Dave's Whiteboard

Disclosure: I grew up in Detroit (and I don’t mean Livonia, let alone Auburn Hills).  My dad was an auto worker (and so was I, for one summer).  People back there say things like “Chrysler’s is doing better,” using the possessive even when the company is the subject of the sentence.

Well, Ford’s is doing well, too.  Not just in car sales, though those are on the uptick.  I’m thinking of the Ford Motor Company digital participation guidelines just posted at Scribd.  Like any large corporate, Ford doubtless has lots and lots of text somewhere, but these guidelines are a great example of sensible policy to guide employees who are using social media.

You really ought to read the whole thing for yourself, but I’m going to summarize and comment here.

Be honest about who you are.

The gist: when your online conversations relates to our business or industry, identify yourself as working for Ford Motor Company.  Say who you are without giving out detailed information.

Not too much to ask in any conversation.

Make it clear that your views are your own.

Include the following somewhere in every social media profile:

“I work at Ford, but this is my own opinion and is not the opinion of Ford Motor Company.”

“Somewhere in the profile” isn’t an onerous requirement. For nearly 10 years, in one online forum, my signature line concluded with “My opinions, not GE’s.”  In case people weren’t sure.

Mind your manners.

Treat coworkers, other personnel, customer, competitions, the company, and yourself with respect.  Don’t post offensive, demeaning, or inappropriate comments.  Respectfully withdraw from discussions that go off-topic or become profane.

I’ve seen lots of discussion about how the immediacy (and physical safety) of the Internet encourage people to be… more than assertive, let’s say.  Good for attention, not so good for reputation.  At least not positive reputation.

Use your common sense.

Keep certain business-related topics confidential.  If you’re talking about the company or the industry, focus on matters of public record.  Don’t divulge non-public company information, or personal information about others.

Remember: what happens online, stays online.

“Search engines and other technologies make it virtually impossible to take something back.  Be sure you mean what you say, and say what you mean.”

Also, consider everything you post online the same as posting to a physical bulletin board or submitting a letter to a newspaper.  Assume that reporters, competitors, and your boss will be able to read it.

Anyone who’s been online for more than three months knows this.  It’s not bad to recall it, though.

* * *

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you know that’s not the whole of it.  The guidelines tell you want to do about company intellectual property, about vehicle or repair concerns, about dealer issues.  And if you’re unsure, ask the corporate communications or legal staff for advice.

Notice: there’s nobody you have to check with and ask if you can participate in arenas like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.  The document says, “we have advised our personnel to observe these guidelines when participating in an online conversation regarding Ford or the automotive industry.”

As an undergraduate, I had a terrific time swimming way over my head in a course on modern sociological thought.  Among other things, we read Talcott Parsons, which is like getting mugged by a noun gang.  I thought I understood what he meant by specific relationships versus diffuse ones, so when Dr. Bauder asked for an example of the latter, I said, “Student and teacher.”  (I mean, it should be a free exchange, right?)

Her reply: “Okay.  What are you doing Saturday night?”

Being specific takes more work

To make the point clear: in a specific relationship, it’s the roles that are specific, and you more or less have to justify including things that don’t fit those roles.  You might shoot the breeze with the grocery store cashier about the weather, or the freshness of the strawberries, but ordinarily you don’t ask about his personal life.

In a diffuse relationship, on the other hand, you have to justify leaving things out.  “You walked right past me and didn’t say a word.  What’s up?”

Many of my professional connections (and some personal ones) are now virtual.  I don’t work in an office; I tend not to have long-term projects.  I don’t have everyday, flesh-and-blood colleagues.  So I need to cultivate my virtual connections: strengthen the existing ones, get the new ones get well rooted.

In the physical workplace, most of your relationships are specific and often defined by various sorts of proximity.  You’re physically close.  You’re organizationally close (same team, same boss, same project, same department).  Or you what I think of as explicit proximity (relative position based on rank) and tacit proximity (based on relative depth of expertise).

