Facebook has a gender problem. We want Sheryl Sandberg to fix it.

Facebook has had a gender problem since its beginning. Now, with the publicity around Facebook’s upcoming IPO, business analysts, portfolio managers, potential investors, and feminist businesspeople are calling attention to the most glaring symptom of Facebook’s gender problem:

Facebook has only white men on its Board of Directors. No women, no men of color, no one to represent the 70+% of Facebook users and advertisers who are not white men.

As with all organizations, Facebook’s gender problem has deep roots and will be hard to fix. However, fixing this one thing– getting women on Facebook’s Board — is not only an easy step, it is also a powerful step.  This is one piece of the gender problem that Facebook can fix right away.

And, Facebook has an advantage that most other organizations with gender problems do not. That advantage? A powerful, visible, well-like, self-described feminist as a COO -  Sheryl Sandberg.

Sheryl Sandberg — the not-so-secret feminist businessperson

Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most successful business women of her generation. As the COO of Facebook, she runs a business that grossed $3.7 billion in 2011. In the hierarchy of Facebook, she is second only to Mark Zuckerberg, and significantly ahead of her closest possible peer, Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman.

Sandberg has set and executed the strategy behind Facebook’s internal and commercial success. She has also lead the way publicly, as Facebook has confronted complaints, burnished its corporate reputation, strengthened its corporate relationships, and worked to position the company for its IPO.

We could write pages and pages about how admirable a leader Sandberg is. Born into a family with a certain level of class, race, and social privilege, Sandberg has worked hard to turn her opportunities into real accomplishments. She has made hard choices, personally and professionally. And, Sandberg has earned her money and her position in ways that capitalism deems fair.

Sandberg is a highly-accomplished business women, a soon-to-be billionaire, and a public figure who’s influential nationally and internationally. And, Sandberg is also considered by many, both female and male, to be a role model for aspiring leaders.

Despite all this well deserved, well earned praise for Sandberg’s leadership, there is one thing that she hasn’t done. This one public action would demonstrate not only Sandberg’s power, but also her authenticity as a leader.

It’s time for Sandberg to put her words into action right at Facebook, and use her power to address Facebook’s gender issue. Starting at the top, with the Board of Directors. 

Aligning Presence, Platform & Power

Leadership requires the leader to use her presence, her platform, and her power to make a difference. And authentic leadership requires a person to align her presence, her platform, and her power to maximize their impact and make her leadership real.

We can give Sandberg high marks for how she’s using her leadership presence.

Sandberg is an inspiring, positive, personable, approachable role model. We know she’s a mom, a wife, and a girlfriend’s girl friend. We know how Sandberg thinks, that she feels, and why. People have a strong sense of who she is, they find her inspiring, and they seek advice in her personal journey.

As a personal presence, Sandberg seems authentic. Her personal life and the story she tells about herself seem aligned- she’s struggled with the demands of being a woman, a mother and a spouse at the same time as an ambitious business person. She’s worked to make a personal link between what she believes and how she presents herself.

As a public presence, Sandberg puts herself everywhere. From Vogue to Bloomberg, Davos to TED, she’s out there being seen as a savvy business woman leading an important company.

We can also give Sandberg high marks for how she’s using her leadership platform.

Sandberg is more than visible– she’s vocal.

Sandberg uses her platform to speak out, whether the message is about Facebook’s resistance to proposed chances in the EU’s data privacy policies or about how women must embrace and protect their ambition. With regard to her analysis of gender dynamics and her advice for women, she’s correct without being complete, and change-oriented without being controversial.

Even those of us who find Sandberg’s advice for change too individualistic and too tied to one kind of woman’s life story appreciate her anyway. Sandberg’s out there talking about feminism and women’s challenges on the road to equality in organizations. She talks about the ambition gap, taking a place at the table, not leaving until you’re ready to leave, and “owning your own power”.

Sandberg is a voice for women, and a voice for gender equality. In the world of business, she’s not only one of the loudest voices, she’s also one of very few advocating for gender equality.

But what about how Sandberg has used her power?

Leadership is not about ‘having’ power; it’s about using power. Anyone who wants to make a change in this world has to use what she’s got. So we ask:

How well has Sandberg used her ability to influence other powerful players at Facebook so that the company addresses and resolves its gender problem?

Specifically, how well has Sandberg used her power to influence Zuckerberg and Facebook’s Board of Directors to demonstrate a commitment to women’s achievement?

If Sandberg were using her power within Facebook, we’d see corporate policies and business results that put her public admonitions into actions.

All those things Sandberg talks about for addressing gender equity? They would be designed into Facebook’s organizational systems. We would see policies designed to get women to the table as well as keep them there.

If Sandberg were using her leadership power within Facebook on behalf of gender equality, we might also see:

• More than one highly visible, highly valued female employee
• More than white, heterosexual women at the top
• A higher percentage of women employees and male employees of color, tracking these group’s representation in the overall paid work force
• Pay equity/ absence of gender-based pay gaps
• Explicit policies & systems for increasing inclusion, that would addressing gender, race/ethnicity, as well as moving toward a work culture/ corporate culture that is free of sexism
• Work life fit policies that help men and women stay connected to their families and their communities while contributing fully at work
• Facebook Site policies that support women (for example, policies that can tell the difference between a photo of a breastfeeding mom and a photo of a topless pron star)

I recognize that these are all relatively big changes for an organization to make.  Certainly, Sandberg has demonstrated Facebook’s support for women by recruiting other prominent women to key positions of responsibility (and hopefully, influence) within Facebook. And, she has demonstrated her support for women on Boards of Directors by recommending women for positions on the Boards of other companies. There are likely to be other efforts by Sandberg that we simply don’t see, because we aren’t privy to the inside of the Facebook organization.

Yet, precisely because Sandberg’s possible internal efforts are invisible to us, it’s all the more important that she demonstrate her leadership by moving Facebook to do something visible to everyone.

Sandberg needs to use her power to get some women on Facebook’s Board of Directors

Sandberg should use her power at Facebook to get talented, competent and inspiring business women — yes, plural, in “at least 2 or 3″ onto Facebook’s Board.  Right now, the board is made up of “rich white guys—not terribly representative of the wide open world Facebook claims to represent“.

Getting women on the Facebook Board would be a public, symbolic, inspirational, functional and financially-responsible demonstration of commitment to gender equity at Facebook.

There are any number of reasons why Facebook should put women on its Board of Directors, right away:

• Women on the Facebook Board will help improve Facebook’s financial effectiveness and strategic thinking
• Women on the Facebook Board will represent Facebook’s largest groups of users
• Women on the Facebook Board will represent Facebook’s most profitable group of users
• Women on the Facebook Board will demonstrate that Facebook is a progressive corporation with enlightened (as in, not sexist, not racist) assumptions about human talent, skill and value
• And, women on the Facebook Board will burnish Facebook’s public image, keeping the stock price high.

