Creating Change – Digital is Different in the Detail

Change management is about helping people to adopt new behaviors and ways of acting, and the basic tenets seem to hold up under a storm of different circumstances.  John Kotter defined the 8 steps to change management back in the 1990s in his now classic book, Leading Change.  Those strategic steps apply broadly to most change situations.

But how do you implement that change management strategy when you are trying to move your organization to become a social business?  What do you have to keep in mind?  What is critical that was only of interest before?  Do you need to execute differently?

As social media moves from a collection of diverse and separate initiatives to more formalized, broader engagement, and ultimately to being fully integrated and aligned with the strategy (see The 3 Stages to Becoming a Social Media Organization, http://goo/gl/fb/6flCv), distinct social media enablers become increasingly important.  Four factors in particular demand new execution practices:

v Social media is real-time and all-the-time

The immediacy of social media is exciting and vibrant and down-right scary.  The change management plan needs to take those considerations into account.  How?

§  Rapid risk mitigation and damage control plans

You cannot predict every possible negative situation that might arise.  But you can define and teach guidelines for managing those situations.  Ensure that a clear social media policy is in place and well understood.  Create scenarios and practice!  Practice should focus on guidelines, not scripts, so that employees can adhere to the advice of Lieutenant Colonel Greg Reeder of the U.S. Marines, “In the absence of guidance: do the right thing.”  (Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Reeder was talking about social media! See http://goo.gl/fb/isThH)

§  Engage legal and IT on the core change management team

Social media is fluid and does not allow time for legal review of all communications.  Have legal on the core team so that employees internalize their perspectives and so that the attorneys understand the range of possible issues.  Involve IT so that the technology can be tweaked for simplicity.  Technology supports; it does not lead.

§  Plan for 24/7

Not every social media implementation needs to be a 24/7 operation, but plan how you will handle comments or problems that might arise out-of-work hours.  Will you use volunteers to cover some additional hours?  Will you follow-the-sun for staffing?  Will your site(s) specify the hours you monitor and respond?  Do you need extra staff at either end of your day?  Who is “on call” for emergencies?

v It’s personal

Social media draws in the employee on a personal basis with a name and face, a personality and a professional reputation at stake.  It also humanizes the organization.  So “personal” has two aspects that must be balanced.

§  Build the team slowly and practice together to create a common culture.  As an organization, you want only one personality.

§  Let the employees with the strongest social media skills mentor others, and base mentoring relationships not on hierarchy but on social media savvy.  Mentoring helps both to grow culture and to reward skill and performance.

§  Allow employees to use their own voices.  They have a common corporate identity, but individuality should still shine through.  Let them share a bit of themselves on-line.

§  Encourage and enable employees to become internal ambassadors for the social media activities.  

v Social media smashes silos

Once your social media strategy expands beyond discrete, limited trials, the activities will have impact across functional and business units; they will seep into new projects unasked; they will rattle independent fiefdoms.  Actively embrace integration.

§  Involve brand managers in the change management core team, even if the only implementation is for customer service.  How the customer service is handled, the words used, the policies enacted, and the customer engagement created will all affect the brand. 

§  Seed other projects with employees engaged in social media.  Bring a social media perspective to non-social media specific projects.  This type of engagement will help to create broader organizational change more quickly.

v Social media is both the change and the process for the change

§  Use social media to communicate

Use forums, videocasts, podcasts, microblogs, blogs to share widely the successes and learnings of the social media initiatives.  And don’t limit the communication to statistics and status updates; demonstrate the value of social media by sharing stories and personal accounts.

§  Make social media indispensible

Embed the use of social media into the day-to-day processes and communication.  Solicit ideas and launch initiatives on internal discussion forums; make significant announcements on a blog; provide real-time announcements (closing early due to weather!) on an internal Twitter or Yammer site.  Make sure that all levels of management engage over the new tools. 

The foundation of change management is constant.  It’s about helping people to adopt new behaviors.  The strategies that underlie change management are well established, tested and proven.  But when an organization is evolving to a social culture, the tactical steps you use to make sure the changes stick need to change.  I would love to hear what has worked for you!

