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FEBRUARY 2013 • Roland Deiser and Sylvain Newton
Organizational social-media literacy is fast becoming a source of competitive advantage. Learn, through the lens of executives at General Electric, how you and your leaders can keep up.
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| English: Data from April 2011 Editor Survey that lists Social Media activities (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
We believe that capitalizing on the transformational power of social media while mitigating its risks calls for a new type of leader. The dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with a corporation’s social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization. ...
Equally important, there’s an organizational dimension: leaders must cultivate a new, technologically linked social infrastructure that by design promotes constant interaction across physical and geographical boundaries, as well as self-organized discourse and exchange.
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Our clearest window on the development of these new forms of literacy is General Electric, ... Witnessing GE through this lens is particularly interesting; unlike Google or Amazon, GE isn’t a digital native, and its 130-year tradition of reinventing businesses and itself makes it worth watching. So does GE’s status as a “leadership factory.”
GE’s commitment to social media is perhaps most visible through its digital platform GE Colab,
designed by GE employees for GE employees to facilitate global teamwork and collaboration. GE Colab combines the capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications, allowing easy networking, information sharing, instant communication, advanced search, blogging, videoblogs, and more. Launched in 2012, the platform has already attracted more than 115,000 users.1
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To get a sense of how executives deal with these new realities, we interviewed GE officers of various businesses and regions. ...We drew on those experiences to illustrate the six-dimensional set of skills and organizational capabilities leaders must build to create an enterprise level of media literacy—capabilities that will soon be a critical source of competitive advantage.
1. The leader as producer: Creating compelling content
With video cameras achieving near ubiquity and film clips uploading in the blink of an eye to YouTube or other platforms, the tools for producing and sharing rich media are in everyone’s hands. ... To engage in real time on a personal level, executives will also need the technical skills to master the basics of digital-multimedia production, including how to shoot and, if necessary, edit videos.
Tools for producing and sharing videos are now in the hands of many executives, who can upload recordings of
meetings (such as this one) to an internal server that employees can access.
© Image courtesy of GE
Mark Begor, who runs GE Capital’s real-estate business, was nervous when he shot his first “unplugged” video message. ... That unease soon vanished with practice. He now routinely produces a weekly five- to ten-minute video for his division. ... Begor says that this routine forces him to crystallize his thinking and that creating short stories people can relate to makes him more aware of his strategy and communication.
... To thrive in the world of social media, leaders need to acquire a mind-set of openness and imperfection, and they must have the courage to appear “raw” and unpolished—traits that may be as challenging for them as developing the creative and technical-production skills.
2. The leader as distributor: Leveraging dissemination dynamics
...While traditional distribution pathways won’t disappear, social media revolutionizes the standard information process by reversing it. Social communication makes distribution the starting point and then invites company audiences to cocreate and contextualize content to create new meaning. Messages are rebroadcast and repurposed at will by recipients who repost videos, retweet and comment on blogs, and use fragments of other people’s content to create their own mash-ups.
... Since executives won’t be able to govern or control a message once it enters the system, they must understand what might cause it to go viral and how it may be changed and annotated while spreading through the network. Distribution competence—the ability to influence the way messages move through complex organizations—becomes as important as the ability to create compelling content.
Equally important is the skill of creating and sustaining a body of social followers who help to spread and reinforce the message. It becomes critical to know who an organization’s key—and often informal—influencers are and to leverage their authority to push content through the right channels. ...
Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president and general manager of GE Aviation Systems, acquired these skills through experimentation. She began blogging a few years ago but initially didn’t get much response. ... To increase the allure and sustainability of the dialogue, she eventually created a “360 blog,” where all her direct reports blog with her on the same platform. This networked blog, with 12 regular contributors, provides additional points of view on issues, promotes more frequent communication, and attracts broader participation. Bolsinger says that the quality of her group’s dialogue about strategy and operations has improved thanks to these efforts.
3. The leader as recipient: Managing communication overflow
Social media has created an ocean of information. ...“There is too much noise out there,” says Stuart Dean, CEO of GE ASEAN,2 who is an active blogger and tweets regularly about issues in his market space. “I’d use Twitter much more as a source of information if I could get exactly what I need.”
Dean’s sentiment is echoed by most executives we know—many of them barely find time to catch up with their daily e-mail load. What to do? As a first step, leaders must become proficient at using the software tools and settings that help users filter the important stuff from the unimportant. But playing in today’s turbulent environment requires more than just filtering skills.
... In the social-media realm, information gets shared and commented on within seconds, and executives must decide when (and when not) to reply, what messages should be linked to their blogs, when to copy material and mash it up with their own, and what to share with their various communities. The creation of meaning becomes a collaborative process in which leaders have to play a thoughtful part, as this is the very place where acceptance of or resistance to messages will be built. ...
4. The leader as adviser and orchestrator: Driving strategic social-media utilization
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| English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
To harvest the potential of social media, leaders must play a proactive role in raising the media literacy of their immediate reports and stakeholders. Within this 360-degree span, executives should become trusted advisers, enabling and supporting their environment in the use of social tools, while ensuring that a culture of learning and reflection takes hold. ...