When it comes right down to it, if Sandberg is really to be considered a ‘powerful’ woman, or a real leader, she needs to demonstrate that she has power, by tackling the ultimate leadership challenge– directing her influence upward, to get her boss(es) to do the right thing.

Sandberg herself has said that, to achieve gender equity, we need more women at the top of corporations.

Citing gender inequality as “this generation’s central moral problem”, Sandberg told Barnard graduates last Spring,

We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.

If, as Sandberg claims, there’s a “stalled revolution especially with women at the top”, Sheryl Sandberg herself can jump start it. Not with her presence or her platform alone, but with her power.

What We Want — What We Need — From Sheryl Sandberg

We don’t need Sheryl Sandberg to resign, as contrition for some kind of leadership failure.

We don’t need her stalled one step from the top, to remind us that women haven’t quite “made it”.

We DO need Sandberg to publicly  “own her own power”.

We DO need Sheryl Sandberg to put her own advice into action right there in the organization she leads.

We need Sandberg to make gender equality happen — starting at the top, at Facebook.

 There are a whole lot of us out here, rooting for you, Sheryl. You’ve told us what to do. Now, show us how it’s done.

See also:
The Horrible Work-Life Truth I Learned at the Harvard Business School Reunion
Recognizing “Women” On The Far Side of Complexity
The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament

No Women on Facebook Board Shows White Male Influence , by Carol Hymowitz, Bloomberg, Feb. 2., 2012
Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw At The Revolution, by Kevin Conley, Vogue

Heather A. Haveman and Lauren S. Beresford, (2012) If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You the Boss? Explaining the Persistent Vertical Gender Gap in Management, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 639: 114

The Path to More Women in Senior Leadership: A User’s Guide By Anne Perschel, PhD, and Jane Perdue Summarized at Forbes.com

In my first contribution to Social Business News, I’m reminding organizations that want to align their social media messages to focus their efforts on leadership.

I find it pretty frustrating that so many social media advocates recommend “governance” or “policy” or “control” when an organization finds there are too many voices, not enough voices, or the “wrong” voices aiming to represent the organization online.

My post on Social Business News, “Too Many Wrong Messages On Social Media? Try Leadership, Not Control” outlines my argument and recommendations in full. Here’s the takeaway:

If employees are making “mistakes” on social media, that’s not the fault of the organization’s governance, but the fault of the organization’s leadership.

If your employees use social media to talk too much or not enough or not about the right things, that’s a leadership opportunity for you. Don’t concentrate on policing the perimeter with control tools and governance initiatives. Instead, lead from the core of your organization and help members learn to express the organization’s brand and demonstrate the organization’s values as they represent the organization.

 

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Social Business News is a website dedicated to covering enterprise social media, collaboration, governance, technology, and change management. It’s updated every day with original content from a broad range of social media, social business and social organization experts.

Be sure to bookmark or get the RSS feed for Social Business News.

Follow us on Twitter @SocBizNews_.

Why do so many social business advocates overlook the organizational value of online communities?

Too many people dismiss online communities for not being central to the organizations they serve.  These critics dismiss communities for being merely social, just another way to chat or swap tips. Even when they acknowledge how communities can be critical for getting certain kinds of work done, they claim that communities are not sufficiently “business-like”. Worse, they dismiss community advocates and experts as “enterprise social business bleeding hearts” and “kumbayaros”.

What these under-valuers miss is the way that these communities serve a key ‘business’ purpose for their diverse and wide-ranging participants.

While the online community is not the organization, for many participants, the community is their central experience of the organization.

It’s in their role as participants’ central experience of the organization that communities are under-appreciated, and I think it’s time we look at the unique contribution that communities make to the ‘social organization’.

Communities serve two organizational needs that are fairly well understood.

1. Communities serve participants as a way to find, share and develop understanding of things related to work.

2. Communities serve organizations as ways to focus, coordinate, and engage members in shared activity that contributes to the organization’s main goals.

Communities also serve a third, under-the-radar need of organizations –

3. Online communities serve members’ individual and collective needs for a coherent sense of “the Organization”, by creating the experience of being part of something larger, consistent, and meaningful.

The double-barreled concept of “central experience” is key here.

Online communities are central because:

• They draw members from across the organization together into a group

• They draw this assortment of different participants to a common set of topics

• The participants’ conversation is anchored in a (relatively) stable and findable place

• The shared place is created and hosted by the organization itself.

The online community aggregates, focuses, and anchors a subset of organization members in a place that belongs to the organization

Online communities create an experience for members because:

• The community isn’t composed of abstract thoughts ‘about’ the organization, but of actual other people who act and respond.

• The community is composed of tangible actions, reactions, expressions and feelings that participants contribute. Instead of thinking about organizational issues in ways that are isolated inside their heads, participants put stuff out into the shared space.

• The community has an emotional tenor. Sensing, experiencing and contributing to the emotions in the community reinforces participants’ experience of the community as real, since their emotional reactions are decidedly real.

• The community is “present” as well as past, or potential, because the community and members’ relationship to the community exists over real time.

Tangible, Material “Organization”

For the participant, the community creates a tangible subset of ‘the organization’ that’s perceived as something different from the both the collection of other organization members that surround the individual while ‘at work’, and the collection of specific individual participants in the online community.

Not a mixture but a compound, not an aggregate but a sum.  The community becomes a ‘thing’ — “the Organization”.

Centrality + Experience => Entitativity => “The ‘Organization’”

Together, the the centrality and the experience of an online community help to create for members a sense of “entitativity”. (Entitativity is the scientific word for “thing-ness”.) Unconsciously and sometimes consciously, participants experience and thus treat the community as though it were “the Organization” .

Creating a sense of “the Organization” is a critical business process. The community does not “become” the organization, but it represents the organization in the experience of the members.

What “the ‘Organization’” means for the Community Manager

When we recognize that the community is experienced as “the Organization”, the stakes are raised for the community manager. The community manager not only has to facilitate and support the community as a community (of people interacting, in helpful ways, across an array of topics), but also s/he has to manage the elements of the community that influence what people conclude about the actual organization based on how they experience the community.

Community managers have to manage “the Organization” by:

1. Intentionally crafting the tangible space.

Community managers must attend to large and small decisions that physically construct the space (e.g., names, colors, user interface, visual appearance, defaults and fields, mode of display, data in the display, etc).

