Since It’s Wrong to Friend Your Boss on Facebook, I guess that makes me sort of an idiot, huh?

Yes, one of my Facebook “friends” is my boss. No, that doesn’t really bother me. Not because I would want my boss to know everything about my life, (I don’t want anyone to know everything about my life for that matter!), but because anything that I didn’t want my boss to know, I wouldn’t post on a social networking site!

I use Social Networking tools to connect with family and friends, yes. I also use them to connect with folks who read my blog, or who are involved with the child abuse survivor community online. I also count among my contacts coworkers, former coworkers, professional contacts, peers from other firms, vendors and consultants and probably a couple of people that I don’t even remember how we know each other. In fact, it’s a pretty varied group on Facebook.

That variety doesn’t mean I’m being “irresponsible” in who I share details of my life with. In my case, it actually serves to remind me to stay responsible in all of my online interactions, no matter who I’m interacting with. I’ve been involved in the earliest forms of online networking through blogs, since 2001. I’m comfortable with what I write on all the different subjects I write about. I recognize that some will find one, or more, of the topics I write about more interesting than others, which is why I do sort of separate those out to some extent, and why only one of my blogs feeds to my Facebook profile, but as far as I’m concerned, if I put it online, I’m ok with it being public knowledge and having my name attached to it. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t post it anywhere.

Of course, with Facebook, that also means keeping up with what others post on my profile, which I also do. I try not to associate with people I don’t trust enough to respect my desire to keep my page fun, educational, interesting, yet still professional. I regularly remove miscellaneous stuff from my Facebook Wall that makes it look less than that. Yes, that’s why, if you are sending gifts, hearts, angels or what have you to all your friends, I more than likely removed it from my wall. Nothing personal, it’s just not what I want all over my profile when people look at it. It’s my profile, my choice, and I choose to connect with coworkers, and my boss. Not because I’m naive, quite the opposite, in fact.

In an otherwise maddening post about his experience with a law school student, Craig Ball makes an interesting “throw away” comment:

We look to the crop of eager young lawyers to be inherently more adept at e-discovery than we who preceded them. After all, they have iPhones.

Craig (who I assume was being facetious), is confusing the comfort level of using technology, with an understanding of technology. They are not the same. Younger attorneys may have an advantage when it comes to using their PC or smartphone to get work done, by virtue of having grown up in a world where this is the norm. Much the same way that older folks used to joke about getting their 9 year old to program the VCR, that doesn’t mean the 9 year old knows how the VCR works. She is just comfortable using the menu to program it because she’s never not had one. Expecting that, because this young girl can program the VCR means that she will, undoubtedly, also understand how video tape gets written to, how the VCR adjusts for different playback speeds, how the broadcast is received by the television, etc. is folly. The ability to use an iPhone has nothing to do with knowing how to create a data-map, a deep understanding of PST files, using hash values to locate duplicate files, an understanding of metadata and forensics, or the hundreds of other things an attorney may run into in the course of an eDiscovery project.

It reminds me of the many organizations who’s use of social media is being directed by a 20 something employee fresh out of college who happens to have 500 friends on Facebook or Twitter, as if that somehow magically qualifies them to direct marketing strategy. It’s simply not the same thing.

Both of these examples bring to mind something else that has bothered me for a long time about the “generational diversity” presentations that I know you’ve all heard over and over, and which was described so well by Manager Tools just last week. In this case, just because an associate is young, doesn’t mean they are better with technology. Some are, and some aren’t. They are individuals, not an composite of the “average” for people their age, or from their culture.

For example,  if you meet another 41 year old, male, white Litigation Support Manager, chances are, they are a lot different than I am, you might want to take notice of that. Heck, they are probably less grumpy, if nothing else!

Kevin Eikenberry posts some interesting thoughts in video form about what will happen when the job market starts to recover, positing that your best and brightest will be the first ones out the door.

I actually tend to agree. I’ve been thinking, for quite awhile now, that when the job market bounces back and people start to feel a bit more secure in looking around, there’s going to be a mass exodus, especially from the legal industry. You can’t go a week or two without reading about law firms cutting staff, cutting associates, limiting pay, and cutting all sorts of expenses, and legal is hardly the only industry getting hit with cuts like this.

So the question is, in the midst of all these “cuts”, what are you doing to keep your best people engaged and on board? If nothing, do you really expect they won’t be looking to leave at the first sign of openings?

That’s the idea that was presented a few days ago by Confused of Calcutta, and one that I kept finding myself considering after reading about it.

You might recall over a month ago that I wrote about non-lawyer staff and the marketing of a firm, and the importance of bringing more to the table than just doing your job, because any good employee can do your job, a great employee becomes a resource for the firm in many more ways than just doing the assigned work.

