Podcasting

Thank you for taking an interest in podcasting. There are numerous sites on the Internet devoted to podcasting as a method for people with little to say to get a chance to say it. That is not what I want to see Podcasting become. I believe that podcasting is a tool that should be utilized by businesses to change the way that businesses interact with our employees, our business partners and our customers.

In the February 2009 Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel wrote an article entitled “Moon Shots for Management“. I reference some of the information from this article in the podcast attached to my writing here. Basically, the article revolves around a recent assembly of business leaders, scholars, and writers to discuss how management needs to be changed to encourage its evolution into the 21st century. I don’t know that management and leadership need an evolution as much as a revolution.  I believe that management and leadership are two different concepts that are often confused in the business world.  This confusion limits many organizations from reaching the potential the people have the ability to attain.  I firmly believe that focusing on the needs of individuals within an organization, creating an understanding of business process and theories, and attentively focusing efforts on developing staff confidence is essential to organizational and personal success.  Similarly, the business leaders, scholars, and writers in the Harvard Business Review article echo many of these sentiments. That group identified 25 items they feel are necessary to accomplish this change. At the bottom of this page, I have listed the summary of those 25 items, but you can find the full information at Harvard Business Review.

You may think that podcasting has no place in business, but I beg to differ. Just as printing changed the way that we communicate, podcasting can do the same for your business.  Adult learning theory shows that people learn in different ways; some are visual, some are auditory, and some are tactile or kinesthetic (Conner, 2008).  Too often in business, someone sends an email to a group and believes the “training” on a subject is complete.  This is likely the cause for a number of organizational initiative failures every year, the lack of attention to individual’s learning needs.  Podcasting provides one additional venue to engage those within your organization that will be performing a task every day.  Video podcasting takes the concept one step further and incorporates video learning theory.  The simplicity of the process and low cost-of-implementation make podcasting a viable and quick communication method in the workplace.  Many business leaders are hesitant to embrace the idea because of their discomfort speaking on video or into a microphone.  My arguement is that as a business leader, your job is to do everything within your power to educate your workforce and facilitate organizational change.  Furthermore, leaders are typically paid more money and given more responsibility than the majority of the workforce, therefore those leaders have a higher degree of responsibility and accountability.  This higher expectation means that personal discomfort does not excuse someone from engaging in activities that increase organizational knowledge and effectiveness.

Download the podcast about this article here:

Why use podcasting in your business [ 9:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2744)

Although I cannot divulge the name of the hospital I worked with, I helped one facility setup a podcasting booth (in a closet) and trained their IT staff on how to edit and post podcast files for their multi-entity healthcare system. Why did they ask me to do this? Because their Press Ganey employee satisfaction scores showed that the employees of this system lacked trust in the executive team because they did not get enough exposure to them. Employees felt that members of the senior leadership team were “out of touch”. With less than $1,000 of equipment, 1 day of technology training and 2 hours of executive training, the hospital was on its way to communicating in a new way. The next year, Press Ganey scores increased from the bottom 5th percentile to the 55th percentile. Of course, not all of the improvements were due to podcasting, but podcasting became one of the tactics essential to improving the executive communication strategy.

If you think your employees won’t listen to your podcast, please reconsider.  This website was placed on the Internet in late January 2008.  I do not advertise, nor do I accept any advertising.  People hear about this show through word-of-mouth or by search engines (which I do not pay).  You can see the reach of this very narrowly focused show by looking at my Geo-RSS link, which shows only those locations which have actually listened to my podcast.  Imagine what you could do in your own business when what you have to say directly relates to every single employee.  I have said it before, but I will say it again…executives tend to underestimate the legitimate power that they wield.

Podcasting is not limited to executive leadership. I suggest that once the technology has become part of the organizational culture that you open up your equipment to those within your company that have useful information to share. For those of you that listen to my podcast regularly, you know that I often refer to healthcare’s bad habit of “promoting people to a level of incompetence”, also known as “The Peter Principle” (Peter & Hull, 1993). Basically, it is common for our industry to promote the best lab tech to be the lab manager, for the best respiratory therapist to become the Director of Cardiopulmonary. Often times, we find out after disastrous consequences that these individuals may have been good task masters, but their inability to communicate effectively makes them ineffective managers. Get your aspiring managers involved in your podcast, see how they communicate. While we can make a difference in healthcare by screening our aspiring managers better, we also have a responsibility as leaders to train those aspiring managers in the best-practices of management and leadership.

If you are interested in ways that podcasting can be used in your business, please do not hesitate to contact me. My email address is spencer@itpodcast.org and my telephone number is 907.543.6647. Look below for the 25 items that Gary Hamel included in his Harvard Business Review article, as well as the listing of the equipment that I use for my podcast.

1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.
3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.
6. Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.
12. Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.
13. Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.
14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.
15. Create a democracy of information. Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.
22. Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the company’s boundaries and render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building complex ecosystems.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.
25. Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

Equipment I use to record my podcast:

• Behringer Xenyx 2442FX – 16 channel soundboard / mixer
• CAD GXL2200 Condenser Microphone
• Behringer Monitor Headphones
• Heil Microphone Arm
• Adobe Audition 3.0 Audio Software running on an HP Xeon Workstation
• WordPress blog software with the PodPress plugin

References

Conner, M.L. (2008). Introduction to learning styles. Retrieved from http://agelesslearner.com/intros/lstyleintro.html

Peter, L. J., Hull, R. (1993). The Peter principle: Why things always go wrong. Cutchogue, NY. Buccaneer Books.