They need to think of themselves as the ‘property managers’ of the organization’s online building, since the community site provides the architecture, the aesthetics and the functionality that creates the experience of “the Organization”.

2. Intentionally curating the space.

Community managers must make firm, consistent, deliberate decisions about what is discussed, what resources and participants are brought in, etc. so that the community acts and behaves in was that resonate with the larger identity and vision of the organization.

3. Facilitating the community in the organization’s style.

Community managers must demonstrate, reinforce and cultivate a spirit and a collective personality that resonates with the identity of the organization, since ultimately participants’ experience of that spirit will influence how they define their organization.

It’s not only that the community managers must help the communities serve the organization’s larger goals; they also need to make sure that the experience of ‘the organization’ supports the larger understanding of who that organization is, what it does, and why it does what it does.

Participants will extrapolate from their central experience of the online community their sense of who “the Organization” is, and apply this to make sense of who the (whole) organization is and also to make sense of how they themselves should act.

Community Managers as Leaders

Because the online community helps to construct the organization an entity, rather than ‘just’ a conversation, Community Managers have to be recognized as more than “facilitators” or “moderators’. Because Community Managers are responsible for participants’ experience of the community, these managers have a critical — and undervalued– role as leaders in their organizations.

As leaders, community managers need to have a clear vision for the ‘central experience’ that their communities provide (a vision that is connected, I hope, to the reality of who the organizaiton is and wants to be) so that they deliberately serve that purpose of shaping what becomes “the Organization” for so many.

Image: a close-up to nature from eeicenbice
Circle of Life – For Mao Mao from Loves_TaiShan

Note: Whether communities remain ‘standalone’ conversations or morph into coherent online collectivities that span several tools on a social intranet, it’s clear that communities will become more and more critical to “social” in organizations. Eventually, these communities will organize all other forms of online organizational interactivity.

“Manager A’s results with the department’s implementation of Program X were outstanding, but her internal Klout score is only a 43. Given her low influence score, it looks like she’s not as good a leader as Manager B.

I know that Manager B has been with us only two years, and hasn’t yet finished Program Y, but look– her Klout score is 65! That’s huge! Clearly, she’s a better leader than Manager A. If we’re chosing between the two, let’s promote Manager B.”

Can you imagine a conversation like this happening in your organization, where managers are evaluated and compared against each other based on their (internal) social media scores?

I can imagine it, and the prospect scares me. Given management’s pressure to quantify, their lack of understanding of what internal social media is and how it should be used, and their worship of abstract concepts of “leadership” and “influence, it concerns me that organizations will misuse these ‘measures’ of online social influence and treat them as objective evidence of performance.

“Social scoring”, as I’m discussing it here, includes any kind of single measure, profile or dashboard that evaluates a person’s use of social media tools (e.g., Yammer, Chatter, Twitter) within their work organization and/or among their organization’s stakeholders. These scores would be like enterprise versions of  Klout or PeerIndex– designed to measure someone’s online influence.

It’s only a matter of time before Social Scoring moves inside our Social Organizations.

Social media is moving into organizations, making organizations more “Social”.

We may be struggling with the terminology to describe digitally-media networked communications tools (be they “social media”, “social networks”, “Systems of Engagement”, or “work media“), but these networked, enterprise-wide tools (hereafter, social media networks) are already in place in many organizations. In other organizations, these tools are emerging and/or being imported.

More and more organization members, regardless of their place in the organizational hierarchy or work process flow, now have access to these social media networks and are using these tools. Thus, more and more people are involved in online social activity that can be evaluated empirically.

Social Scoring is increasingly available.

Social scoring is an emerging mini-industry. Social scoring is already being used to to evaluate the performance of people in certain kinds of roles (e.g., as brandividuals, as industry thought leaders, as celebrity endorsers, as influential customers ). Within some specific external career markets (e.g., social media marketing itself) candidates are being hired for their social scores.

Despite important concerns about the quality of social scoring systems, appropriate metrics and ethical use in marketing, social scoring is pervading other organizational functions too.

Why is Social Scoring invading the Social Organization?

• Social media networks facilitate the relationships that make individual leadership possible.

Because social media network tools make it possible to reach more people, more quickly, more efficiently, and more often — we expect to see leaders using these tools to create meaning, to reach out to others, and to connect with organization members. We expect to see individual leaders using these tools to influence how members think and what members do.

• Social engagement tools facilitate important organizational work.

In addition to creating and maintaining relationships through which work gets done, social media networks help to inform and focus organization members on organization-level values and goals.

• Inside organizations, we are anxious (desperate?) to evaluate rising leaders as soon as possible.

We want to identify people who seem to have what it takes to become leaders, and we want to invest in these people. Social scores may help us identify leaders we have overlooked.

• It’s hard to evaluate employees on their performance in a way that seems fair to everyone.

Thus, we look for tools that help to make these evaluations more “objective”. Scores — taken literally at face value– give the appearance of being objective, in part because they subsume the qualitative, subjective evaluation criteria into a number. And certainly, everyone agrees that a ’43′ to is less than a ’65′, regardless of the underlying criteria, right?

• It’s hard to compare individual employees, with their unique histories, to each other.

But social scores help with that, by turning oranges and apples into numbers. We use these numbers to compare very different people, in different functions and at different ranks in the organization, on (what appear to be) the same set of relevant criteria.

All this would all be fine, if these scores measured what mattered to being influential within an organization. But they don’t.

Before we start using Social Scoring to evaluate individual influence, contribution and performance within our social organizations, we need to reconsider what social scoring measures, what it doesn’t measure, and why that matters.

7 Reasons to ReThink Social Scoring inside Organizations

1. Not everyone becomes socially influential by using social media OR by directing their influence efforts to audiences that are online.

Many relationships are made and maintained by purely non-digital interactions, like face-to-face coaching conversations, or speaking up in a meeting may make an individual influential but may never be measured by a social media metric. Moreover, not everyone who is or may need to be influenced is available online

3. Social scores show only a part of the picture of social influence.

Even when measures are carefully constructed, they can exclude dimensions that are important to one person but not another, to one department and not another, to one organization and not another.

2. Considering digital behaviors alone, people build strong relationships in different ways.

A particular online behavior may be preferred by one employee but not another. A particular online behavior may be used for different purposes by different people. For example, to encourage a colleague and show support, one person might prefer to use a retweet while another person might prefer to cheer the colleague on ( e.g., “#WayToGo, Brownstone!) A social score might weigh one behavior as more influential than another. But, which one of these behaviors is more effective, and which one should count more?

4. Online influence may not be used in pursuit of the right goals, yet may be measured as though it is.

Social media networks, and thus social scoring, are goal agnostic. A social score does not tell us whether or not a person is getting the right job done.