That could explain why I see much to like in this idea of coming in to a job and bringing your own identity, using the tools you choose, etc. You don’t stop being you between the hours of 8-5, and you don’t stop being an employee of the firm at 5. That’s not the way the world works any more. Certainly there is much to be said for work/life balance, and I am a big believer in having a healthy balance between work and fun, but at the same time the best source of customers for any enterprise are the people your employees are talking to and interacting with. I know my impression of many companies has been based on what the people who work there have said about it, or experienced while working there, but it’s something I don’t think many companies think about, and dare I say, it’s something very few law firms have stopped to consider. Oh, many will take great pains to not get a negative reputation among lawyers, but don’t stop to think about all of the potential clients their support staff is also connected with. The wild world of Web 2.0 is starting to change that perspective, but slowly. It’s now easy enough to see how connected many of the people who work for you are, and not just the potential damage that can be caused by disgruntled employees, but also the opportunity that having truly engaged employees brings.

Staff members who are proud of the firm they work for are, generally, more than happy to tell the people they know about it. That can’t be a bad thing, can it? Unfortunately, too many places will never know, because they live in abject fear of what their employees might say if they were given the freedom to do so. That’s too bad, and just might be an indictment of how they treat these non-attorney staff members. Not so much as people, with rich, full lives, relationships, and many things to offer, but as cogs in the machine, there to do your bidding for 8 hours per day and nothing more.

I know which kind of environment I enjoy working in more. I’d bet I’m not alone.

Well, it’s been an interesting year, that’s for sure! Like most years, 2009 didn’t turn out the way I expected. Last year at this time, I really had no idea what was headed my way. The biggest surprise, obviously, was being promoted to management. Not only did I not expect that to happen, but I also really had no idea what that would mean for my every day life.

I’ve mentioned before, management is different. It’s no longer about going to the office, doing the work, and going home. I spend so much time planning strategy, evaluating ideas, brainstorming, preparing training materials, reaching out to other areas of the firm, etc. that it can be very difficult to turn that off at the end of the work day. That’s not always a bad thing, sometimes I can accomplish much more of that stuff away from the distractions of the workplace, but it has caused some other things to suffer. I find myself with less time to write very meaningful posts here or on the child abuse blog, and I’ve not managed to blog at all over at Friends in Tech. I simply don’t have as much spare mental energy as I used to!

On top of that, it’s been more difficult to go home and do the social, personal things I’m used to doing. Oh, I may still spend the evening with Angela doing things we’ve always done, but I may not be 100% mentally there when we are. I may be mulling over an idea I had earlier, or fleshing out details of a plan while also watching The Office or eating dinner. That’s not good.

That being said, I suspect that much of the problem lies not so much with a lack of time as much as an undisciplined approach to time. Not that I’m unorganized, I probably have more lists than any three people you know, but when I sit down to write, or brainstorm an idea, it doesn’t always keep my focus, and winds up taking much longer than it should. My mind goes in tangents instead of opening up an Evernote page and outlining an idea right then and there while I’m thinking about it.

So that’s the plan for 2009. I’m going to be trying to figure out ways to be more disciplined with my time, and learn how to focus on getting all the way through a plan, or activity, then focus on the next one, instead of starting, writing a few ideas, then remembering that I need to email someone about another task, or check the hockey score real quick, etc. Any tips you’ve gleaned from your own lives are always appreciated!

I know I said that I loved the entire post I pointed you to earlier from Stop Blocking, but there’s one line that really resonates outside of this particular issue.

Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway? I’m not sure when supervisors and HR abdicated this responsibility to IT, but IT is simply not qualified to address employee productivity.

It immediately reminded me of something that I hear often from the Manager Tools guys, that there are so few people in management who really understand and work at being a good manager. This task of addressing productivity fell to IT because no one else has any idea of how to address productivity. Actually taking the time to set the expectations to the people who work for you, figuring out how to measure their performance and holding them accountable for meeting the goals you set out for them is quite a bit of work. I know, as a new manager I’m still struggling with figuring out how to do it! So, it’s awfully tempting as management to start blocking things that would cause distraction, as if you could block every potential distraction!

It also reminded me of a post from this past summer about dropping billable hours and how you would measure the work of associates:

“Then how do you know if your associates are working?”

I lean in, like I’m going to let them in on my secret formula.

“By managing them.”

As I look down the list of reasons not to block social media, I’m struck by how many of them fit this very point. If you are effectively managing the people who work for you, they understand the consequences of failing to meet expectations and not being productive, they understand the appropriate ways to interact online, and what sorts of things are frowned upon by the organization. They know better than to disclose confidential information, and they know with certainty what will happen if they do. They understand that being careless with malware will hurt their productivity because they’ll be without their PC while it’s getting cleaned.

As I look back on 20 plus years of working myself, and all of the conversations I have had with others, there’s something that really runs true here. There really aren’t very many good managers. I find that many, not all, managers are in management just because they were the last one standing when others moved on (ed.- he says fully self-aware).

Most people are thrust into management because they’ve been good at a job, and a manager left, so they got the promotion. Not because they showed managerial skills, and they probably weren’t given any managerial training either, they just happened to be good at one thing, so they got the spot. Is it any wonder then, that they surrender responsibilities to the IT Department? They don’t know any other way to deal with the risks of something like social networking. They don’t dare rock the boat by trying to be innovative, because being innovative requires confidence, and people who have never been groomed to be managers, yet find themselves in that position, lack the confidence to do things differently!

