by Charlene Li
Becoming an engaged leader is a personal journey, and bona fide transformation doesn’t happen in a day. And just as leadership styles vary greatly, no two approaches are exactly alike. There are a number of reasons CEOs make the difficult journey, but most times it is because they catch a glimpse of the incredible upside in terms of achieving their goals more effectively.
For example, Carolyn Miles, CEO of the international NGO Save the Children, came to social media because she had a clear goal—to mobilize support and provide critical help and relief to fight health crises affecting children, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa that came to a head in 2014. When she became CEO of Save the Children in 2011, the organization was already active in social media. Senior management discussed if it made sense for her to be active, as well, and how it would help the organization. Miles recalled, “We decided it was important for audiences to know there are real people behind Save the Children, and not just institutional accounts.”42 She began writing a blog (called “Logging Miles”), posting on Huffington Post, and using Twitter.43 Her content is packed with stories and photos that appeal to donors at a grassroots level (see Figure 4.2).44 For Miles, engaging in social channels was an open-and-shut case. It suited her needs perfectly. In other instances, leaders need additional time and space to be persuaded to make the leap.
Change Is a Process
When Mike Smith, CEO of the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), was invited to publish a regular blog on LinkedIn’s “Influencer” platform in 2013, it was reported on the front page of Australia’s major business newspaper as breaking news.45 Slow news day? Perhaps, but as Smith himself has said, “It showed how novel it was for CEOs to embrace a presence on social media” (see Figure 4.3).46
Although something of a digital evangelist now, Smith admits that he harbored doubts for years about engaging in digital channels. And he’s not alone. The journey to becoming an engaged leader is a change process like any other, and it unfolds in stages. Most leaders are familiar with the Kübler-Ross model—the series of emotional stages individuals face following a dramatic loss, such as that of a loved one, commonly called the five stages of grief. The stages have been adapted in a wide array of other settings to explain the emotions associated with accepting other types of major change.
For many leaders, for instance, the move to digital leadership is akin to a loss. Their old understanding of leadership, including what is expected of them, has undergone a shift, and it is a challenge to accept the new, altered vision of reality. Power structures have changed, and control has been disbursed across the organization. Recognizing the stages in this transformation of modern leadership delivers two benefits. First, it can help leaders understand what they are feeling, thereby hastening the journey to acceptance and transformation. Second, it can enable leaders at every level of an organization to become change agents and encourage others to embrace the future. I’ve adapted the Kübler-Ross model and boiled it down for our purposes to four stages:
Stage One: Denial (Anger, Dismissal, Repudiation)
Leaders stuck in the denial stage of the journey will look upon digital, mobile, and social platforms purely as fads. They may insist that they are not going to fall for it. Depending on the culture of an organization, deniers may be numerous, and there might even be social capital to be earned by being a technology naysayer. Further, they may believe: If I can outlast the bright shiny object of the moment, once it fades, I can keep doing what I am doing. Deniers won’t engage in much discussion about digital, and instead will dismiss it with one-liners such as, “What could I possibly say in 140 characters that is meaningful?” Finally, individuals in the denial state will often virtually pat change evangelizers on the head, treating them as if they were suffering from a passing delusion, and think, Don’t worry, you’ll come to your senses soon!
Stage Two: Bargaining (Excuses, Escape, Desperation)
Bargainers see that they are running out of time fast and are looking for an escape hatch. They might be in numerous company. If so, they will form a “last stand” coalition to lobby against the change. In addition, bargainers will ask themselves (and others): What can I say or do that will change their minds? How open do I need to be? How little can I change? For a top-level leader, the common bargaining stance will be: Can I get my communications team to do this for me? Can I delegate this to the marketers? Isn’t this a job for the social media team?
Stage Three: Acceptance (Agreement, Realization, Awakening)
Acceptance occurs, and suddenly leaders acknowledge that maybe digital has some legs. They accept that it has taken off within their industry or organization and they log in or register for an account. At first they may be going through the motions, getting their feet wet, but then they realize, This is something that works. The light finally turns green in the acceptance phase, and leaders catch a glimpse of the full upside of digital engagement.
ANZ’s Mike Smith’s personal journey to acceptance took a major leap forward when he realized that being digital is not about technology or “being up to date with the latest thing.” Instead, he came to realize “It’s part of the focus business needs to have on being customer-centric by engaging customers and improving their experience with us.”47 That is when Smith’s eyes opened to the potential of embracing digital leadership.
Stage Four: Transformation (Belief, Embracement, Evangelization)
The transformation stage is in sight when you move from tentatively exploring social and digital solutions because you have to, to embracing them because you believe they represent important new ways to be innovative and achieve your goals. Both your energy level and idea flow increase as you see a new world of potential and possibilities. Following his transformation, Smith became an active Influencer on LinkedIn and started ANZ BlueNotes, an independent content site covering the financial markets, on which he is a frequent contributor.
