by Charlene Li
Now, in the networked world, the constraints of time and space are largely eliminated. Leaders can personally engage with individuals or groups through multiple touch points, thereby cultivating and transforming relationships purposefully. Discussions can be far more fluid, leading to a deeper ongoing relationship that aligns people around common objectives. Engagement, after all, is a strategic type of dialogue that extends beyond engaging employees to engaging customers, partners, and shareholders of every stripe.
For the engaged leader, the art of engagement includes deciding when and how to connect with followers in a focused way. As we will see, engagement in the digital age needs to be orchestrated. The science, again, is about using digital tools to achieve a specific goal and putting in enough practice to become proficient. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The three parts of our model—Listen at Scale, Share to Shape, and Engage to Transform—are fluid and overlap: We listen in advance of sharing, and share as a way to engage. Separately, as well as in concert, these steps are designed to help leaders develop their instincts, skills, and confidence. They will also guide institutions—businesses, communities, and schools—on how to develop and nurture digitally engaged leaders.
With that in mind, Chapters 1, 2, and 3 each examines and unpacks one of the three steps of the engaged leadership framework. They further introduce the main ideas and present a plan for execution. Chapter 4 puts the pieces together and builds an even bigger model for implementation across organizations.
Becoming an Engaged Leader—Strategy Begins with a Plan
Leadership, compared to finance and perhaps marketing, is associated with the softer side of business. But with technology we can sprinkle some rigor into the mix. A primary takeaway running through this book is that leadership in the digital age can be more effective and more strategic. More effective because leaders can cultivate relationships with followers in ways that were simply not possible in the past, and more strategic because the new tools are tailor-made to help leaders reach their objectives. This benefits leaders by guiding them to focus their efforts appropriately, and it advances organizations because it is scalable.
Becoming an engaged leader requires a transformation in how you think, how you work, and the types of relationships you are comfortable cultivating. But before that can begin, leaders must have the right tools for the task. There are two questions packed in there. First, what is the right goal or objective? Having a hammer won’t help a carpenter unless she knows where to place the nail. What are your objectives? What problem or challenge will you ask digital tools to solve? Second, what are the right tools for the task? Having the nail in the right spot won’t help our carpenter if she has a wrench instead of a hammer. Many leaders use apps and social networks (Yammer, Twitter, etc.) because they think they should—they’ve read about them or a savvy colleague uses them. Alternately, many leaders frequent one social site over another simply because they feel comfortable there.
When it comes to digital leadership, one size does not fit all. In order to assign the right tools for the right task, and vice versa, we will use a worksheet as the basis for creating your digital transformation plan. A downloadable version of the worksheet is available at charleneli.com/the-engaged-leader. At the end of each chapter, you’ll have a chance to fill out this worksheet in more depth and detail. To get started, identify up to three strategic goals you want to accomplish, and the measurement you will use to track your goal attainment. Included in Figure 1.3 are three example business goals that we will use at the end of Chapters 1 through 3 to illustrate in a tangible way how listening, sharing, and engaging support business goals.
It’s important to note that your digital transformation is a personal journey. The ideas and tools in this book will catalyze the transformation, but the shift in mind-set is just as important. There are no perfect off-the-shelf methods for how to proceed. People always ask me, “What’s tomorrow’s Snapchat or Twitter?” I don’t know what it is—but it will be there. In some ways it does not matter what it is—it’s simply another round of disruption. People want to chase and touch the latest bright shiny object. They think they need to stay on top of it. I tell leaders, “Above all, don’t get distracted.” Engaged leadership in the digital era means not chasing the latest apps and gadgets. Being an engaged leader in the digital era means knowing what your goals are and what tools to use to achieve them. It also means being brave and bold enough to step into the fray: listen to followers, share yourself with them, and engage them directly in new and amazing ways.
Chapter One. Listen at Scale
The Denver-based chain Red Robin launched its Pig Out Burger at casual dining outlets across the United States in 2012. The sandwich was fully loaded with cheese, onions, bacon, aioli, and two fire-grilled beef patties. This meat lover’s menu item should have had carnivores swooning across all 50 states. Only, it didn’t, and the complaints began streaming in. The bacon is soggy and greasy. The aioli is drippy and weak. The bun is falling apart in customers’ hands. As the reviews flooded in, they were funneled to the test kitchens at headquarters. “Managers started talking about ways to tweak the Pig Out recipe, and four weeks later, we had an improved, kitchen-tested version to roll out to restaurants,” Chris Laping, CIO and senior vice president of business transformation reports. “That’s a process that would have taken 12 to 18 months before.”6
Executives acted fast and with precision, and that’s notable. But there’s more to the story. It wasn’t customers who were writing the reviews about the burger. It was Red Robin employees. Restaurant servers posted what they heard from customers and experienced themselves via the company’s internal social network. They shared their concerns and experiences online, and executives were all ears. They took an interest, asked for more details, and worked with employees to solve the problem. Leaders listened and responded. Red Robin CEO Steve Carley comments, “If you engage staff in a way that shows their opinion is important, it’s extraordinary what you learn—and the excitement you generate.”7
As the Red Robin example illustrates, and what most of us know intuitively, listening is instrumental in cultivating relationships. In this case, leaders listened, employees felt heard, and it made a positive difference in the business. In any setting, organizational or otherwise, listening delivers context and knowledge about the speaker. The deeper you listen, the stronger the connection becomes, and the easier it is to develop and manage the relationship.
