The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

  • About Us
    • Our Values
    • Our Team
    • Our Clients
      • Client Success Stories
    • Community Leadership Awards
      • Community Leadership Awards 2024
      • Community Leadership Awards 2023
      • Community Leadership Awards 2022
      • Community Leadership Awards 2021
  • Services
    • Benchmarking and Audits
      • Community Performance Benchmark
      • Community Readiness Audits
      • Community ROI Calculator
      • The Community Score
    • Models and Frameworks
      • Community Maturity Model™
      • Community Engagement Framework™
      • Community Skills Framework™
      • Community Technology Framework™
      • The Social Executive
  • Research
    • The State of Community Management
      • SOCM 2024
      • SOCM 2023
      • SOCM 2022
      • SOCM 2021
      • SOCM 2020
    • Community Careers and Compensation
    • The Community Manager Handbook
      • 2022 Edition
      • 2015 Edition
    • The Social Executive
    • Special Reports
    • Case Studies
  • Events
    • Connect
      • Connect 2024
      • Connect 2023
      • Connect 2022
    • Community Technology Summit
    • Professional Development
    • Resource Bundles
    • Upcoming Events
    • Community Manager Appreciation Day
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2025
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2024
  • I’m looking for…
    • Community Engagement Resources
    • Executive Support Resources
    • Community Reporting Resources
    • Platform and Technology Resources
    • Community Strategy Resources
    • Community Programming Resources
    • Community Career Resources
    • Something Else
      • Vendor Resource Center
      • Community FAQs
      • Community Management Podcasts
        • Community Conversations
        • Lessons From The NEW Community Manager Handbook
      • Community 101
        • Community Management Glossary
        • Community Management FAQs
      • Case Studies
      • Community Webinars
  • Community
    • The Network
      • Member Login
      • Join The Network
      • Roundtable Call Library
    • The Library
      • Subscriber Login
      • Subscribe to The Library
  • Blog

Open Leadership and Coaching Executives

October 2, 2013 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable

Over the last few years, as social business and networked communications environments have become more pervasive, executives increasingly became pockets of inertia due to their more traditional modes of communicating and managing. But because of their influence, that has a dampening effect on organizations and prevents them from making the next leap in progress and innovation In order for organizations to move forward effectively with social business they need educated and engaged social executives leading the way.

One of our roles at The Community Roundtable is to advocate for social business and community strategists and one of the more powerful ways we advocate is to provide the information and tools to help people succeed. In that spirit, we compiled The Social Executive research in order to explore how executives connected business strategy to social approaches, how they adopted social approaches themselves and most importantly to provide successful coaching approaches and tools for those working to make social business initiatives successful.

A big part of the research was identifying and documenting the specific challenges executives face and the ways in which they learn. The picture of executives that emerged explains a lot about why it is so difficult for them to change. They are constantly traveling, overloaded with information, booked solid and have very few trusted sources of information on social business trends.  As an added challenge they are primarily experiential learners. What this means is that much of the approach we see being taken to engage executives is all wrong because it starts with giving them research and business cases – things that overwhelm them with more information, take a long time to digest, are not necessarily trusted and are not experiential. We tend to throw facts at executives before they even care and fall into the trap of giving them too much, too soon.

I’m excited to be presenting the consolidated findings from this research at JiveWorld, which will include:

  • Why executive adoption matters
  • Why social approaches matter strategically to executives
  • How social approaches help executives personally
  • The executive adoption journey
  • A case study

One of the most valuable outputs of the research is the definition of the stages of adoption and the trigger points that move an executive from one stage to the next – trigger points that with a bit of work can be orchestrated and used to match coaching techniques with where a specific individual is on their journey.

The Social Executive Framework

If you are working to help your executives learn how to effectively use social tools and approaches, you can find out more by:

  • Joining me at JiveWorld on Wednesday, October 22nd at 10:30 as well as Nikki Bussard and Benjamin Taub on Thursday for a case study.
  • Reading the UBM case study from the research and looking through our initial Social Executive presentation.
  • Finding out more about The Community Roundtable’s advisory services, which include custom presentations, executive assessments and coaching.
  • Letting us know if you are interested in our Social Executive Toolkit – a package of research, curated content, frameworks and templates to give you the tools to effectively coach executives – coming in mid-October.

About Rachel Happe

comments powered by Disqus
Community best practices

Resources for the people who build online communities.

ABOUT US
Our Values
Our Team
Our Clients
Careers

RESOURCES
Vendor Resource Center
Podcasts 
Community 101
Case Studies
Webinars

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Benchmarking and Audits
Models and Frameworks
Research
Professional Development

QUICK LINKS
Blog
Newsletter
About The Network
About The Library
About The Academy

LOGIN
The Network
The Library
The Academy

Contact
Support
Partnership
Inquiries
Subscribe to
Our Newsletter