Seems to me that, instead of constantly worrying about what your people might do, with any tool, organizations might be better off training their managers to be effective, and innovative. That innovation will trickle down and take care of many of these issues. Right now, we’re not seeing a lot of turnover in many industries, and it may be harder to spot bad management, but I guarantee you, when the economy shows signs of turning around, and people start to feel more confident in their job prospects, you’ll see scores of unhappy, and very talented, people moving elsewhere. Finding quality and innovative management might keep a few of them around.

I’ve made many of these same points myself, and made passionate arguments against blocking access to social media sites in the office, but I think this may be the most clear and concise list of reasons that I’ve ever seen.

Why the 54% of companies blocking access to social media should unblock

As they say, go read the whole thing. I couldn’t possibly pick out any one passage that would do it justice, but I will say that there is one passage that does merit some further thoughts. That is for a later post.

I saw this post over at Kevin O’Keefe’s this morning and realized that there was one sentence that really jumped out at me about social networking, because it’s something I don’t think a lot of people realize.

Social media is not something to do ‘when you have some time’ – make time for it or you won’t see the benefits.

This is something I see time and time again with people who are new to social networking. They sign up for a Twitter account, or a Facebook account, post a status along the lines of “Just checking this out”, and connect to maybe a handful of people they already know. Then they forget about it. A couple of weeks, or a month later, they come back and post another update, something along the lines of “Still trying to see if this works for me”, and go back to ignoring it again. Then, maybe they give it a third try a couple of months later. Eventually, they give up and declare the whole thing a waste of time.

It takes more than that. Just like in-person networking, it involves much more than simply showing up at a networking event, saying hello to two people, leaving, and awaiting all that great follow up you heard about. Good networking requires you to spend some time conversing with people, interacting with people, and following up with them. Online networking is no different. Making good connections requires interaction, it requires listening and it requires time and effort. Anything short of that will not lead to the best results.

The great thing about online networking tools, is that the time requirement is actually much less. I can pass along an interesting news item, blog post, or event to hundreds of people at the same time. I can skim through my Twitter stream or Facebook newsfeed and keep up to date on the happenings, and interesting things my connections are sharing, learning more about them and how I might be able to help them in the process, in very little time each day. It’s remarkably efficient, and effective, when you take the time to figure out how to work with the tools, and how to really interact with the people you want to connect to.

Building relationships takes time. If you don’t have the time to interact with me, why should I want to connect, let alone do business with, you?

Guy Kawasaki calls it Going on the Offensive with Facebook, and lays out some specific examples of how you could do it, but to me, more important than the specifics, is the overall idea.

I love the fact that Guy is willing to look at all of the scare stories about what you shouldn’t put on Facebook, and how much that personal info is going to get you in trouble professionally, and counter that with the fact that you can use the tool just as effectively to promote yourself positively as you can negatively!

As I mentioned recently, Facebook and other social networking tools are incredibly effective means of personal communication. That has plusses and minuses, but if you want to promote the positive things about yourself, you’ve never had a greater opportunity to do so. Don’t sanitize your profile, or worse yet, delete your profile out of fear. Rather use all of the aspects of your life to show off the unique characteristics that make you, you, and let your strengths and ambitions come to the forefront of your profile. Show us what you’re made of, and why you’re worth paying attention to, or working with.

Social Networking does expose the worst about people when they don’t think about what they’re saying, but it can also be a great tool to expose the good about yourself. Use it to do just that!

This actually goes double for you if you are, in fact, a douchebag. Go ahead and make that easier for me to find out ahead of time, m’kay?

As many of you know, I’ve been in DC this week, swamped with the ILTA09 conference, not just as an attendee, but also as a speaker. I was asked, many months ago, to be part of a presentation on social networking.

I’ve already mentioned that I thought the session went well, but wanted to write up a brief post about the basic point I tried to make there.

Social Networking is not something brand new to be scared of, it is the same behavior we’ve always engaged in, communicating, connecting, sharing, etc. It is, however, light years more effective than any way in which we engaged in that behavior before, and that has ramifications, both positive and negative.

On the positive side, it’s never been easier to connect to people. The barriers to entry online have never been lower, it takes very little technical knowledge to create a Facebook account, for example, and that has fueled an explosion in the number of people using the internet to network with each other. There are thousands of social networks that exist online, all it really takes is finding out where the folks you want to connect are spending their time, and then getting involved!

Of course, that efficiency also means that it’s never been easier to make a jackass of yourself, and have the whole world know about it. It also means that it’s never been easier for other people to do things that impact how others may see you. The example I gave, you might not be stupid enough to drunk tweet, but the people you’re drinking with might be that stupid and they might talk about you! Same damage done.

So, as you folks go back from the ILTA conference and try to talk to your firms about social networking, try to focus on the fact that it’s not some brand new scary thing. It’s networking, in a much more efficient manner, with all the benefits and risk that any networking holds!