Herding Cats and Other New Norms

If you are a 21^st century-born organizations, you probably don’t need a social media strategy.  Social media is an integral element of your overall strategy; the two do not have separate lives.

But what about more mature organizations?  A non-profit celebrating its 125^th anniversary this year; a 75-year old global manufacturer; a 110-year old financial services institution with hundreds of billions in assets and ranked among the safest in the world?  What does a social media strategy mean to these organizations?  Why – and how – should they change a successful business model?

Social media is not a discontinuous technology change that demands attention and threatens the “old way” with a single blow.  It’s hard to define.  (Use the words “social media,” and many companies think only Facebook and Twitter.)  It is amorphous.  More than anything, social media reflects social change, not technology change. 

Over time, successful businesses do need to adapt to social change – in the way they operate both internally and externally.   Social media and social networking have evolved to the point that they are changing people’s expectations about how to interact -  person-to-person,  individual-to-business, and business-to-business.  Because, to state the obvious, “businesses” are just amalgamations of people with a common objective.  Once changes in personal interactions take hold, those changes leak into business interactions.

What are the big changes requiring significant shifts in business models?

·        Knowledge is a commodity. Remember when knowledge = power?  Knowledge is not only now available, it is freely shared. 

·        The quantity of available data has exploded beyond our capacity to process it.  Data and automated analyses are like an active volcano, constantly spewing out.  The lone hero with the data who could run statistical programs has a lot of competition, competition that is trumpeting different data and different statistical programs.

·        Engagement is not just the word of the day; individuals want a say; they want to be heard; they increasingly demand to be respected and empowered.

These fundamental changes demand shifts in what is valued in the workplace and how companies function.  Continued success in this century requires that organizations evolve to new norms.

·        The visionary composer is one of the most valuable employees.  The individual who can take all of the data and analyses and create a harmonious future vision, who understands how to integrate all of the information, is more valuable than the expert. 

·        Hierarchies are more porous; command and control is dead.  Corporate hierarchies will not disappear, but the leaders need to be the first among equals, one of the team.  Excellent corporate leaders will manage not demand.

·        The ability to herd cats, not sheep, will drive results.  Increasingly, employees want to control their own time and to have an impact.  Like cats, each wants to be recognized as an individual participating in a shared culture.

Organizations need to build these new norms into their processes.  How they recruit, train and review employees, for instance, needs to change.  The old performance metrics might no longer measure what really matters. 

What new metrics have you used to adapt to social changes?

The 3 Stages to Becoming a Social Media Enabled Organization

When social media “works”, it changes how an organization is governed, how people work together, how employees approach their jobs.  How do organizations achieve the necessary change?  How do they evolve? 

Most organizations already have functioning, and often successful, business models when they begin to consider social media.  Employees have roles and responsibilities that are defined and on which they are measured.  How do “old-line” companies shift their operating style?  Creating the new environment takes time and intent.

I have found that most organizations go through 3 stages of transition, evolving from their established cultures and structures to more open, engaged, “social media” organizations over time.  Companies start with limited experiments (like single seeds in pots), expand to larger and more formalized efforts (plots with rows and cultivation plans) to engaging a whole plantation (end-to-end enterprise changes).

·        Pots – This is the first stage, when organizations test and learn, experimenting with diverse and separate initiatives.  Everything is contained in a separate pot.  Investment requirements are low.  The focus is on distinct activities – a Facebook page, a live chat on-line support function, a blog…  What seems to fit best with the organization?  What drives results? 

·        Plots – At this stage, the new activities that individually fit best begin to be accepted, and management begins to include them in broader planning.  Formalized structures and processes, along with increased investment, begin to take hold.  Culture change becomes more deliberate through new hires, employee training, and shifts in roles and responsibilities. Performance measurement begins to include “social media” factors such as buzz and the impact of ambassadors. 

·        Plantations –Social media activities and thinking are integrated into the core business and aligned with the strategy; the organization has reinvented itself without losing the essentials of its business.  Social and digital media are no longer distinct from the overall strategy.  The entire plantation has evolved to a new way of operating.

Companies can and do change.   Test and Learn.  Formalize and Change.  Integrate and Reinvent.