Who Are You?

Kathy Ennis

(LIS Network event, 7th June 2012)

A small select group of us attended the June LIS Network meeting on Personal Branding – “Who are You?” – in which Kathy Ennis gave us a great introduction to the subject which is her passion. As Kathy herself admitted at the end of the meeting, “I could talk about this for hours!” It was certainly a fascinating tour of the subject.

Personal branding is about identifying your USP, and helping yourself to stand out from the crowd. This must be of particular relevance at the moment, especially for those looking to move jobs, or needing to find work, when the jobs market is so difficult.

Kathy started off by talking about branding in general – we looked at some well-known brand logos and considered what thoughts, feelings and emotions they engendered in us. The brand is not the logo itself, but what it represents and makes us feel. Personal branding should work in the same way.

According to Kathy, personal branding has four components (“The Four Vs”), which must be aligned to present a coherent whole:

Values

• Come up with five words which you think encapsulate your core values
• Ask others who know you to do the same – ideally finding people who know you in different contexts, such as family, friends, work colleagues etc
• The words which are common to your own and others’ lists are the ones to focus on!
• It can also be useful if one of your five is a value you aspire to, rather than one you feel you already have – this gives you something to work towards.

Visuals

• This relates both to you as a person, and to the things you have around you
• Need to reflect your values – if you see yourself as a successful businesswoman, you need to dress like one!
• Colours can be important, as they can alter people’s perceptions – eg blue is thought to be a “trustworthy” colour, and is often used by banks in their logos (!)

Vocals

• In other words, the things you say about yourself
• In a professional context, this means how you describe yourself. When people ask you what you do, don’t just give your job title, but tell people what you actually do, what services you provide, how you help people etc.

Verbals

• This includes all the other ways you express yourself, such as online and in print
• You should Google yourself regularly to see what others might see if they did the same thing! Social networking has an important role to play in professional life, but should be undertaken with care, bearing in mind who might be looking at your words of wisdom in the future

It’s very important that what you do in terms of visuals, vocals and verbals are aligned with your values. If you’ve stated that attention to detail is important to you, this will not ring true if you dress scruffily, or if your write carelessly and without checking for typos.

I was struck by the parallels between what Kathy was saying, and one of the principles of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), which I began to study last year. In her book “NLP at Work”, Sue Knight talks about aligning your levels of influence, these being Purpose, Identity, Beliefs and Values, Capabilities, Behaviour and Environment. Sue says: “The more familiar you become with what you want to be important for you at each of the levels and the more you remind yourself of this, the more likely you are to be able to regain your alignment (and hold on to it) in times of challenge and stress.”

A slight digression there, but I find it satisfying when I see links between the different elements of CPD which I follow.

Kathy’s final message was that it pays to invest in yourself, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. I’ll be talking a bit more about that in another post.

I enjoyed this meeting; I guess some of what we heard could be dismissed as “common sense”, but I think there is always value in hearing this kind of information presented in a coherent way, and backed up by anecdotal evidence, which Kathy does so well. I will be carrying out the "values" exercise above - if I can get over the embarrassment of asking other people to comment on what they think my core values are, it feels like "fishing"!

I’m looking forward to hearing what Kathy and Susie Kay have planned for the new season of LIS Network meetings!

Knowledge Management – Tales from the Front Line

James Andrews, British Red Cross

(CILIP London event, 14^th May 2012)

I decided to attend this event for two main reasons:

•  I’d not been to a CILIP London event before, and was looking forward to meeting some London-based information professionals – especially those I follow on Twitter

• The event title suggested it would be a practical look at KM with some real examples of active workplace initiatives to enable collaboration and knowledge sharing

I was also curious to find out how much James’ experience was aligned with the “Introduction to Knowledge Management” course (TFPL – excellent!) I attended in 2011.

James identified three main types of knowledge management – Sharing, Storing and Seeking. He also listed People, Processes and Technology as being the three key enablers of KM.

He then talked about the “Cynefin” framework, developed by Dave Snowden as a practical application of complexity theory to management science. The framework is based around five domains – Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Disordered. James touched on it only briefly, and I would certainly need to study it in more detail in order to talk about it here, but this YouTube link gives a brief overview.

Every KM event I’ve been to has stressed the importance of person-to-person connections over technological solutions, and this was no exception. However, technology certainly has a role to play in KM:

• To automate processes, releasing people to do more creative and interesting tasks
• To enable collaboration
• To help with sharing, storing and seeking information and knowledge
• To increase efficiency and reduce risk.

James then moved on to some real examples of KM in action at the BRC.

