Words

"Life and death are in the power of the tongue", said King Solomon, in the Bible (Proverbs 18:21). Sages of blessed memory added: "silence is a fence for wisdom". Not always, speaking is the right thing to do. Not in all cases, using words, adds.

No doubt, that words are significant. They always had. However, it seems, that regarding to work, the power of words turns to more powerful. Why is it so? For two reasons:
First, in the reality that existed one hundred years ago, the employee had less interaction with his manager. Therefore, also if words were powerful, there were fewer opportunities for using them, when speaking about employee-manager communication. Secondly, the relationship between the manager and the employee have turned in the last years, in some aspects to be symmetric, and in others not. This lack of balance drives the word said or written to have much more influence. I will explain:
Today, employment is symmetric. This issue has been dealt in previous posts, but I wish to return to it and explain its consequences on use of words. In the past, a place to work was a choice for life. Today, people are regular to move on every few years, changing their employment. The initiative for such a change could be the manager, but could come also from the worker. This is the symmetry. If, as a manager, you have said something non-positive to an employee, or even you have been understood that way, it is easy for the employee to remember and turn angry and bitter. These can be translated, within time, to people not wishing to stay in work. It is not easy to know about such things. As in other aspects of life, it is easier to rune than to fix. In the former situation, also if such feelings would exist, their influence on the employees stay was minimal. As employees know that they are staying for many years, they knew how to ignore, not to take every issue and empower it. It resembles the relationships between a married couple. We know that the relationship is important; we know we want it to last. So we learn, as adults, not to get insulted from every said by the other. It is obvious that two grown people cannot see everything in the same way, yet it is not worthwhile heart breaking. The fact, that we see a specific place of work as a stage only, eases its breaking.
Yet, there is the a-symmetric part of the manager-employee relationship that was and is to stay: The word of a manager has more power. It has more influence. It flies far.

The combination of these two factors, the symmetric and the a-symmetric, makes life non-balanced. Make the power of the word more significant.

A few things I have learnt, part of them, the hard way:

Beware what you write to your employees. Especially when using email. Formal documents are in most cases professional, and rarely serve as part of the communication between a manager and his or her employee. When we speak with our employee face to face, we see them, hear them and sense them. It is easier to fix mistakes, if we failed in choosing our words. If we write a mail, backing off and rephrasing is much more complicated. Emails tend to be one dimensional, and the employee's impression is not supported by our facial expression, by the tone we use when we speak and by all our body language, which are, as researchers claim, the main part of what we understand in any message.
The use of email in the 21st century flattens the organization in some aspects, and should be considered as a blessing, yet it has potential faults as well. The flattening enables a channel of communication between various levels in the organization, communication that does not exist in other channels. The impact of every written word empowers, as it is not supported by the frame of all other accompanying channels, leaving the communication manly one channel, with one dimension only. Therefore, be careful! Even though it is tempting to write short and straightforward, when writing emails, consider every word and write what you decide- in more than in one way. That way, the chances of misunderstanding, decrease. Of course, we should memorize, time after time, that many issues should not be dealt by mail at all.

When you talk, and even more important, when you write, consider avoiding criticizing together with giving compliments. It is possible, but we should take in mind, as managers, that in many cases the compliment turns transparent. Nobody notices it, even if it was the major part. It does not matter if the complement precedes the critics or comes after. One time after another, I have learnt that people are selective in what they decide to catch. What do I recommend? To decide what is more important in each case, and stick to it, without adding the other part; or, take the risk, those things will be disregarded.

This is the place, before continuing, for an important tip. It is somehow natural for us to criticize, less natural to appreciate and value good things done. Appreciate your employees! When someone does a good job, do not treat it as obvious. Tell him or her, what you think, even better in writing. Even a short mail will do the work. It does not cost, but it is worth, and a lot. You would not believe as how much our employees are yearning to hear something good from us; how important it is to them. They deserve it, so give it! Say something good.

