by Charlene Li
The Engaged Leader
A Strategy for Your Digital Transformation
Charlene Li
© 2015 by Charlene Li
Published by Wharton Digital Press
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
3620 Locust Walk
2000 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://wdp.wharton.upenn.edu/
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without written permission of the publisher. Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Web ISBN: 978-1-61363-055-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61363-053-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61363-054-9
For Ben & Katie
I promised I wouldn’t write another book until you were teenagers.
It was good to wait, to gain perspective, patience.
Thanks for teaching me every day how to keep it real.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One. Listen at Scale
Chapter Two. Share to Shape
Chapter Three. Engage to Transform
Chapter Four. Transform the Organization
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Learn More
About Wharton Digital Press
About The Wharton School
Endnotes
Introduction
Ginni Rometty has a Twitter account (@GinniRometty), allowing people to message her, but she has yet to post. That’s right: The CEO of IBM, the global technology and consulting firm, doesn’t tweet, and her presence is minimal in other public social venues such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Does this mean that America’s most powerful female CEO doesn’t make the grade as an engaged leader? Hardly. She’s actually a model leader for a new era.
It’s obvious from the partnership IBM formed with Twitter in October 2014 that Rometty grasps fully the potential business value of social data.1 This followed an equally consequential alliance with Apple to bring the power of mobility into the heart of the enterprise.2 Rometty doesn’t tweet simply because it’s not a part of her larger plan. She maintains a laserlike focus on her larger goals, recognizing that there’s a big difference between a strategic embrace of the new digital world and superficial symbolism.
Ginni Rometty is exactly the type of digital trailblazer we will examine throughout this book. She understands the power of digital, social, and mobile tools for IBM, and she uses them strategically. For instance, she has overseen the development of what IBM calls a “system of engagement”—including arguably the most liberal social business policy in the corporate world. More fundamentally, she has undertaken a far-reaching transformation of IBM aimed at the historic convergence of big data, cloud computing, mobile, and social—including tens of billions of dollars of both investments and divestitures—to shape IBM for a new era.
As far as her own digital activity is concerned, she is focused on those direct forms of engagement where her personal agency can have the greatest impact. She’s on the IBM Connections platform—IBM’s internal social networking tools—every week, getting feedback, responding to comments, and connecting with employees. She has increased IBM’s use of its pioneering “jams”—vast global brainstorms the company uses to drive deep transformation and innovation. She personally teaches a course every month on IBM’s interactive Think Academy, the business world’s largest massive open online course, or MOOC. She’s on her iPad—perpetually—answering messages and reaching out to clients. She blogs, posts mobile videos on YouTube, and uses mobile apps to connect to and foster relationships among attendees at IBM events.3 This combination of proactive outreach and reactive shaping allows Rometty to further her overall strategy and adjust it in real time.
Rometty and other leaders like her know the value of social and digital tools, and they use them wisely. They don’t chase every bright shiny app or platform that comes along. They are successful because they take a thoughtful approach to utilizing the multitude of tools, digital and otherwise, that come and go. They use them in a focused way to listen to employees, share ideas, and engage their workforce more effectively.
Leadership has always been about the exercise of power and influence to achieve a strategic end—whether the goal is to conquer a city, launch a new product, or provide for the homeless. But what draws each of us to act on behalf of leaders is more nuanced than that. We follow people who are credible, who inspire us, and whom we trust. The relationship between leaders and followers is as fragile and complex as ever in the digital age, but something has changed of late. Technology has profoundly altered not only how we develop and nurture these relationships, but also how leadership is practiced.
In order to be truly effective today, leaders in business and society must change how they engage, and in particular how they establish and maintain relationships with their followers via digital channels. While looking someone in the eye and shaking hands with customers and employees will never lose their value, they are no longer enough to sustain relationships in a fast-moving digital world. The metamorphosis required to become what I am calling an engaged leader is not easy or painless. The openness required is unprecedented, and the trust and transparency are mind numbing for many top leaders who are accustomed to maintaining control and proceeding in an orderly and predictable fashion.
I define an engaged leader as someone who uses digital, mobile, and social tools strategically to achieve established goals as they relate to leading people and managing organizations. As basic as that sounds, putting digital skills into practice is tricky and uncomfortable. Here’s what I tell leaders: If your palms aren’t sweaty and your stomach isn’t churning, then you probably aren’t practicing engaged leadership.
