Chapter 15

The CEO and Executive Management Guide to Social Collaboration

In This Chapter

Driving innovation across the company

Defining your role in the social collaboration system

Listening at the virtual water cooler

Bringing the organization together

Social collaboration can be used as a leadership tool to drive innovation as well as a tool to encourage more employees to act like leaders. In this chapter, I begin with an example of how one company launched a successful social collaboration system with support from the top of the organization, and then I present some ideas on how you might inspire innovation in your company with social collaboration tools. Later in the chapter, I tell you how CEOs typically use these tools, explain how you can benefit from tuning in to the social collaboration activity stream, and tell you what you can do to help your colleagues use these tools most effectively.

Is it a cure-all? Hardly. A tool is just a tool. A hammer and chisel are tools in every pair of hands, but only Michelangelo had the right touch to find King David in the rock. On the other hand, given a 3D printer and the right software, creating a scaled-down replica of the Statue of David wouldn’t be so tough. Part of the challenge of leadership is to make the best use of all the tools you have available to you, technological and otherwise.

Without resorting to hype, I will argue that social collaboration is a significant organizational tool, worth some fraction of a CEO’s attention. Many of the biggest technology investments of the past several decades have been poured into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms and other transactional systems. In contrast, social collaboration platforms are systems of engagement, meaning that they are judged by how they connect people rather than how they manipulate numbers. Numbers are certainly important, but organizations run on the talents and decisions of their people.

At the same time, social collaboration is far less expensive and risky than implementing an ERP system, a project management challenge sometimes associated with IT disaster stories. What’s required most is organizational commitment, not technological wizardry. When collaboration networks fail, they fail for lack of active and productive use.

Leading with Social Collaboration

Success with social collaboration doesn’t necessarily require an endorsement from the very top of the organization, but when that happens, it can make a big difference.

When The Community Roundtable began publishing a series of reports on The Social Executive in early 2013, it started with a profile of UBM CEO David Levin. Levin leads an events and publishing company that has grown through more than 100 acquisitions between 2005 and 2012, and he has been a prominent executive sponsor of social collaboration as a method of knitting the organization together.

He is also my boss (several levels removed) because UBM is the publisher of InformationWeek and organizer of the E2 conference series. I probably would not have chosen to focus on him as the model leader (for fear of being seen as sucking up), but Community Roundtable co-founder and principal researcher Rachel Happe picked him as the perfect example of how executive leadership can make a huge difference in the success of social collaboration. You can find the full case study and other research on effective community management at http://community-roundtable.com.

UBM “is a company whose whole market had been completely disrupted by the Internet,” Happe says, making it necessary to “evolve the organization in different ways than they ever did before.” Originally known as United Business Media, UBM needed to innovate to stay ahead of the accelerating shift of publishing (and advertising dollars) from print to the web. With the events part of the business showing more vigor, Levin decided that the organizing principle of the business should be community, whether that was the community that comes together for a conference or the community of readers on a website.

If community were going to be so important externally, it needed to become more important internally. Levin wanted to create a collaborative organization that would break down artificial distinctions between events, publishing, and other divisions of the company. He wanted to get everyone working toward the same goals and sharing constructive criticism when products and processes were not working as they should.

The way he personally brought that about was by doing it himself.

As the Community Roundtable case study tells the story, UBM’s first social collaboration experiment at the executive level was a wiki used to support an executive meeting in 2008. Participants found it an effective way to collaborate and endorsed leaving it active for general company use. However, “within a month it was a ghost town with little or no engagement.”

In other words, just making the technology available was not enough. To be successful, social collaboration needed someone to take charge of making it successful. UBM Global Community Manager Ted Hopton became that person, transferring to a job in the human resources department where he would be responsible for advocating for use of the tool and driving the cultural change it was meant to achieve.

UBM also moved from that first experimental wiki to Jive Software’s broad social business platform, which includes a variety of collaboration and community tools, including blogging. Internally, this social platform is known as The Hub. Immediately after the soft launch of the new platform, on a Saturday morning, Hopton was surprised to get an e-mail from Levin asking for some coaching on the mechanics of how to create a blog post with Jive.

“I knew David was passionate about it, but I didn’t expect him on a Saturday morning to be posting to his blog,” Hopton says. However, this started a regular series of “Dear UBM” blog posts, which replaced the company-wide e-mails Levin had been in the habit of distributing to employees about once per month.