The key to expediting the journey is recognizing which stage you are in. And when you are supporting other leaders in their transformation, respect where they are in their journeys. Provide them with the time, space, and support they need to move smoothly through the change process.
Transforming the Organization
Much of this book has been dedicated to unpacking and assembling an implementation framework—listen, share, and engage. It provides a structure to facilitate your personal digital transformation. As that occurs, you will need to be ready to help the other leaders around you reach the acceptance stage and transform their thinking, as well. Whether you are a top leader preparing to change the culture within your company, a unit leader charged with engaging a cohort of managers, or a front-line leader working to funnel ideas and innovation up through the organization, there are a number of things you can do to help hasten the transformation.
We will look at this by job level, but keep in mind that the advice offered for each is not exclusive to that level. Ideally, you can treat the prescriptions here as à la carte, picking and choosing as you like to put a plan in place to foster digital transformations in your organization.
Managing Up: When the Executive Is in Denial
It is not uncommon for CEOs and other top leaders to arrive fashionably late to the party. Selling your big boss on digital transformation requires less rather than more. First, stick to the big picture. Talk to her about what social and digital tools can accomplish for her, not what any particularly cool technology does. (Otherwise she will understand what Twitter does, for example, but not what it can accomplish for her in particular.) Here are some examples of how social business drives business impact across the organization (see Figure 4.4).
Next, start small. Choose one area of the business or one domain and explain how it can be improved. Let her draw her own conclusions about transforming the larger organization. Finally, emphasize ways to wade into using digital tools that doesn’t require a major time commitment. Part of this entails exploring what
she will not need to do anymore as a result of the efficiencies and scale of digital and social tools.
Managing in the Middle: Bringing Middle Managers on Board
Middle managers can be one of the most difficult groups to bring along because digital and social tools can feel like a threat to their authority. First, they see direct reports circumventing the established chain of command and reaching out directly to top executives via social tools. Likewise, executives are going around them to try to find out what “really” is going on in the organization. This leaves midlevel leaders feeling out of sorts and out of the loop. The traditional definition of a middle manager is to act as a gatekeeper—passing information up and decisions down. Yet as social networks improve communication and reduce the power distance in the organization, this gatekeeper role isn’t needed.
Second, middle managers aspire to move up into top leadership positions, but digital is transforming those roles, as well—creating confusion around promotion paths. Given their discomfort with digital engagement, midlevel managers don’t have as many opportunities to develop digital leadership skills. Without focused intervention, they are apt to get stuck in the denial or bargaining stages.
The key to getting them unstuck is to redefine what it means to be a middle manager. Rather than being gatekeepers, they become facilitators. They listen, share, and engage at multiple levels throughout and across the organization, breaking down silos and identifying barriers to action. By shifting their role, they are made indispensable rather than extraneous. In essence, hastening their journey to acceptance and digital transformation requires showing them what is in it not just for the organization, but also for them.
Taking It from the Top: Managing from the C-Suite
If your organization is so lucky as to have transformed leaders who fully embrace and engage in digital and social channels, don’t take it for granted! All too often I see these leaders happily engaging individually but not actively and intentionally developing other leaders in the organization. Here are a few things that leaders can do to foster and support digital leadership.
Clarify goals and objectives. After taking the leap themselves, CEOs and other top executives will have some work to do in encouraging others to follow in their footsteps. The best thing any leader can do is to socialize her digital agenda, customize if needed, so that everyone is executing from the same playbook. Starting with your end goals in mind has been a common refrain throughout this book, and it becomes even more vital when bringing others into the loop for implementation. This means clearly delineating not only goals but also boundaries, so that line leaders can see how the organization expects digital to be integrated into their work.
Set the tone. Top leaders are accustomed to setting the tone for their organization on big-picture strategy and goals, and digital transformation is no exception. If top leaders are social in a digital sense, then that sensibility trickles down. As always, leaders look up to see what cues they can take from the top.
Invest in formal training. Creating time and space for training is the other important ingredient for increasing a leader’s comfort with digital leadership at every level. Our research and executive advisory work at Altimeter has found that training needs to be more than assigning a reverse mentor to an executive—after all, a Millennial may know how to use all the tools yet very little about leadership at the executive level.48 Instead, start by educating leaders in how digital and social engagement can help them achieve their strategic goals, and then develop tactics on how to learn, share, and engage. Consider using the worksheet shown in Figure 4.5 as part of your digital leadership training.
Conclusion
The framework for becoming an engaged leader—listen, share, engage—will serve as a template for leaders as they undergo their digital transformation and guide others along the journey. All the aspects of the art and science of digital leadership mentioned here are open to anyone. They require only an openness to change, a willingness to practice, and the dedication to prepare by anchoring digital strategy to goals and objectives.