Backing Off—It’s Not an Option
Not everyone is comfortable stepping out from behind the safety glass of a command-and-control-style engagement in order to mingle with employees and customers in open digital venues. After all, many of today’s leaders rose through the ranks by following established rules, pursuing a more traditional definition of success. The shift is disorienting and causes many leaders to shut down and disengage. It’s one thing to opt out from specific channels because they are not a part of your personal plan, as Rometty has, but quite another to use inaction as your permanent default. It’s as if your cell phone keeps ringing and you won’t pick up.
I get it—the challenges for leaders today are daunting.
First, power and influence have decoupled from title and pay grade, and many people are at a loss as to how to proceed. The hierarchies developed at the dawn of the industrial age, and which are still common today, were done so to create efficiency and scale. They work well if you manufacture widgets, where the information and expertise needed to make decisions reside only at the top. But in our modern, digitally connected world, the need for efficiency pales compared with the need for speed, innovation, and change. The people who have to respond quickly to change live at the edges and bottom of the organization. Organizational leaders today need to trust that their employees will exercise good judgment when making decisions that in the past would have been sent “up the ladder” for someone else to make.
Next, traditional middle managers are fighting the change. Because they sit in between top leaders and the front lines, they abhor the new openness. They see top executives going around them to talk to their direct reports. They feel they are losi
ng control, so many fight these changes tooth and nail. While these managers often present an obstacle to change, they are also a crucial part of the solution. The key for leaders is to help their lieutenants across the organization realize the fallacy of control and show them how they can be successful leaders in a networked organization.
Finally, there is a lack of ownership among leaders struggling to see the upside of the digital landscape. John F. Kennedy saw the potential in the 1960s when he was the first to use television to win over the electorate. Barack Obama, likewise, stepped up to use social networking to secure the White House and then used digital data to stay there. So why are so many CEOs and business leaders still trying to figure it out and find the upside? Because many still believe it’s someone else’s job. They don’t think they have the skills or expertise to tap into digital and social tools. So they back off.
These are genuine challenges. But is it realistic to put on blinders and send every call to voice mail? Can leaders abdicate their responsibilities to reach out and connect, deferring to their social media team and a few intrepid Millennials? No way—not if they want to have a functioning, robust relationship with customers, colleagues, and employees. There is a many-to-one high-speed connection today between leaders and followers, and this new structure requires new tools. The pace of technological innovation, explained famously by Moore’s law, has produced a number of drivers (see Figure I.1). They explain this complex state of affairs and begin to spell out the opportunities for the bold and the brave. You’ve seen these drivers before; let’s look at what they mean to leaders.
The most obvious driver is connectivity. The rise of social networks means that we can be immediately linked. We can find each other and make contact with anyone—poor or powerful—fairly easily. Anonymity is impossible, and exclusivity diminished. Networks enable us to work together fluidly across space and time. The result is a rise of agency for individuals. Conversely, the power of hierarchies has markedly declined. All this together means that leaders have no place to hide. They need to be prepared to respond to and interact with the masses in a way that would have made King George VI faint dead away. The corresponding promise, of course, is mythic: Leaders now have a direct link to customers.
Mobility is another fundamental driver that’s changed the game for leaders. Thanks to an array of technology, your team can work just about anywhere in the world without sacrificing speed and performance. This offers leaders instant access to a much wider pool of talent. It also diminishes their ability to control and micromanage. Despite the strong urge to push back and say, “No way!” to remote access and unlimited mobility, it’s impossible to stem the swirling tide of change. Leaders need to jump in and use digital tools to stay connected to an increasingly mobile and global workforce. How else can they cut through the noise, communicate expectations, and develop relationships with people across time zones?
The final driver worth mentioning is big data. In the past, a knowledge gap separated the people who posed the strategic questions—leaders—and the data analysts who parsed bits and bytes. Today, accessing data is much easier, and the analysis is automated. This enables executives to ask many more questions and find the answers themselves. What’s more, big data allows them to work faster. The best example I can think of is IBM’s Watson Analytics. Because Watson Analytics learns while evaluating unstructured data so rapidly, it is capable of returning natural-language search queries instantly with evidence-based hypotheses. For example, I can ask it, “Which of my salespeople are most effective at using industry content to engage our customers?” As amazing as it sounds, Watson Analytics has the answer. Although not all leaders have access to Watson-quality data parsing just yet, it’s coming.
These three drivers have at least two important things in common. First, they are forcing top leaders to rethink their place in the organization and grab hold of digital tools to help them make decisions and get things done. Second, despite the challenges just described, they offer huge opportunities and momentous upside for leaders willing to take the leap.