However, do not exaggerate. Write and say only the truth. The words we use, their value is subjective. If we reuse to much the term "excellent", for example, its value, as to the listener, will decrease drastically. If we do not give a complement every day, on every thing, we drive a situation, that when we do complement, its value amazingly is high. That way, it is also easy for us to give it, to say a good word, as we feel inside our hearts, that the people deserve it; that it is significant.

One last thing: When we want to pass an important message, it is best to pass it three times. Use more than one mail, or use more than one communication channel. We were born that way as people. In order to achieve more than hearing, also listening; more than reading, also heart and mind understanding, we must return and say it repeatedly.

Maybe, not in all situations, "Life and death are in the power of the tongue", but in all cases, the words are truly significant. For the better and for the worse.
On that, Sages of blessed memory said: "Wise people, beware what you say".

Yours,
Moria

to the Hebrew version

Between acting emotionally and acting rationally

Many years, many of us were educated to think and act in a rational matter; to be logical and ordered. I can testify that I was brought up learning in a very strict high school and things surely got even more logical and rational during the university as I learned in the Mathematics and Computing department. No doubt, that rational management has significant benefits: It enables consistent progress to achieving company goals; it enables existence of uniform processes in organization; it enables us control.

A known saying regarding to sales, speaks about 80% of every sale to be emotional, and 20% to be rational, justifying the emotional.
Even if we think this saying is exaggerated and radical, yet, a substantial portion of every sale is emotional indeed.

I took part, last week, in a convention that dealt with decision making; most lectures were based on game theory, psychology of decisions making and the combination of both; we combine ordered processes with personal emotional decisions.
I wish to claim, that emotional and rational combined management, is not a constraint or weakness. Emotional and rational combined management is better. I am sure that some may think (and they may stand correct) that what I say is exactly the proof that cognitive dissonance works. Maybe I am trying to justify myself, as so I act.

Yet, here are some points in favor of emotional management and the combination of it with rational management:

1. We work with people; whether if customers, suppliers, managers or employees. In an era of knowledge, more people work a greater portion of their time with people. The recommended way to work with people is to be a person ourselves: to speak with those we work with, not only as professionals, rather, as people. To be sensitive to others. To support and take interest in what they go through. Not to be arrogant. Combining emotional aspects, enables me to express the "me".
2. Intuition seems to be the opposite of rational management; deciding from "guts feeling", not brains. However, when examining the issue more carefully, we understand that the experts, those who have deep smarts, work a lot using their intuition. They take many decisions without even thinking. Even when they analyze alternatives, many times the first alternative considered, turns out to be the best. That is intuition. How does intuition work? Maybe, the decisions are not really "guts feeling" decisions. The expert does think, does analyze and does decide rationally. He or she runs this process unconscious and therefore we have the illusion that it was emotional and not rational. The uncertainty gives us the feeling of something irrational. That does not stand correct.
3. However, above all, the main point is that combining emotional and rational management aspects together, gives us a broader view. It enables us to take into consideration, not only what is profitable, but also what is right to do. Emotional thinking, gives us the opportunity, many times, to think not only "business", but also "values". Emotional management does not necessarily mean getting angry and acting impulsively, externalizing all our week points. Emotional management is first and mainly, doing what is right in our eyes (not only regarding our conscious brain).
   

I am lucky to run a private held company that belongs to me. Managing in such terms, I do not have any directorate who may guide me to concentrate on money and business profit only. I can act involving emotions and logic, and no one can complain.
Yes, I am lucky. I thank god every day for that.

Yours,
Moria

Working from home

Working from home. This is a capability born thanks to technology, but not less, thanks to many of us being knowledge workers. Production workers, having all wonderful technologies of Internet, laptops, Emails and cellular telephones will never be able to work from home. Also some knowledge workers cannot work at all, or at least, part of the time, from work. Appointments with customers, meetings in the office are still part of the tasks, better performed out of home. Yet, it is obvious, that we have advanced regarding to ten years ago or more.
I’ll state in advance, that I’m not speaking about full time working from home. This is possible sometimes, it is more common in some places in the world, but this is not the subject of this post. Here I write about working out, in the office and/or with customers, but combining working from home from time to time.

