by Charlene Li
Thodey aside, many leaders find personal engagement difficult because it is personal, potentially time-consuming, and requires a high-touch approach. I am not suggesting that every leader engage personally in digital channels—especially if they are not ready for it. Depending on goals and personality, it is not the right approach for every leader. What I do suggest is that leaders be intentional about deciding if and how they will personally engage, rather than do nothing by default. I have enormous respect for someone like Ginni Rometty, who has made a conscious decision to abstain from a platform like Twitter because it doesn’t align with her strategic goals.
As we’ve seen, some types of engagements are proactive while others are reactive; some require enormous psychic effort while others are essentially automated. Part of the art of digital leadership is deciding which types of engagement to use and when. It all depends on what action or feeling you expect the interaction to inspire in followers.
Cultivate Followership—How You Will Make Followers Think, Feel, or Act
Part of the art in an engagement strategy centers on the relationship one hopes to build with followers, a practice referred to by some business scholars as “followership.”31 For our purposes the focus is on how digital engagement encourages employees to assert their independence of thought and action, while remaining united in the pursuit of strategic goals. Focusing on how followers think and feel results in positive qualitative outcomes such as increasing trust and credibility. This is often perceived as the “softer” side of engagement, but make no mistake—mastering followership requires laserlike focus on outcomes. In some cases you may design an engagement to deliver a sense of familiarity and accessibility, while in other situations you will want to instill a sense of confidence, perhaps, or even authority and control. With each interaction, frame your mode of engagement accordingly. Simply keeping in mind the type of relationship you want to develop will help you choose and design engagements that cultivate followers.
David Thodey shared a keen insight with me, saying, “Organizations are nothing more than a community of people coming together to hopefully achieve something bigger than what they could individually.” Taking a page from classic community management, he employs techniques to develop a specific type of feeling and outcome with each engagement. For example, in Figure 3.5, Thodey responds to a problem brought to the surface by an employee on the internal social network.
Thodey’s brief interaction is managed with precision. First he empathizes with the employee’s situation. Then he pulls in people who can be part of a solution. The result Thodey is going for is to make the employee feel heard and valued. His problem is being taken seriously. And with digital engagement comes a multiplier effect. Because the conversation is seen potentially by every employee (or, in the case of external platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, by a much larger audience), other people will experience the same effect through engagement by proxy. Individuals across the organization and beyond begin to see that Thodey and his leaders are engaged, and this starts to change relationships for the better.
In online community management, moderators of venues such as Sephora’s BeautyTalk or the technical community Spiceworks understand the power of every interaction and the impact each has on the community. Likewise, corporate leaders need to think through how each engagement adds up to achieve their goals. One key element to consider is how to use language within the engagements themselves. Rachel Happe at The Community Roundtable shared a keen insight in a recent post, writing, “In most business communications the emphasis is on being declarative and crafting a well thought-out and complete thought … But the enemy of engagement is perfection. The more complete your thought, the less other opinions and input is [sic] needed. Complete and perfect communications are a transaction, not a conversation.”32
Language for Cultivating Followership
The voice you use to engage followers depends in part on your goals and intent. Sometimes leaders need to take an authoritative tone, especially when stating a clear direction or opinion. Other times leaders need to strike a difficult balance, with a voice that is modest, imperfect, and human while not coming across as passive or solicitous. It’s in this second area where leaders sometimes struggle.
The Community Roundtable’s Rachel Happe offers these best practices that leaders can employ to develop followership:33
Be careful about using absolutes—always, never, no, yes.
When expressing an opinion (which is important because differences are where innovation and change come from), use phrases like in my experience, I have found, I think, and from my perspective, which allow an opening for others and encourages them to share their experience and perspectives.
Use but and should sparingly. But arrests a conversation and takes it in a different direction, implicitly judging another comment as incomplete or misdirected. Should is often used when you are telling someone what you think he ought to do, which is a dynamic of control versus engagement.
Use you and we carefully for similar reasons—both words can subtly indicate control over ideas and people.
Be curious and ask a lot of questions, even if you think someone’s issue has been addressed. There is often more to the story, and this kind of probing can lead to better understanding and, sometimes, a different answer.
Happe’s takeaway is that engagement must be interactive. It is an imperfect dialogue that changes and evolves. Be aware, too, that engagement takes time. Also, in the beginning, it often looks and feels like awkward teenage dating. No one knows what this new relationship is about, and the rules are unclear. When the accounts payable intern is riding alone in an elevator with the CEO, for example, he’s afraid to open his mouth and say the wrong thing. But it’s arguably worse for the CEO—she feels awkward when a 23-year-old employee comments on the company’s latest missteps. It’s uncomfortable for everyone, and it takes some getting used to. It requires openness, honesty, and even, at times, vulnerability. This is something that Thodey honed through trial and error in the relative safety of Telstra’s internal social network.
