person, but do not witness what we do online.

In a group of three people, any comment is going to be heard by all three. Even if we suffer from filter failure once in a while, we can safely assume that anything said in that group should be the speaker’s real opinion. Thus, harrassment is obvious, and the only question is whether or not comments off the workplace clock and site will affect workplace performance.

Adding social media into the picture creates a new problem; socially, we’re not developed well yet to handle asynchronicity. It’s not a problem of people being any bolder, or relying on pseudo-anonymity. It’s the idea that we’re used to witnesses only being present at the time of the offence – whether we perceive an offence or not. But online, everything is on record. Even when we write blogs in our boxers, we’re on record. If we detail our bathroom habits, it’s on record.

If we praise or ridicule a coworker online, it’s on record. Temporal witness becomes eternal witness.

How do we deal with this?

Sure, we can censor ourselves, but that’s a patch not a fix. Sure, we can police public profiles in some instances – but what about the future, when all employees are expected to be social advocates for their companies, and proudly bear their corporate badges even when they sleep, through their social web presence?

This is foolish, magical thinking at best.

I really wish I had an answer for you on this one; should we be treating the social web the same, given the difference in assumption of witness? Or do we just need to grow better foresight and learn to account for asynchronous discovery or our communication failures?

What do you think?

Privacy, Courage and Anonymity

December 15, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

When all reasonable expectation is removed from a prospect, behaving as if the expectation still existed is madness.

There’s a fundamental difference between privacy and lack of disclosure I think people need to get their heads around. Privacy intimates that the things you don’t want found, don’t get found. Or, if someone intentionally finds them out, that you have some form of recourse appropriate to their improper disclosure. Perfect example of this: Tiger Woods. It’s unfortunate that he felt he could send text messages to his mistresses over the years, because he was placing proof of his actions in their hands, and in the hands of his cellular service providers. That’s not breach of privacy, that’s disclosure. On the flip side, go ahead and try to figure out whether I like jam or peanut butter on my toast. If I don’t tell you, you won’t; that’s not privacy, that’s lack of disclosure.

If we neglect to send drunken college photos of ourselves to Facebook, are we protecting our privacy? Yes. But what about uploading the photos and then jacking up the privacy so high that your friends can barely find the pictures? Are you protecting your privacy then?

No. You’re being an idiot.

Not following me? Let me paint this another way. Let’s say you’re a big fan of downloading content. You BitTorrent every new movie as it comes out, every album, everything. You get so prolific with this, so involved in the community that you sign up for accounts with Demonoid and everyone else you can think of and go from being a participant to being a provider. You’re smart – you colocate on a server slice using proxies, never use your own name in context with your filesharing. But still, you do this, and you get sued into oblivion by the RIAA or somesuch. Did anonymity help you protect your privacy? Not a chance. Anonymity is useless online. Your actions as a net become visible by their nature as protected. It’s like a permanent Streisand Effect; you’re asking for exposure. Are you protecting your privacy by being anonymous? Maybe for a while, but the tools available mean this tactic is only as effective as your actions are ignorable. As soon as you breach the invisible line of big-fish-ness, you’re screwed.

And if you’re on the exposing side? Are you doing the courageous thing by outing those who have been stupid enough to lay themselves partially bare out of ignorance? Well, not likely. If it’s your job, there’s no courage involved here. If not, you’re just a bully. Granted, some people deserve it (read as, people who don’t even try to click the privacy boxes). But don’t confuse cutting insight with courage. Sharing your opinion is so possible it’s nearly mandatory at this point, so get the legs out from under your high horse and make sure what you’re doing is of real utility to people before you worry about how brave you are.

So why network at all, you ask? Because you get to meet new people. You expand your influence and business potential. You make more money, know more about everything, and expose yourself to varied input, thus becoming a bigger person than you could otherwise. We’re not yet in a space where shyness is punished, but it’s coming, trust me.

At the end of the day, you can’t rely on privacy policies, because those can chance without notice. You also can’t rely on your cloak and dagger anonymity, because tools exist that demolish this with rigid celerity. Instead, if you don’t want it repeated, don’t say it in the first place.