As the distance increased (other floors, other departments, other cities), you have to work harder to establish and maintain good working relationships.  People don’t know you.

Reducing friction in your connections

When you cultivate relationships in the virtual workplace, you’re using different tools to increase proximity.  For a long time, we’ve had workplace tools to reduce physical distance and collapse time-zone distance.  Now we’ve got greater (and more frequent) distance, but also more powerful tools.

One concept that’s important to me, as someone who typically works on his own, is the virtual cube-mate.  I like being able to stick my hear around a metaphorical partition to say, “Listen to this.”  Or “Do you know…?”  Or “Here we go again.”

But reducing virtual distance doesn’t mean that distance isn’t there.  And it doesn’t mean your in-person, interpersonal skill transfers to the virtual world.   As the Russian proverb says, your elbow is close, but it’s hard to bite.

I have a pet phrase for asides and parenthetical remarks I’ll make, especially in a one-to-one exchange like an instant-message conversation or a series of direct messages on Twitter: “conversation insurance.”  Things I do or say because:

• I want to make myself clear (or clearer).
• I want to avoid misunderstanding.
• I’m trying to be more like myself.

Some of that’s just common sense (though common sense tells lots of people the earth is flat).  For instance, “I’m not disputing what you’re saying. I just think X applies as well…”  You go a little further because your message is going further.

Some of it, though, is simply engaging long enough (in some complex combination of individual units and elapsed time) that both parties are better able to form a pattern for the other that’s not a bad approximation of face-to-face.  Which, as I think about exchanges over the past two or three days, isn’t so much conversation insurance as connection oil.

I don’t know that there are Ten Quick Tips for this, which is too bad; I could have a workshop.  I do have a couple of notions:

• Walk, don’t run. Trying to connect closely with everyone you know (and everything they know) just makes you one of those LinkedIn Lotharios, the kind of person in whom networking seems like an infectious disease.
• Assume good faith. This guideline for Wikipedia editors encourages people to assume that others are trying to help, not hurt.
• Don’t drive crossways in the parking lot. That was advice from a colleague to his new-driver sons: when you’re at the mall, always drive along the “roads” up and down the parking lot.  Don’t go cutting across the lanes because there’s an opening.  Other drivers may not expect you.

That last point is why I now use emoticons — at least on Twitter.

They’re conventions, not moral failings

I’ve been online a long time.  I’ve never cared for abbreviations like IMHO, YMMV, and so on.  I have a theory that each time someone types LOL, they lose a neuron.  So emoticons ( or, even worse, “smilies” ) made me shudder.

But… as I did online text-chat in Second Life, in French, I worried that my humor (or attempts at it) would be misunderstood.  So I’d add emoticons I saw my francophone friends using.  It hardly hurt at all, and people got to know me.

Likewise on Twitter — especially if I’m making a public comment to someone I don’t know well.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re only thinking of your chosen network, that not everyone knows you as well as you might think (or wish).  I can joke around with some people, but virtual passersby might not understand.  So an emoticon, or a few drops of some other form of connection oil, helps reduce the potential friction.

Online presence is a kind of invitation, but you have to work at figuring out what the invitation means for you.  Sometimes, as with what I call book blogs — HotNewBook.com, set up mainly to promote Hot New Book.  Those are invitations to come in, browse, and buy.  The author probably doesn’t have a lot of time to interact with everyone who’d like to interact with him.

Otherwise, if people are active on social sites, you have to work out how to interact with them.  In other words, it’s just like real life, except the conversation stops if your power goes out.

(I’d like to thank Chris, Dick, Heather, Jane, Kevin, Sahana, and Simon, whose conversations with me this week reinforced for me the value of virtual connections.)

My relationship images are based on this CC-licensed image by Doha Sam / Sam Agnew.
CC-licensed cube-mate photo by el frijole.