That one manager might get a lot of retweets for that lolcat picuture, but has his social influence resolved conflicts in the distribution system? Social scores may distract our attention from considering whether the activity has served an important goal: What is this person using his or her influence for? Are they focusing on building influence for themselves or moving others towards the organization’s shared goals? Not everyone uses social influence in service of collective and strategic goals, so a social score can’t really tell us about job performance.

5. Specific measures themselves may be used for the wrong purposes.

For example, many tools that were created to diagnose strengths and weaknesses to help a manager grow are often misused to evaluate that manager.

We’ve all see people judged as being better or worse for something due to their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a tool that is too often mistakenly described as a “score”. And, I’ve recently seen social network analyses of specific managers used to assess the performance of those managers, when the point of the analysis was only to identify relationships they might want to build to get certain kinds of work done.

6. We forget too easily what these scores actually measure. We also forget what they don’t measure. Ultimately, we lose sight of what these social scores actually mean.

Once a measure has been created — even though we “know” all the caveats and the biases involved — we begin to treat those meaures as being more valid (measuring what we think they measure), more accurate (measuring correctly), and more meaningful that they actually are.

Social media tools are means to an end that can get confused with the end itself.

7. We over-rely on social scores because we don’t understand the processes they measure.

We grope for measures that make it easy to evaluate what we struggle to fathom with our own own analysis of the ‘data’. When we can’t understand what really makes someone influential, and how influential someone is relative to others, we rely on measures like Klout scores. Worse, once we have the scores they are easy to use as a crutch so that we avoid ever having to learn what the scores really tell us.

We may not really understand what Klout measures (despite Klout’s own efforts to make the scores more informational.) But we can compare a ’43′ to a ’65′ and know who’s better. At least, we think we can.

The Future of Social Scoring for the Social Organization?

These seven caveats of social scoring should help us realize that embracing social scoring simply because it’s available is the wrong thing to do for our organizations and our colleagues.

Rather than rushing to embrace social scoring, we need to recognize what social scoring currently is and re-envision what it could be. We need to make sure that social scoring offers useful, meaningful information about each other and about our own organizations.

We desperately want to know who in our organization is making a difference. We want to find those rising stars, thought leaders, and influential influencers. Especially, we want to be able to give people credit for the social work that they do online.  Social scoring can be part of this process, but only once we made social scoring fit our organizations’ explicit needs.

We need to create second-generation scoring tools that evaluate online influence behaviors that are important to our organizations, that help get work done, and that lead members towards shared goals.

See also:

The Quantification of Individual Social Equity, by Geoff Livingston
Klout: Do You Have Enough Influence to Get the Job? by Michelle Tripp at BrandForward
Why Klout doesn’t count: putting social media influence in context, by Matt Owen
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Image of figure skating judges’ scorecard, on eHow’s How Competitive Figure Skating Works.

This post is featured on Social Media Today.

How has the activity of organizational change been changed, with the advent of social media?

Back when I was an internal OD/Org Change manager in the Soap Plant, we spread ideas about change the old-fashioned ways: meetings, photocopied paper mail, and face-to-face conversations.

With the rise of enterprise social networks, and all of those messaging, micro-blogging, meet-up-ing, and connecting tools, the world of an internal organizational change agent must also have changed– but how?

Has Social Media Movement Building moved inside organizations?

At last week’s Social Media Week events, there were several sessions about using social media to foment change ‘outside’– among citizens, voters, consumers, and audiences.

Social media — the latest, greatest tool set for social movement building –is being used outside organizations:

1. To aggregate individuals who share an interesting change,
2. To cohere these individuals into a community, and
3. To mobilize this community into off-line as well as online efforts to change a social situation.

No one at Social Media Week really talked about using these very media platforms and techniques inside organizations. This led me to wonder:

Inside our organizations, are individuals intentionally using social media to develop organizational change movements?

We already know that the adoption of social media within organizations, through the implementation of “enterprise social software”, can (and should) transform relationships among individuals and organizations. Once conventional organizations, these actively networked collectives have become “social organizations”.

As far as I’ve seen, most of the conversation about the dynamics of social media within social organizations have to do with dynamics around getting work done (project management, knowledge transfer, innovation) and personal career development (expanding your network, finding sponsors, developing a personal brand). These activities reflect the basic needs of organizations and the self-oriented concerns of individuals who want to succeed in organizations.

But what of organizational social change agents?

You know, those individual people in our organizations who have a vision about how things could be better? These individuals may or may not be in leadership positions; they may or may not have managerial authority or access to significant organizational resources. But what they do have -now- is access to internal, cross-organizational communication networks.

• Are individuals using these communications networks to aggregate the attention of individual members around a moment, an event, or particular program?

• Are they using social media to build these aggregates of individuals into a core community of employees/members who are moving towards a shared vision of a better organization?

• Are they using social media to move organization members to act differently at work, to push for change and initiate it themselves?

The kinds of organizational changes I’m thinking of are not things like re-instituting Friday coffee hour. I’m thinking about organizational change initiatives like developing a worklife flexibility policy, promoting LGBTQ inclusion initiatives, or influencing the organization to adopt a cradle-to-grave sustainability program.

I can imagine a few individuals using the internal social network:

• to identify possible allies,
• to recruit new members,
• to share information about successes, failures and opportunities for influence,
• to send messages–public messages–to key decision-makers,
• to gather financial, behavioral data on the change topic.

Enterprise social media tools could also be used to build off-line community–for example, creating ways for people to meet each other and work together in person. Social media can help a change initiative movement “scale” to include a critical mass of members within an organization. And, it can allow individuals at many different locations in an organization to group together and put pressure on the organization from many different angles.

All of this change agency can be facilitated by social media within the organization, without or before even turning to the organization’s external stakeholders to engage them in helping to influence the organization.

There are obvious power-related obstacles to using social media within an organization to mobilize organizational change.

The primary one is, of course, that the organization itself owns the networks. If powerful members of the organization wanted to prevent individual members or employee groups from using the organization’s networks to foment revolution, all they would need to do is change the rules about how the network can be accessed by members, or revoke the user privileges of certain members.

Another obstacle to using social media for organizational change is that the very visibility, transparency and trackability of internal social media tools makes it difficult for internal change agents to keep their enthusiasm and participation “under the radar”.

Still, why not use the master’s tools to transform the organization?

It seems so likely that this activity is possible, I’d like to know if anyone actually done it. Anybody have some stories?

Some ideas about where this might be underway? Please share…

See also:
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?
Only A Cosmetic Apology? MAC’s Juarez Controversy & Fauxial Awareness
Enterprise Social Networks : another productivity lever

Social media tools can transform an organization.

