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Measuring Networked Leadership

February 27, 2020 By Rachel Happe

For many years, I had an uncomfortable relationship with the word ‘leadership’. It seemed vague, imprecise and conflated with ‘executive’, especially in corporate settings. It certainly didn’t apply to me. Then I was an executive and I still think of myself as a leader. To me, it felt like the word beauty; something that is in the eye of the beholder.

Working with online communities, however, has helped me clarify what leadership means because you see leadership clearly in behavior. It is, in fact, fairly concrete. You can see it by looking at who:

  • Validates others regularly, encouraging them to engage
  • Shares what they have learned
  • Offers perspectives and asks clarifying questions
  • Asks open-ended questions

You might be thinking that a lot of people do these things and you are right – because leadership is available to everyone. What sets leaders apart is the willingness to pursue it. By engaging transparently, leaders show a willingness to be vulnerable, to expose themselves to critique, to go ‘on the record’. Leadership then is not the same as being an executive. There are executives who are leaders and there are leaders who are executives – but there are also plenty of executives who actively eschew any kind of conflict, difficulty, or vulnerability. Executives who are not leaders tend to surround themselves with handlers and operate through structured channels in predictable ways.

Leadership requires courage – the courage to be different and to expose yourself to critique, which is challenging when many decisions are nuanced and messy. Through the lens of behavior, it is actually easy to see who the leaders are. And it can be measured.

In communities, leadership is revealed in measuring engagement, which we measure through four categories of behaviors: validating, sharing, asking & answering, and exploring. Each of these categories of behaviors results in a cultural outcome, from a culture of comfort, to connection, to trust, to partnership.

How to build a community - Networked Leadership

By measuring the breadth (what percentage of a population or community exhibits this type of behavior) and depth (how much of this behavior/person is exhibited) we can measure how cultures change over time – are they becoming more open or more anxious? Are more leaders emerging or is curiosity getting shut down? And because we can measure culture – we can measure the effectiveness of the executives in charge in their ability to create this culture.

SOCM 2019 Chart - Community Generates High Engagement Rates - Networked Leadership

One of the primary reasons community approaches are so powerful is that they encourage and reward leadership behaviors. In a knowledge economy, those leadership behaviors are critical to distribute and cultivate so that organizations can optimize learning, change, and innovation.

For those organizations looking to digitally transform and create a networked business model, this is one of the most important aspects of making this possible. Executives are now being tasked with creating a culture of innovation. In many cases, what that means is not defined and can be interpreted in many different ways – making it is hard to help executives understand what success looks like or to hold them accountable when their efforts fail.

Our experience with communities shows us exactly what a culture of learning, change, and curiosity looks like – and allows us to measure it. Those that understand this are using communities to change how they change – and making progress on some of their most complex organizational objectives.

SOCM 2019 Chart - Communities Advance Complex Objectives - Networked Leadership

Communities aren’t just about creating awareness and reaching more people – they are an operational approach and governance structure to change how organizations lead and manage. Find more insights in the 2019 State of Community Management report.

Communities are Modeling the Future of Work

October 16, 2019 By Rachel Happe

No one wants to be told what to do. The more someone tells you what to do or believe, the more you will resist — especially if it is something new. I often show people this picture of my daughter as a baby, getting her first spoonful of solid food.

Keep that image in your mind as you think of your experience in school, college, and the workplace. How many times have you stopped yourself from expressing that same emotion? As we mature, we learn to control our emotions especially in the face of authority figures. Our entire society and its institutions have been designed for control. Rejection of that control creates risks to efficiency — it slows things down. It requires engagement.

Control was expedient in an era of mechanical technology and production — when people were largely doing repetitive work to produce, service or deliver goods. The faster they did that work, with the least friction, the more profitable the organization. The 20th century is a story of molding people to do this repetitive work. To do so required standardization. With standards comes competition and judgment as people fail, meet, or exceed the standard. Rejection of that control created unwanted friction.

