Dreams of being a Lovable Fool, instead of a Competent Jerk.
In the paper, “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks”, Casiaro and Sousa Lobo discusses the balance within an employee of being competent in what they do at the same time being a likeable person. A balance that they deem can be nurtured within your employees and one that can be leveraged for corporate performance. It at first seemed like a very basic paper that individuals like to work with people that they like, which seems reasonable enough to me. Once they started discussing it further though, it came apparent that this could be a very valuable tool in application within a business. The direct examples of the tech support lady, who could calm down the clients before they got to the competent jerks in the IT department. From a management view point however, even with the knowledge that she was creating such a social hub, that she should be kept over the person doing the work would be hard pressed to show to HR.
I would like to make a brace statement, that all IT people are competent jerks. Waite, before the mobs come after me, the article made a very valid point that it is all a matter of perspective. I don’t personally think that any IT person would be a jerk, but I could see from others perspectives that they may think of the IT jerks just because the IT employees are more logical and may lack the communication skills that the lovable fool would have. The methods that the paper said could truly help this sort of situation out where a well balanced individual could help to bridge this gap of communication.
It’s a balance though that an individual needs to be actively aware of. I say this because one can always just focus on the interpersonal communication efforts but as the paper stated, a lovable fool can quickly becomes a hated one. There needs to be that balance that the person knows what they are talking about, not just talking.
A very interesting paper, and one that I found very useful for future reference. I must be on my way to being a lovable competent employee cause I'm not a jerk nor a fool so I'm getting there !
24Hour Knowledge Factory
Building a 24-hour knowledge factory does have merit in that there are business processes that could be split into 8 hour increments and be passed onto the next global teammate. In fact, the 24 hour knowledge factory is already being worked into some professions. For example, an article recently published was discussing hospitals sending out x-rays over seas so that a radiologist who is wide awake could exam them instead of someone who half asleep working on the nightshift. The major factor that I feel 24 hour knowledge factories will fail is in the communication between the passing of hands. Even with new technologies of documenting what was done by the team before hand, the explaination may not directly translate or be understood the same to someone else. This is an issue of someone that could be sitting right next to you, so imagine someone across the world from you and their work ends up getting held up because they need to wait for a response from you, which in turn makes your work held up. In a sense this is like the grade school lesson where each student stands in a line and passes on the same msg to the next person by a whisper, by the time the msg gets to the last person in the chain, the msg ends up meaning something entirely different. True, technology would have these communication lines documented and communication lines could be built but its one thing building a process and having everyone from around the world following it. Back to the radiologist example, the document that I read gave an example of how a smaller offshore company made the best bid to exam the x-rays had only 2 certified professions that were signing off on all the work of the 20 other employees who were untrained.. Thats a scary thought that your work is dependent on whom ever each night and its hard for your business to be able to go out there each night and track what is going on in the other country efforts-which directly goes into my next topic,security.
The security risks that passing this work between working teams of different countries is more then the document leads one to believe. We have our own internal trade secret traders, so how much would the problem get when we open up to offshore companies.
On a good note though, communication and security are just barriers that can be overcome with time, effort, and patients. Its a very interesting topic, that it seems the medical professionals will be the front runners on seeing how well it will work.
Here is an article regarding radiologists:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12392-2005Apr23.html