• Intranet “people and skills” search – a collaboration between the Intranet team and the HR department. This contains contact details, profile pictures, optional status updates (a la Facebook) and a free text section for job description, responsibilities, experience etc. It also has a section on language skills. The introduction of this tool has had two significant benefits:

1. Those seeking particular skills amongst the staff have a time-saving method of doing so
2. Previously all staff would receive an email enquiring about particular skills – now that distraction has been removed.

•  Communities of Practice - quite a few of these now exist, in areas such as Project Management and Marketing. Each CoP has a wiki space to use as they wish – collectively known as “Open Mic”. James suggested it’s a good idea to provide a page structure for a wiki, rather than just a blank page, and to recruit champions to get things up and running

• Information Management - until the 1990s, each branch of the Red Cross was a separate charity. When they all came together under one umbrella, the new organisation inherited a legacy of document silos, making information management across the board extremely difficult. Most information sharing was carried out by email. To address this problem, several initiatives have been introduced including:

1. Workspaces (within Sharepoint 2010) – this feature serves both a document management and a collaboration purpose. They are being tested on a sample of 100 people to start off with. Information is being organised by function rather than by team, for the first time, which they hope will be a more robust platform if the structure changes again in the future.
2. Information Governance – to set boundaries and guidelines for information management. This includes things like minimum metadata standards for documents being stored.

Finally James returned to the subject of people, and how important interpersonal connections are for knowledge management. He touched on the subject of facilitation, and reminded us that there are a number of facilitated activities available to KM practitioners, such as Knowledge Cafés, Peer Assists and Peer Reviews. I have found these sites extremely useful for further information: 

http://ianwooler.wordpress.com/know-how-to/ 

http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=8152469

·

(thanks to Ian Wooler for the recommendations) 

As soon as I saw James, I realised I’d heard him speak before – I think it was at a NETIKX meeting on Sharepoint, sometime in 2011. It’s possible, then, that I was hearing some of his points for the second time, but I think they resonated much more for me this time, as I’ve now started working with research team leaders in my own organisation to identify the key KM challenges we face.

So what of my expectations for the event? I did get the chance to put faces to names for a few Twitter colleagues; I also met other interesting information professionals, as you always do at this kind of thing. And I was not disappointed in my expectation of the subject matter; James did an excellent job in bringing the subject to life, with his real examples of initiatives at the BRC. I was particularly interested to hear about their “people and skills” search, as this is something which I’d already identified as being highly desirable in my own organisation.

In terms of what I already knew about KM, a lot of what James said was familiar to me, but it was interesting to hear about the Cynefin framework, which I’d heard of, but knew little about. I’ll be reading up on that in the next few weeks.

All in all, a good event, well worth attending. I’ll be looking out for the next Cilip London event.

Facilitation, Facilitation, Facilitation…!

"Facilitation Uncovered" - 20th March 2012

The word “facilitation” is coming up more and more at work these days. My senior manager first mentioned it to me in a one-to-one meeting at least a year ago, as it was something he could see me doing in the future, to help our research teams get more out of their project and brainstorming meetings. Now, as I get more involved in Knowledge Management at work, it is being mentioned again, as facilitated events such as Peer Assists and Peer Reviews are a key part of the “learning before, whilst and after” cycle.

So, when I saw an evening event called “Facilitation Uncovered” being advertised by SLA Europe, I jumped at it, and booked straight away. The session was run by Linda Cockburn, a freelance facilitator and trainer with more than 10 years’ experience, including several years at the BBC. There were eleven of us in the group, allowing for plenty of interaction and discussion.

Linda’s task was a tough one, given that she only had one hour to instil in us the essentials of facilitation! A quick round of introductions led to our first learning point – Linda had used the opportunity to create a rough map of the room with our names indicating our seating positions, and recommended that a facilitator repeats each name three times, to help it stick and enable them to use names throughout the session.

We were split into three small groups for an exercise in which we each had to think of two or three questions starting with, “As a facilitator, how do I….?” Each group used Post-its to add their questions to a flip-chart, and where possible similar questions were grouped together. I was quite surprised at the lack of overlap in our group; most of the questions were different, reflecting our different work circumstances, priorities, and concerns.

Each group summarised their questions, and Linda addressed the main ones, providing answers and solutions. This activity in itself provided another learning point – it’s really helpful to keep checking back with group members that you have correctly understood the point they are making.

We then heard Linda’s Essentials of Facilitation, covering:

Planning

• Be clear about the outcome – then you can design a session which works towards it.
• Draw up a timetable – in sections, including activities, outcomes, timings, resources
• Prepare yourself – eg. Arrive early to set up, wear a watch, make a confident start

Lead the Process

• Generate an atmosphere of trust and safety
• Be the host – welcome people, make introductions
• Set the scene (ABCD) – gain their Attention, put over the Benefits, set out your Credentials, give the session Direction
• Set out ground rules – if you feel these are necessary

Know your role

• Maintain the distinction between the role of facilitator, and the group. You cannot be both, it just won’t work.

