LEADING THROUGH THE GROUNDSWELL
By: Charlene Li

We are in the midst of a groundswell, the spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need -- information, support, ideas, products and bargaining power -- from each other. The world will never be the same again. How leaders respond to this new world will forever define their careers, and the fate of their organizations. It"s that simple.

Talk with your customers. Listen to your employees. These are long-time, well tested truisms of business. But ask a businessperson to engage with people on Facebook or Twitter, or create a forum where employees can connect, and a look of sheer terror crosses their face. Rather than jump at the opportunity to interact, engage, and dialog with customers and employees, s/he runs in the opposite direction.

Why, in the midst of this groundswell, the largest seismic technological and sociological shift our generation, are organizations so hesitant to engage? Companies push back – how open, how transparent, how authentic, and how real do they need to be? The problem is that they are asking only half the question -- it’s not just a matter of how open they should be, but also, how comfortable they are giving up control. The new reality is that customers are demanding that they be given a role in the process and forcing organizations to give up control – or more specifically, the semblance of control.

In this tempest, command-and-control leadership and traditional hierarchical structures are too brittle to deal with fast-moving changes. But there is also a very real limit to how much control a business can give up. This is more than simply being open, authentic, and transparent. It’s a considered and rigorous approach to leadership, strategy, and management that can be studied, emulated, developed, and most importantly, measured.

Social technologies are at the epicenter of authenticity -- the groundswell of your customers move you inexorably to be more open and transparent with them. But these same technologies play an important role in ensuring that things still get done in this new open environment. A full circle takes place -- the very technologies that drives the inevitability of authenticity are also the ones that will enable and support it.

The Upside Of Giving Up Control

Companies are intrigued and excited about the opportunities opened by social technologies. But despite best laid plans, they didn’t have the right organization, cultural and leadership to engage the groundswell. This is the inevitable democratization of leadership, and it’s not optional. Leadership is about building relationships, and you can’t “control” relationships. Just ask your spouse! What’s required is a new approach to building business relationships, one that is founded on trust but also structured with just enough rules so that things can get done.

There are five benefits to organizations can realize from being more open: 1) scale to engage with customers and employees; 2) scale to lower costs; 3) speed to market; 4) dealing with complexity; and 5) increasing commitment and loyalty. Each of these can be measured and weighed using existing metrics within an organization. The fundamental question is now how open to be? Three factors determine this: 1) your goals and the benefits you receive from being open; 2) the need of your audience (employees, customers, partners) for you to be open; and 3) the competitive context.

The Open Leader

Open Leadership is the way a person approaches relationships. It’s a mindset, not the title. Open leadership is something that you may be naturally inclined towards, but it is more importantly something that you decide to do. There are archetypes of leadership, ranging from the Fearful Skeptic to the Realist Optimist. The skills of these open leaders are those of traditional leaders — empathy, humility, inspiring trust. But add to that a new list of skills needed in the newly social world - collaboration, agility, and most importantly, adopting to the culture of sharing to build that trust.

When leaders open up and give up control, they also need to know that things are getting done. The Sandbox Covenant is the process by which the open leader defines how big the “sandbox”, and then in concert with employees, customers, and partners, defines the walls of that sandbox clearly. Leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s defined by how you will interact and engage with your employees, customers, and partners.

A key trait of open leadership is that you develop other open leaders. You may find them in unexpected places, and sometimes you will need to go outside of your organization to find them. These “revolutionaries” will need special development as your organization will not be accommodating of them. Another key part will be how you as a leader deal with the inevitable mistakes and failures people will make. Like any relationship, the mettle of leadership is tested through crisis, even the small, every day ones. The Sandbox Covenant also supports ongoing open leadership, so that it is ingrained into the organization.

The Open Organization

How will your relationships with customers change with open leadership? You will not only get closer to them, but the walls of your organization will begin to fade. How will you work with newly empowered employees? Everything from how you handle benefits and career planning to how and when you include employees in strategic planning and product development will change. Your partners, resellers, and shareholders will require that you be more open about how you work — primarily because they need the information to be better partners.

As we’ve seen, just as openness is not an absolute, how open you will be will also change as your goals and circumstances change. New technologies will always be appearing, changing the balance of power, but your open organization needs to have the resilience to adapt quickly. The organization of the future will look and function very differently from today’s hierarchical structures — that’s because they will be built for the organic, open groundswell, the new way people play, work and get things done.

Charlene Li is a featured speaker at the World Business Forum on October 5-6, 2010 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. She is also leading the HSM Online Seminar "Social Networks" in January 2010.