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Virtual Leaders
May 11, 2009
By Holly Dolezalek
A bank with branches in several states has to let all of its tellers know about fraudulent customers who are trying to float checks or forge endorsements. A construction company has to capture the knowledge of one-third of its workforce before those employees retire, and transfer it to a whole generation of new recruits. Case agents at a credit union have to keep track of hundreds of customer calls and cases.
None of these scenarios is brand new, but the social software companies are using to collaborate on them is—at least, to many leaders who are used to leading face to face.
The bank is alerting its tellers with RSS feeds instead of e-mail or other methods. The construction company is responding to its knowledge management challenge with Socialtext, a social networking and collaborative software application. The credit union is using tags, which are labels the agents assign to the cases so it's possible to see at a glance which kinds of customer calls are coming in most often. In all three scenarios, knowledge created by all employees—not just the leaders at the top—is flowing back and forth in a way that enhances productivity, improves communication, and creates a more nimble and informed company as a whole.
Sounds great, right? Well, these applications have lots potential, but no company succeeds with them by turning them on and hoping for the best. Like any new technology, it requires champions, people who can lead the way in using them to their best advantage.
Leading Adoption
Any new technology has to get over the adoption hurdle. No technology is going to be adopted just because it's available, and any leader who wants to use social software to improve collaboration—whether it's an executive, a manager, or a worker who has the responsibility of leading a team to perform some task—is going to have to first lead the adoption of that software. "You can't just turn an application like this on and expect people to adopt it, or adopt it for the business goal you have in mind," says Ross Mayfield, CEO and president of Socialtext, a social software company in Palo Alto, CA.
Consider the example of Twitter, a social software that allows users to send constant text updates (known as Tweets) and read the updates of others. There may be a brilliant way for a dispersed team to use Twitter in a project or a regular task. But if the users don't understand how Tweeting will help them to do their jobs more effectively, they're not going to let go of their old methods to learn a new one.
That's why leaders who want their teams to use social software had better learn by doing it first themselves. Real use puts any leader into the position of being able to champion the possibilities and work around the limitations. "Being disconnected from the tools your team members are using doesn't work," says Paul West, founder of SharePoint360, a hosting provider and consulting firm for SharePoint in San Diego, CA. "They want open lines of communication, and if they don't feel like the tool you're promoting is the right one to get that, they'll use older methods they're more familiar with but that don't benefit the collaborative effort."
Ultimately, says West, there's a point where if the leader can get employees over the hump, an element of peer pressure takes over because anyone who isn't using the technology is creating more work.
Leading Use
One factor that often prevents many companies from adopting social software is that it seems like a free-for-all. Anyone can comment on a blog, tag a post, or add to a wiki, and the opportunity to share opinions and information leads both to informative and helpful content and to offensive and inaccurate content. A leader must communicate standards for contributions and enforce those standards, while being careful not to be so rigid about what is contributed that team members stop bothering.
"Collaboration with social software needs to be a free-for-all, because that's how you drive participation," says Philip Green, chief technology officer of Inmagic, a knowledge management technology company in Woburn, MA. "But the point of social collaboration is to work from accurate information and then augment that information with the comments and tags and other bits from participants. That means erroneous comments have to be deleted or clarified, as do comments with profanity or other terms you don't want to encourage."
That might mean managing permissions, or settings that allow only certain employees or types of employees to comment on certain content, and others to rate that content without being able to comment on it. "Wikipedia has had to change its model, so certain records aren't editable," Green explains. "That's because users sometimes changed those records so they were inaccurate, and the arguments became repetitive and misinforming. Social software sometimes has to work this way, too, with management encouraging bottom-up participation without surrendering top-down control of certain things. It's the combination of bottom-up and top-down, and the tight integration of the two, that get you a better repository of data that benefits the participants."
It all means that a leader in efforts like these had better have solid written communication skills. "Writing skills are more important in virtual collaboration than physical teams," says Brent Arslaner, vice president of marketing for Unisfair, a provider of virtual events in Menlo Park, CA. "That's because moderation is a key piece of leadership in this area. You have to be concise and accurate so misunderstandings are kept to a minimum, but you also have to synthesize people's contributions and redirect them so you can take the conversation where it needs to go."
Cultivate Your Flexibility
One of the most helpful skills a leader can have when leading a team using social software is emotional agility. That's because social software brings together a diverse group of employees who can contribute and have their voices heard, and that can be an unpredictable combination. "The people I see succeeding in this area are those who can relax and have some fun with the tools," says SharePoint360's West. "You do have to keep it business oriented, but I had a client who decided to post the catered lunch menu on the same page as the updates about office announcements and other necessary information. It started to really drive traffic to that page, and when the management team decided to remove the menu because it wasn't hard data, everyone threw a fit. Sometimes leaders have to give people a reason to consider social software the front door to their project or the central place for their work, and they have to have the flexibility not to judge that reason or try to force participation without it."
That flexibility has to apply to different demographics, as well. "Part of gaining adoption is to recognize that people have different preferences for using social software, and you have to be sensitive to those differences," says Socialtext's Mayfield. "The 'Net generation grew up doing their homework on Facebook, and you can tap into the technological literacy of those employees to help drive participation. But you need a balanced approach to participation, because the folks who are more senior—and possibly less ready to adopt these technologies—are also the ones who are likely to have the most important things to say."
Something Old, Something New
When managing virtually collaborative teams using social software tools, the most successful leader is likely to be the one who remembers that although the tools are new, the reason to use them is not. A successful leadership style will be one in which an appreciation for these tools' capabilities does not obscure the business goals and objectives the team has been assembled to meet.
"In the end, whether you're managing a physical team with meetings or a virtual team with Facebook, you're still building consensus and gathering opinions from multiple parties to guide your decision-making," says Unisfair's Arslaner. Leaders must learn as much as they can about how these tools work, and mentor or lead employees in their use. But when questions arise about how well they're working, the oldest question is the best: "What are we doing this for?"
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