by Charlene Li
Regardless of the specifics of any individual situation, there are a number techniques and tools that all leaders should consider as a way to get organized for the science of listening at scale.
Create Content Filters
We just talked about creating filters to make listening at scale more manageable. As mentioned, the people you trust most may be your best filters. Find a small group of influencers in your organization or network whom you respect. Maybe these people are the connectors who cut across silos and intersect with a wide cross section of your organization. Follow them and find out whom they follow, what social networks they populate, and what streams they are listening to. Most internal enterprise social networks (such as Chatter, Connections, Socialcast, tibbr, and Yammer) allow users to see whom other people are following. External sites like Twitter are the same—you can see whom other people are listening to. If your team members are all listening to some of the same people, you will want to check them out.
Directing your listening is a trial-and-error endeavor. It will take a few weeks of tweaks before you feel satisfied that you are listening to the right people and finding the feeds that give you what you need to lead. RSS feeds are useful for pushing blogs, feeds, and industry news in your direction, but they need to be filtered (narrowed down to suit your interests) and aggregated (organized so that you can scan through them easily).
Platforms such as Twitter allow you to filter and personalize content by name or key word. Yet this can get tedious if you need to do it on a number of different platforms. There are better ways. Content filters such as Feed Rinse, for example, allow you to screen multiple feeds, block posts by key word, or tag content. For example, if you want to hear the chatter about big data but want steer away from posts and comments about a particular news item, these types of filters will customize your feeds.
Filters help leaders focus their efforts and get the greatest return given their limited time and attention. Likewise, there are additional tools that leaders can use to optimize information. For instance, I use an app on my phone called Refresh that helps me prepare for meetings. When I have an appointment with someone, it populates my calendar entries with background knowledge about that person, synced from the Web, including past jobs and career highlights from LinkedIn and elsewhere. If I am meeting with my colleague Susan about a project, I can see if she has tweeted about that project. If I am meeting with an internal job candidate, I will be able to see his past job experience right on my calendar.
These are the types of tools that save leaders time and direct them to what they really need to monitor each day. In addition, they enable the type of focused listening that would otherwise take endless hours to achieve.
Listen across Multiple Channels: Dashboards and Command Centers
After identifying whom and what they’ll listen to, the next step for leaders is to funnel the information into a format they can readily use. That’s where content aggregators come in. Content aggregators (such as Feedly) combine feeds and streams to create a dashboard—one page to scroll through, thereby saving you from going from link to link across the Web. Feedly is effective because it monitors activity across your networks and highlights posts and news items that are most popular among your colleagues so you don’t miss anything that’s trending. Another useful dashboard for leaders is Hootsuite. Instead of going from LinkedIn, to Twitter, to Facebook, Hootsuite brings all of these to one place and organizes them across channels. Content streams can then be organized by followers, company names, hashtags, or key words. You can also create interactive dashboards that generate data-rich reports.
Some leaders create their own dashboards to suit their particular needs. The shipping company, Maersk Line, for example, maps content and information by relationship—comments and posts by employees, industry experts, customers, and fans of the company are all tracked separately and compared (see Figure 1.2). Maersk even created a platform for its “fans” to congregate so the company can listen to what they say. And it engages an additional 800 shipping industry experts using a LinkedIn Group called “Shipping Circle.” Simple and ingenious. Maersk figured out where each of its constituents liked to congregate, channel by channel, and built a science around listening carefully to the conversations.10
Any dashboard you create on your own is going to look different from someone else’s—design depends entirely on the goals you have in mind. Regardless, Maersk Line is a great example of specialized listening. Maersk doesn’t listen to all the chatter everywhere; it tracks particular groups of people where they hang out. In the end, Maersk Line is listening to followers and using the information it collects to run its business.
Spend 15 Minutes Listening
The final step in the science of listening is adding a guardrail around when you listen. Leaders need parameters, or one of two things can happen: They don’t prioritize listening, or they go off the rails and listen too much for too long.
I tell leaders to get into the habit of listening every day so they have a continual drip of the information they need almost in real time. They don’t need to dedicate a lot of time. People are accustomed to approaching listening online with an in-box mentality. If someone sends you a text, you answer it. You have to read every text or you’ll miss something important. But it’s different with listening at scale. You don’t need to read everything—merely skim through to get a feel for things. The effort should be light and quick, just to get a sense of what people are talking about.
When leaders ask me how much time they should spend listening each day, I suggest no more than 15 minutes. And the time doesn’t need to be scheduled. Instead, get in the habit of dedicating your interstitial time to reading the feed and perusing your dashboard. I’m talking about the in-between time—moments in the cab, standing in line at Starbucks, or waiting for your lunch order. This is just listening—this is not sharing. It’s not writing a blog or tweeting—it’s just checking your feeds.
