Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization

Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization [Hardcover]

Dan Pontefract (Author)

Publication Date: April 8, 2013

Arms you with powerful tools for overcoming resistance to change and creating a culture of collaboration, engagement, and employee empowerment

Your people are your most valuable asset, and if you want them to excel (and your profits to soar), you’ll need to abandon your traditional command-and-control management style and adopt a collaborative, open leadership approach—one that engages and empowers your people. While this isn’t a particularly new idea, many leaders, while they may pay lip service to it, don’t really understand what it means. And most of those who do get it lack the skills for putting it into practice. In Flat Army you’ll find powerful leadership models and tools that help you challenge yourself and overcome your personal obstacles to change, while pushing the boundaries of organizational change to create a culture of collaboration.

Develops an integrated framework incorporating collaboration, open leadership, technologies, and connected learning

Shows you how to flatten the organizational pyramid and engage with your peoples in more collaborative and productive ways—without undermining your authority

Explains how to deploy a Connected Leader mindset, a Participative Leader Framework, and a Collaborative Leader Action Model

Arms you with powerful tools for becoming a more visible leader who demonstrates the qualities and capabilities needed to become an agent of positive changeEditorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Leaders of any description and department are struggling. Society is awash with social technologies; employees want to be included in the conversations and decisions; and management is stuck sorting out how teams should operate using dated leadership models in a new and technologically- sophisticated social world order. Human Resources needs to catch up with technology; Finance continues to operate in a silo; and IT is tripping over both legacy systems and newer, social technologies, while experiencing difficulty adjusting to a more collaborative behavioral model. Most importantly, employees are becoming significantly more disengaged.

Does any of this sound familiar?

There is no easy way to undo what years, and even decades, of outdated management practice have done to leaders. Command and control is rampant, evil and unnecessary. The process of change has to start with the leadership in any organization, and Flat Army is designed to prevent your organization’s ship from sinking. Dan Pontefract knows and understands what happens to organizations when employees are unhappy and uncommitted. More importantly, he knows what it takes to create a leadership culture that drives engagement, empowerment and encouragement amongst continued execution. In all of the corporate leadership roles he has had, he held a steadfast belief that a collaborative, connected and participative leadership framework is the only way in which to operate.

Pontefract is currently the Head of Learning and Collaboration at TELUS—an international telecommunications organization of 40,000 employees—where he and the TELUS team instituted concepts such as the TELUS Leadership Philosophy; a formal, informal and social learning model known as Learning 2.0; and a plethora of open, social and collaborative technologies that, in part, helped TELUS augment its approach to leadership and engagement.

Today, employee engagement at TELUS sits at 80 percent, the highest in Canada for large-sized organizations and in the top one percent globally. TELUS and Dan have received multiple awards from ASTD, CLO and Skillsoft in recognition of the growth of a new culture of leadership, collaboration and learning.

Prepare to be entertained, shocked and engaged. Challenge yourself. Challenge the status quo. Flat Army pushes the boundaries of organization change. It can change yours.

From the Back Cover

FLAT: to be on a level surface, not in a hierarchy

ARMY: a large group of people who share similar aims or beliefs

FLAT ARMY: an unobstructed flow of corporate commonality