Dreaming in Digital

Charlene Li – “Open Leadership” 10/03/2010

Charlene Li – Open Leadership

A  New Approach
Leadership requires a new approach, new mind-set, and new skills. It isn’t enough to be a good communicator. You must be comfortable sharing personal perspectives and feelings to develop closer relationships. Negative online comments can’t be avoided or ignored. Instead, you must come to embrace each openness-enabled encounter as an opportunity to learn. And it is not sufficient to just be humble. You need to seek out opportunities to be humbled each and every day—to be touched as much by the people who complain as by those who say “Thank you.” (Li, p. xvi)

Shift in Power
What’s really going on here? The answer, both simple and far-reaching, is that there has been a fundamental shift in power, one in which individuals have the ability to broadcast their views to the world. (Li, p. 5)

Time to Get to Work
The first step is recognizing that you are not in control—your customers, employees, and partners are. If you are among the many executives who long for the “good ol’ days” when rules and roles were clear, indulge yourself in that kind of thinking for just a few more minutes—then it’s time to get to work. This is a fad that will not fade, but will only grow stronger, with or without you. [Li, p. 8]

Buy Now!
With today’s empowered customers and employees, organizations need to earn the right to have a conversation, and then only at the right time. Without a relationship in place, the best marketing campaigns will fall on deaf ears, especially as people struggle to channel the real signal in the cacophony of today’s media clutter. So just as a marriage proposal on a first day is, with rare exceptions, alarmingly premature, a pitch to “Buy now!” would be spurned. (Li, p. 57)

Measuring Relationships
What’s the ROI of a handshake? Or think of a lunch you recently had with a colleague or direct report, where you invested time and money to develop a deeper relationship with them. How do you calculate the ROI of an internal business lunch? This illustrates the fundamental problem of being open and of business in general some things in a relationship can be measured and managed, but many other things cannot. (Li, p. 76)

Coffee Pot Effect
Companies invest an inordinate amount of money on relationships, everything from public relations to establish relationships with highly influential members of the media to the coffee pot in the lunch room to keep up employee morale. In most cases, more than half of a company’s operating expenses are likely to be spent on activities that have an indirect impact on the bottom line. We may not be able to link the ROI of these expenses to direct sales, but we know there’s some incremental benefit that makes them worthwhile. (Li, p. 76)

A Deeper Dialog
As you try to measure the benefits of ROI of a deeper dialog and relationship with customers, you must realize that you can’t even begin to calculate the benefit of protecting your organization’s reputation in a real-time communications world. Another way to frame the issue is to ask: What is the ROI on your fire insurance policy? You wouldn’t even contemplate going without it! Reputation protection can’t be a primary goal for your openness strategy, as it quickly becomes obvious that you are acting in a defensive manner rather than trying to develop a real relationship. In the end, reputation protection is a good by-product of deeper relationships, a benefit that organizations derive when key employees—and customers—come to their rescue. (Li, p. 89)

Bibliography

Li, Charlene. Open Leadership. Jossey-Bass, 2010.