by Charlene Li
Bertolini could have turned a blind eye and left the situation to Aetna’s army of legal and PR experts, but he chose to engage with Guha directly: “The system is broken and I am committed to fixing it,” he tweeted.26 “I am glad we connected today and got this issue solved. I appreciate the dialog no matter how pointed” (see Figure 3.1.).27 The result: Aetna agreed to pay all Guha’s medical bills, and Bertolini’s Twitter interaction was heralded as an example of enlightened social engagement.
Bertolini, a passionate advocate for health-care reform, is an engaged leader who felt comfortable jumping into the fray and engaging in a dialogue.28 This wasn’t the first time he had engaged with a patient or policyholder directly via digital channels, and it wasn’t the only time he insisted that his industry could use a dramatic overhaul. But this engagement stood out for three reasons. First, Guha was insured by Arizona State University with Aetna as the underwriter, thereby making the situation notably complex in terms of relationships and business dynamics. Second, Guha’s dramatic story was gaining considerable attention thanks to his personal appeal on Twitter—so this was a public relations issue as much as it was a point of policy. Finally, Bertolini was potentially setting a precedent that he and Aetna would respond and capitulate to future patient demands made via social channels. The bottom line is that Bertolini took a risk by engaging, and it paid off. He established himself as an engaged leader and someone searching for innovative ways to improve health-care delivery. His style of engagement, although bold, was not haphazard. It directly and clearly correlated with his stated objectives and priorities. Therefore, it also improved his relationship with followers as opposed to creating distance or damage.
Why Engagement Transforms Leaders—and Their Organizations
When I talk to leaders about Bertolini’s willingness to engage digitally, many share that they would have handled the crisis differently: Make a promise like that to a customer one time and you open up the floodgates. Can he do that for every single patient? Bertolini’s crazy for setting a precedent that he can’t possibly adhere to.
Yet Bertolini and leaders like him are privy to the immense upside of true digital engagement because they have experienced the benefits. When leaders engage with purpose, they achieve a transformation. In fact, engagement is the most powerful of the three steps described in this book because it differs most radically, in idea and practice, from our traditional notions of leadership. The first two steps—listening and sharing—are supporting platforms that make engagement a transformational tool for leaders (see Figure 3.2).
Before we dive into the mechanics of engaging to transform, let’s take a moment to explore how listening and sharing come together to make engagement more potent.
Listening helps leaders see the context of a given issue more clearly and separate the signals from the noise. That way, they can get an accurate baseline assessment of which individuals and issues they should engage with. For example, Red Robin’s latest menu item would not have been resuscitated if CEO Stephen Carley and his leadership team had not been tuned into the intelligence from restaurant servers. Once Red Robin executives were brought into the listening loop, they recognized that they needed to lean in even further to engage with front-line employees. Together they were able to rework their recipe and make the Pig Out Burger worthy of its audacious name.
Likewise, sharing puts employees and other stakeholders on the same page as leaders and gives them the direction they need to advance in lockstep. Rosemary Turner of UPS, we know, spends her days broadcasting across the company and sharing ideas and advice with thousands of employees. They hear her “voice” constantly, so when she reaches out to engage with a front-line colleague, he or she is fully prepared to step up and help solve whatever problem is at hand.
Both listening and sharing establish goodwill between leaders and followers and align people around common objectives. They strengthen relationships and pave the way for fruitful engagement between leaders and followers. Along with listening and sharing, engagement shapes relationships in a way that solidifies a leader’s power and influence. But engagement is different and more powerful because it enables leaders to amass social capital. It is a very different type of social capital than leaders have established in the past, one that comes with being proactive and approachable.
Having an effective means to interact with followers enables leaders to improve and transform relationships like never before. Yet they need to do so carefully and intentionally. The fact that Bertolini decided to chime in personally, taking an interest in a critically ill patient, catapulted Aetna’s response to the crisis to a totally new level. It was very mindful, very intentional of him to get involved, and the engagement paid off. You can bet that Bertolini’s contact with Guha dramatically enhanced his standing with Aetna policyholders, health-care providers, and employees alike. Now more people than ever look at him and think, This is a leader who really gets it.
Changing Minds about Engagement
Engagement is where the biggest change happens on the road to becoming an engaged leader. Through digital means or otherwise, leaders need to listen to subordinates, customers, vendors, and others—they have no choice now. Sharing via digital channels, although perhaps more discretionary, has become more commonplace, as well. Engagement in the digital age, however, is still a stretch for most leaders because it alters how they feel about themselves and how they normally act, and it changes their relationships with followers.