Tom Fox, in the Washington Post’s Federal Coach column, provides some advice for managers in the federal government who oversee younger workers.  Fox holds that “the best leaders recognize that potential talent is nurtured by developing expertise, executive skills and solid judgment, along with providing constant feedback and opportunities for personal growth.”

The advice may be obvious, but it’s also pertinent:

• Connect the dots between now and the future.
  • Or, help the less-experienced worker see how current responsibilities fit into a larger picture that makes sense for that worker.
• Encourage an apprenticeship mindset.
  • A real leader will know that the root of “apprentice” means “to learn,” not “to do all the scutwork.”
• Reinforce lessons learned through constant feedback.
  • It’s true that learning can happen anytime.  You can increase the likelihood of its happening by helping your staff to reflect, reprocess, question, and re-express what they’ve been doing and the results that have followed.

All of which reminded me of the skillful approach to coaching that’s wrapped in the sometimes flashy, sometimes sly trappings of What Not to Wear.

If you haven’t seen this TLC program: in each episode, fashion consultants Stacy London and Clinton Kelly critique the clothing choices of someone whose family or friends nominated them for this, um, performance review.

As with many “reality” shows, WNTW has a certain OMG appeal.  Worldly folks like you and me would never dress as poorly or as blindly as the folks on the program, right?

I’ve watched many episodes (sometimes as an antidote after watching an especially grim movie).  Beneath the apparently lightweight notion of focusing so intensely on fashion, Stacy and Clinton pay a lot of attention to helping the individual focus productively on goals.

Stacy: We don’t want you to label yourself just as a mom.

Lori: But my daughter is my priority.

* * *

Lori: If you’re trying to change my distorted version of what I look like with form-fitted clothes, you’re not helping with these styles. Period.

Clinton:  You do not have a crazy distorted body, a weird body shape. You have your own body shape.

WNTW follows a set pattern.  I was thinking about this pattern as a model for helping inexperienced people start figuring out an area of complexity.  Sort of a well-dressed version of complex learning.

You can think of the nominated-by-friends aspect as just part of the randomness of the workplace.  We don’t always get to choose our learning opportunities.  Sometimes they show up dressed as crummy assignments, annoying coworkers, or the departure of a favorite boss.

Some of the standard elements in a What Not to Wear episode:

• The individual models 3 of her own outfits and explains why she likes them–while surrounded by mirrors.

• Clinton and Stacy create 3 new outfits that demonstrate fashion  rules suited to the individual.
• The hosts ritually toss out most (or all) of the person’s old wardrobe.
• The person goes shopping solo, armed with the new rules (and a $5,000 credit card from the program).
• Invariably, Clinton and Stacy intervene to deal with poor choices from Day 1′s shopping, and to help with Day 2′s.
• A hair stylist and makeup consultant try”reframing in their areas of expertise.
• The individual returns home for a reveal with family and friends.

Whatever you think of fashion, you have to admire the way the gurus guide the individual into the (typically strange) word of style with mindfulness.

They’ll make outrageous comments about the old wardrobe, but they’re also respectful of the individual, her life, and her career.  I’ve seen them dealing with a professional witch (from Salem, Massachusetts, no less), an Episcopal priest, a dreadlocked “alternative model,” and a cancer survivor who’d had a double mastectomy.

Looking past the show’s structure, you find:

• Rules of thumb (with the why).
  • If you’re small-statured, coats and blazers that fall just above the hip are an ideal length; otherwise, you run the risk of a longer coat length distorting your proportions.
• New approaches gives as experience shared.
  • Don’t despair if the first four or five pairs of pants you try on don’t fit the way you want them to – sometimes you have to kiss a lot of jeans frogs before you find your denim prince.
• Simplified cognitive maps (the mannequin outfits and the rules they exemplify).
• Opportunity to apply basic rules
• Feedback on that application in a collaborative setting

From time to time, WNTW does a “where are they now?” show, reconnecting with people who’ve been on the show.  I suspect these are less interesting to the show’s audience (or there’d be more 6-months-later episode).