Why to enable working from home?
For many reasons. First of all, it saves the worker or the organization travel costs. But more important than that, time is saved. For most of us, that do not live near to work, time saved can sum to two or three hours. Indeed, very significant regarding our free non-sleeping hours. We live in an era where life and work are mixed and almost blended. We receive private calls on work time. We get and send SMS’s during meeting, trying to see what’s happening back at home, or why the Pizza did not arrive on time. At home, we continue to receive calls from work, and mainly, to write and receive Emails, many times, until the late hours of night. Those of you who dream to cut these relations and imitate the way our parents used to work, will probably be disappointed. Work-life-balance experts say that the levels could lower; It is recommended to turn off the phone and computer when having guests, going to parties or to the movies. But true reverse is probably impossible. What can be done, is to compensate; to enable technology that brought all these, to work in our favor as well: To encourage our employees to work in more flexible hours, so they can take the kids out from the kindergarten or school and continue working later out; to enable our employees to arrive a bit later, after rush time and start the first hour from home; to enable them to work, one day a week, from home.
Working from home gives us much more than time savings. The organization benefits, in some level, by operational savings. In most cases work is more effective, comparing to the same work done in the office. But the main benefit is in the change of spirit and the good feeling for the employee. I personally, from time to time, take a day off, and work from home. When I see that the day I planned is near, and was not yet cancelled by some urgent meeting added in the last moment, I admit to feel happy. On regular days I wear suits to the office. On days I work at home, I always wear jeans; deliberately. It is part of the making the right atmosphere. For some employees, the ability to work at home enables them to accomplish arrangements and fixing at home without taking a vacation day.

When is work from hope applicable?
The first condition, of course, for working from home, is that there is a back office work that can be performed at home with no specific software unreachable from home, no tight work with colleagues or meetings everyday with customers. It is not wise to work at home and speak all day on phone with the office or the customer.
Not less important, is the ability of the employee to be responsible to work from home. Not to stay in pyjamas; not to peek on TV; not to go in and out of the kitchen 20 times a day; to know to say no to the children who do not understand how is it that Mom or Dad are working and unavailable, even though they are home.
Knowledge workers are highly independent employees. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that they will have work to be done at work. Therefore, it will also be assumed that they have the responsibility required for working from home.

What is the manager’s job?
The manager should not enable, automatically, working from home, to all employees, in all conditions. The manager has first to clarify the responsibility required and check if each employee indeed can work from home, effectively.
The manager’s responsibility (or this can be defined organizationally) is to decide how frequent to enable work from home (once a week, once in two weeks, or once a month).
The manager’s job is to supervise the work from home and see that the employee does not postpone important tasks, just to be at home, and to see that the employee indeed knows how to work from home effectively.

By enabling working from home, we tell our employees, in one more way: We trust you!

Working from home is beneficial for the employee, and not less, for the organizations.