One of the things I enjoy so much about social media is the chance to be (more often) the person I am, with my specific sets of talents, interests, and goals. Every time I extend myself out on social media, I get to choose what I’ll say, how I’ll represent an idea, and how I’ll demonstrate what that idea means to me.

The same is true for organizations. Each time an organization reaches out to share a message, it is aiming to create an impression on its audience(s) that conveys a sense of who that organization is and what it cares about. Each message creates meaning.

Historically, this reaching out, this extension of the organizational ‘self by creating meaning,’ happened in one of three ways:

1. formal corporate communication,
2. advertising (either for products or for corporate), and
3. CEO presentations (e.g., interviews, speeches).

All of these efforts involve managing the corporate, collective self into a single, intentional voice– keeping the meaning as tight and limited as possible. The message was (and is still) almost always massaged, shaped, intentional, deliberate, goal-oriented.

What makes social media so interesting as a tool for creating meaning about an organization and within an organization is that:

1.) Social Media messages often bypasses the ‘professional massage’ step, and
2.) Social Media messages come from many places, many individual and many interactions instead of one central source.

When communication bypasses the sausage machine, it can create meaning that evades centralized, controlled boundaries. It can be ‘off message’ and offer a very different meaning, it can be ‘on message’ and be more complex than the typical extruded meaning, and it can be somewhere in between, fleshing out and filling in our understanding of what that organization is all about.

Because social media communications come not only from ‘corporate’ or ‘marcomms’ efforts but also from online representatives, brandividuals, and a motley assortment of folks connected to the organization, all these additional, little bits of communication offer an alternative form of data for understanding the organization.

Instead of a massaged, managed, deliberate stream, social media give us many local, specific, situational, personalized messages about the organization.

While it’s true that sometimes the meaning conveyed in these messages just reinforces the centrally-managed meaning, a lot of these messages create new meaning.

New meaning gets created when individuals speak about something specific, on behalf of the organization.

When individuals are speaking on behalf of their organization to some interested person, that individual faces a unique challenge. S/he has to take the general, global, abstract, big picture message of the organization and translate it into the specific context. S/he has to understand the organization and s/he has to put that understanding into her or his own words. Her own words convey new meaning.

The organization member her or himself has to craft specific meaning out of a general understanding. In that moment of crafting, at that point of articulating, the individual has to put new words together in new ways to represent the organization’s point of view.

At that moment, in this unique communication, the individual creates new meaning about and for the organization.

One source of new meaning is how the individual translates an abstract organizational position into a specific statement. Another critical source of new meaning is that the individual contributes her or his own knowledge — local knowledge, from her or his direct engagement in the organization — into that message. That local, personal knowledge is almost always new information, and in this way the real experience of that individual member creates new meaning for the organization.

In the process of creating new meaning, the new meaning also accrues some additional heft. Not only does the new meaning get created, but also it gets ‘owned’. The person who said it owns it, and now has to stand behind it. S/he may called upon to repeat this message, to elaborate on its meaning or even to demonstrate it in her next interaction with that audience. Thus, the new meaning has legitimacy, some authority, and more than a little bit of authenticity.

Here on this blog, writing about the dynamics of social media, new meaning creation, and how it engages organizational identity and reputation challenges me the same way that writing ‘about’ Zappos culture on Twitter challenges the average Zappos employee.

We both have to take a big picture message, and convey a big picture intent, in specific communication acts. We have to understand, translate, embellish, exemplify, recreate, rewrite, from general to specific. We have to create new meaning each time, in each blog post and each tweet.

And so it is with each of us who, through social media, puts into words and into interactions the values, the attributes, the goals, the meaning of what we are part of, who we are speaking for, and what we are speaking about.

We’re not just making it up as we go along; we’re making new meaning as we talk together.

See also:

Be Your Own Hashtag
Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be
The Best PR that $1.6 Million Can’t Buy: Authenticity in Action at Zappos
Why We Want Brandividuals on Social Media

Image: Solidarity….. misconceptions by Super is Sunny

I’m taking part in the virtual book tour and are doing to explore concepts from . Maddie and Lindy, along with their colleague Jamie Notter, have long been some of my favorite bloggers.

“Even though” they write about communications strategies, and focus on a very specific type of organization (associations), their ideas are big, broadly applicable, and eminently practical. I appreciate their deep sensitivity to the organizational and leadership challenges of communications, especially when applied to social media tools. So when Maddie and Lindy put their ideas together in a book, and set up a virtual book tour to promote their ideas, I was only too happy to sign on.

Knowing that this post would be one of the last in a long line of reviews (all of them positive, it turns out) I wanted to ask them questions that not only pertained directly to authenticity and organizations of all kinds, but also to ask them questions that they might not have already answered.  Below, Maddie graciously answered my questions … even the completely softball opening question of:

“Why “Open Community“?”

Maddie Grant: We come from the association industry and for many of us “membership” people, community is old hat. It’s what we do. It’s central to our work.

And yet, for some reason (actually a lot of reasons) what we know about community isn’t always translating well to building community online. Lindy and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web–from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff and members, to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. It’s easy to get bogged down in the newness and the detail, and miss the bigger picture–not the 10,000-foot bigger picture, but the “just high enough to make practical sense” bigger picture.

So we started writing the book, and the idea that kept popping up is the concept of Open Community. Here’s the gist: Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what your organization represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online.

Surprising Reactions and New insights

cv: All of the reviews of the book have been enthusiastic and positive. Certainly, you knew your book would address a ‘pain point’ or fill a need for association staffers and/or members, and the positive response to the book confirms that you’re offering associations something they feel they need. As you’ve read the reviews yourselves and talked to people who’ve read the book, which reactions have surprised you? Where there any points you took for granted (or thought were kind of banal) that resonated very strongly with readers? What new insights did you have about Open Community as you listened to readers?

Maddie Grant:  Actually, we wrote (and promoted) the book very consciously as a “conversation starter” and every “big idea” in the book is meant to be something people can riff off of and build a bigger conversation around. So while we were more excited than surprised that i t has actually worked that way and sparked some great conversations, we were also amazed at the creativity of some readers in sharing their thoughts. Here’s an example – and filmed a little video spot talking about what resonated with them.

On the downside, we’re looking for case studies from associations “living” the concepts in the book–and we’re sure they are out there–but everyone feels that they are behind the curve right now. So it looks like our industry may need this book even more than we thought, to help push things forward and help these organizations become more “social” and more open.

