Assignment paper - Week 3 - 7010

Reference

Gamble, T. K., & Gamble, M. (2013). Leading with communication: A practical approach to leadership communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

· Chapter 15, "Social Networking and Technology," pages 273–288.

SOCIAL NETWORKING AND TECHNOLOGY

In the playgrounds of our lives, including nursery school and kindergarten, it is likely that we were taught to share. As we matured, however, many of us also learned to keep things to ourselves. The competing lessons of share and mine complicated our lives a bit. What should we share? What should we keep for ourselves?

Being graded on individual achievement in school initially made the idea of sharing even more difficult for us. Yet today we frequently find ourselves in groups and teams, and we are all expected to share and collaborate. Achieving balance between these two forces of sharing and keeping information to ourselves has not been easy for some of us. Every aspiring or practicing leader, however, needs to work it out. Some are having more difficulty than others accomplishing this, while recognizing that sharing and collaborating are 21st-century imperatives.

According to data from Fisheye Analytics, while online venues typically discuss company executives, too few of these executives actively use social media—media for social interaction—to spread their own messages. Not enough leaders are using social media strategically to build their personal brands in and out of their organizations or to engage with peers, employees, customers, and the public. 1

We live in a culture of sharing.

If you are like many students of leadership today, you may be ready to change that perception. Just consider your own connectedness. When you arrive in class, do you immediately turn off electronic devices disconnecting yourself from others? Do you turn off your cell or merely put it on vibrate? Do you ever text before, or maybe even after, the instructor enters and starts class? If using an iPad or laptop, do you use it only for taking notes, or do you also use it to check your Facebook or LinkedIn pages? Who, if anyone, do you follow on Twitter? How many followers, if any, do you have on Twitter? If you have followers, does that automatically make you a leader? How connected a leader do you aspire to be?

THE SHARING LEADER: HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT LEADING VIA ENGAGEMENT?

How do you want to lead? What tools do you see yourself using to interest and excite followers?

One focus of this chapter is on social networks internal to the organization. The fact is that tools of collaboration have multiplied, and leaders can no longer be reactive rather than proactive when it comes to social media use. 2  Another focus of this chapter is how you can use technology, specifically social media, to help redefine “sharing” and the leader-follower relationship. As Soumitra Dutta writes in “What's Your Personal Social Media Strategy?”, “It's no secret that social media—global, open, transparent, non-hierarchical, and real time—are changing consumer behavior and workplace expectations.” 3  Social media can be your partner in connecting you with members of your team, facilitating the nurturing of new ideas, the solving of problems, and the transformation of your organization.

Rachel Sterne embraced social media when she was named the first chief digital officer for the city of New York, one of only a few governmental officials in the country focused on transforming their organizations’ relationships with stakeholders using the digital arena. Sterne, for example, was charged with reinventing how the city engages its stakeholders and chose to use Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Twitter to reach her goal. Sterne also hopes to persuade colleagues to embrace, not fear, digital outlets. Sterne asserts that only if leaders use social media in an authentic way (posting themselves, not having assistants manage their accounts) will they succeed. 4

Chances are that the people you are interested in reaching and rallying are already online. They likely use YouTube, Twitter, Yammer, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google?, just to name a few social media sites. In fact, they may have participated in creating much of the content they view and share online. As we think about it, our culture could be described as a culture of sharing. We update our status on Facebook numerous times a day, check in at Foursquare, tweet thoughts and recommendations, and upload photos or videos to Flickr and YouTube. As a leader, you can take advantage of this. As Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, explained, “People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them”; that if people have “control over what they share, they will want to share more”; and that “if people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that's more open and connected is a better world.” 5  User sharing can benefit leaders and their companies as well.

Let's see where we are. You aspire to lead, and you want others to follow. For this to happen, you need to build relationships, and technology can assist you in that effort by giving you a platform through which you and those you hope will be your partners in mission, goals, and values are able to share ideas and experiences. But first, we need to explore how you really feel about sharing when it comes to leading.

