New Leadership
For some reason the blog posts I've been reading have been on fire lately. Particularly hot has been the writing of Maddie Grant, both on the YAP blog and on her Socialfishing blog. Her post on Sociafishing was based on a post done by Scott Brinker, but I like Maddie's version better. Scott was writing about five new rules if you want to be someone who combines marketing with technology. Maddie expanded and said the five rules are relevant if you want to be a "community manager." I would go one step further and suggest that these are five new rules that get at a whole new kind of leadership for organizations.
The five rules are:
- Analytical pattern recognition
- Agile project management
- Experimental curiosity and rigor
- Systems thinking
- Mashable software fluency
As I said on Monday (among other times), leadership is not about positions of authority (exclusively) but it is about the capacity within the system to shape its future. These five are a fairly good representation of much of that capacity. Listen to Maddie's summary of # 1 and #2:
1. Analytical pattern recognition
Many people can be good listeners and active participants (on behalf of their organization as well as personally) in the social web – but not many, I think, will necessarily be able to see and extract the bigger picture for pushing strategic imagination.
What powerful language! To extract the bigger picture and push strategic imagination. That is leadership (part of it, at least), and that is something we need at all levels of the organization. If all you did was implement, you might need to see the bigger picture, but if you really want to shape the future, you need to extract that bigger picture–I think of extract, as in lemon extract–drawing out the essence and containing it in a concentrated form that can be easily transmitted to others.
But even being able to recognize the patterns so you are extracting the bigger picture isn't enough on its own. It must be done in order to "push strategic imagination." Again, I think these are powerful words. Strategic imagination sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but I think it actually gets at an important paradox that we too often fail to embrace in organizations: that strategy contains both the expansive and open mind of creativity and imagination AND the convergent and tactile mind of choice and implementation. Leadership these days requires accepting paradoxes like these and running with them.
2. Agile project management – Knowing how to act and react in public is definitely part of having an agile management style; knowing how to involve your people (staff and members) in the continuously evolving, iterative feedback process of building community by consciously giving them ownership is another.
How "project management" became the process of building community by giving others ownership I'll never know, but I like it! It fits right in with the notion of systemic leadership and building capacity to shape the future at all levels of the organization. Managing a project is not about someone at the top with a detailed timeline and budget. It's about building a community that makes things happen, and you'll have to keep revisiting what those "things" are and how they fit into the project and the enterprise.
I'll stop with just those two for now, and add one more reflection. The things that Maddie, Scott, and I are talking about seem like a lot to ask of people. Whether you're talking about marketing, or social media, or managers in organizations, it seems like a lot to ask them to embrace paradoxes and build communities. I think that's a lot for the very top leadership positions, let alone most people in the organization. My response?
I guess we're not in Kansas any more. It's time to step up.
5 Comments
Peggy Hoffman
Thanks to this posting I went back and read both Maddie and Scott. Your thoughts on project management as community buildings stopped me in my tracks because that’s really another way of viewing components within associations. In so many ways we load components (SIGs, Chapters etal) with huge mission statements and strategic plans when they need to be communities that are owning and moving forward projects and ideas for the large group. Thanks for the thoughts (and you stopped at 2 because???)
Dave S.
A really great post building off of Maddie’s and Scott’s. It got me thinking a bit about one of the points that you expanded upon and I’m not sure the project management aspect is what is most striking, it’s the connotation that adding agile to it suggests. Just compare the definitions and foci of each (the definitions were adapted from Wikipedia just for the record).
Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project.
Agile PM (or an agile approach to any discipline) generally promotes a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.
Notice the nuances and differences? One focuses more on the successful outcomes and downplays the impact of the individual whereas the other looks at the human side of the equation and how they can contribute to the attainment of the goals. It’s a night and day difference and something that I thought I should contribute to the thread.
Maddie Grant
Thanks for taking this one step further! You’re right that this is a concrete example of what might be considered “systemic leadership” and I think if we continue to throw lots of such examples at the association industry some of them might stick… 🙂
And I love Dave’s addition of the definitions – it almost encompasses what is so revolutionary about social media and how it’s all about bringing the human element with all its unpredictability back into management, leadership, technology and everything else!
Scott Brinker
It’s wonderful to see these thoughts evolve and grow. I like your phrase “strategic imagination” (as well as the lemon extract metaphor). And I certainly agree with your vision of a more democratized workplace as a way — maybe the only way — for organizations to adapt to this new environment.
The command-and-control structure of traditional hierarchies seems increasingly outmoded — and frankly overwhelmed — in a world where communities are now such a strong force in marketing and management.
Makes me want to go reread Tom Malone’s “The Future of Work” through this lens.
Anyway, thanks for the link to my post!
Lindy Dreyer
If you look at the big picture goals of most projects–whether it’s developing a new product, advancing an advocacy position, marketing and communications, fundraising–serving your community is at the top of the list. The community already “owns” it…but do they feel like they own it?
HELP WANTED: COMMUNITY CONCIERGE
Mads doesn’t like the term “community manager.” It’s not that much different from project manager, right? But a good community concierge would open doors, connect people and resources, give credit to individuals, and naturally concede ownership to the community. A great community concierge would have the strategic imagination/lemon extract/awesomesauce to be able to harness the community for fabulous projects.
Maybe you can help us think this through?