In the 21st century technology is rapidly absorbing routine tasks — from production to services to delivery. People are no longer needed for these tasks. But the way we parent, educate, manage, and reward people is stuck in the cultural norms of a world that is rapidly disappearing. It is creating huge risks for our organizations and anxiety for individuals and a quickly evolving culture clash.

What does this new world look like — a world where organizations can operate with fewer people?

People will be the engines of innovation — creating new products, new organizations, and new markets dynamically by using their unique qualifications to create, form relationships, negotiate, make decisions, and analyze. Most differentiating, people can see and address white spaces — things that do not already exist — and determine whether those gaps represent a threat or opportunity. And to find those white space, they need to be rewarded for rejecting and questioning the status quo.

People are critical to innovation because they are unique in their emotional capacity. Initially, people use emotions as powerful guides to assess opportunity and risk. Those emotions are the leading edge of innovation and happen before we can even think coherently about something. As people process emotions they express them in art. The reaction to art prompts people to find words that create shared meaning. As that meaning is negotiated, patterns emerge and they can be researched, standardized, and turned into technology.

This innovation process historically has spanned decades, locations, and organizations. It was implicit and impossible to manage because of its complexity. It also led to enormous waste as investment was scattered across portfolios to accommodate the unknown and hedge against the unknown.

But you can’t tell people to be creative. You have to create the environment in which they can be creative — and having a governance model focused on efficiency will backfire. In this new world, control is for amateurs.

The Internet and the social technologies that leverage it provide the infrastructure to connect, create, and communicate in multiple complex networks. This has rapidly accelerated innovation, both in positive and negative ways — disorienting individuals and organizations while both try to make sense of what is real and meaningful. There are few controls, creating chaos and clustering, which pits one group against another.

Traditional organizations, largely optimized for the past century, are scrambling to catch-up and starting to realize that it’s not just about technology but also about the behaviors and culture. Their rigid, hierarchical governance models are breaking when met with the fast-moving, networked model of the open web. Few traditional or digital-first organizations are maximizing the potential of technology. Traditional organizations have created complicated governance structures that remove most risk but also shut out most opportunities — they have too much control. Web-native companies are innovating quickly but opening themselves and society up to great risks — they have no controls.

How do we create a governance model that rapidly adapts to opportunity but also limits risk? Governance that feels like a trellis vs a cage? How do we avoid control but ensure controls are in place? And how do we get people to change, without telling them what to do?

This is, in large part, the work of community professionals; to harness the distributed power of a network while creating controls that ensure the safety of its members and its culture. Increasingly organizations are seeing it as a model for corporate governance — shifting from rigid control to a connected ecosystem with controls.

That structure empowers people — and is more palatable.

Big Community Idea: Heather McGowan + the Future of Work

July 25, 2018 By Hillary Boucher

“There has never been a more important time to understand the context and impacts of accelerated change.”

As we started to tackle the agenda for Connect 2018 I kept coming back to the quote above. This year, as we focus on the theme “Community Accelerates Organizational Transformation” I was repeatedly drawn to Heather McGowan’s words. With the transition to a more digital workplace and the rise of interest in both internal and external programs, it felt both obvious and important to also explore the cultural impacts of community on the future of work. I’m thrilled to announce that Heather will join us at Connect 2018 as our Big Idea Keynote.

We haven’t always included a Big Idea Keynote – we aren’t keen on the idea of doing something just because it’s “what’s done” or just because we’ve done it before, but this opportunity felt too good not to take advantage of. And when there is a good fit, bringing a fresh perspective into the room can inspire, motivate, and deepen our thinking.

As an innovation strategist, Heather has worked with diverse teams to address the ways organizations can most-effectively react to rapid and disruptive changes in education, work, and society. You can learn more about Heather, and her approach to the Future of Work here.

There are limited spots remaining for Connect 2018 – you can learn more or register now.

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