Self-Reflection: Looking In and Out

What is your SQ—sharing quotient? Using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing “strongly agree” and 5 representing “strongly disagree,” score your response to each of the following questions:

I prefer keeping information confidential. _____

I believe that explaining an idea to everyone takes too much of my time. _____

I believe I have no responsibility for others’ understanding of how and why we make decisions. _____

I don't believe in using technology to foster collaboration. _____

I don't believe the leader should blog. _____

Using technology to update those in and external to the organization is PR and nothing more. _____

I cannot commit to hearing from everyone who wants to voice his or her opinions in the organization. _____

It is not my responsibility to promote the uncensored contribution of ideas. _____

I don't think it is advisable to involve everyone in innovation efforts. _____

Open technology platforms are not in a leader's best interests. _____

TOTAL _____

The higher your score, the higher your SQ. If you scored lower than you thought you should have, you may need to consider the following: how a lack of openness could impede goal achievement, what led to your viewing sharing as antithetical to leading, and what you can do to increase your comfort with sharing. On the other hand, whether you scored high or low on sharing, it is time to ask yourself what you can do to formally encourage sharing and the specific kinds of sharing you would like to implement.

We may not all feel good about sharing because we may not have had good experiences with what was shared about us in the past or fear what could be shared about us in the future. In part, Watergate became a crisis because the tapes made of former president Nixon's oval office conversations were ordered to be shared. Today, sharing occurs via the Internet. Users have “fans” and “followers” with whom they can maintain digital contact. Only communication doesn't just go in one direction, it goes in all directions—creating transparency as opposed to privacy, openness as opposed to secrecy, engagement with others as opposed to distance from them. We are getting more and more used to expressing ourselves in public and in real time. Leaders now have the opportunity, perhaps the obligation, to deal with this.

Use social media to build your personal brand.

Of what value is sharing? Why are we talking about it? Consider this: at Comcast, one executive started a Twitter account named @ComcastCares and, with that effort, succeeded in putting a more human face on the company. 6  Being open to the use of online media may enhance your ability to excite and involve people who would otherwise follow from the sidelines. People once left outside the doors where decisions are made suddenly can find themselves enticed to enter. Sharing can help you determine what people like and dislike, embrace and fear. By engaging with others, you can develop a more collaborative team because the engagement generated by sharing also fosters trust.

Use Sharing To

Excite others

Increase understanding

Foster trust and collaboration

Increase connection and support

Increase access to ideas

Accelerate involvement and innovation

Additionally, sharing can also engender connection to and support for one another. For example, the U.S. Army used a social media program,  ArmyStrongStories.com , to encourage soldiers to blog about their experiences. Any rank-and-file soldier is free to post a blog. The natural allies of a company and its most believable voices are its employees. 7  When people are able to pose questions (answered by either one another or you) and comment on one another's ideas, they effectively are given a voice and shed their reluctance to voice opinions.

There are also other benefits. If they are interacting on your social network, they are less likely to be interacting on a network unrelated to the organization. And if you can use technology to cut down on unproductive travel, limit the number of poorly planned meetings, and harness the collaborative productivity of your partners and followers by forging links that improve the quality and quantity of interactions, then you can increase access to new ideas, accelerate innovation, and make sizeable leadership gains. For example, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen blogged on the company's internal website, asking for input from all 80,000 staff worldwide. Asserting that the blog let him get beyond “corporate speak” and dialogue directly with employees, Verwaayen credits it for increasing employee support of him and the company's strategic plan. 8

What do the characters’ comments reveal about how they see their leader? Based on their responses, what advice would you give the leader?

DILBERT © 2011 Scott Adams. Used by permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

DO YOU CARE WHAT YOU SHARE?

What is it that you can share? How will sharing facilitate leading?

First, you can share information. You can use social networks to communicate or reinforce a decision, introduce a goal, and involve your team in implementing strategy and connecting with one another so they can focus on the goal. Second, you can use a blog or another collaborative plat-form like Yammer to update thinking and progress. If one of the leader's tasks is to communicate the organization's mission, a blog can facilitate this effort. Third, by conversing online you can open yourself to more immediate feedback, making it easier for you to more readily identify who supports and who has problems with an idea. People can help one another with problems not by ignoring them, but by airing, addressing, and coming together to resolve them. Fourth, you can apply the creative solutions generated by crowdsourcing to help solve a specific problem. Finally, you can generate buy-in for decisions by opening up information sharing—meaning that by using collaborative technology, everyone is free to offer input, with the leader responsible for the ultimate decision.

You can't be a secret sharer.

