Leadership in the time of Social Media
February 25, 2010
We are used to thinking that what happens in organizations is the realization of the choices of powerful people. They are supposed to know what is going on as they make those choices. However, the stories about decision making during wartime, or during the recent financial crises, make it very clear that politicians and executives are far from sure of what has been happening and they simply don’t know what is now happening.
Partially, it is because of corrupted communication. The results of failing communication can be catastrophic. In today’s FT Tim Harford quotes a study on communication and decision making during the Vietnam War: “The joint chiefs of staff were warned that Lyndon Johnson did not like split advice. Robert McNamara also argued that government would be inefficient if department chiefs were to express disagreement with the president.”
The leader who isolates himself from dissenting opinions is bound to make disastrous decisions. The failures in communication in Vietnam continued in Iraq. According to researchers, Donald Rumsfeld and his immediate subordinates made dissent extremely difficult during the first years of the war. It is normal, but costly in corporations and disastrous in politics to filter out information that contradicts preconceptions.
Failures of leadership are failures in communication.
All organizations are power and communication structures. Very often communication is corrupted just because of power. “If you deliver differing views to your boss, it is highly likely that you are not going to be listened to in the future.” For ambitious people, this is the worst possible fate. What social media try to achieve, is subordinates giving truthful information about what is going on, which they don’t do, and bosses listening attentively, which they don’t.
If this dynamic is taking place at every level of the organization, you are in big trouble. Each organizational level that creates a strong boss, ambitious subordinate relation is a distorting barrier to communication and informed decisions.
Business leaders try to know what is going on in the corporation through employee surveys and 360-degree appraisals. Organizations are full of local knowledge, but if bosses need to ask outsiders to tell them how their organization really works, there is trouble in store. If organizations want to be relevant and effective, they will need to incorporate elements of bottom-up, real-time information delivery and real-time listening into their management thinking. Be that pushing real-time updates or subscribing to people who matter.
The role of the effective leader during the time of social media is to widen and deepen communication. Leadership is participating and exercising skills of conversation which uncorrupts information, keeps the necessary paradoxes alive, and keeps on opening up the possibility of new meaning rather than closing down the further development of thought.
Thank you Tim Harford
February 26, 2010 at 08:20
Thanks again for a good post Esko. Hopefully there’s plenty of leaders out there getting this message!
This whole “one man should bare it all” kind of thinking is, in my mind anyway, a bit twisted kind of logic. How, and in the first place, why, should there be this godlike figure moving the pawns with relying only [or mostly] in his own judgement? Like you mentioned; organizations are filled with knowledge and valuable people, the real challenge is to get that knowledge used properly and effectively, with the employees.
Like I’ve said many times recently: if people just read [and internalized] more what Daniel Goleman had to say [and still has to] about Social Intelligence, way before the social web revolution, our understanding of leadership and communication would be bettter.
Some people just don’t understand that leadership isn’t about having power or using it, it’s about leading a team whose members are people you get to listen to and take care of.
February 27, 2010 at 12:56
Esko – Right on! Leadership in a time of clouds! I agree entirely with your observation about the potential of today’s tools to overcome intended and unintended barriers to communication. What also strikes me is the context. You have been blogging about this a lot as well. I think we agree that the role of the leader and the burden on communication change when contexts change.
One context that I would like to flag is that of anticipation. Why, what and how we anticipate changes the role of a leader and of signals amongst actors. When there is a war on many people believe that the role of the leader is to be fearless and absolutely convinced of their plan. This may be true, but as you point out this should not exclude openness and the exchange of different views. However, I think that it is important to point out that in a war or any other situation where the goal, the resources and rules are all taken as given, that in the end the plan – how to best use the resources, playing by the rules to achieve the goal effectively – must prevail. The leader can nurture a communicative and open team or impose a forced march – it depends on the plan and the battle. In advance we cannot tell which one will win.
But there is another situation where the basic idea of planning is inappropriate. It is in the context of open goals, open resources and open rules. Many situations are not this open, either because we do not want them to be (we are afraid or sure of ourselves) or because circumstances simply pre-empt (hunger, prison, etc.). In those situations where we are called upon to find the capacity to be free (A. Sen) the idea of “leadership” may not even be applicable. Initiative maybe, but the head of the pack, the follower-leader image, doesn’t really seem apt.
I am looking forward to continuing the conversation.
Riel
March 1, 2010 at 06:48
Esko, you coudn’t be more right about the essential role of communication in leadership. It is often more important to raise questions than to give definite answers. Leadership skills are partly about creating a positive psychological space where people are encouraged to give their opinions and raise further questions.
However, this seems to be a interactive process where both the leader’s and the community’s expectiations are important. For example, it is a common bias to attribute the reasons for both success and failure of organizations to internal qualities of the leader instead of taking a broader view and looking for social and situational reasons.
So, I would like to emphasise that it is not solely the responsibility of leaders to change this culture by being more open to communication and encouraging bottom-up information delivery but it is also a shared responsibility. Current times ask more for organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) from all of us – that means for example being more active agents in delivering information, helping others to find relevant information, discussing it actively and doing that in a positive spirit. These skills are extremely important for the organization, and many companies also want to recruit people with these skills, that have sometimes been called “extra-role behaviour” because of incorporating behaviours that are not part of their work roles. The “extra”-part seems to grow and the “role”-part of work seem to get more and more blurry every day.