About This Book—Listen, Share, and Engage
I’ve spent considerable time working with executives—in small groups and large public venues—researching solutions and designing tools to help them develop digital skills and strategies. I’ve written two previous books on the topic and have field-tested numerous ideas, dashboards, and practical models. For the purposes of this book, I have distilled much of my advice on engaged leadership into the three steps that leaders should take to successfully hasten their digital transformation: listen, share, and engage (see Figure 1.2).
These three steps work together to create a runway for engaged leaders to accomplish their goals. Listening is the way leaders determine what individuals need from them to enhance the relationship and deepen the connection. Sharing is how leaders use stories and other tools to develop mutual understanding and shape people’s mind-sets and thus the actions they take. And engagement is a two-way dialogue that motivates and mobilizes followers to act in concert toward a common purpose. As we will see, the nature of the online medium means that the idea of a follower is broader than ever. One’s followers are not only employees but also customers, peers, and the people in one’s wider networks. In other words, effectively leveraging digital channels increases a leader’s power and influence exponentially.
We will explore each of the three steps in detail in the chapters that follow.
1. Listen at Scale
We know that listening is a fundamental part of developing relationships. It helps us understand what people are interested in and where they are coming from. In a sense, the best talkers are also the best listeners. We see this everywhere we go. We can’t walk in and engage a group at a networking event or a conference luncheon unless we initially stop to listen—who is in the conversation, what are their concerns, what are they talking about? With that information you can enter the fray and steer the conversation in a strategic way. The same is true for many types of dialogue—listen first and then share.
The ancient art of listening takes on new meaning in the digital age. We can listen to tens, hundreds, or thousands of people all at once without ever looking them in the eye. And we can do this on a continual basis—at scale. With technology we can listen to our direct reports down the hall, front-line employees down the street, and project teams across the globe. We can listen for ideas, opinions, and complaints. We can also listen to what employees are saying about the organization—to us directly and to each other on public social networks. It’s an awesome new world when we can tune in so easily and deeply—but it is also a noisy and distracting world without the proper filters.
As we will see in Chapter 1, there is an art and science to listening in the digital age. The art of listening entails choosing who and what to listen to in order to accomplish the goals you’ve set forth, whereas the science of listening involves utilizing certain tools and techniques that are proven, effective ways to focus a leader’s attention on what matters and to avoid information overload.
2. Share to Shape
Like listening, sharing is a fundamental skill—and a basic developmental milestone that starts in childhood. Over time we learn to share as a way to build trust and cultivate relationships in all aspects of our lives. We say that people who don’t share close themselves off from others and become socially isolated, while those who proceed in the other extreme, oversharing, watch their efforts at openness backfire as people back away from them. Sharing needs to be balanced and strategic.
Much of that strategic balance is lost in traditional hierarchies, where sharing is rigidly structured and constrained. Each layer of an organization is designed to filter information up and push decisions down. And that doesn’t make a lot of sense. After all, if you examine all the information within a company, maybe 1% or 2% of it truly needs to be kept under lock and key: mergers and acquisitions, compensation, and the secret sau
ce (e.g., the formula for Coke). Yet we teach leaders that in order to be successful, they must hoard information to enhance their own value.
The opposite is true in a networked organization where sharing is a net positive. When leaders share, they engage and attract followers. In Chapter 2, we will examine how leaders can use new ways of sharing to inspire people to follow their lead. In essence, leaders become facilitators who accelerate the spread of information and shape the decision-making process. As part of that, we will look at the art of sharing—including what content to share and how to shape it with strategic intent. In addition, we will explore how to make something more shareable, utilizing emotion, authenticity, and uniqueness. (The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a perfect example of something that became shareable. So many people—leaders included—accepted the challenge because it was authentic, important, portable, and engaging.) We will explore the science of sharing as well, by looking at the digital tools that are at a leader’s disposal.
The upshot of this type of sharing is that people will stop grasping at what you, the leader, are looking for. They can stop guessing what you are thinking. Instead they will know what you want and expect, and they can focus on delivering it.
3. Engage to Transform
Data from Gallup shows that only 13% of people worldwide are engaged at work, meaning they are emotionally invested in creating value for their organizations.4 And despite many companies’ best efforts to address this problem, that number has barely budged since 2010.5 In other research, we’ve seen that engagement occurs when people feel appreciated for a job well done. Long-term satisfaction is less about raw compensation and more about being on the team and part of something important. Yet, historically, engagement within organizations has been inefficient and haphazard. Leaders could reach out and personally shake hands with only a few people at a time, or perhaps a few hundred through town hall meetings.