THE BENEFITS OF SHARING

Relationships have value. Sharing enables leaders and followers to grow, converse, help, and accomplish change together. Let us look at these outcomes in turn.

Growth

Sharing facilitates personal and organizational growth. It lets leaders enhance their understanding of supporters across multiple locations and vice versa. Leaders and supporters listen, learn about, and respond to one another's concerns, offering ideas on initiatives and generating feedback and insights that make decision making easier.

Conversation

Sharing promotes conversation, removing barriers between people, enhancing understanding, and leading to the creation of long-term focused relationships. Conversation is at the heart of every relationship. When people talk to each other, others become curious, first watching what is going on and, perhaps in time, entering the conversation as well. Dialoguing can feed itself. Adding a “share this” button facilitating the posting of content is now commonplace.

Alerts You to Problems

Monitoring online interactions can alert you to problems and potential problems, letting you answer questions and respond more quickly than you otherwise could. When you see what people comment on, you pick up on concerns and areas of weakness. Giving feedback and offering advice becomes natural, as do offers to help.

Accomplishes Change

Ask a simple question. For example, How can we be better? People want to play a role in making things better—an idea that can have a transforming effect on internal communications. If a conversation around such a question is moderated, say by the innovation director, ideas never thought of before—ideas beyond the familiar—can be handed over to developmental teams and transformed into actions leading to a culture of continuous improvement. 9

Observation: Watch and Learn

Interview an organization's leader regarding his or her thoughts and feelings about using social networking, the kinds of online sharing occurring in the organization, the role the leader plays in the network(s), problems and benefits he or she perceives, and how the leader would like to see social networks evolve.

Every sharing activity you engage in, whether a blog, Wiki, tweet, discussion forum, or podcast, needs to have a goal. Once you formulate the goal you want to address—for example, let's say yours is to reduce turnover—then you can activate an action plan. You can learn about how people feel about the goal (why they think turnover is high), talk about it (discuss reasons for leaving the company), figure out how to support concerns (suggest alternatives to leaving), and then change what needs to be changed to reach your goal (put a retention program into effect).

LIMITING RISKS OF SHARING: COMMUNICATING AUTHENTICITY

Sharing can make you feel that you are losing or giving up control. Some companies have even blocked the use of social media—perhaps fearful that confidential company information might be disclosed. But sharing is not necessarily an uncontrollable activity. You can structure a social media policy to ensure accountability.

Establishing Ground Rules for Sharing

It is okay for you to establish limits on what your “wills” and “won'ts” are when it comes to sharing. Begin by identifying where sharing can contribute to gains. Lay out the ground rules for participation. If people use good judgment and common sense, understand the company's values, promise to act in accordance with them, are in tune with the reasons for embracing social media, and take responsibility for their posts, then the trust you place in them should be reciprocated, with all acting in accordance with understood expectations. And as trust builds, the trust you place in them and the trust they place in you, so will the value of sharing, as deep, productive relationships are forged.

FIGURE 15.1

© The Financial Times, August 10, 2011.

There are a number of other decisions to make about sharing. Do you feel the need to know who is blogging about what topics, for example? If your answer is no, then you are okay with uncoordinated sharing. In contrast, you may decide to initiate and empower a few people to orchestrate the effort, making sharing primarily their responsibility. Which do you prefer? If you are optimistic about social media's ability to build connections and comfortable working with others to get things done, then sharing will come easily to you. On the other hand, some contend that the “good intentions” of sharing cannot possibly last—that excessive sharing actually makes surveillance of employees easier—and could potentially cause users harm down the road. Do you agree? For example, Social Intelligence Corp. provides a service that feeds to client companies every faux pas, every sarcastic comment, every line of implied prejudice, even lewd personal photographs, by scouring sites such as Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and LinkedIn and compiling a dossier containing findings. 10  The lesson: don't put anything online that you would not want anybody to know.

FIGURE 15.2

© The Financial Times, August 10, 2011.

Working It Out: Alone or Together

First, you are going to work collaboratively online to develop your own social network. In order to do this, you need as a team to name the network, establish the network's form and goals, identify who the stakeholders are in the network and how you intend to ensure inclusiveness, and write scenarios depicting good and bad practices, as well as the “wills” and “won'ts” of your social network's online interaction policy. Effectively, you are establishing “best practices” guidelines for your network's users. Once this is done, create a podcast or video to share what you have developed with the class.

