Twitter, Facebook and management
May 20, 2012
Emotional contagion is a fact of life. It means that our moods and even physical health are created in interaction with other people. We tilt either to the positive or the negative as a result of our relations, and the further relations, the people that we relate with have. It is a chain that goes far beyond the horizon. This is why we can no longer see our minds as independent and separate but as thoroughly social. Our mental life is co-created in a larger and larger interconnected network. What we have called the individual mind is something that arises continuously in relationships between people.
Our social interactions also play a role in shaping our brain. We know now that repeated experiences sculpt the synaptic connections and rewire our brain. Accordingly, our relationships gradually frame our neural circuitry. Being chronically depressed by others or being emotionally nourished and enriched has lifelong impacts.
Mainstream thinking sees the social in social business as a platform or a community, on a different level from the individuals who form it. The social is seen as separate from the individuals.
The approach suggested here follows a different reasoning and sees individuals as social. Both the individual and the social are then about interaction, where the individual is interaction inside and the social is interaction outside. The inside and outside cannot be separated or understood separately.
Interaction starts with recognition. It is about granting attention to others and making room for them in our lives. Being recognized has tremendous significance. People in traditional companies were often stuck in narrow, repetitive patterns of communication that provided them with numbing, repressive and even neurotic experiences.
Leading and following in the traditional corporate sense have seen the leader making people follow him through motivation and rewards. The leader also decided who the followers should be.
When seen through the logic of social media, leading and following have a very different dynamic. Leading in this new social business sense is not position-based, but recognition-based. People, the followers, also decide. The leader is someone people trust to be at the forefront in an area which is temporally meaningful for them. People also recognize as the leader someone who inspires, energizes and empowers them.
Another huge difference from traditional management thinking is that because of the diversity of contexts people link to, there can never be just one “boss”. Thus, an individual always has many leaders that she follows. You might even claim that from the point of view taken here, it is highly problematic if a person only has one leader. It would mean attention blindness as a default state.
Following is at best a process of active, creative learning through observing and simulating desired practices. Leading is doing one’s work in an open, inspiring and transparent way. Leading is engaging with people and being reflective. Patterns of recognition and patterns of communication are the most predictive activities there are in forecasting viability, agility and also human well-being.
Identity is a pattern in time. The individual and the social are born, and form one another at the same time. You can’t add a social layer to what you do, or to your IT systems – you are social!
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Thank you Ralph Stacey, Doug Griffin, Ken Gergen and Dian Marie Hosking
May 20, 2012 at 23:22
Just as traditional management is being supplanted with the rise of the social management relationship, so also must we create new norms of follower-ship. Old norm tells us the Boss will show you what to do. Follower-ship was a passive activity. The social individual is required to take an active role in the lead-follow relationship. This may be an intuitive and default reaction for some, but not necessarily all, and is not actively taught or reinforced in the workplace (perhaps with rare exception?).
May 20, 2012 at 23:24
I remember, many moons ago in the early days of blogging, a period when most of the bloggers I followed were posting consistently melancholy posts. It dawned on me that, in a subtle way, we were passing on mood to each other.
May 21, 2012 at 08:07
The UK Royal Society of Arts (www.theRSA.org) has interesting research programmes on connectivity and the social brain.
Also Michel Bouwens, co-founder of P2P Foundation (http://p2pfoundation.net/Michel_Bauwens) wrote good pieces of writing on the political economy of social media.
Finally, twitter is sometimes manipulated for commercial purpose, Some people say it is often the case, I do not believe so.
best
a
May 21, 2012 at 08:54
Reblogged this on red rabbit skills services | skills programme development and related services.
May 21, 2012 at 08:55
Great post thanks. I like the connectivity that you point to.
May 22, 2012 at 09:14
Valuable insight, recognizing that an individual always should have many leaders that she follows. Thanks for sharing your thought on this one.
May 25, 2012 at 19:27
I think a lot of workplace dissatisfaction comes from feeling forced into a disengaged follower role, which is not part of an authentic social interaction. Although we’re already social, there is value in acknowledging this and making a concerted effort to cater to the social needs of people, who can be followers in one project and leaders in another. Great post!