Digital engagement is a complete paradigm shift that can be examined from three interrelated perspectives: distance, direction, and frequency.
Distance
Distance—or, more specifically, power distance—is the broadest way to examine how the digital age has altered engagement between leaders and the constellation of people surrounding them. The Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede used the term power distance to describe how a specific culture views relationship dynamics between people.29 Individuals in cultures demonstrating a high power distance, according to Hofstede, are deferential to figures in authority and generally accept an unequal distribution of power, while individuals in cultures demonstrating a low power distance readily question authority and expect to participate in decisions that affect them. Intentionally reducing power distance is a key step in securing buy-in and participation in strategic initiatives—and it is a key reason leaders frequently engage in person by walking around and meeting people.
In the digital age, engagement greatly diminishes the power distance between leaders and subordinates because of the radical transparency of information and communications, social media, and wide-scale connectivity. Greater accessibility means being more open and transparent—and for some leaders, this comes with a sense of greater vulnerability. But for others it’s a refreshing breath of fresh air because it allows them to step outside the bounds of formal hierarchies to develop authentic relationships. The decrease in power distance has a dramatic impact on who can engage with whom, for what reasons, and how often.
Direction
The decrease in power distance points right to the second way in which we can examine the shift in how leaders must engage—direction. The traditional rules of business engagement, borrowed from the military, are top down. Leaders determined the time, place, and nature of engagement. Rarely would somebody ever approach a leader with feedback or question his or her authority unless they were a close peer or the leader’s boss. But today people at all levels initiate digital engagement, asking leaders about their plans, goals, decisions, and mandates, across the entire spectrum of the organization and industry. With digital and social tools, hierarchy and the chain of command disappear and the rules of engagement become less formal—and, some would argue, more confusing—with each passing day.
Frequency
The third way to examine the shift created by digital engagement is by looking at frequency. Although leaders can decide how often they engage, t
hey can’t stem the constant tide of requests that flow in from above, below, and beyond. They have to expect that people, both internally and externally, will reach out 24/7 simply because they have the means to do so. This increased frequency of engagement is a challenge to leaders in a number of ways, most notably because they can’t meet outsized expectations to be available to respond. Just thinking about the potential burden in terms of time and attention is enough to dissuade leaders from even considering engaging digitally.
Reduced power distance, change in direction, and increase in frequency mean that leaders are no longer insulated. They are not the protected species that they once were. And yet with all this newness come tremendous benefits and opportunities. It is an opportunity for engaged leaders to transform the entire organization through their engagement—with one person at a time or everyone at once. Leadership means constantly reinforcing the direction an organization is taking, and engagement opens up new and better ways to steer business transformation.
Digital Engagement Strategy: Art and Science Overlap
Many leaders shy away from direct digital engagement because of the slew of changes and challenges just mentioned. To face these challenges, it is important that leaders have a digital engagement strategy to inform their interactions and add a layer of transparency. This strategy, described in the following box, integrates art and science in an action plan divided into four elements. The art side is focused on engaging followers in a way that suits each leader’s goals and leadership style. The science side is intended to make digital leadership more predictable and manageable. With practice, persistence, and a plan, leaders can go from being introverted in how they engage, staying within their comfortable circle of peers, to more extroverted in how they reach out and interact with followers.
Digital Engagement Strategy
Art—Engaging to Cultivate Relationships
The art part of our engagement strategy focuses on the relationship one hopes to build and on qualitative outcomes as they relate to specific interactions. We will start by looking at which type of engagements leaders might choose from and then will consider how a leader wants the engagement to affect followers.
Choose the Right Type of Engagement
The fact of the matter is that people want to engage with leaders a lot more frequently than leaders want to (or can) engage with them. That’s where the tension around an engagement strategy comes in. Leaders fear engagement because they’re convinced they may not have all the answers their followers need. More than that, they are concerned about managing their limited time and bandwidth.
Yet this is the allure of engagement in the digital era. Like sharing, engagement can happen at scale (one to many) and still leave followers with the sense of access to leaders that they are looking for—and that’s empowering. It used to be a really big deal for the CEO to show up at the call center and say, “I’ll sit down next to you and join the call, okay?” Employees might have fidgeted in their seats, but they felt special. Now leaders can do something like that anytime, right from their desk if they so desire—if that’s the type of engagement they believe will make a difference.
In terms of an engagement strategy, understanding some types and levels of engagement will help leaders determine which may suit their particular needs. There is an art to determining which is right for you, but it begins with educating yourself. There are any number of ways to engage, but here are three that demonstrate the variety of engagement possibilities, along with advice on how to get started with each type.