You know how powerful those 15 minutes can make you? They can make you incredibly smart and informed. If you use the time wisely, it may turn out to be the best 15 minutes of your day in terms of return on investment.
Listening for Power and Influence
Listening delivers knowledge. Maersk Line knows not only what its employees are thinking, but also what its customers, fans, and industry experts are saying. It uses that knowledge to create compensation packages for new recruits and to design its next generation of ships. The more information you have about your employees and followers, the better position you’ll be in to build those relationships and exert influence.
The same is true for the other two parts of the engaged leader model. We’ll see that sharing can be used to shape outcomes, and engagement can mobilize followers to act on your behalf.
Take a few minutes to think through how you can listen at scale to accomplish your strategic goals. Describe whom or what you need to listen to, in order to accomplish each of your goals. Identify any tools, resources, or training you may need to do this. Figure 1.3 identifies some ways that listening can support the example goals identified in the introduction.
Questions to Get Started
What information do you need in order to be successful?
What is most important to hear and learn from customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and shareholders?
Who are the people you need and want to listen to? How will digital tools help you listen to them?
What decisions do you want to make based on the information?
What are some ways that you would choose to listen at scale?
Chapter Two. Share to Shape
Sharing to shape is seldom a one-size-fits-all endeavor. On the one hand, consider a certain leader I’ve encountered—Rosemary. She uses Twitter to connect with her sprawling team, categorizing them into groups such as managers and supervisors, and she uses its direct-messaging capabilities to co
nnect with them. Unorthodox, perhaps, but it works for her because Twitter is easy to access from anywhere and universally popular among her staff as well as the heads of HR, engineering, and business development. She uses it to recognize employee accomplishments, set and reinforce expectations, and share business intelligence, crucial safety tips, and even timely updates on traffic and weather.
Francis, on the other hand, is half a world away from Rosemary and prefers photos to text. He broadcasts the occasional blog or Facebook update through his marketing team, but his chosen medium for sharing is “selfies.” He’s perpetually on the road at speaking engagements, and selfies, therefore, are how he connects on the fly with the people he meets all around the world.
What do Rosemary and Francis have in common? Quite a bit despite their differing responsibilities and social media preferences. Rosemary is Rosemary Turner, president of UPS North California District, who is charged with overseeing 17,000 employees—every manager, staff member, driver, and dispatcher in the territory.11 If the trucks don’t roll or if Christmas gifts don’t get delivered, it’s on Rosemary. Francis is Pope Francis, the reigning head of the Catholic Church. He is Bishop of Rome and Vatican City as well as the leader of approximately 1.1 billion parishioners worldwide. He meets with heads of state and maintains diplomatic relationships with more than 100 nations, all while trying to forge a consistent dialogue with Catholics around the world.
Beyond a shared concern for maintaining Christmas traditions, both are engaged leaders who understand how to harness social tools for sharing in a way that helps them manage relationships and shape the actions of their many followers. As we examined in Chapter 1, listening at scale enables leaders to determine what ideas, information, or actions will inspire followership. Sharing, then, is how engaged leaders not only attract followers but also keep them effective and productive vis-à-vis the leaders’ wider objectives (see Figure 2.1).
Why Sharing Shapes
Leaders who are less sure about sharing than Turner and the pontiff commonly ask me, How do I generate followers? And I typically respond, Well, you’re already leading people, right? The perceived disconnect between everyday leadership and followership within social channels belies an interesting and relevant point. Leaders may have 500 or 5,000 people reporting to them, but only a tiny percentage of those people follow them on social and digital channels. This highlights a number of significant opportunities that sharing, as presented here, holds for leaders. Sharing, the next step to becoming an engaged leader, can exponentially multiply one’s authority and influence in several ways.
First, sharing forges connections with followers that improve relationships. At UPS, for example, Turner’s biggest concern each day is supporting employees on the move across San Francisco’s main arteries. Twitter links her easily and instantly to thousands of drivers out in the field in trucks or to sales executives visiting major accounts. It’s a platform that UPS employees are comfortable with because many were already using it to connect with each other. Stay away from the Bay Bridge—there’s an accident; Remember, the Giants game starts at 5:30; and so on. Figure 2.2 shows an example of Turner recognizing a UPS employee on Twitter for work well done.
The insight and intelligence that Turner shares across her domain allows her to connect informally with people across the organization. She uses Twitter to broadcast to everyone at all levels of the company. Because of the goodwill she has established through sharing, and the way that she shares, employees feel validated, and Turner’s influence within UPS is elevated. Because of what she shares in social channels, her people trust her, and the credibility she has earned pays dividends that allow her to build followership and shape performance.