I’m sure it’s tough for the individuals to maintain or even heighten their new style awareness when in their old settings.  The answer, though, isn’t requiring Stacy and Clinton Refresher Training.  Instead of a single answer, I’d say there are many possible ways for the person to adapt to real life, continue strengthening newfound skills, and to avoid falling back into stretchy sweats and rock-concert T shirts.

In terms of your professional development, is that your standard outfit?  I don’t mean on your body, necessarily.  How are you dressing your mindset?

Grad student Kathleen Bogart has Moebius syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes facial paralysis: no smiling, no blinking, no lateral eye movement.  A New York Times article, Seeking Emotional Clues Without Facial Cues, looked at her experience and that of others with Moebius.

When she tried working with refugees from Hurricane Katrina, Bogart often couldn’t connect with them.  They didn’t see sympathy or understanding in her face–because she can’t express those things facially.  People in conversations mirror and react to one another, and we’re usually very skilled at detecting and interpreting very small physical signals: a forced smile, a distracted glance.

This is a complicated area.  It’s not necessarily the case that people with similar paralysis can’t recognize emotion, but the inability to mimic is a barrier.  Some people cope through other channels: eye contact, for example, or voice.  The challenge has turned into a research field for Bogart.

I had no special interest in studying facial paralysis, even though I had it; there were many other things I could have done. But in college I looked to see what psychologists had to say about it, and there was nothing. Very, very little on facial paralysis at all. And I was just — well, I was angry.  Angry.  I thought, I might as well do it because certainly no one else is.

One result was a study of how people with Moebius recognize facial expressions (link is a PDF) of her study, demonstrating that the ability to mimic the expressions of others is not essential to recognizing their emotional state.  As the Times article suggests, if the strategies that people with Moebius use to understand emotion are “teachable,…they could help others with social awkwardness, whether because of anxiety, developmental problems like autism, or common causes of partial paralysis, like Bell’s palsy.”

The Times website has aslide show in which Bogart talks about having a face that can’t express emotion.

I was surprised to learn–from my wife, no less–that I unconsciously assess things (especially edible things) on a personal scale with almost as many degrees as a thermometer.

It’s an understatement scale, I guess, because even as my approval increases, the terminology is…less than exuberant, as in these examples:

• That’s okay.  (Barely acceptable.)
• That’s not bad.
• Not half bad.  (Well above average.)
• Not bad at all.
• That’s all right. (At least one Michelin star.)
• Pretty good.  (At least two.)

There’s a theoretical maximum, “really good.”  It’s like absolute zero, only warmer; you don’t find it much in nature.

I asked my children whether they’d ever heard me apply these terms.  They couldn’t say, because it’s hard to talk when you’re convulsed in laughter.

The purpose of a scale is twofold: measuring and evaluating.  Measuring is a comparison with some standard: you’re this tall (in inches, in cubits, in stacked-up poker chips).  You typed 268 characters in 3 minutes and made 4 errors.

Evaluating is forming a judgment, usually by means of a further comparison.  You’re tall for a 14-year-old boy.  You meet the minimum speed required for this job.

Thanks to Stephen Downes’s OLDaily, I came across Clarence Fisher’s connecting assessment.  It’s a rubric he created for middle schoolers “to help students think about the connections and global understandings they are establishing.”

He doesn’t plan to assign grades based on where students are–this is a conversation starter, he says.  To me, it’s a way to say to the student, “This is how it might look if you’re at a beginner level of skill.  This is more-than-beginner.  This is how it looks if you’re accomplished.”

Fisher offered another rubric in an earlier post–one to help grade student blog posts.

What I like about these is that Fisher shares what he’s come up with for a particular situation.  He even provides Google doc versions (blogging rubric, connecting rubric) in case someone wants to use them as starting points.

Pretty good, I’d say.

“Approval scale” image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by mag3737 / Tom Magliery
(images are his; cartoon balloons are mine).