Aligning Actions and Purpose, and Conveying Meaning

cv: When I talk with organizations and their members, I focus on two issues–one is aligning actions with purpose, and the other is finding what’s most meaningful about the organization/business for members/employees and the organization’s external stakeholders. When you think about the insights and recommendations in Open Community, which single bit of advice do you think is most relevant to aligning actions and purpose? How about for helping associations and organizations communicate what’s most meaningful?

Maddie Grant:  Great question. In a wide sense, the entire book is about conveying the meaning of the organization. You can’t successfully connect with your community online without being able to identify why that matters purpose and what you are trying to achieve. Maybe you’re trying to advance an industry or profession–every association mentions that in their mission. Or maybe you’re trying to achieve something more tactical, like reaching out to younger stakeholders or reinforcing an advocacy campaign.

And as for our single bit of advice: choose clarity over control. We define clarity over control as “a leadership concept in which the clear articulation of an organization’s most important priorities, universally understood by all stakeholders at all levels of the organization, de-emphasizes the need for centralized control over every detail of the organization’s activities.” We call it “the key to leading the way and sharing control.” In it’s simplest form, it means being able to define for everyone in an organization (staff and members) how online activity advances the mission of the organization. If you can do that, then you’re allowing not only your staff, but also your members and other stakeholders to share and collaborate in the work of the organization in
a strategic way.

cv: In the last several months, there have been several books trying to explain and help us anticipate how social media will push organizations to change, and how organizations might embrace social media to transform themselves and their relationships with their stakeholders. I’m thinking of books like Charlene Li’s , Tony Bingham & Marcia Conner’s , by Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, & Randi Zuckerberg, and The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith. Each of these books is focused on its own niche (leadership, learning, nonprofits, and social change, respectively) but all of them address the link between social media and serving a community.

Recognizing that you’re focused on associations, what insights from Open Community do you think apply to any organization and to every organization that wants an online presence?

Maddie Grant:  There are many lessons in the book for any kind of business. We actually feel that many associations have a huge advantage that they have yet to leverage–they have a built-in community within their membership. Association communities are people who gather in real life and talk about industry issues and spread the word or volunteer their time for the good of the order. The book is about helping associations translate that to building community online as well as offline. Many other kinds of companies and businesses are actually looking at membership-type models to build customer loyalty. And even for those that haven’t defined their business model in that way, similar lessons apply because successful use of social media tools has everything to do with building relationships between people. For-profit companies may not have built-in communities, but the smart ones are aware that the power of social media lies in the growth of networks around brands and organizations.

So specifically, there are lessons in the book that are absolutely relevant to any organization: lessons about building internal capacity (process and structures) for successful social media management; about how to manage the relationship between public outposts (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and your homebase website; about recognizing and rewarding champions; about new skill sets for becoming a social organization; and more. The ultimate lesson in the book is that building community online is about people, not about technology or tools.

Read this book!

CV: My own view of Open Community is that it hits the issues square in the center, and offers actionable advice for managers who want to use social media to cohere their stakeholders around a sense of shared purpose.

I’d recommend this book to practicing managers, but I also think it would be worth a read by academics. Although Open Community isn’t an academic book about organizational theory per se, the insights and suggestions are well-informed. I can imagine management professors reading this and getting a double whammy– actionable advice to offer students, and an orientation to what’s really going on in actual organizations run by real managers who care about what they do and the people they do it for. I’d also assign this book to BBA, MBA and ExecEd students, because Maddie & Lindy reinforce all the messages we want students to hear about communicating and leading– in a very real-wold way. While Open Community will orient any manager to the key issues of social media, it really is a primer on the leadership challenge of creating community- online and offline.

More on SocialFish:
Mobile apps are a waste of time for associations, by Lindy Dreyer
Do you have a philosophical commitment to becoming social?, by Maddie Grant
Social Organizations Are Inclusive, by Jamie Notter

[Disclaimer: I liked this book enough to buy my own copy; I didn't get a free book in exchange for a post. I'd have read Open Community anyway, and appreciated it just as much. ]

For the past 90 days and counting, we knew this day was coming.

You didn’t need an Irish bookmaker to tell you that Tony Hayward’s tenure as CEO of BP was coming to a close. Any organization facing a crisis like the BP Oil Spill would be likely to replace the guy at the helm.

While it’s common for corporate boards to respond to a crisis by replacing the CEO, this is often a meaningless action. Investors may feel a pump of optimism, the relieved CEO may feel some relief, and the new CEO may feel hopeful, but the leadership change at the top often leads to very little change at all.

Why CEO Change Doesn’t Make a Difference

A change at the top doesn’t indicate a change inside.

While it’s true that the CEO is ultimately responsible for the actions and outcomes of the organization, the CEO alone has limited influence. What really drives the actions and outcomes of an organizations are the systems and processes that operate across the organization.

For example, it’s not the CEO’s expressed interest in green fuel alternatives, but whether with his leadership the corporate investment priorities are changed and corporate achievements are tracked, celebrated, rewarded and reinforced through business systems and HR processes.

In order to make a change that matters, the new CEO has to have more than different values, different skills and different priorities. The new CEO has to institutionalize these priorities by innovating within the organization’s design and systems.

Without system change, there can be no material, substantial change improvement in the organization.

Why CEO Change Does Make a Difference

While firing the CEO and replacing him with someone else doesn’t often matter in a material way, it can matter in a more symbolic way.

A change at the top creates a chance to change the organization’s story.

Removing Tony Hayward creates a break in BP’s Disaster Story. With the new CEO Bob Dudley taking over, everyone needs to make sense of the change.

Instead of the story continuing to be “the CEO makes one misstep after another, demonstrating each time that BP is inept and uncaring”, the story becomes “BP has a new CEO. How will he be different?”

Having a break in the story, even if there is really nothing different beyond the name and the face of the CEO,  invites us to reconsider what’s happening at BP.

The story has a chance to shift from being more of the same to being about change.

If BP can get us to consider the mere possibility that things are changing at BP, this can help us change our perceptions of BP. When we change our perceptions of BP, we give them a chance to change for real.

• A change story can help the people within the organization focus on a different set of actions and interpretations, and help them feel hopeful about their collective future.

• A change story can pump up institutional investor, leading to an uptick in share price and a sense of rebound.

• A change story will get the media to portray BP in a questioning way, rather than reinforcing same conclusions. Things are now ‘open’ to reinterpretation.

Don’t be fooled, though. Real change only happens when systems change, so that actions change, so that values are changed.

Still, a change in the story, a kind of change that can seem fake,  can actually lead to some real change. Not to sound schmaltzy, but fake change can lead to real hope.

The takeaway for BP: Real change must be designed in

If Dudley is something different, he could help BP revise its approach to the spill and change its strategy and future outcomes. But, this will only happen if Dudley is able to lead BP employees to innovate and change systems, and to innovate and change their own behaviors.