Your opinions are welcomed.
Yours,
Moria

Thoughts regarding Knowledge Management

For those who don't know me, I work, live and breathe Knowledge Management, for the past nine years. Knowledge management is not the same as managing knowledge workers. It deals with preserving, sharing and creating the organizational knowledge, using well defined methodologies and focusing on organizational business needs.
A week ago I met a colleague that was in the KM industry for many years and left. He is busy nowadays in some totally different area- the entertainment e-business. The truth is that I was surprised. The person was one of the first people in Israel that dealt with knowledge Management, and he ran a successful company in this area. His PhD. was about knowledge maps. I was even more surprised from the speech I was to hear within a few minutes:
You are brave, so he said; Knowledge Management will fail as a discipline. On the one hand, he flattered me having the strength / the will / the innocence to continue on with Knowledge Management; he was very happy to hear that I am working nowadays on my PhD. in Knowledge Management. On the other hand, he recommended me to leave and find something else to earn my living on.
Why leave? I asked. The Knowledge Management discipline, he explained, is against human nature. People do not will to share; Organizations are afraid, especially from the power that comes with managing KM. Most organizations that started large projects of Knowledge Management, he added, stopped after two or three years and in many cases even fired the CKO's who led the process. I started running scenes from the past years in my head. Yes, there were several organizations that did not continue on; and yes, there were CKO's that have left their job, not always in best circumstances.
There was something in what he said. Too many times I remembered Knowledge Management projects ending because of problems and struggles between people. The more I thought, KM was in all cases the victim, not the trigger for these struggles. One time, there was this CEO who believed in KM (and some other great ideas) but did not believe that he had to communicate any of his ideas to the managers who were supposed to actually share. The day he left, and one of these managers took his place, all the good ideas, including KM, were cancelled. In a different case the CEO worked directly with the KM activities manager, although there was a manager in between (the boss of the latter). The intermediate manager was not part of the process. At the first chance he had, after the CEO was replaced, he cut the budget off. Sorry to say, but there are more examples, and at least in both organizations I spoke about, there were already success stories and benefits yielding from the Knowledge Management activities.
Isn't knowledge an important asset, critical for organizations' success? I asked this colleague. Very important, he answered. That is why there are so many struggles around the issue. So why stay?
I left the place worried and troubled. Am I just stubborn as it is hard to recognize truth, bring so deep involved?
I find myself thinking about the issue a lot since. I do believe in people; I want to believe in them. I believe in organizations, and I believe that if Knowledge is an important asset, even critical, organizations will manage it, and even positively. It must happen, as it is the right thing to happen. It is not enough to find ways to manage the knowledge workers. Knowledge itself must be managed. The two are interconnected, and of course there are even overlaps. But these are two defined disciplines: Management and Knowledge Management.
I learn a lesson here regarding management of knowledge workers. Many of the ideas these workers will come up with, will not be trivial. Precisely these innovative non trivial ideas will be the ones most difficult for the organization to accept. There will be people in favor, but probably more not. People and organizations are afraid from exchanging the existing with the new. People are terrified when a good idea comes from someone else and try to object, many times until the idea is proven, and even sometimes even later. Our job, as managers, is to enable. Not only to enable the idea itself and help its progress in the practical level, but also to enable it's acceptance by people. And that is not easy.
I hope I did not leave you with a melancholy impression. I promise to some happy and smiley posts in the future. I promise, for those that wondered that I am not leaving Knowledge Management. Not now. Too much yet has to be done.
Yours,
Moria

Hiring people to work

Hiring people, like any other management process, is not new, whatsoever. Today we read many articles discussing the matter, as we are again in a growing environment and companies are hiring a lot. I personally, as much as I hate bureaucracy and always look for the short and practical way to do things, feel that I myself am part of turning the hiring process in my company to being complicated and not so simple at all. Why? As everyone else, I am afraid of a hiring process that is not successful enough. First of all, I see the employee that may be asked to leave. Setting off an employee is always a very unpleasant situation. Companies should not hold people who do not fit in; but we always have to do everything we can to avoid taking people and replacing them. Every time we fire someone, I believe, we leave a scar in his or her heart. I admit that I have fired several people in the past years. When I do so, I try doing it while leaving the employee with their dignity and I try learning a lesson from each episode, in order to make the chances of the next time I'll have to stand in a similar situation, smaller.
Beside the personal sadness, firing people in order to replace them with others is a business loss. It also is a personal loss for the people left in the organization. We encourage our employees to develop an informal relationship one with another. Some of us (like me) call it "family value"; others use different superlatives. Good inter relations develop into good working environments and trust. Trust enables sharing and knowledge development, besides it giving each one of us as a worker a good feeling when we enter the office every morning.
The bottom line- We hire not to fire. Indeed simple. So why to write on it? And what is new looking in a knowledge perspective?
Looking in a knowledge perspective can give us some points to emphasis on:
In an era of knowledge, a worker has to learn a lot during his or her stay in the organization along the years. Sometime, the amount of learning exceeds the practice with which the employee arrived. The ability and desire of the candidates to learn are not less important than their professional experience.
In an era of knowledge it is important not only to know, but to be able to teach others and learn from them. It is not enough to learn from books and from the Internet. The ability to work with others, teach them and learn from them is essential to choosing the right people.
In an era of knowledge the workers choose the place they work in, not less than the organization chooses them. Adequacy between the organization's values (the real ones, not those on the office walls) and the personal values of the worker, will aid contribution of the worker to company's goals in the future. We have to remember that people do not stay for money only. There always will be someone somewhere else that will offer more. Employees want to feel that they are achieving their goals and working the "right" way; Organizations have to have the same feeling regarding the employees working for them: The managers have to have the feeling that each employee is part of the progress of the whole. A personal conversation with the candidate can be the way to test the adequacy. A conversation about goals and wishes; a conversation about what the employee likes to do in his or her free time and what make them happy. Such a conversation should not be held by the HR department. Organizations are built from smaller groups, each with its sub-values and ways of doing things. A conversation held with HR, seems too theoretical. It is better that the manager of the group will hold such a conversation and personally take such a decision.
Yes, there are other points that can help, but I tried to put down in this list the major ones: Learning ability, sharing ability and value adequacy.