Figure 3.6 shows an engagement in the comments to one of Thodey’s recent posts on LinkedIn that illustrates the type of humility combined with confidence and resolve that takes time and experience to develop.34
Science—Managing Goals and Controls
Like many of the rules of engagement we have explored, the science side of engagement is intended to make digital transformation more predictable and manageable. In order to achieve that outcome, a leader can focus on two things: goals and controls.
Define the Goals of Engagement
As stated throughout this book, defining your goals and using those goals as the basis for your engagement strategy is a critical part of planning to engage. When digital engagement is connected to long-term goals from the outset, it will move your leadership agenda forward faster. It is a way not only to achieve those long-term goals but also to align the organization behind addressing critical issues and problems.
At Telstra, David Thodey uses social media to engage, very intentionally, with two specific goals in mind. The first is to achieve a better understanding of what’s going on across the company. According to Thodey, “One of the biggest challenges of leadership is getting the unadulterated truth and understanding the reality of what is happening in the business.”35 This goes beyond simply listening to what employees and customers are saying and doing—he uses engagement to dig deeper.
He’s always looped in, and the result is that people see he’s deeply interested in the work they are doing. He has his finger on the pulse of everything going on at Telstra, and it puts him in a great position to shape the organization one day at a time. Along the same lines, Thodey recently went on Yammer rather than using management consultants to define the characteristics of an “ideal Telstra leader.” More than 700 responses later, feedback on traits such as caring, passionate, and co
mmitted are being highlighted in development plans across the business.
The second goal Thodey has in mind when using social media to engage is more strategic—he wants the entire 40,000+ organization to pivot toward being more present and connected to the customer experience. How is he planning to accomplish that goal? By changing the culture across the company. “My goal is to create a culture that is open and transparent,” Thodey shared. “Transparency creates accountability, and individuals can opt in to make a difference.” He went on to say, “You get that in a start-up company, but in big organizations the default is conformity and a lack of accountability. The fear factor of speaking up is a real issue.”36
Thodey’s resolve was put to the test in August 2014, when the company announced internally that it had missed its customer service targets and would not be paying out full annual bonuses as a result. Employees were indignant that they would not be getting the part of their bonus based on customer service goals. In many cases, including senior leadership, this figure was as high as 40% of overall bonuses.
While discussions on Telstra’s Yammer network are usually balanced, this time the chatter was entirely negative, and quite blunt, even for Australians. But Thodey didn’t whitewash the situation. Instead, he saw an opening and jumped in with his own perspective, writing, “I don’t like it either. I’m disappointed, but the numbers are the numbers and we missed our goal.”37 Thodey, they learned, wasn’t receiving a customer service bonus either. The impact was immediate—employees didn’t expect their CEO to lose the bonus right along with them. Although they were still unhappy with the outcome, people began to accept the rationale for the decision and the importance of making customer service the centerpiece of their work.
As an aspiring engaged leader, consider how engaging directly and personally can help you achieve your strategic goals. This is where the art is—each leader must identify and articulate what goals are most important to him or her. When leaders engage with their goals in mind, it helps them prioritize efforts while keeping the entire organization focused on what matters.
Put Controls in Place
The second way to practice the science of engagement is to put key controls in place. Many leaders are reluctant to engage because they fear that it’s tantamount to opening up Pandora’s box. But in reality it can mean exactly the opposite. Engagement is something that leaders themselves should command. A vitally important component of digital leadership is creating rules of engagement for oneself that are sustainable. You choose what, when, and with whom to engage. Start with your specific goals and then build the controls around them in the following three ways.
1. Set Expectations
There’s no one right way to engage; it’s wide open. Real-time engagement versus programmed; periodic versus frequent interaction; chief executives leading the charge personally versus a team effort—the key is that it is the leader’s engagement to define and design.
Telstra’s David Thodey, for instance, engages frequently across multiple platforms, internally and externally. He feels comfortable talking about everything—work, family, hobbies, and so on. Thodey is open and constantly engaging. Ginni Rometty of IBM has different rules of engagement. Most people know little about her private life because she never talks about herself. It’s all business with Rometty, and she keeps her engagements clearly focused. Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana, falls somewhere in the middle. He is an active contributor on Humana’s internal platforms and recently started posting on Twitter. He also hosts the monthly town hall session with Humana’s 40,000 employees. But it’s never a free-for-all. Broussard and other company executives discuss anything employees ask—but it is a once-a-month engagement with specified start and end times.