Without context and knowledge, it is impossible to be on the same page as the people you lead. We’ve all seen this dynamic at play at cocktail parties. In most cases you can’t walk in and commandeer the conversations. First, you need to stop to pay attention. Who’s talking? What are their interests and concerns? What are they buzzing about? Then you can enter the conversation, forge a connection, and strategically shape the conversation. The same holds true in relationships between leaders and followers. Listening allows leaders to better understand the people they want to lead, externally as well as internally. It enables them to know those people’s likes and dislikes, leverage their knowledge, and improve results in the way that we saw at Red Robin.
All this is just as true today as ever. But what’s interesting about the digital space is that now you can listen at scale (see Figure 1.1). Your customers, employees, partners, and shareholders are constantly talking on digital and social platforms: They are talking to you. They are talking to each other about you. They are sharing ideas, impressions, and concerns about your business. They are complimenting, complaining, and engaging at all hours in a dazzling array of voices and styles. And, yes, you can listen, respond, and react not only to one person at a time but to hundreds or thousands or more. The key is that you listen with your eyes to many people all at once, any time, and from any place. That is listening at scale.
In the past we could only scratch the surface of listening. A person might tell you one thing and say something els
e to their peers. But now you can know with much greater certainty what people think and what’s really going on in the space around you. While listening is considered polite, thoughtful, and empathetic, it’s also a power play. Leaders who listen are in a position to exert their influence and shape positive business outcomes.
A New Mind-Set for Listening
Listening at scale creates new opportunities for leaders. Yet, in order to fully activate these opportunities, we need to undergo a shift in how we think about the ways we listen. The first opportunity that comes with listening at scale is access. In the past, CEOs and senior executives relied on direct reports to feed them information and intelligence. This ivory-tower approach was counterproductive for a number of reasons. It kept leaders at a distance and insulated them from the front line of business. It also forced them to trust direct reports to bring in adequate intelligence from the field. Yet, as we recall from the child’s game of telephone, secondhand information is delivered with a subjective spin, and the original context often gets lost in translation.
This arm’s-length dynamic causes leaders to become disconnected from reality, and leaves them scratching their heads and wondering, Is that really what’s going on out there? One of the great advantages of crossing over to become an engaged leader is that executives can see (for themselves) what is happening all around them. This new normal is not only refreshing for leaders, but also empowering. They can survey the chatter and interpret it on their own, thereby eliminating the middleman and avoiding the associated spin.
A second opportunity that has come with listening at scale is relationship building. Digital listening brings with it an unprecedented level of certainty when it comes to getting to know one’s followers. In the past you had to guess what was important to people and surmise what they were thinking. Now you can know—because there are so many more ways to listen. In addition, it’s not one-to-one relationship building. Engaged leaders can listen at scale and hear what the entire organization, as well as the wider ecosystem, is telling them.
The third opportunity that listening at scale has brought to leadership is characterized by constancy. In the past, listening came in big chunks—quarterly reports and annual surveys forced executives to listen. They would go out and talk to customers and employees as part of a road show that lasted for a few weeks out of the year. The biggest mind-set change associated with listening at scale is that listening now has to happen 24/7. Leaders are expected to tune in on a regular basis. They can’t look away for a few days or a week or they’ll miss something important. And they can’t defer this task to anyone else.
There is an art and a science to listening at scale, and we will examine both.
The Art of Listening
The art of listening at scale has everything to do with making strategic choices. Focusing your efforts requires a mix of judgment and intuition. It also requires a strategic mind-set. Once again, it begins by knowing your goals. Later in the chapter we will examine specific tools for listening, but there isn’t one precise algorithm that reveals exactly where and when to direct your everyday listening efforts. Listening “with your eyes” across multiple channels entails endless opportunities and combinations. You can tap into project notes, sales intelligence, employee chatter, and industry analysis. You can listen to key customer groups or employees on the front line, or narrow your gaze to listen to direct reports or new business leads. It’s up to you.
Listening at scale is not about listening to everybody. Beyond strategy and intuition, there are a number of techniques to help hone the art of listening at scale and narrow down your efforts.