Did I fall when hiring people? I sure did. But, I improved. And I'm still working on it.
I would appreciate hearing from your experience too, especially from the knowledge perspective.
Yours,
Moria.

Why Blogging? Why me?

Hello.

I would like to introduce myself. My name is Moria Levy, my age is 43, and I am the founder and manager of ROM Knowledgeware, an Israeli firm focused in Knowledge Management. I founded the company nine years ago. I also have a husband (Ran), four children (Or, Sapir, Tomer and Kfir), a dog and a parrot.

I write a lot, mostly in the Hebrew KM magazine 2know. I write many years (nearly a decade). I write on what I do- Knowledge Management. Up till now I wrote as I was educated in the university. My writing focused on Knowledge Management methodologies and was aimed mainly to people in organizations that deal with KM. As I wrote in Hebrew, this meant a unique group of a few thousands of people. My writing never spoke about me. I kept a distance leaving "Moria", the person, behind. So I was taught to be honorable. The person is of no interest; what is interesting is what he or she are writing.

The last year I'm feeling a change. One can find a lot of personal writing on the net. This trend started before, but on 2007 it has expanded rapidly. Like in other disciplines, we assimilate the understanding that connection between the rational and the emotional has a special potential. It enables synergy. Writing in a personal style gives every person the ability to better express him or herself and therefore better purify thoughts and ideas in this style of writing. The bottom line: This out-of-the-heart style writing triggers good quality writing.

This blog will be focused on management; Management in an era of knowledge. The 21st century is characterized as a knowledge century and we are knowledge workers. In other words, knowledge is a central component in workers occupation and success. The first to develop this perception of knowledge workers and knowledge workers management was Peter Druker. I will not broaden here on his ideas, as there is much to be said and it justifies a list of its own.

We, as managers, should act differently than as we did a world where knowledge was less central. The knowledge is so important nowadays, for proper work, that it affects all aspects of work and management: We must take it into consideration when we hire people (how do we choose appropriate employees when existing knowledge is so important, sharing it into the organization and expanding it is critical); We must take it into consideration when we think how to develop and cultivate worker and we deal with employees retention. We must take it into consideration when we analyze our core competences (yes, we are one small global village); We must take it into consideration when we think about our relations with our customers (think about the sick person coming to the Doctor with a list of medicines recommended in the Internet and specific knowledge that even the Doctor didn't know about); We must take think differently when we analyze our competitors (understanding that it is so easy for them to know what we know and what guides us in our activities); etc.

When I blog, I bring with me three dimensions of myself:

• Me as a manager, dealing we all of these issues like each one of you, every day, every hour;


• Me dealing with Knowledge Management and therefore very aware to the needs, the possible solutions, but also aware to how hard it is to really implement them into the organization;


• And me, being a person, with values I was brought up to and over years crystallized me to whom I am today.

I do hope this blog interests you the readers and helps you thinking and dealing with management in the era of knowledge.

I hope to receive your comments and learn from them, as the talk backs do give us an additional dimension and enrich the readers and the writer.

I will be happy to hear from you ideas and issues concerning managing in the ear of knowledge that you wish I blog on in these lists.

It takes time for a good blog to materialize and find its place. I thank you in advance for your trust and patience.

Yours,

Moria