Acquiring Authenticity

According to an article from the Harvard Business Review,“Managing Authenticity: The Paradox of Great Leadership,” “Authenticity is a quality that others must attribute to you. No leader can look into a mirror and say, ‘I am authentic.’” 11

When you are authentic, you are genuine—an individual, not a copy. You know who you are. People trust you because they judge you to be genuine. 12  Authentic leaders share to build trust. In like fashion, shared goals depend on trust. Authentic leaders depend on support teams to help them achieve their goals. They open themselves to different viewpoints, make themselves available to people throughout the organization, and use technology to facilitate their communication. They engender a culture of transparency, publicly admitting errors and explaining rationales for decisions.

Technology such as project blogs, video blogs, and internal Wikis facilitates sharing and helps reveal how an organization does business. Networks spread goals, help the vision permeate the organization, and explain strategy. As more and more people follow you, your leadership profile rises. However, that does not mean leaders have to share everything. In fact, sharing everything can actually contribute to others seeing you as inauthentic. If you explain your reasons, people will accept why you can't reveal more to them.

Sharing, or a culture of open leadership, can transform an organization. 13  A skillful and pragmatic social networking program can help communicate and drive home the organization's vision. However, it all starts with a leader who is willing to embody personally the culture of sharing, encourage participants to experiment, take risks that sometimes lead to failure, and resiliently move on. With technology supporting collaborative processes, and goals functioning as the catalyst, empowered participants learn to think like team members, not just individuals. Everyone becomes a stakeholder in growing the company.

Theory Into Practice

The Merging of Virtual and Real

In their book, Infinite Realty: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson suggest that avatars are able to make a better impression than we could ever hope to make. 14  What this means is that workplaces likely will be making a paradigm shift to three-dimensional avatar conferencing. Participants attending such conferences will feel immersed in the scene as they perceive the situation through the eyes of their avatars.

The theory is that while many don't like video conferencing because it doesn't feel like a real meeting, once users can feel like they are sitting around a table and have full view of others present, they will enjoy it more. A leader, for example, could program his or her avatar and make it appear that he or she was looking directly at you—but actually create the same illusion for all others involved in the meeting who were programmed similarly to be perfect participants. What is more, the authors report that avatars could be created with faces that actually morph with the faces of those you want to impress, enabling each person present to see a face containing some of his or her own features.

Why do you believe we are more likely to approve of someone who resembles us? In your opinion, is there anything ethically questionable about creating an avatar's face for yourself that partially morphs with the face of another?

LEADING VIRTUAL TEAMS

In today's organizations, virtual teams are responsible for much of the organization's work including marketing, strategic planning, and customer service. Empowered by collaborative technologies, virtual team members can shape the organization's course as never before.

Virtual teams draw on the expertise of employees based around the globe. Employees across multiple countries are participating in highly interactive meetings, shaping ideas in concert, and yet never leaving their desks. Team members currently create user-generated content, posting and sharing content in ways not possible a decade ago—even using crowdsourcing to access brainpower outside the organization as a means of securing creative solutions to posted problems.

E-Leadership Tools and Strategies

Leading a virtual team does not change the leader's charge of building a climate of trust, collaboration, and commitment that fosters the diversity of opinion critical for making sound decisions. However, it does complicate and energize it. The reason: for at least some of the time, the leader is decoding and encoding messages without the benefit of nonverbal cues that face-to-face communication offers. The tone of a comment, the facial expression of the person posting a comment, as well as the person's posture and demeanor are left to the leader to imagine. That said, Skype and webcams are accelerating in use, making it easier for leaders to use video conferencing to interact with employees and other stakeholders located anywhere. With leaders spending increasing amounts of time leading virtual teams, the ability to interpret emotions while fostering collaboration is critical.

It falls to the leader to provide guidelines and structure for the online group's work. The leader has to make the team's purpose absolutely clear, outline the team's operating parameters, and set contribution and performance expectations—such as consistency of participation, responding to questions and requests for input promptly, and completing tasks on time. The leader should monitor but not impede the group's work, facilitate the team's choice of media, offer comments and feedback as needed, and respond enthusiastically to the team's creative ideas and efforts. Virtual leaders need to listen, demonstrate respect for diverse opinions, and express their appreciation for the team's work.

