Social Leader

Redefining Leadership for the Complex Social Age

Frank Guglielmo, Sudhanshu Palsule

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351860789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Technology, global economics, and demographics are colluding to create workspaces that thrive on communities rather than hierarchies. Our industrial paradigm with its roots in the military is swiftly being replaced by a paradigm based on networks that are held together by passion and social connections, and fueled by instantaneous interactions between members of communities. This new paradigm is creating a massive impact on how we think about successful leadership and how we develop leaders. We have found that this shift involves thinking of leaders more as Mayors and less as Generals. The Social Leader structures a new approach to leadership and provides tools for leaders to understand themselves in this new era of connectedness and community. Authors Frank Guglielmo and Sudhanshu Palshule describe and explain the five new imperatives of leadership, the Tenets of Social Leadership, illustrating ways for leaders and would-be leaders to reimagine their personal narratives and their leadership capabilities.

Part I
Making the Shift from General to Mayor

1
Leading in the Social Age

Lead from the back, and let others believe they are in the front.

NELSON MANDELA

In 1995, the commercial Internet came into existence and the world ended and was reborn. This is not an overly dramatic statement. If you are over thirty-five years of age, you learned to think and work in a world defined by planning for foreseeable trends and competitors. That world has been completely replaced by the Social Age—a time marked by digital connectivity, socially created information, and globally connected networks where constant disruption, agility, and competing points of view are the rule. If you are less than thirty-five years old, all you know is the Social Age. You joined the world of work in the twenty-first century and only know a world where the Internet and social media are part of life. You are native to this world and everyone else has immigrated to your world, bringing with them ways of thinking and leading that don’t quite fit.

Let’s take the example of Julia—a digital immigrant struggling to make the shift. Julia is the global head of strategy for a well-known telecom company in the United Kingdom. She is talented, in her forties, and has earned her place in senior management. With a track record of driving change in her past three organizations, she is now working in a corporate role. Many of the teams that report in to her are spread across the world and loosely linked together. Julia thought she knew all about managing a matrix and understood that she had to drive the corporate marketing vision and strategy across the regions and the local markets. She gathered her regional marketing heads at an off-site meeting to explain the company’s new strategy to all of them and share the vision of the top team. She gave them lots of detail on how regions would provide information to the center, what the numbers were to look like, and, most importantly, the key processes that would make sure the matrix worked.

A year later Julia was starting to realize that she hadn’t gotten the traction she wanted. In one particular region there was a young marketing head named Dmitri who had tweaked some of the core messages that came from her office and developed a marketing campaign using a local celebrity that clearly did not fit with the global marketing message. But the campaign was a big hit and the region was doing very well. Julia struggled with balancing the need for order and consistency with the corporate message and the need to manage employees like Dmitri. She congratulated him on the new campaign but asked him to henceforth report to her on every decision he made, and made it very clear that from now on, no campaign was to be launched without her approval. Dmitri soon left the company, and the numbers in the region began to dwindle. Before leaving the company Dmitri logged onto Glassdoor and made sure that he expressed his views on what was wrong with the organization.

Julia hadn’t even heard of the “Glassdoor thing,” as she called it when the head of HR brought it up at a Monday morning meeting. He connected to the website and displayed Dmitri’s comment on the LED TV screen at the end of the room: “...good company to work for but there is zero culture of innovation. Managers like employees to do what they are told to do, and any attempt at thinking on their own or being creative is disallowed.”

“But surely we have to enforce discipline and standard procedure across all regions!” exclaimed Julia when one of the meeting participants referred to the need to understand people like Dmitri. “We cannot be held ransom by anyone ...” agreed Paul, the head of finance. Julia was struggling with the Social Age and she was playing by the book.

Julia saw in Dmitri an employee who was “refusing to play ball.” If only she had been able to step into the shoes of a Social Leader, Julia would have found a way to reconcile Dmitri’s passion for his market and his constituencies with the fact that a global strategy was essential to the company. Dilemmas such as these are exactly what complexity is all about. Rather than attempting to solve them in a linear, top-down fashion, Julia needed to explore complex solutions arising out of the conversations, actions, and behaviors characteristic of the Social Age.

Sally Shankland is the CEO of UBM Connect, one of the companies in UBM, a global marketing and events management company, and also heads the social and culture function for UBM Global. She has been working at UBM for twenty-five years, making her way up from an entry-level marketing role. Astute, authentic, and compassionate, Sally is the epitome of a leader who has made a successful transition into the Social Age. She talked to us about how, just fifteen years ago, she led differently and her need for control dictated how she ran meetings and teams: “I used to set very high standards for myself and for my team, and my natural style was all about ‘lemme tell you how to do it.’ ” Calling this a default pattern for most leaders, she talked of how she had to make the shift from someone who led from the front to someone who knew how and when to get out of others’ way. “For me,” Sally said, “it used to be about giving my team the directions and saying this is where we’ve got to go ... your job is to ... and I would describe what I expected from them in detail. Then we met again in a week and I would ask them to report to me what they had done.” As Sally said, “This definitely worked twenty years ago when business was not as frequently disrupted as now.”