1. Event-Based Engagement
Event-based engagement is where leaders make themselves available in an open-forum setting at a particular time and place. It’s an extension of a familiar format that leaders are largely comfortable with—but with a social and digital twist. This type of engagement might be akin to the “Ask Me Anything” sessions online where leaders, as well as experts and celebrities, answer questions posted by public participants. Or it might look like a live corporate town hall meeting where employees in multiple locations watch on a screen and submit their comments and questions digitally.
An event-based engagement is more impactful when executives use it to engage at scale. Humana CEO and president Bruce Broussard, for example, started engaging employees as a regular contributor on the organization’s internal platform. Originally he used the platform as a focus group mechanism to test ideas. Now he uses it to host monthly meetings with top executives. He also hosts larger quarterly meetings where 6,000 Humana leaders ask questions and network. Broussard makes content from these sessions public within a few days of the meeting, and 55,000 Humana employees can participate in the ongoing conversation. These forums are widely anticipated by the general population at Humana and are considered to be extremely successful in terms of the engagement they create. In this company’s case, the key success factor was providing open access to senior leaders in a structured way. Leaders are willing to discuss anything employees throw at them.
An event-based engagement can be large in scale, but it is also relatively controlled—the time span is limited, the content is often organized by topic, and the circumstances are managed. The multimedia requirements of an event-based engagement can add a level of complexity. Nonetheless, such events are an easy starting point for those who are accustomed to engaging with live audiences.
2. Participatory Engagement
Participatory engagement invites people to answer a particular question, comment on a post, or establish a priority. Engaging within this context puts followers at ease because it levels the playing field, in that everyone’s opinion matters equally. The engagement is similar to that provided by a feedback survey, but the simple fact that the leader is asking the question from his account implies that he is not only involved but also personally interested in each person’s response. Who wouldn’t want to bend the ear of an executive, especially when you know he is interested, listening, and ready to take action?
In Chapter 1, we saw how David Thodey, CEO of Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia, listens actively to what is happening inside the company with an enterprise social network from Yammer. While Thodey will tell you that he is still on a journey to learn how to be an engaged leader, I consider him to be one of the masters, especially when it comes to engagement. Here’s an example of him using participatory engagement, where he extends listening with engagement to reinforce to employees that he is interested in their thoughts and concerns and that they all need to work in concert. At one point he asked the entire company, “What processes and technologies should we eliminate?” The question received more than 830 responses and gave Thodey an intimate look into what wasn’t working at Telstra (see Figure 3.3). And to show that he was doing more than just listening, Thodey put many of the suggestions into practice.
The key success factor for participatory engagement is follow-through—once you’ve gathered the input and feedback, what will you do with it? Thodey charged his team with systematically reviewing and analyzing the hundreds of responses. They made visible changes to processes as a result. By being responsive and closing the loop, Thodey sent a message that employee participation made a difference. Employees are smart—they won’t waste their time on stunts that are purely for show. Use participatory engagement to involve employees in making decisions that matter.
Personal Engagement
Looking toward the other end of the spectrum, personal engagements are one-on-one interactions that happen using tools such as internal social networks, public social media accounts, or even email. As we just saw, Mark Bertolini connected with Arijit Guha directly and personally, and it became a public interaction. But more often, personal engagements are quiet opportunities for leaders to strengthen a particular relationship by repairing a rift or thanking someone for his or her service.
At Telstra, Thodey uses the company’s internal social network to reach out directly to individual emp
loyees, and he uses Twitter and LinkedIn to engage with individuals outside Telstra. For example, here is Thodey engaging with a less-than-happy customer on Twitter (see Figure 3.4).30
Thodey makes it look easy, mostly because he comes to this with a background in anthropology (as an undergrad in college) and a natural disposition to engage. But the reality is that personal external engagement is something that Thodey approaches with great care and a lot of advance planning. He is concerned primarily about his ability to consistently engage with customers, and he doesn’t want to set expectations that he can’t meet. His solution is having backup—a member of Thodey’s communications team scans Twitter and alerts him to any issues that require his attention. Then it’s up to him to decide when and how to engage and respond, which he does personally.
Initially, Thodey was concerned that the time spent engaging would be all-consuming, but when I asked him how he manages to keep up, his response was telling. He shrugged and said, “I jump into customer issues because it’s dear to my heart.” If someone takes the time to reach out to him directly, he explained, it usually means that person has exhausted all other avenues for resolution. With this type of customer contact connected to a strategic goal, Thodey finds interstitial time to flick through Twitter or take a spin through Yammer. He reflected, “People overestimate how much time it takes, but it’s really just a few minutes here and there.”