Because online media encourage sharing and openness, the directive/authoritarian leader and the laissez-faire leader will likely be disadvantaged while the collaborative leader will excel. 15  Because sharing spreads information through-out the organization, letting others in on what the leader knows and vice versa, the leader needs to function as other than the primary information source. Instead, the leader has to be a process implementer, that is, a facilitator of the team's work. 16

Special Challenges Facing Virtual Leaders

Increasing numbers of leaders work in offices that contain few if any other people in the same physical space. Organizations have gone global—venturing beyond the building box. They no longer are constrained by walls, meaning they no longer are limited by their physical spaces. Because their employees are geographically dispersed, their leaders lead them in virtual teams—separated by time and distance—directing their virtual projects from afar.

E–team leaders need to be ready to coordinate work accomplished globally—on a 24/7 basis—exerting leadership not only across space, but also through time. Thus, the definition of the workday has also evolved. Virtual workdays cross time zones, generating a “follow the sun” approach that depends on technology, including telecommuting, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing, to function. 17

While still affirming traditional goals, leaders of virtual groups face a number of unique challenges, including that they may never physically meet the members of their staffs. Thus, they find ways to use technology to collaborate and bridge physical distances. They do not depend on face-to-face contact to resolve conflicts or solve problems. Instead, they use technology to communicate enthusiasm, inspire quality work, foster collaboration, and convince others who may have never met them up close and personal to trust them. While in face-to-face teams trust develops from the formation of social and emotional attachments, in virtual teams it develops more from the timely sharing of information and the keeping of team commitments.

Those who lead from a distance need to be proactive, engage team members, and display their confidence in them. They need to build systems that sustain team synergy, and to do this, they need to rely on tools that foster teamwork and feelings of connection between and among team members and the leader. Of interest is the finding that in virtual teams transformational leaders significantly improve the performance of team members. 18  Empowerment also tends to be higher in virtual teams. 19  When leaders reach out, listen and respond to, and value and respect the members of their team, they are better able to connect with them and lead.

Unfortunately, working virtually may also increase the potential for mistaken first impressions and stereotyping based on geographic and cultural differences. Such faulty perceptions work against the building of effective relationships and if left unchecked, can impede the team's operation. As a result, virtual leaders need to be personcentric, doing their best to forestall misperceptions, feelings of employee isolation, misunderstandings due to delays in responding, and confusion resulting from cultural differences or equipment troubles. Instead, they need to capitalize on the built-in diversity knowledge of the teams they lead. 20

While in traditional teams leaders use facial expressions, office size, dress, body language, and vocal cues to exert leadership, in virtual teams they tend to use an abundance of task-oriented messages—initiating, scheduling, questioning, and taking time to ensure followers understand and can execute goals. 21

In summary, virtual teams are just like real teams, except that team members work in geographically dispersed workplaces, possibly at different times. Like all teams, members need to share information about themselves and their task, establish trust, define goals, develop shared expectations, and work out conflicts, including individual roles and responsibilities, so they can complete their projects. When they work well, the members of virtual teams come to trust one another to behave consistently, understand each other so that they can anticipate one another's behavior, and share compatible values and goals. 22  When led effectively, virtual teams reduce costs and increase the sharing of knowledge, contributing to the growth and success of the organization.

Post It: Imagineering a Better Way

In Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, author Charlene Li identifies five levels of engagement people have with social networking:

(1) Watching. Watchers passively read a site's content, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, or watching video content, for example. There is little engagement you can have with a watcher, also known as a lurker.

(2) Sharing. Sharers are a step up from watchers. Sharers pass on what they read or see to one or more other people.

(3) Commenting. Commenters add their voices to the discussion.

(4) Producing. Producers create content; they are not engaged intermittently, but they are engaged over time.

(5) Curating. Curators are highly and personally engaged as a moderator, editor, or motivator. Few people are curators; most are watchers. 23

Here's the challenge: What can you do to get people to increase not just the amount but also the usefulness of the sharing and commenting they engage in? What can you do to encourage their full participation?

Being social is fundamental to our humanness. Being virtual is in vogue. The popularity of social media and virtual spaces demonstrate this. While you have likely used an array of social media in your private life to make connections and share with friends, using social media and leading virtual teams are now also critical leadership tools. How eager are you to embrace them?