Tinker or transform - what will you do with social media?
- Summary:
- Social media creates organizations where networks rather than management hierarchies count, says Euan Semple.
If you’re going to take full part in e digital revolution, then that means embracing social media. Increasing numbers of organizations are doing just that. But, there are still plenty of companies that are nervous or too over-cautious to fully immerse themselves in social media in the way they need to, according to Euan Semple, speaker, consultant and writer on the social web:
I think these are potentially disruptive technologies and most people don’t really take advantage of that. I’ve often said: do you want transformation or just tinkering? Most big corporates want tinkering, possibly for good reasons, but it’s kind of frustrating.
Organizations need to get stuck into social media – because they don’t have choice. As Semple is fond of saying:
The staff already have a social media strategy and if you’re lucky they’ll have included you.
That doesn’t mean that social media networks are inherently bottom up – it’s as relevant to middle and senior managers, as explains Semple:
It isn’t a case of ‘up the workers’. It isn’t management by committee. Someone still has to take the responsibility to take tough decisions, but they do so in the context of their networks of people.
Social media is a creator of networks. It connects people that have never been connected before. It closes the gap between managers and workers and helps flatten organizational structure. In that way, social media is both a cause of and an agent for profound cultural organizational change.
Semple believes that the old hierarchical model is too simplistic. Organizations are like living organisms made up of lots of separate but related cells. At their best, these cells all work together in harmony, rather than there being an imposed command-and-control structure:
I do think most of our organizations are complex systems, not simple hierarchical organization charts… not even the army.
In this network or connected organism everyone takes responsibility, everyone is a ‘grown-up’ and uses social media as a platform to share thoughts and ideas. Semple notes:
If people think harder and are more willing to share what they think and are better at doing so, then we’ll get better outcomes. But we’ve been so used to being passive or blaming the ‘grown-ups’.
So it’s much more about understanding your impact and network and how much influence you have and how you exercise that both upwards and downwards.
Sounds straightforward, but Semple is not downplaying what he calls the “existential challenge for managers” this shift in culture involves:
So much of the role of manager has been perceived as controlling and this bunch of uncontrollable unruly miscreants that you employed in the first place have to be kept in check, rather than seeing them as a bunch of people who are smart enough to turn up to work for you.
When it comes to implementing change, be it major or minor, social media can ease friction by improving lines of communication. But above all, it’s a rich information resource that companies would be crazy to ignore. Who knows the company better than the people who work there? And it’s far cheaper to consult your workers than pay an expensive consultancy firm to come up with a strategy for you. Semple notes:
The benefit of social is that you can access the people that work for you and work with you and make that the basis for more confident decision making and more intimate decision making. It’s a way of making sure you don’t end up in an echo chamber.
My take
Euan Semple is an entertaining and knowledgeable speaker on all things social. He will be talking in more depth about change management at Paris HR Tech World, October 25-26.