Will a change in CEOs really make a difference?

It all depend on whether the new CEO can take the opportunity offered by a change story, and design it into a story of real change.

See also:

BP’s Beyond Petroleum: Hypocrisy, or caught in the act of learning?
Organizational Change Using Authentic Attributes
Is Twitter is Really Changing Comcast’s Culture?: 7 Signs to Look For
3 Things the New York Jets Can Teach You About Authenticity

Images: Robert Dudley from OffShoreInjuries.com Tony Hayward from INN World Report

How much has the paucity of women executives at BP and the overall gender imbalance in BP’s managerial ranks contributed to the Gulf Oil Spill?

I’m betting that had there been more women in the executive ranks at British Petroleum, more women (especially from inside the Company) on BP’s Board of Directors, and more women in company overall, the attitudes, behaviors and decisions at BP — the same ones that created the Gulf Oil Spill — might have been avoided.

You might dismiss this as a crude argument, and I’ll admit that the strokes connecting the variables are quite broad, but there is a sensible structure under-girding the suggestion. Let me rig it up for you.

The Situation at British Petroleum

Consider the situation at British Petroleum

– British Petroleum has historically failed to demonstrate a concern for worker safety and for the safety of the environment, despite their public relations campaigns to the contrary.

– The organization has failed to address the most serious potential mechanical risks, even through relatively small investments such as the $500,000 ‘kill switch” that could have stopped the current underwater oil geyser.

– BP has failed to protect workers’ safety through safe equipment and safety procedures.

– And, BP has consistently denied the technological risks and the environmental risks related to deep water drilling.

Overall, BP demonstrates inadequate skill and concern when it comes to safety & risk. It is unwilling or unable authentically to address environmental concerns related to its current and future business.

Women Managers, Pro-Environmental Attitudes and Greener Behaviors

Now, consider what women managers & executives might typically bring to the table.

• Women demonstrate a higher concern about the environment and demonstrate more pro-environmental behaviors (Dietz, et al., 2003)

• Responsible environmental practices are more important for women than for men when considering a potential employer. (Aspen Institute, 2008).

• Women MBA student are more like than men students to indicate that having a positive impact on society is an important criterion for their job choices. (Aspen Institute, 2008)

• Women managers make greener business decisions than male managers. (Hansa*GCR Greentech Report 2008)
  Check out this chart.

If there were more women executives, managers, and employees at BP, there would have been more concern for the environment, more pro-environmental behaviors, and more effort to make BP develop responsible environmental practices that would have a positive impact on society.

Further, more women managers would have meant that across a broad range of business decisions, more of these decisions would have been ‘green’.

Women: More Measured Risk Calculation, and More Risk-Sensitive Behavior

You’ve seen this research before, in the meme about whether more women in finance might have helped to avert or reduce the severity of the Wall Street, etc. financial crisis. So, I’ll only recap two points:

• Women managers make choices that are more sensitive to risk (risk-averse) than men (Charness and Gneezy, 2007).

• Women managers are less likely than men to be overconfident. (Barber and Odean, 2001)

Women managers are less likely than male managers to feel confident that even empirically-calculated, and empirically demonstrated potential risks can be ignored.

Women Executives and BP’s Commitment to Alternative Energy

The current head of BP’s Alternative Energy Division is Katrina Landis; perhaps she is making a difference within BP to make the organization more green and more risk-aware. However, just one year ago (June 2009) the highest-ranking woman executive at BP was Vivienne Cox. Cox ‘retired’ (at age 48?) the day before BPs current CEO Hayward shuttered the division, and slashed BP’s investment in alternative energy in half.

• What might Cox’s departure and the closing of the group suggests about how women executives and alternative energy are valued by BP’s C-suite?

• What might have happened if more women were at Cox’s level, and if more of these women were involved in BP’s core business?

Keep in Mind

What we call “gender differences” among managers are the result of cultural, political and occasionally biological differences between women and men. Women are not inherently or “essentially” more risk-sensitive or environmentally aware, but in our society women behave in ways that are more responsive to risk and more environmentally aware than men. These are not stereotypes, but empirically verified differences in stated preferences, priorities, and actions.

As with the “More Women on Wall Street” argument, many of the same caveats apply:

• Not every woman demonstrates the modal behaviors of women as a group.
• Not every woman in every organizational situation becomes an advocate for her own views when these contrast with those of the dominant view.
• Not every woman is able to influence the dominant values, system dynamics and overall situation in an organization.
• Saying that women will be more risk-aware, more safety conscious, and more environmentally active is not to dismiss the idea that some men will also be this way.
• Remember, too, that expectations about what makes ‘good’ leadership and defines success criteria are also gendered. “A woman who wants to rise to the top must suppress the very things that are supposed to change the existing culture,” writes the OpEd page of The Economist.

Also, while we’re at it:

– I’m not arguing that women should dominate or form the majority of BP executives.

– I am not arguing that ‘women are better than men’ …

Rather, Your Take-away Should Be:

(1) women managers behave differently regarding the environment and regarding risk,

(2) these differences are important, and

(3) increased representation of women / gender balance is a significant, under-appreciated strategy for getting more pro-environment, sustainability-focused, risk-sensitive leadership into organizations like British Petroleum.

It’s important for BP, and all organizations, to build businesses that are sustainable, and profitable, and valuable to society. Increasing the presence of women, throughout the organization and especially in key decision making posts, is a critical way to improve business and move us towards a better future.

There may be a unique opportunity now for the few women executives at BP as well as for women who want to become involved in energy businesses that actually move beyond petroleum and towards sustainability.

Research suggests that turbulent business environments, like the one at BP, may be just the place where women executives can ‘break through” gender-related barriers. Especially attractive women candidates will be those who demonstrate leadership styles and management skills that promote openness and inclusion, and facilitate innovation and large scale organizational change.

If British Petroleum is ever gets serious about developing a more sustainable, environmentally respectful business, one way to start is to hire and promote women — and men — who are committed to sustainability, who will make greener choices and –this is key — who will advocate effectively within BP for these values to guide the organization’s action.

Some posts about BP that you should read:

BP: Why can’t they say they are sorry and trying to make sure it will never happen again? Bob Sutton, Work Matters
Are you up for the challenge? BP’s careers tagline says it all Fran Melmed, Free-Range Communication

Chart of Gender Differences in Greener Corporate Behavior from (Hansa*GCR Greentech Report 2008)

Some References:

Aspen Institute, 2008. Where will they lead? MBA Student attitudes about business and Society. The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education.