And this shift was significant, as Happe’s case study explains: “While no one would have considered a ‘reply to all’ on one of the CEO’s e-mails, it did not take long before people began to comment on his blog posts, starting a conversation between the CEO and 6,000+ employees that was never possible in the past. As David got more comfortable with this dynamic, his posts became more casual — and unedited — powerfully modeling a behavior for the organization that in essence said, ‘It is more important that you share and communicate than that you do so perfectly.’”

Also, because these messages no longer went out by e-mail, employees needed to log on to the internal social network if they wanted to keep up with what the CEO was thinking. Okay, slight exaggeration: As an employee, I can tell you that I get e-mail notifications whenever an announcement of great significance appears on his blog or the blog of another top executive. However, what arrives in the e-mail is just a link, not the whole message, and to follow the discussion it generates, you have to be on the blog.

Certainly, participation in social collaboration is only one way how UBM executives lead, but it is an important one.

Happe says Levin’s motivation reflects what she sees from all the executive leaders she has found who have taken an active interest in social collaboration. “Almost every executive we talked to was trying to figure out the innovation equation,” she says. “Most people in organizations don’t view themselves as doing innovative work, but right now companies need innovators.”

In other words, more employees need to discover their inner innovator. Often what’s required is not necessarily revolutionary innovation but process innovation that any employee who sees the organization’s inefficiencies can make suggestions about, Happe says.

Driving Innovation by Getting the Whole Organization Thinking

The executive sponsors of social collaboration are looking to drive innovations both large and small. The ideal may be the creation of a profitable new product, but companies today also need process innovation and constant, incremental improvement, Happe says. With social collaboration tools, you can drive innovation. Here are some suggestions:

Solicit ideas through contests. In lean years, an organization may have to be innovative about “doing more with less.” Some social collaboration success stories revolve around engaging employees in contests to come up with cost-saving ideas. Cutting your way to success can’t be the only strategy, however, or the organization will wind up whittling itself away to nothing.

Host online brainstorming sessions. One way to get the organization moving in the right direction is to encourage everyone to think about breakthrough possibilities and then build on each other’s ideas.

Identify the best candidates. Once you have gathered a critical mass of ideas, methodically whittle them down to the most promising ones.

Here's an example of how one company used input from online brainstorming sessions from various teams throughout the company to create a better product. The creation of UBM's Future Cities product (www.ubmfuturecities.com) began with the recognition that many divisions of the company were producing events and publications addressing different aspects of urban planning and urban life and ideas for how it may be improved. The concept of "smart cities" spans everything from architecture and building management to electrical systems, transportation, government, healthcare, and Internet use.

As reported in the Community Roundtable case study (www.slideshare.net/rhappe/the-social-executive-ubm-case-study), the product "generated revenue for UBM within three months and leveraged 10 percent of UBM's workforce to contribute in a variety of ways. Not only would that type of initiative not have happened before the existence of The Hub because of its cross disciplinary complexity, it sparked another similar effort that started to generate revenue within one month. This project — Big Data Republic — showed value in both enabling initial innovation and transferring lessons from that innovation quickly to another team."

These products also arrived with a more modern and social look and feel than the websites of some of UBM’s older media properties, including InformationWeek, which started as a magazine and migrated to the web. The result is articles that are formatted as blog entries and that also invite active conversations with readers rather than passive consumption.

InformationWeek is migrating to a similar format, reflecting UBM’s strategy of becoming a community-driven business rather than a traditional print publisher.

Managing innovation

Internal online brainstorming efforts are a variation on crowdsourcing, a technique some consumer product firms have used to engage Internet users in coming up with new ideas. For example, Ben & Jerry’s has run contests inviting customers to come up with new ice cream flavors.

Applied internally, crowdsourcing for ideas is sometimes known by other names, such as “innovation management” or “ideation,” but the basic idea is still to generate a lot of ideas in search of a few gems. By soliciting ideas in a format that invites the participation of the community, we can have other participants comment on an idea and help improve it, so that the final result is better than anything any one person may have come up with.

Instead of inviting anyone on the Internet to submit ideas, an internal campaign can be limited to employees to allow for private discussion of proprietary issues. Or you may include some select group of external users, such as close business partners.

Because the participants in this internal crowd know more about the business, they can recommend improvements to processes outsiders would never know existed. This can be a great way of generating cost-savings ideas. For example, the Canadian airline WestJet saved more than $10 million in the first three years of an internal crowdsourcing initiative that challenged employees to submit cost-cutting ideas.