Linda then suggested a good way of structuring a meeting, which involved splitting it into three timed sections:

• Divergent Thinking – where different opinions are welcomed and discussed
• Convergent Thinking – where consensus begins to emerge and “what is important” is defined
• End Point – conclusions, action points to be taken forward

I found this a particularly useful concept, and will be using this in my own situation.

One of the participants asked about a situation where two people, or two factions, were completely opposed, and how to deal with that. We had quite a discussion on the subject, and various suggestions emerged:

• Speak directly to those disagreeing – “is this going the way you want it to?” – get them to take some responsibility for the outcome
• Bring in other people – perhaps those who haven’t spoken for a while – and see if what they have to say helps the situation
• Agree a timeframe for dealing with the dispute, or take it outside the session
• If you can anticipate that there may be such problems in a meeting, try to plan for it

Overall I found the session really useful, and made some good contacts too. I have no doubt I will be returning to Linda's tips and pointers in the future.

Giant strides on Leap Day

29^th February 2012 proved to be quite a big day for me. Not only was it the first presentation I’ve had to give in quite a while, but the purpose of the presentation was to introduce the principles and concept of Knowledge Management to our Research team leaders, with a view to introducing KM over the next few months.

Some people take presentation and public speaking in their stride – I’m very envious of this ability! Over my nearly thirty-year career, I’ve had to get up and talk to people from time to time, and for me, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. No matter how thoroughly I prepare, I’m always nervous on the day. On this occasion, the self-imposed pressure was increased by the feeling that I had this one chance to get my message across – I’d introduced the principles of KM to my senior manager before Christmas, and he was keen to spread the word further. This is an opportunity for me to raise my profile at work, and work more closely with the Research team and others across the company.

So, how did I approach the task in hand? I read blogs on public speaking and presentations, and attended a seminar on presentation skills. I went to a talk on “Confidence in the Workplace”, and read presenter Kate Atkin’s book , “The Confident Manager”. I also drew lessons from the recent NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) course I’d attended. On the practical side, I worked hard to make my presentation relevant and interesting, flagging up the benefits of KM early on and reiterating them at the end. I’m afraid I DID use bullet points on quite a few slides, but not many on each one, and I definitely did not read them out!!

One of the blog posts I’d found very interesting and useful was Bethan Ruddock’s post on using scripted presentations. I really identified with this from Bethan’s post: 

“I’d love to be able to talk off the cuff, come up with apt and informative points based on minimal notes, but I can’t. No matter how many times I practice, if I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say next, I go all of a flutter, and end up saying nothing but ‘umm… errr… umm’.”

This is exactly my problem, and for a long time I toyed with the idea of doing my presentation from a script. In the end, I didn’t, but having written a script really helped me to get into my head some of the phrases and terminology I wanted to use. I rehearsed using my script several times, then decided it wasn’t going to work for me (partly because I knew the presentation would take place in a small room, sitting around a table, and it would be so obvious if the script was in front of me!!). I tried rehearsing with nothing at all, and was pleasantly surprised to find that, as long as the slides were in visible, the words were coming. Not always fluently, but I thought I should be able to get by. There were a few key phrases I wanted to be sure to have at my fingertips, so I wrote those out to refer to, in case I needed them.

The big day arrived, and I woke up with the familiar knot in my stomach. Actually I was quite pleased with myself for getting this far without one – in the past I’ve started to feel nervous earlier than that! The presentation was booked for 3 pm, so I had to get through the rest of the day, and get some productive work done, before it started.

Finally, there we were, in the meeting room; I was introduced, I opened my mouth and the words came out. Sometimes not exactly as I would have wanted them to, but no-one left because of it! The slides worked, and I only referred to my notes once. I’d forgotten at the start to invite questions and interruptions at any time, and when I did so part-way through, I got one straight away, and dealt with it with no problems.

There was a useful discussion when I’d finished, and we agreed that I would meet individually with each of the attendees as a next step, to find out what their individual concerns and issues are, with respect to Knowledge Management within the team.

What did I learn from the experience?