In August 2012, President Obama enhanced his street cred when he agreed to be the guest of an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, making himself the first sitting president to participate in the Wiki-style news site’s popular Q&A feature.38 However, his credibility was knocked down half a peg when he failed to address the most frequently asked question—regarding the legalization of marijuana and the role the federal government plays in enforcing drug laws. The nature of the AMA format set up openness expectations that Obama, however well intentioned, couldn’t possibly meet. The lesson here is to set clear expectations and guidelines at the onset and choose your formats for engaging accordingly. In Obama’s case, he could have stated up front that he would skip certain topics. Alternatively, he could have avoided the AMA format altogether and chosen a venue that suited his needs as a leader.
2. Set Limits
The toughest part of the science of engagement is triage. To whom and about what will you engage? Topics come up quickly and demand a commensurate response. The simple way to break it down and make it all manageable is to create a playbook that specifies how you will engage, with whom, and under what circumstances. List the topics, venues, and time frames. Make sure your extended team understands the playbook and revise it whenever needed. The Telstra communications and social media team, for instance, meticulously planned their playbook, encompassing each type and level of engagement for their CEO—and they continually revised it with his input. Being an engaged leader requires instinct and savvy, to be sure, but having a reference tool removes some of the guesswork for you and everyone on the team.
3. Determine What to Delegate
Digital engagement is not something most leaders should do entirely on their own. Relying on your team to pick up the slack is the strategic way to engage. With that in mind, determine what you want to delegate to your staff and include this in the playbook so it is clear who’s running point on each issue and relationship. Decide what goes on the overall dashboard and think about each concurrent level of engagement—your own as well as engagements moderated by your team.
It is important to determine up front how much of the engaging you will do personally versus how much you will delegate to your team. Telstra’s David Thodey does all his own posting, something he insisted on from the start. His logic: “I sign all of my own letters, and I want people to know that I personally stand behind every post.” But he does get help from his team—they may contribute to drafting a longer-form blog post for LinkedIn, or identify topics for him to post on, but Thodey insists on pushing the Submit button on everything.
The vast majority of leaders do and should rely on their teams for help. They may direct the content and tone, and approve topics and posts, but they should leave the mechanics to someone else. There is no right way to proceed, but again, ask what kind of relationship and outcomes you want to achieve, and how delegation will help, or hinder, your ability to achieve those results.
Getting Started with Engagement
Engaging to transform is the capstone step in the journey to becoming an engaged leader. It involves listening and sharing (both are integral parts of engagement) and interacting with followers in a thoughtful way either at scale or one to one. Engagement creates a natural continuum. In the process, it aligns people around common objectives. And just as important, engagement fosters key relationships. This is part of what makes engagement precious—it has tremendous meaning for the people with whom a leader chooses to engage. It is a tool, therefore, that should be used wisely and intentionally. If it becomes commonplace, it may lose its value.
Round out your engaged leader strategic plan by identifying how and when you will engage to transform relationships. Go back to the strategic goals identified in the introduction and think through how engagement can help you achieve those objectives. Note that you may choose not to engage. If that is the course you take, be thoughtful and intentional about deciding and balance it with strong listening and sharing activities. Figure 3.7 provides an example of how engagement could support the sample goals we identified.
Questions to Get Started
When will you engage—and how will the engagement move the relationship forward?
; How will your engagement develop and deepen the relationship with your customers, employees, partners, and investors?
How will you actively maintain the relationship with your followers?
How will you manage and scale engagement?
Chapter Four. Transform the Organization
A number of years back, I was chatting with GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt when he noted that he wasn’t on social media because, as he said, “That’s the CMO’s job.”39 At the time, that may have been true. CEOs were seldom on Twitter prior to 2010, and few organizations had broadly adopted social and mobile tools—those were the early days of digital media. It took time, but today Immelt is rooted in social technology. He joined Twitter in 2012, and he tweets with regularity and from a personal perspective (see Figure 4.1).40 He also writes an internal blog that is widely read across GE. Launched in 2011 as a means of reaching out to the nearly 300,000 GE employees worldwide, Immelt’s “On My Mind” blog has been an ideal venue for sharing his observations.
One of the things that has struck me as I’ve watched Immelt’s transformation into an engaged leader is that he has made the move gradually and in increments that suit his personal style. In 2010, when he was asked to deliver the commencement speech at Boston College, for example, he sent an email to a subset of GE employees to solicit their ideas for what topics to include in the speech. Of all the ways one might crowdsource a commencement speech, email may have seemed old school compared to Wiki technology and other social platforms. But email was what he was comfortable with at the time. And it worked beautifully—Immelt received hundreds of email responses from GE employees, and a number of those made their way into his speech.41