While the potential group of participants in an internal innovation campaign will not be quite as large as in a public crowdsourcing campaign, it can still be very big, particularly within a multinational corporation.

A few months after State Street Corp. launched its enterprise social network, it held an “innovation rally” that attracted 12,000 posts on ideas to improve the business. Of course, it couldn’t act on all those ideas, but that wasn’t the point — the exercise got employees from across the business engaged with coming up with ideas to improve the business. The financial services firm then established collaboration groups for each of the most promising ideas to refine the best of them into concrete business plans.

Focusing innovation

At the E2 Conference in Boston in 2013, in a keynote stage interview with James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and author of the book Digital Disruption (Amazon Publishing), my boss InformationWeek Editor-In-Chief Rob Preston asked about the potential for a “democracy of ideas” to produce the best innovation.

Launching a general call for innovation ideas “is not the way to go,” McQuivey said flatly. That’s true even if you use more specialized innovation management software more sophisticated than Jive ideas. “It’s not that the tools aren’t good, but they are more often misused,” he says. Ideation tools can be helpful when used in combination with a focused strategy, but if the approach is open ended, “I guarantee you that will fail,” he added.

The ideal is to challenge employees to come up with ideas targeted at a specific business problem, specifying as clearly as possible the goals and the criteria for choosing winning ideas. When the rules of the game are left unspecified, the employees whose ideas are not selected are more likely to be left with hurt feelings and suspicions of political intrigue, McQuivey said.

In a 2011 white paper produced for AIIM, an industry organization that promotes content management and collaboration technologies, Andrew McAfee made a similar point that most open innovation environments are not focused enough. “Most deployments allow participants to contribute ideas on any topic, instead of asking them to concentrate on specific opportunities and challenges facing the business. A main problem with unstructured environments is that people don’t know what constitutes a good or valuable contribution, or why their idea was not acted on,” he wrote.

Organizing ideas for improvement

To get real results with a social innovation initiative, you can’t stop by tallying up all the ideas submitted and declaring victory. Ideas only produce value if you can translate them into action in some way, by creating a product or implementing a money-saving new process.

The bulk of the ideas generated in a brainstorming session, online or off, will be terrible, impractical ideas. A small number will have potential, and one or two, if you’re lucky, will be dynamite.

You want to design a process for graduating the promising ideas to the next stage of consideration and leaving the duds behind. As McQuivey suggests, you want the criteria for selection to be as plain and obvious as possible, reinforcing the belief that the process is fair.

The process of graduating from one stage of consideration to the next can have several steps, making it possible to keep refining the pool of ideas. By making the process collaborative, we can keep the discussion going to add to and enhance ideas so the winners are even better at the end of the process than they were at the beginning.

Making a game of it

When trying to take advantage of mechanisms like voting on ideas that work best with mass participation, it helps to understand what motivates participation. In fact, if you want to succeed with this approach, you don’t want to be above manipulating your people’s desires and emotions. Idea management applications are some of the most aggressive and creative users of gamification techniques that aim to make software use as compelling as playing a game.

In addition to an employees’ natural motivation to see the company do better, you can tap in to their sense of competition, desire for recognition, or interest in winning a prize. The most valued prizes aren’t always monetary, or even big money payoffs where money is involved. A lunch with the CEO can be a prize. Or an Amazon.com gift card. At AT&T, the winners of one innovation contest win seed money from an internal venture fund and the chance to turn their ideas into reality — an ego boost and a career advancement all in one.

Rating the best ideas

The most obvious way of keeping score in this scheme is the ratings on ideas. Those who get the most votes will rise to the top. Maybe some will even be motivated to campaign for votes, asking friends to help them raise their ranking. Cheating? Not necessarily, given that someone with the political instincts to campaign for votes may also have the skills to get it implemented if it achieves the right recognition. You can also limit the potential for gaming the system by adding objective criteria for recognizing the winners in each round.

The idea authors are not the only people whose participation should be recognized. Everyone who votes or comments should also be earning points because they are the ones doing the work of organizing and improving the submissions.

In addition to rewarding participation, look for ways of recognizing higher-quality contributions, such as comments on an idea that wind up improving the idea itself. Offer recognition to the most discerning and helpful community members.

Some systems include the notion of an online status or reputation ranking, which can be made visible with the use of badges, which are icons connoting status displayed like a badge of honor next to an employee’s profile picture.