Second, sharing helps leaders achieve key objectives. As with listening, sharing must be geared to accomplish strategic goals or else it risks becoming superfluous. One of Turner’s goals is to empower employees across her unit to speak up with their ideas and concerns. She wants to level the playing field to improve operations. This dovetails with the wider “open-door policy” at UPS, whereby employees, customers, and vendors are encouraged to maintain an open dialogue with company leadership. She shared, “I am finding that when I send out a blast on Twitter, I get just as much if not more reaction than if I send out a survey internally. One manager who is four levels below me said, ‘Rosemary, I respectfully disagree.’ I really like that kind of unfiltered honesty and I’m trying to get more of that kind of engagement from our people.”12 Turner’s approach to sharing enables employees to reach her anytime—thereby achieving her goals as well as the larger corporate mandate for openness.
Interestingly, Turner was not always so enthusiastic about sharing. Two years ago, when her communications leader suggested that she try out social media, Turner’s first thought was, “I’m not Kim Kardashian—I’m not going to post what I had for lunch!”13 In the end, she acquiesced, but insisted that her communications person run the Twitter account on Turner’s behalf. When those initial posts started getting great reviews, Turner realized that Twitter was a game changer. She shared, “The impact has been dramatic. I feel I can touch people and it extends the impact of my leadership when I listen, and then share back what I’m hearing. I now have all of these connections, where I can contact someone and find out what I want.”14
Similarly, one of Pope Francis’s goals is to connect with common people in order to make the teachings of Catholicism more accessible. Every time he steps away from the bulletproof Popemobile or comes down from the balcony to stride solo across St. Peter’s Square, he is working toward that mandate. Everything he does is carefully crafted to support this goal, and he uses social media strategically to extend his reach. He chooses selfies as his mode of sharing because they correspond with his objectives.
Finally, sharing also amplifies a leader’s power and influence. As what she shares gets passed around, her sphere of influence can extend well beyond the official confines of her department or domain.
These are just a few of the positive by-products of transforming into an engaged leader.
The Sharing Shift—From Scarcity to Abundance
Each stage in becoming an engaged leader—listening, sharing, and engaging—gets progressively more complicated in terms of navigating change and risk. While Millennials and digital natives are accustomed to sharing all aspects of themselves with their virtual friends, today’s top leaders seldom share the same passion for openness. And that makes sense when you consider the dramatic shift in the supply-and-demand dynamics of information.
Leaders in the past accumulated power by hoarding information and then releasing it in a highly controlled way, thereby creating scarcity. Today they can be far more influential by disseminating information more broadly (harnessing abundance). Although leaders shouldn’t be capricious in how they share, today’s inherent loss of control creates a condition of permanent uncertainty that they need to acclimate to (and perhaps even learn to appreciate). The process starts by breaking down the waves of change associated with sharing in order to examine them in manageable chunks:
From talking at people to sharing with them. This shift is closely aligned with the power dynamic just described. Leaders of old, in commander-in-chief mode, would direct others to act, offering sparse context around end goals and little latitude with regard to execution. Today, with the proliferation of knowledge, sharing needs to start from a desire to help followers achieve their goals in addition to your own. The key is to clearly articulate the overall strategy so that everyone can coalesce around a common purpose. Sharing needs to inspire action as opposed to dictating the precise shape that action takes.
From infrequent reporting to continuous sharing. Leaders recall the premium they placed, circa 1990, on quarterly shareholder reports and the mythic unveiling of year-end results. Weeks of resources were dedicated to crafting one perfect presentation that happened on schedule and according to the calendar. Well
, that was before analytics and real-time information opened the floodgates. Today, leaders need to share, and frequently, just to stay in front of the message. Rosemary Turner is sharing all day every day on multiple platforms. Why? In large part because it keeps her mammoth workforce on track. The flip side is that without her advice, employees would look in ten different directions for guidance and end up at odds with one another. Keeping the trucks running on time is especially important in a logistics business such as UPS. Regardless, frequent sharing keeps people aligned and in sync.
From formal to informal sharing. In part because of the frequency just described, informal sharing has become the norm. No longer can leaders emerge from the ivory tower, put out some finely crafted pearls of wisdom, and expect followers and direct reports to hang on their every word. The world moves too fast for that sort of formality. Even the papacy has taken notice. Francis seldom offers proclamations from the balcony or even from behind the pulpit. Instead he walks among the people or drives around in his (very) used car—190,000+ miles—all the while stopping to pose for photographs.
From polished to imperfect. This mode of sharing is perhaps the most difficult change for some leaders to make. Sharing, because it is ongoing and informal, is also oftentimes off the cuff. When opportunities to share were infrequent, whatever you shared needed to be finely honed. Now, with the time required to broadcast drastically streamlined, the friction is removed from sharing, and informality is the norm. Luckily your posts need not be perfect; instead they should be authentic, relevant, and timely—photos, reactions, and a few choice words that suit the moment.