• No matter how well I prepare for presentations, I may have to accept the fact that I will always feel nervous beforehand. Two people I’ve spoken to since have said this is a good thing! I tried hard to identify what exactly I was nervous about, and still haven’t been able to answer that fully. So – recognise it, accept it and move on!
• Once I’d started, it was easier to relax and enjoy it. I’ve noticed this before, too, and it’s something to remember when I’m feeling nervous beforehand. From my NLP reading, I’m convinced that because I’ve got into a pattern of thinking “I hate doing presentations and always feel nervous and get tongue-tied”, this is my automatic response whenever I’m asked to give a presentation. Pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy!
• One of the tips I picked up from the seminar I attended on giving presentations was to do with breathing. It’s obvious really, but if you don’t breathe properly, the lack of oxygen to the brain can impede clear thinking. I made a real effort to take some deep breaths before I started, and took my time to breathe when I could feel myself gabbling a bit!
• There’s not much I would have changed about how things went, but I will ensure next time that I mention at the start that questions and interruptions are fine (if that’s the case).
• If nothing else – this went well and was a good confidence booster for next time!

Useful links:

Bethan Ruddock’s post on presenting, mentioned above (and links within it): http://bethaninfoprof.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/presenting/

 

Excellent blog on presentations/public speaking:

http://andnowpresenting.typepad.com/professionally_speaking/

 

 Kate Atkin’s book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Confident-Manager-Confidence-Communication-Successful/dp/1906316155

CAMAWiSE - Peer Mentoring workshop, 21/2/2012

I recently attended a Peer Mentoring evening organised by CAMAWiSE (Cambridge Association for Women in Science and Engineering). The event was followed by the group’s AGM, a clever idea to combine the two to get the most out of the evening and encourage people along. Not that I think they needed much encouragement – this was my second meeting since joining the group, and I have found the members and attendees to be a sociable, likeable and enthusiastic group of women of all ages. 

The group organised something similar last year, and the feedback had been very positive, so they decided to try the format again this year. The idea is that in a group of peers, everyone mentors each other; in our work, we all gain different experiences and in a group of committed and intelligent people there will be useful experiences relating to your current situation. Support can be through exchanging practical tips, defining and clarifying the topic, getting other people’s perspectives and hearing people’s experiences of similar situations.

After agreeing some “rules”, we brainstormed some topics for discussion. We ended up with five groups taking the following topics:

• Transitions (eg from research to other types of job)
• Building confidence
• New companies
• Returning to work/finding work
• Negotiating promotion/salary rise

I was in the last of these groups, comprising five participants with widely varying backgrounds and stories to tell. We started by introducing ourselves and our reasons for picking this topic. Although we were experiencing different problems, we could still identify some common ground, and we had some interesting discussions covering subjects such as self-confidence, appraisals and student reviews.
 
All too soon time was called, and our facilitator went around the room to gather feedback from each group on how they’d got on. There had obviously been some stimulating conversations, which will hopefully be continued in other forums. Our group plans to meet up in a couple of months so we can report back to each other on our progress. In addition, two Linked-In groups have been set up to continue the discussions started by two of the groups.

I found this a very useful event. It's always interesting and valuable to hear other people's experiences; quite often it puts into perspective what you see as your own "problems".

The AGM followed, and the meeting was wrapped up in a very positive atmosphere. Peer mentoring is a valuable tool,  give it a go if you get the chance! I can also highly recommend the group, if you are thinking of joining -  it’s dynamic, supportive and sociable.

Welcome to my blog!

I'm an experienced Information Professional based in Cambridge, where I've worked for a high-tech R&D company for nearly 12 years. I'm part of the Intellectual Property team, and my main responsibilities lie in conducting searches to support members of the team, as well as our many research scientists and engineers. I also manage our e-journal subscriptions, and provide document delivery and other services. 

Sometime last year I came to realise that I'd let my career drift somewhat, and decided it was time to take charge of matters. At the same time, organisational changes meant I had a new manager; both he and his manager have been encouraging me to move out of my comfort zone and take on new responsibilities.

In November 2011 my company sent me on an "Introduction to NLP" course, which was incredibly interesting, and gave me an invaluable push in the right direction (thankyou Sue Knight!!). Sue's book, "NLP at Work", has been open on my dining room table ever since, and I continually go back to it to extract the next nugget. I can heartily recommend it!  I foresee NLP being the subject of future blogposts.

I've also started to take an interest in Knowledge Management, and see it as a key part of my developing role at work. I'm planning to post about my KM journey, and would be very interested to hear from others about their experiences.

Towards the end of 2011 I started actively looking for networking and development opportunities, and I will be continuing to do so in 2012. Last year I went to two LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange) events, and so far this year I've joined CAMAWiSE (Cambridge Association of Women in Science and Engineering) and attended two of their events. There are so many events around which I would love to go to, unfortunately you just can't do them all! So it's a case of picking out those which sound the most interesting and valuable.

I've been planning to blog for some time now - partly encouraged by the "23 things for CPD" movement. I didn't actually register for CPD23 but I did find the posts very useful and still refer back to them frequently. So I will aim to use this blog, among other things, as a reflective tool, as well as sharing my thoughts with you all out there! I'd love to hear from you if you have comments to make.