Use People as Your Filters
Without filters, listening at scale can be overwhelming—particularly for leaders accustomed to having information fed to them in neat little packages at regular intervals. The most organic way to separate the signals from the noise is to rely on the people around you who are able to hone in on what matters and let the rest go. We all have individuals in our network whom we turn to when we want to find out what’s really going on. Some people know about finance and fiduciary responsibility, say, while others are hooked into art and architecture. These and others like them are the people you should be listening to.
Leaders, therefore, don’t need to read everything—they need to follow and listen to other people who read everything. And our best conduits of information aren’t necessarily other leaders and executives. Frequently we need to look farther afield. It may be that someone on the IT help desk connects with people across different departments. Perhaps there is one particular sales manager who’s expert at pulling together the loose ends to offer a complete picture of the business. Or maybe a key customer has a blog that provides the best industry insights. These people serve as excellent filters. Follow them on Twitter or on your internal social network. Add them to your network on LinkedIn. Whatever, just listen to what they are saying, posting, and broadcasting.
Listen through the Layers
Just as there are different people to listen to, there are also numerous frequencies that are wide open for listening—different layers, if you will:
Active versus passive listening. Active listening is listening head-on through your own systems and networks—the company Facebook page, the tweets @YourCompany, as well as your internal social networking tools. Passive listening is monitoring less specific outside targets—industry news and RSS feeds—and seeing what patterns emerge. Both of these layers provide differing (or sometimes corresponding) perspectives that equal one part of the whole story.
Direct versus indirect listening. Direct listening means tuning into what people tell you directly—that is anything that is targeted at you. Indirect listening is capturing what people are saying to other people or to each other. With this, you’re listening to things that they may not consciously be choosing to share with you—but it’s out there, so why not listen?
Inside versus outside the stream. Listen inside the stream by reading Twitter or LinkedIn news feeds. Listen outside the stream by reading comments, retweets, and the like (content that is posted about content).
Keeping all these layers of listening in mind helps leaders piece together a complete picture of their business and decide where they want to focus their everyday efforts.
Scan Your Environment
Before we look at specific tools to help leaders act on what they hear, a final technique for practicing the art of listening at scale is simply to scan your environment regularly for a few minutes several times a day. Make it a habit.
This is something David Thodey, the CEO of Australia’s telecom giant Telstra, does.8 Each morning, Thodey, a renowned early riser, grabs a cup of coffee and his device. He looks through his enterprise social network on Yammer to review the overnight activity. He scans it to see what the general vibe of the organization is. Scrolling down this activity feed allows him to quickly see which ideas or dilemmas are generating a lot of discussions, which are important. He follows certain people—connectors and idea generators throughout the organization. Looking at their posts allows him to see which topics have traction and where the real problems lie. More often than not, he’ll post in those discussions to keep them moving and give them visibility with senior leaders. He has described Yammer as “the greatest hierarchy buster I’ve ever seen.”9
Thodey checks in again at lunchtime, and at the end of the day, to see if there is anything emerging that needs his attention. Sometimes he uses what he reads to finalize the agenda of his regular staff meetings. He’ll go in and say, “So, I just saw on Yammer that there’s an interesting discussion going on over here. Is it something we need to look into?” Oftentimes, because his senior leadership team knows that he’s looking and listening, they are already on top of it. So much so that the platform is referred to in some quarters as “Ask David” rather than Yammer.
According to Thodey, he doesn’t worry about having to see and
read everything—listening doesn’t carry the sense of debt and obligation that a full email in-box does. Rather, it’s a way of getting a taste, savored in small bits throughout the day, one that gives him the knowledge to make better decisions.
The Science of Listening at Scale
Many leaders opt out of practicing the art of listening because they think it’s too time-consuming. There’s too much data, and it’s overwhelming. Yet the reality is that being digital is fast becoming mandatory. Expectations have changed, and followers assume that you will be up to date on what they share on social sites. You don’t know that people are talking about the plant closures? It’s all over our feed. (Aren’t you paying attention?) If you care about establishing, maintaining, and deepening your relationships with employees, colleagues, and team members, you need to be listening to them and making adjustments based on what you hear.
Luckily there are excellent and accessible tools that leaders can use to organize themselves, prevent data overload, and separate the signal from the noise. This is the science side of listening at scale. Until recently this was considered to be a job for IT leaders and chief marketing officers (CMOs). But the tools and apps today are so powerful and easy to use that leaders themselves can apply them and have a front-row seat to what is going on across their business and industry.
The tools you choose to use for listening, must connect directly to your strategic leadership goals. Once you identify the top three things you need to manage and monitor with social and digital tools, it’s time to get started. But remember, not every leader needs to light up the Twittersphere or have a working mastery of Snapchat. There are RSS feeds, social networks, microblogs, vlogs, ambient alerts, content aggregators, dashboards, and filters. It all depends upon what you need to achieve. If you do use Twitter, great … but use it strategically. Listening at scale does not mean following everyone who follows you. (That’s the least productive thing any leader can do.) The question, then, becomes how to listen based on your goals and the needs of the people you want to lead.