For the longest time, I believed that certain people were inherently more important than others — think Einstein or Gandhi — but lately my viewpoint has changed.
Now I’m convinced that everyone in society, just as everyone on a team, really does matter equally. All people have their own strengths and weaknesses, and each person contributes to the group in their own unique ways. This insight has inspired me to become what I call a Social CEO, but more on that topic in a moment.
First, let’s consider the analogy of the human body. We often compare our leaders to the head or heart of an organization, and that comparison makes a lot of sense. After all, the brain controls our motor functions, and the heart keeps all the other systems working by circulating blood and oxygen.
However, we tend to forget that other essential body parts are just as important. We cannot afford to have our lungs or liver or nervous system give out, even for a short period of time. What if our spine and muscles suddenly stopped working? The brain and heart would be out of luck.
This realization about our anatomy has completely altered my thinking about leadership. Now I’m convinced that it takes a Social CEO to effectively run a business in the 21st century. By a Social CEO, I mean a leader who adopts social media tools to better understand what motivates the entire team, and then digs in to help them solve real-world challenges. A Social CEO is a chief executive who adroitly uses social media to check the pulse of the organization and channel the energy of the staff.
Being a Social CEO can create multiple benefits, including better communications, an improved brand image, increased transparency, and greater employee morale — all of which help to increase leadership effectiveness.
Despite these benefits, many leaders are still hesitant to adopt social media tools such as crowdsourcing software. According to TheSocialCEO.org, 40% of CEOs appear in company videos and half of all CEOs post their personal biographies on company Websites. Yet only 20% of CEOs have a social network account today, and that is a huge mistake for the other 80%.
At the same time, 80% of consumers are more likely to trust a company with a CEO who engages in social media, while 78% of employees prefer to work for a CEO who engages in social media. This is because social media offers a powerful new way to capture community knowledge and enhance group creativity.
The problem for most CEOs is that they have trouble understanding the difference between “actionable social” information and what’s known as “social noise.” Think of actionable social as useful data that can be acted upon to improve the business. Social noise is the remaining excess of posts and feeds that drown out the important messages hidden within.
In business, this outpouring of social noise stems from enterprise social media tools that allow everybody involved to correspond with everybody else. Such a free-for-all creates a chaotic rush of information in which the hardcore followers chatter on incessantly, in turn causing many others to pull back and disengage.
To sort through all the noise as a Social CEO, business leaders need to become smarter about engaging with their employees, partners and customers. New crowdsourcing software allows leaders to contain, control and curate social media conversations, rather than hosting unwanted social free-for-alls. Only in this way can social media serve as a kind of bloodstream that circulates nourishing information throughout the organization, keeping the head and heart in close contact with the rest of the body.
Hayes Drumwright, founder of Trace3, leads fundraising for Project Hope School.
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