Showcasing leaders, recognizing winners

Organizing the innovation management process into multiple stages allows you to build suspense, which is a natural pattern for creating engagement in games and storytelling.

At the end of the process, you will announce your winning ideas, but don’t wait until then to create buzz about the results. Showcase your semi-finalists — recognizing both the ideas and the people who submitted them — and ask members of your community to take another look at the ideas as they have been refined through the process.

When you pick the ultimate winners, make an even bigger deal out of them. In addition to recognizing their contributions, you want to motivate others to compete next time.

Blogging and Sharing for Leaders

How much time should a CEO or other executive leader plan to spend personally posting and sharing on a collaboration network? A few minutes a day would be a terrific start, just enough to make her presence felt and check in on what’s going on. In smaller organizations, where the company leader is personally supervising projects at a detailed level, that person may need to be active on the network throughout the day.

According to Happe, the most popular format for executive participation is the blog post rather than the status post. Regardless of whether the network uses this terminology or makes a sharp distinction between post types, what this means is that executives tend to share their thoughts in the form of longer, somewhat more formal messages. These may be produced, at least some of the time, with some help from the company’s internal communications team. However, it helps if the posts read like informal communication.

For company-wide announcements, composing a social post doesn’t need to take any more time than an e-mail with the same content. Moreover, a blog entry puts more communication tools at a leader’s disposal, such as embedded video and other multimedia.

When UBM CEO David Levin has a significant announcement to make on his firm’s internal social network, The Hub, he publishes it as a post on his “Dear UBM” blog. However, he also participates in a more casual fashion with status updates and comments on what others have posted — often, very simple ones like, “Well done! thx David.” Other times, it will be a simple check-in style note, like “Enjoying a spring day in New York . . . at work.” On the day I took the screen shot shown in Figure 15-1, the folk singer Richie Havens had just passed away, and Levin posted a tribute, including a series of links to videos of Havens’s performances.

The frequency of his updates ranges from several times per week to once every other week. It’s not reasonable to expect a busy executive to be on the collaboration network constantly. For that matter, you don’t want any employee spending all day posting and reading posts.

For a social network to be productive as a business tool, it needs to be used to get work done — not allowed to become a time drain.

Figure 15-1: UBM CEO David Levin’s activity on The Hub.

Listening to the Social Network

Collaboration networks are designed to encourage conversation, so effective participation means listening to what others are saying as much as broadcasting your own messages. Marketers have come to value public social networks as ad hoc focus groups, providing insight into the opinions, sentiments, and behavior of consumers. Organizational leaders have a similar opportunity to gain insight into what employees are saying and doing and struggling with in the course of their work.

Despite the limits on time, many leaders find this valuable because they sometimes feel lonely at the top, surrounded by so many handlers that they feel they’re getting only a watered-down account of what’s going on in the company, Happe says.

Yet making time to scan through unfiltered conversations remains a challenge. “I don’t think CEOs and people at that level do a lot of browsing,” Happe says. More likely, they will have an executive assistant scan the activity stream and point out things that the boss ought to be aware of or comment on.

Because a discussion can grind to a halt or lose its spontaneity if the CEO jumps in to the middle of it, the more natural mode of online conversation for a company leader tends to revolve around comments on his own blog.

Still, when using a collaboration network, leaders can get the opinions of many more people, including those who are closer to front-line operations. “They get to scale themselves,” Happe says. “Executives spend their entire days in meetings. Why? Because they want to talk to as many people as possible.”

Understanding the Implications of Transparency

Transparency is generally a positive word in the language of management consultants and social business advocates. To be transparent, a business must strive to be more open and honest with its customers and employees. The enlightened leader is supposed to proclaim commitment to transparency and also welcome constructive criticism.

That’s the theory. In organizations that buy in to the theory, social collaboration may be introduced at least partly as a means to achieve greater transparency. Or the implementation of social collaboration may be blocked specifically because some leaders fear it will introduce more transparency than they’re willing to tolerate.

Executives are not the only ones skeptical of the argument for transparency. A June 2012 report by Jessica Stillman on the GigaOM blog was titled, “Employees skeptical of execs touting enterprise social, survey finds.” Drawing on research by Deloitte, she writes:

Among the primary selling points of enterprise social tools is their ability to prick the executive bubble and allow business leaders to get at the perhaps less than beautiful truth about what’s actually going on at lower levels of their organizations. By facilitating information sharing across organizational divides and hierarchical levels, this argument goes, social tools will help businesses forge a more cohesive and transparent culture.