Barber, B.M, Odean, T., 2001. “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, 261-292.

Beck, T., Behr, P.,Güttler, A. 2009. “Gender and Banking: Are Women Better Loan Officers?” CEPR Discussion Paper 7409.

Charness, G., Gneezy, U., 2007. “Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Investment”, Working Paper.

Dietz, Thomas, Linda Kalof & Paul C. Stern.  2oo3. Gender, Values, and Environmentalism, Social Science Quarterly, Volume 83 Issue 1, Pages 353 – 364.

Dwyer, Peggy D., Gilkeson James H., & John A. List 2002. Gender differences in revealed risk taking: evidence from mutual fund investors, Economics Letters, Volume 76, Issue 2, Pages 151-158.

Momsen, Janet Henshall, 2000. Gender Differences in Environmental Concern and Perception. Journal of Geography, v99 n2 p47-56.

Is there ever a time when our reactions don’t reflect our own perspectives on an issue? The whole wisdom behind the dictum: “Seek First to Understand” turns on our awareness of the near-impossibility of uncoupling our initial reactions from our personal standpoint.

Our experience with an issue, as well as our general world views, are always triggered by potentially contentious topics. We need to recognize this not only when we respond to a topic but also when we interpret how other people are responding.

Yes, that is what I kept telling myself last week, as I read all the comments and emails about my “Doubting Thomasina” post of last week, 3 Reasons Why Employee Engagement is a Scam.

The links between experience & worldview to the reactions showed up as three different types of responses to the post. Coincidentally , each type of response reflects one of the 3 Types of Employee Engagement Advocates.

Most of the responses on the blog as well as the emails I received with links and suggestions (thank you!) came from one particular type, yet all three were represented in one comment or another.

Given a brief explanation of each of the types, can you tell which one fits you best?

The 3 Types of Employee Engagement Advocates are:

• The Pollyadam¹ / Pollyanna
• The Transactionalist, and
• The Tempered Radical

The Pollyadam / Pollyanna

The Pollyadam believes in the value of employees’ engagement to each individual employee. S/he expects that offering more meaning and fulfillment to the individual in exchange for more productive effort from that individual has no inherent conflicts. It’s a win-won for both employees and employer.

The Pollyadam has no concern about whether the employer organization really intends for employees to be fulfilled, or whether it’s the employees or the organization who has the power to define fulfillment. S/he expects that most business are ‘good’, and where organizations aren’t good there are protective limits to their badness. There is no concern that the organization may gain proportionally more than the employees, or that any lopsidedness might be undesirable.

The Pollyadam just won’t look at the downsides or complications of Employee Engagement. Thus, s/he dismisses concerns about Employee Engagement as something prompted by an incomplete understanding of how capitalism works, or by garden-variety cynicism.

The Transactionalist

The Transactionalist sees Employee Engagement as the latest in a long line of superficially attractive, potentially profitable organizational programs.

If the Transactionalist is a manager, Employee Engagement looks like a great program to espouse—you get more productivity and more employee ‘satisfaction’ along with the added benefit of looking like an inspiring leader and all-around good guy. Talk about a win-win win!

If the Transactionalist is a consultant, Employee Engagement looks like a program that can be sold to management on the basis of productivity promises, and to employees as a sign that the organization cares – an easy win-win.

Whether a manager or a consultant, The Transactionalist recognizes that Employee Engagement is not something that can easy to implement or quick to achieve. Employee Engagement works well enough to show results and is a continuously moving target, so it’s a profitable, long term gig.

The Transactionalist doesn’t care about potential conflicts for the employees and the organization. The Transactionalist may or may not see the potential downsides for employees, and s/he may or may not see how Employee Engagement can be used in an exploitative way. This is often (although not always) because The Transactionlist is ultimately on the side of the employer – and understands Employee Engagement as something that the organization does ‘for’ employees in the service of overall profitability.

The Transactionalist and the Pollyadam are codependent partners in crime. Working together, they make it possible for employees to be misled (and disappointed) while employing organizations take over more and more of the employees’ being. Working together, they make real change and authentic engagement impossible.

The Tempered Radical

Enter The Tempered Radical. The Tempered Radical sees not only the inspiring promise of Employee Engagement for both employees and organizations but also the reality of poorly executed, cynically motivated initiatives.

The Tempered Radical recognizes that Employee Engagement is the latest iteration of a long line of humanistic workplace programs intended to mitigate– or maybe even erase– the tensions between employee interests and employers’ interests. S/he sees and takes aim at the power imbalances that keep these tensions hidden.

The Tempered Radical has an ulterior motive. S/he has a different understanding of what work organizations might become, and wants to use our current interest in Employee Engagement as a vehicle for transforming the world of work, and the relationship between work and the rest of life.  The ultimate goal of a Tempered Radical is not just an engaged workforce that finds meaning in work, or a company made productive through inspired effort, but a work/business environment that leads to flourishing across economic, social, and personal systems.

The Tempered Radical works to motivate managers and employees (and even shareholders) towards a different understanding, speaking about the vision without sounding like a naïf. The Tempered Radical also works to keep ‘business realities’ salient, so that employee desires, organizational desires and stakeholder needs are pursued in ways that keep the organization healthy. Thus, The Tempered Radical embraces efforts to identify, clarify and prompt conversation about conflicts and tensions that are ‘built in’ to most Employee Engagement programs.

S/he still understands that there is a long way to go before this vision can be realized, or even understood, by a majority of businesses, and The Tempered Radical is in it for the long haul.

As Reflected in the Comments

While I was surprised by the amount of response to 3 Reasons Why Employee Engagement is a Scam, I was delighted by how the comments were dominated by Employee Engagement Advocates of The Tempered Radical type.  Yes, there were a few Pollyadams and one or two certified Transactionalists who commented publicly or shared their views with me backstage, but it was heartening to see just how many readers were ready to engage directly with the concerns I raised.

Although a person’s type has a strong influence on their response, context is important too.  Often, I find that the Pollyanna in me comes out strong when I’m confronted by a Transactionalist. Similarly, when I’m in a room of Pollyannas I seek out the Transactionalist just to keep things anchored in reality. But, almost always when I’m with a Tempered Radical (especially one who’s more radical than tempered), I feel inspired.

How about you?

Have you figured out which type you are?

Even more important, have you figured out which type of Employee Engagement Advocate you want to be?

See Also:3 Reasons Why Employee Engagement is a Scam

Image: “This is so me”  from giveawayboy. With a shout-out to JoLo, who subscribes to both.
¹ Pollyadam is a term I coined, in the spirit of semantic akido, both to flag and resist the tendency to see naivete as a predominantly ‘female’ trait.