Five Dysfunctions of a Digital Team

When an organization’s external digital presence is inconsistent or incoherent, this is nearly always a symptom of deeper internal structural problems, such as:

Silos: The people responsible for digital work are isolated from the rest of the organization. They can’t get the information they need to support other teams/departments until it’s too late. The digital lead or team ends up becoming a quick-turn-around production team expected to blast emails without strategic input or considerations for member engagement. The digital lead may not be seated at a high enough level within the organization to be proactive, or the digital staff may be a sub-unit of an existing team that has a director who does not represent digital well for leadership or cross-team planning opportunities.

Personality Fit: You have the wrong person in the digital role—he/she may have some historically appropriate skills but otherwise brings the wrong attitude and is unable to work collaboratively with others. Digital work interfaces with all aspects of an organization, so the person responsible must be open-minded, solutions-oriented, and ideally a delight to work with. If your digital lead creates resistance, or seems conditioned to say “no” more than “let’s figure this out,” you are—at best—stifling the growth of your organization’s digital program. At worst, you are enabling the growth of a toxic environment around digital work, and your organization may spend years trying to recover.

Overload: The digital lead or team has too much to do and is unable to prioritize work. This is one of the most common conditions we see. Your leadership may have undue expectations for how long R&D or even basic online operations should take, and they don’t know how many requests are coming in from all angles. Often the digital team isn’t the right size to keep up with increasing demands, or the digital lead is unable to prioritize the work on their own. Sometimes, they don’t know how to say no to requests that are unrealistic or that don’t fit their vision (if they have one—see the next point). Leadership can exacerbate the overload by asking the digital lead to chase after new bells and whistles, which they may not have the confidence or experience to push back on.

Lack of digital vision: The underlying issue beneath overload is typically the lack of a framework to strategically prioritize resources for digital work. Every organization needs a digital vision to set a direction that supports the core mission and business goals of the institution, and to evaluate whether the inevitable new tools, creative ideas, and campaigns “fit” with the strategic approach and should be undertaken. Strong digital teams prioritize new opportunities—and kill bad ones—using a simple rubric of “viability and fit.” To measure viability, they need to be experienced and networked enough to know what’s going to work in the digital world, and empowered enough to stand up to people who don’t. To measure fit requires this vision.

Lack of organizational vision: The problem may not actually be with the digital team at all. A good digital communications or engagement strategy can’t compensate for a missing organizational vision or outdated theory of change, both of which have to come before you can establish a digital framework. If you can’t clearly articulate what your organization is specifically trying to change in the world, how to realistically achieve that change through your current actions, and how your supporters can play a meaningful role in making that change happen, then you’re just asking your digital team to create pseudo engagement with increasingly meaningless actions. It may be the toughest thing to do, but spend some time re-evaluating your overall game plan, offerings, brand story, and engagement model, and then re-evaluate your digital work to support that.

via ssireview.org

Great analysis and advice regarding challenges in managing and governing the digital function in organizations – by Jason Mogus (@mogusmoves) of Communicopia, Michael Silberman (@silbatron) of Greenpeace, and Christopher Roy (@christopherroy) of Communicopia and Open Directions. Don’t miss the followup piece on Four Models for Managing Digital.

Port Metro Vancouver CEO on collaborative planning

To me, collaboration must reflect three critical elements:

Number 1: Collaborative strategy development. This is the building block, the creation of a common vision, the foundation upon which we build commitment, trust and accountability. The time of thinking and acting individually has long since passed.

Number 2: Joint investment. Collaborative financial commitment to the joint strategy is the means by which we execute our strategic vision, and investing jointly solidifies mutual commitment and leverages each individual investment many times over.

And, Number 3: Collaboration in operational measurement and improvement. When we define and refine mutual benchmarks and expectations, together we fulfil our commitment to reciprocal accountability and we maximise the operational and thus commercial and economic benefits of the investments that every partner has contributed.

Having advanced these three critical elements of collaboration, we can then offer an option for customers, a truly integrated reality, and not just promotional repackaging.

I propose to you that the new and powerful value proposition for the Vancouver Gateway is this: By collaborating and completely aligning — even integrating — our business objectives and outcomes, we can leverage our individual investments, better mitigate risks, more dependably deliver the reliability and consistency that our customers demand, and deliver the socio-economic and environmental benefits that our communities deserve. We can accomplish these many goals while also generating the largest economic return for every dollar invested in any Canadian Gateway. These are the realities, and the real strengths of the Vancouver Gateway.

via portmetrovancouver.com

This is an excerpt from a Nov 23, 2010 speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade by Robin Silvester, President and CEO of Port Metro Vancouver.

Good to see a focus on bringing additional voices to the table to shape strategy, but here’s hoping this “collaboration” reaches beyond just government and industry to include citizen and First Nations perspectives.