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The social layer podcast: helping your business to accelerate, to grow healthy and to use social enterprise networking.

Building trust in your organization is critical for a healthy culture, employee satisfaction, overall effectiveness and is necessary when setting up a social network. Adam discusses ways leaders can increase the level of trust in their organization.

Adam also discusses the concept of parallel learning, what is it, why it happens in a company, why it is bad and one way to reduce it.

Feature Segment: Growing Trust in your organization, growing trust in people for you

Miriam Webster defines trust as assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something

Two ways to build trust within your organization and team members trust in you, if it is not there currently

• 1. Consistently display vulnerability, show your vulnerability, for example, dogs lay down under an alpha male exposing their neck in a display of vulnerability.  We can share ideas when we know they are likely to be stolen. A leader can be transparent and share her weaknesses, her confusions as a leader, this s being vulnerable and increases trust when done in moderation.
  2. Consistently do things for other people, help your people to do their jobs well, this sends a strong message that leadership wants teams to be successful.

Trust, like culture, begins and ends at the very top.
Andrea Bonime-Blanc

Social Layer Segment: Put a Stop to Parallel Learning

Parallel learning is a term that I coined while writing my non-fiction book, one chapter in this book is devoted to this concept, parallel learning it refers to the phenomenon when two individuals or teams working in the same company are learning and researching the same material yet do not collaborate and share notes.

Why is it bad?, it is unhealthy because the company is paying twice (or more) for the same knowledge, that is more salary expense than would be necessary if employees would simply collaborate.

Reasons Parallel Learning happens:

Innocent reason, the employees simply did not know the others were working on the same thing or had the knowledge and they innocently did not communicate

Intentional, the parallel learning occurs when leaders or employees are competing for credit or for accomplishments and want all the credit for themselves. This is one indication that your culture needs work.

• A great idea…use social networking software (ESN) to help break down parallel learning, this will work especially well for the innocent parallel learning.
• For the intentional parallel learning you may have bigger culture problems then ESN can fix in the short-term. To stop intentional parallel learning you must generate more trust in your organization; you are unhealthy and need an overhaul in your culture.  I would suggest hiring a organizational health coach or consultant.  Email adam@colliersengineering.com for more information.

Announcements:

FOCUS: I have decided to place my side business as short term my top priority (other than my day job) so these podcast episodes may not be consistent for the next few months. You can find the services that I offer here: collieradam.com/hire

Available Soon: I have finished my 1st e-book, which is intended to help IT leaders or managers to get started with social enterprise networking.  This ebook is essentially social enterprise software market research 101.  It introduces the reader to some great options for ESN software and it hopefully will save the reader some market research time and potentially even consulting fees. Still researching the price-point, it will either be free or $9.99 at the most.

Ice Skating: this NY winter has been brutal, Adam has been Ice Skating for exercise, at the end of this episode Adam shares the sounds of him ice skating.