Digital leadership has many benefits, as we’ve seen, not the least of which is a direct connection to employees, customers, and other important stakeholders. As you move along your journey, always think about your audience—your followers. Using digital to become a more engaged leader can eliminate the divide between you and them and deliver enormous value as a result.
But it takes time because it requires a new and different skill set. As a leader, you are comfortable decoding complicated financial spreadsheets and interpreting analytics. Your job is to multitask: running from airport to airport and toggling with ease among myriad issues and problems. You make big-picture decisions fast and with precision. In doing so, you set the tone for the rest of the organization. Accurate or not, this is the stereotype of the leader—smart, confident, and unabashedly Type A. Yet all this fast action, lone heroism, and grace under pressure seldom acts as a catalyst for becoming an engaged leader.
Rosemary Turner of UPS and Mike Smith of ANZ both admitted that, when it came to seeing the light concerning social and digital tools, their vision came into focus slowly. But when they caught sight of it, the realization was powerful, and it transformed their leadership practices dramatically and for the better. Like Turner and Smith, and many others, allow yourself to proceed moderately as you acclimate to your new surroundings. Success requires an open mind and launching a few trial balloons.
The framework at the center of this book—listen, share, engage—creates a safe runway and grants you permission to practice. Setting aside 10 minutes a day to start, to see what other CEOs are posting on Twitter or what is trending on your company’s internal news stream, is enough for week one. You need to take measured steps at first and allow yourself to go through the Kübler-Ross-like stages. This is what will allow you to be your best as an engaged leader. People may be pushing you—your staff, the media, possibly even your kids. Don’t take the bait—take your time.
My work with CEOs and executives has proven, time after time, that the wisdom and experience a great leader brings to the table are the keys to making his or her digital transformation stick. Any one of the tens or hundreds of digital natives within your organization can teach you to use Twitter, but only you can know how to use it (and other digital tools and platforms) to make your business better. As a leader you are better than anyone at separating the signals from the noise and analyzing the emerging big picture.
So start slowly, but start now. Becoming an engaged leader and transforming yourself and your organization may be the last thing you want to do at present, but my money says that, in time, you will agree that it is the most important thing on your agenda today. And in time it will transform your agenda, and your business, not just once, but again and again in ways that no one yet knows.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have come to exist if not for an email introduction from my friend and fellow author Kevin Werbach to Shannon Berning and Steve Kobrin at Wharton Digital Press. Thank you, Kevin, for connecting us!
In our first conversation, Shannon asked me a simple question: “What are you passionate about these days?” The answer immediately came to me: seeing leaders transform with digital engagement. Shannon helped me think through the topic, refined it, and believed in it. The result is in your hands.
I also had the substantial help of Jacqueline Murphy, who was my writing partner and collaborator. Jacque and I go way back—she was the editor of my first book, Groundswell, so there is a fluidity to our discussions. On countless Skype calls, Jacque helped me order my thoughts, pulled out gems, and massaged my words into coherent pages. But more important, I could trust her to tell me when I was going down the wrong path—and also to reassure me that I should heed my inner compass.
The team at Altimeter Group has been and continues to be incredibly supportive. Our COO, Shannon Latta, kept taking thi
ngs off my plate so I could focus on research and writing, while my longtime assistant, Susan Wu, protected my calendar. Brian Solis made key introductions, and Jon Cifuentes helped develop many of the case studies. I couldn’t ask for a more dedicated, stimulating group of people with whom to spend most of my waking hours. #GONG
A special thanks goes to the many leaders in this book who took the time to share their experiences with me. Your stories are an inspiration. I am struck by your generosity, optimism, and responsiveness, and I am envious of the many people in your organization who benefit from your engaged leadership each day.
To my patient husband and children, thank you for leaving me alone so I could write, and intuitively knowing when a hug would sustain me. You carved out precious space in our home amid our remodeling project, helping me move my desk five times in as many months.
Last, thank you to the many, many people I’ve had the good fortune of connecting and engaging with over the years in real life and on digital channels. Writing a book can be a dark, lonely pursuit, and your questions, comments, and @replies are a constant source not only of ideas, but also of succor and encouragement. Keep it coming!
About the Author
Charlene Li is the founder and CEO of Altimeter Group and the author of the New York Times bestseller Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform How You Lead. She is also the coauthor of the critically acclaimed, bestselling Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, which was named one of the best business books in 2008.
She is one of the foremost experts on digital strategies and a consultant and independent thought leader on leadership, strategy, employee engagement, and marketing. Formerly, Charlene was vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, worked in online newspaper publishing, and was a consultant with Monitor Group. She was named one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company in 2010 and one of the most influential women in technology in 2009.