Sally told us of the shift she had to make in the way she led, and recalled the time UBM made the decision to move from its traditional print business to digital. Looking back, Sally remarked, “It wouldn’t have worked to have taken that [top-down] approach” during that time of massive disruption in the business model. Sally talked about the way the disruption gave her the impetus to sit down with the team and start a conversation about a customer audience that was behaving very differently from the one UBM had traditionally served. “We sat down together and started mapping out the landscape, and over time questions began to emerge ... How are people behaving? Why are they behaving that way? What is it that they need? What would it look like? What does the future vision look like?” It took time to reach a collective agreement, which, as Sally explained, was getting a group of diverse people to agree on what they were not going to do. Sally was guiding her team, not telling them what she wanted. She was facilitating the conversations and guiding the group to becoming a coherent whole. She was “leading from the back” rather than from the front.

Sally had a “beautiful moment” a year later when the team got together again. Sally said, her face lighting up as she recalled that moment of discovery, “I saw total alignment. We didn’t have to ask if we were on the same page ... we were like a school of fish that swam together making patterns.”

When we spoke with Sally, she told us how the change in culture at UBM made Social Leadership possible. “UBM is now a business that is governed by principles rather than by rules,” she said. Speaking about the positive impact that the paradigm shift created, Sally talked of how that made it possible for leaders to adjust: “We learned how creating value is more important than capturing value ... and in the end, when we have created value, we end up capturing value anyway, but that is not the purpose.” That is an apt descriptor for the Social Age: the only way we can capture value is when we don’t try to capture value, but rather work toward creating value for our networks in the community.

The Social Age is a new order brought about by the confluence of three major forces: digital technology, globalization, and changing mind-sets and attitudes. Together, these forces are creating profound changes in the world and, more specifically, in the environment in which we work and lead. Julia’s story is about one of the ramifications of this Social Age. She was left facing the unplanned consequences of actions that had made perfect sense in previous years but were no longer useful in the current context. Julia needed to understand that, to lead in a rapidly changing Social Age, she had to tap into the passion that drives people in differing constituencies and harness them to a common purpose. What Julia needed to do was step into the shoes of a Social Leader, just as Sally did.

The Social Leader is a phenomenon whose time has come. We define the Social Leader as one who is able to harness the passions of networks of individuals by generating the Social Energy needed to achieve a common purpose. Let’s begin our journey into what it means to be a Social Leader by looking at some of the characteristics and challenges of the Social Age.

What is Driving Social Leadership?

The Social Age is here. It is present and will be the context in which you lead from today onward. Let’s take a moment to step back and identify the key characteristics of this new reality.

The Social Age is characterized by:

1. Socially created information. The lines between public and private spaces are becoming increasingly blurred, leading to an overlapping social space. Information is therefore finding itself increasingly in the social space, created continually and communally and accessible to all through technology. Our organizations are becoming increasingly inhabited by individuals, and under scrutiny from stakeholders and customers, who possess three resources on a scale that is unprecedented: ubiquitous access to social information; an expectation that they can engage anyone and everyone in conversation to shape the point of view of the community; and speedy, cheap communication that allows them to react to events in real time.

2. The rise of global, networked communities. Driven by passion and purpose, groups of people from around the world are becoming linked together in communities that are dramatically transforming the way we communicate, make choices, take decisions, and engage with one another. These global communities are also sharing information and becoming points of influence in novel ways. With information fast becoming a commodity, the competitive landscape is dramatically shifting to a context in which it is the social relevance of information, rather than the information itself, that is a source of advantage. The problem with social relevance is that we are no longer in control of it; rather, socially networked communities whose actions, decisions, and interactions are beyond our jurisdiction bestow relevance upon information.

3. The birth of the prosumer, who is completely at home in the Social Age. The term prosumer defines the shift in individuals from consumers, who seek to acquire goods and services that are created for them, to contributors proactively engaged with companies and one another in the creation, development, and even the conception of the products and services they use. A mind-set of transparency, participation, and engagement have created a new generation that is starting to have an impact on the creation, dissemination, and absorption of information. As employees and as consumers, they expect to have a voice in the products and strategies of companies they care about.

As a result of these three factors, our organizations are being driven to act more like communities than like traditional hierarchies. Leaders in organizations are experiencing a shift from planning to agility; instead of generals directing their troops, they are becoming mayors managing diverse constituents. All in all, these factors have created five leadership challenges that are unique to the Social Age:

1. Dealing with discontinuity. Although business discontinuity has always been around, it occurred in rare and dramatic ways. Today, business discontinuities are the norm—from mobile apps transforming the cell phone to streaming video destroying the video rental market to data mining of search terms remaking epidemiology.

The ability to pick up “weak signals” emerging from an adjacent technological or industry space and respond to them speedily is fast becoming a leadership challenge of huge importance. When Nokia was at its pinnacle of success in the early years of this century, it failed to capitalize on a few weak signals that were happening outside its field of vision. The most critical one was Google, a search engine company, buying a small start-up in Silicon Valley called Android in 2005. As this was happening in an adjacent space, it ostensibly had nothing to do with the world of cell phones and telecommunication. But...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I MAKING THE SHIFT FROM GENERAL TO MAYOR
• Part II THE SOCIAL LEADER IN ACTION: THE CHALLENGES OF THE SOCIAL AGE
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Authors