Leadership Exchange

Instant messaging is invading and changing the workplace. Employees started to sneak instant messaging into the office in the late 1990s, but now more organizations are endorsing it. Faster and more casual than e-mail, instant messaging can foster broader collaboration among employees even as it further blurs the boundaries between work and life.

Roughly one-third of U.S. employees use instant messaging at work, many without the knowledge of their employers, according to a 2006 survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute. Many employers remain reluctant to endorse it, fearing security breaches and distracted employees. But tech consultant Gartner Inc. projects that instant messaging will be the “de facto tool for voice, video, and text chat” for 95 percent of employees in big organizations within five years.

Unlike e-mail, instant messaging offers a “presence” —a snapshot of those colleagues available at a given moment worldwide. Together with allied Internet technologies, such as blogs and wikis, it is “changing the way people collaborate,” says Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. Organizations “increasingly react to situations and problems on the fly, not solely by hierarchy,” he says.

The Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2007

Bidding Buzz

In January, Mike Colaw, special assistant to the executive vice president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, and his staff were tossing around ideas about how to attract more attention to the university. Someone suggested auctioning items on eBay. The idea quickly grew to auctioning a year’s worth of tuition, room, and board on eBay, a package valued at $23,000.

The university started making headlines when the bidding kicked off at one cent in early February. When the auction closed on February 13, the university had received 33 bids, including the winning bid of $18,669.99.

“We expected to get some local media coverage, but when we Googled ourselves and saw the story on the BBC Web site, we could say it went global,” says Colaw.

“We’re trying to be as creative as we can in finding that next thing,” adds Colaw. “No matter what we do, the Internet will play a central role. The generation that’s coming to college now lives and dies with the Internet.”

CASE Currents, July/August 2007

Be A Conflict Competent Leader

The ability to effectively deal with conflict ranks among the most essential leadership skills. Unfortunately, it is an area where many leaders fall short. Authors

Craig Runde and Tim Flanagan in their book, Becoming a Conflict Competent Leader, say that when we are faced with conflict, the instinctive response is not usually the best one and may cause us to behave in counterproductive ways.

They describe conflict as any situation in which people have incompatible interests, goals, principles, or feelings. “The interplay of

difference, incompatibility,
and interdependence will
continue to create conflict in
organizations,” they write.
“But leaders can change
their response to conflict in
ways that create
new solutions and
more effective
organizations.”
They suggest
putting a positive
spin on conflict
by thinking about
it in terms of best
solutions, communi-
cation, and creative tension
versus negative descriptors
such as confrontation,
misunderstanding, anger,
and hostility.