It’s an argument to which employees apparently respond: Oh please! According to a surprising new survey from Deloitte, many executives have bought the party line on the effects of enterprise social media far more than frontline employees, who largely view social as more empty rhetoric out of the C-suite.

In other words, employees believe their leaders are willing to talk about transparency but not necessarily to follow through on the promise.

Just don’t use the rhetoric of full transparency if you’re not really committed to it. Make the limits clear. Set the acceptable norms of behavior through policy and by modeling appropriate uses of the social platform. I tell you more about how to approach those tasks later in the chapter.

What’s most important here is that leaders and employees alike understand the ground rules. Adopting social collaboration implies acceptance of a degree of transparency because the technology enables open discussion and commenting. If an employee gets fired, for instance, for sharing a critique of company strategy on the social network, no one in the organization will ever believe that frank and open discussion is welcome.

On the other hand, employing the social technology doesn’t necessarily mean the organization will tolerate open dissent or disrespect toward its leaders. There is no rule saying that the CEO of a social business must walk around with a Kick Me sign on his back. The collaboration network need not turn into a bottomless comment box for employees to register complaints.

Encouraging Connections Across the Organization

One of the most common reasons for a CEO to support social collaboration is to form one cohesive organization from a loose collection of business units.

Simply implementing social collaboration software won’t make this happen, at least not to its maximum potential. A memo or blog post from the CEO stating the goal of unifying the company through collaboration is a good start for setting direction, but this sort of message needs reinforced over time. At a large company, most of the work of forming, coaching, and aligning cross-functional groups will necessarily be delegated to community managers.

However, the CEO can set an example by bringing together people from different parts of the company to accomplish common goals, encouraging them to use the collaboration network in their planning. When those efforts are successful, celebrating the success of the collaborators can be a good way of showcasing the potential of the system. The point being, the people should always get more credit than the technology.

For example, UBM CEO David Levin wanted to see more collaboration between his event management and publishing groups and also between different locations. (The company is headquartered in London, but also has operations in San Francisco, New York, and around the world.)

By actively using the social collaboration network himself (as described above), he encouraged its use as a unifying force for the organization.

Former SuperValu CEO Craig Herkert endorsed Yammer for social collaboration because the company had grown through acquisitions and many of its other computer systems were fragmented. The collaboration network supported the formation of groups for store managers with common interests, such as operations in college towns or seashore locations, even though those managers were attached to different store brands and separate org charts.

When the multidivisional, multidisciplinary magic happens, the result can be new products, new efficiency, a greater sense of organizational unity and purpose — all sorts of wonderful things.

A CEO whose organization is taking advantage of social technologies in other ways — such as marketing, market research, and customer service — should consider the role that social collaboration plays in the broader picture of social business. After all, social business is a vision (and a hot marketing term for many vendors) of the unification of all sorts of social network interactions, both internal and external.

For example, when a customer complaint or question comes in through a company’s Facebook page, it ought to be simple to hand off that issue through the company collaboration network. Let me rephrase that. It ought to be simple, but it typically isn’t. If you take the time to identify these types of needs before implementing the social collaboration solution and work with your chief technology officer to find a solution that fits those needs, your social collaboration tool will be much more effective.

Today, systems for customer engagement outside the company tend to be managed with different technologies and by different people than the systems for collaboration inside the company. The evangelists of social business argue that ought to change — and that it eventually will.

Dion Hinchcliffe, a business strategist and enterprise architect for the Dachis Group (who has written for me at InformationWeek), believes that the few businesses who have put all the pieces together are indeed more productive. They are quicker to respond to opportunities and threats and better able to organize cross-functional activities. However, most social business initiatives operate at the departmental level, leading to “social silos of different tools, policies, and staff,” he says. This fragmentation is partly the result of an immature software market and new business best practices that are still being defined. This leads organizations to place a variety of bets, rather than staking out an all-encompassing strategy.

Because of that, many companies wind up with separate productivity tools that help salespeople collaborate around sales, marketing people collaborate on campaigns, and customer service people collaborate around service and support, without making it easy for these groups to collaborate with each other. Often, insisting on a single-vendor solution that meets the requirements of all those groups isn’t practical, and integration of the various systems may prove elusive.

As a company leader, you can encourage better organizational alignment between these groups, regardless of whether the technologies are fully integrated. One way to do it may be with cross-functional initiatives, coordinated through the company-wide collaboration platform and instigated by the CEO.