Steve Sargent, president and CEO of GE Australia and New Zealand, believes that social media is reshaping the leadership culture by pushing executives to span geographic boundaries, engage more closely with stakeholders, and amplify the impact of employees at the periphery. ... GE employees in Brazil, for instance, now work with colleagues in Australia to develop products and services for customers doing business in both countries. ...
To achieve this goal, leaders must become tutors and strategic orchestrators of all social-media activities within their control, including the establishment of new roles that support the logic of networked communication—for instance, community mentors, content curators, network analysts, and social entrepreneurs. Organizational units that leverage the new technologies in a coordinated and strategically aligned way will become more visible and gain influence in a corporation’s overall power dynamics.
5. The leader as architect: Creating an enabling organizational infrastructure
Leaders who have steeped themselves in new media will testify that it requires them to navigate between potentially conflicting goals: they must strive to establish an organizational and technical infrastructure that encourages free exchange but also enforce controls that mitigate the risks of irresponsible use. ...
... The leader’s task is to marry vertical accountability with networked horizontal collaboration in a way that is not mutually destructive.
This challenge is reflected in GE’s policies, which embrace the value of sharing expertise and perspectives with family, friends, colleagues, customers, and other stakeholders around the world. With this openness comes a shared responsibility: employees must observe GE standards of transparency and integrity, refrain from speaking on behalf of the company without authorization, and be clear in their social messaging that their views are personal. ...
6. The leader as analyst: Staying ahead of the curve
As companies start to digest the consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution, the next paradigm shift is already knocking on the door. The next generation of connectivity—the Internet of Things—will link together appliances, cars, and all kinds of objects. As a result, there will be about 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.3 This transformation will open new opportunities, spawn new business models, and herald yet another major inflection point that leaders must manage.
It’s imperative to keep abreast of such emerging trends and innovations—not just their competitive and marketplace implications, but also what they mean for communications technologies, which are fundamental for creating an agile, responsive organization. Executives who monitor weak signals and experiment with new technologies and devices will be able to act more quickly and capture the advantages of early adoption.
GE’s leadership university, Crotonville, is leading a number of initiatives to help top executives stay ahead of those changes. ... In Silicon Valley, leaders are immersed in a range of cutting-edge technologies. Part of the program there involves “reverse mentoring,” which connects media-savvy millennials with senior GE leaders to discuss the latest tech buzz and practice. ... Exposing seasoned leaders to the millennial mind-set encourages them to experiment with new technologies—which, in turn, helps them better engage with up and comers.
Clearly, these are early days. Most companies recognize social media as a disruptive force that will gather strength rather than attenuate. But social-media literacy as we define it here is not yet an element of leadership-competency models or of performance reviews and reward systems. Equally, it has not yet found its way into the curricula of business schools and leadership-development programs.
...We are convinced that organizations that develop a critical mass of leaders who master the six dimensions of organizational media literacy will have a brighter future. They will be more creative, innovative, and agile. They will attract and retain better talent, as well as tap deeper into the capabilities and ideas of their employees and stakeholders. They will be more effective in collaborating across internal and external boundaries and enjoy a higher degree of global integration. They will benefit from tighter and more loyal customer relationships and from the brand equity that comes with them. ... And they will be more likely to create new business models that capitalize on the potential of evolving communications technologies.
It takes guts to innovate radically in leadership and organization, for legacy systems, cultures, and attitudes are powerful forces of inertia. ... Social-media engagement will confront leaders with the shortcomings of traditional organizational designs. Leaders who address these shortcomings will learn how to develop the enabling infrastructure that fosters the truly strategic use of social technologies. When organizations and their leaders embrace the call to social-media literacy, they will initiate a positive loop allowing them to capitalize on the opportunities and disruptions that come with the new connectivity of a networked society. And they will be rewarded with a new type of competitive advantage.
...We are convinced that organizations that develop a critical mass of leaders who master the six dimensions of organizational media literacy will have a brighter future. They will be more creative, innovative, and agile. They will attract and retain better talent, as well as tap deeper into the capabilities and ideas of their employees and stakeholders. They will be more effective in collaborating across internal and external boundaries and enjoy a higher degree of global integration. They will benefit from tighter and more loyal customer relationships and from the brand equity that comes with them. ... And they will be more likely to create new business models that capitalize on the potential of evolving communications technologies.
It takes guts to innovate radically in leadership and organization, for legacy systems, cultures, and attitudes are powerful forces of inertia. ... Social-media engagement will confront leaders with the shortcomings of traditional organizational designs. Leaders who address these shortcomings will learn how to develop the enabling infrastructure that fosters the truly strategic use of social technologies. When organizations and their leaders embrace the call to social-media literacy, they will initiate a positive loop allowing them to capitalize on the opportunities and disruptions that come with the new connectivity of a networked society. And they will be rewarded with a new type of competitive advantage.
About the Authors
Roland Deiser is a senior fellow at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University and author of Designing the Smart Organization: How Breakthrough Corporate Learning Initiatives Drive Strategic Change and Innovation (John Wiley & Sons, October 2009). Sylvain Newton is the GE Crotonville Leadership Senior Leader for Business and Regions.
Notes
1 See Ron Utterbeck, interview by Robert Berkman, “GE’s Colab brings good things to the company,” MIT Sloan Management Review, sloanreview.mit.edu, November 7, 2012.
2 Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
3 See Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” mckinseyquarterly.com, March 2010.
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