Anne McCrossan (Visceral Business) on business transformation: part 3
This post forms part of a series of guest articles by experts in different fields around business and social media.
Anne McCrossan, founder of Visceral Business, is a branding and change management consultant with a dizzying track record and client list. After reading her recent article on ‘Recalibrating Organizations’, I interviewed her with the goal of drawing out some of her ideas around change and corporate leadership for a SOMESSO guest article.
The resulting hour-long conversation is published here as a 3-part series. Part 1 examined how companies need to move from pushing a message to galvanizing people around an idea; part 2 explored in more detail why companies need real values. This final part looks in more detail at how organizations structured around values and relationships work in practice.
Scaling whole-company community outreach
If an organization’s overriding purpose and values are clear, then you will see people self-selecting as potential community leaders. These individuals will not necessarily be your employees: you must seek out and cultivate those that have the most committed affinity with your brand – these are the most important members of your community. This has implications for your approach to recruitment: as people move closer to your organization, you can start thinking about relationships that should be funded because they’re valuable – employing the people who are already committed. In this way you will build business around affinity as opposed to structure. And, like cell division, this kind of community building is infinitely scalable.
Starting with long-term strategy
Any organization starting out on this road needs to consider how it positions itself. A lot of businesses address the new social space by keeping all the business management fundamentals the same, and simply attempting to port their existing activities into the social space. They are saying: ‘This is what we do, now how can we do this in the social space?’. But in effect, they’re creating ‘socialwash’: an unwieldy, expensive and inauthentic overlay on business as usual. It becomes another overhead, like the expensive marketing of unremarkable products.
But even utility companies, packaged goods companies, companies that are transaction-based, need people to believe in them. Organizations must rethink their strategic objectives, and how these are articulated in the corporate vision, within the context of the whole operating ecosystem.
Far better to ask: ‘What are we about in a social context? Not as a factory but as a movement? Not just as an institution but as a network?’ Once organizations reframe corporate strategy from this perspective, the result is a whole series of implementable, cascading initiatives, whether around marketing, HR, leadership training or new ways of doing things. These pour into a business, renew its capabilities, and galvanize people. A lot of slack can be eliminated.
Real-time connectivity and diagnostics
Social technology can provide an excellent diagnostic for how and where businesses are getting stuck. And often they’re stuck because management culture is pushing action out from the centre without the buy-in required to sustain that policy, or because – pursuing the polar opposite of engagement – organizations are choosing to outsource activities that should be a core part of the organization’s own conscious intelligence.
Community management often suffers from this. When I see companies outsourcing community management, or hiving it off into a sub-section of marketing, not only are they failing to empower their community voice to help them understand what really matters, they are also missing opportunities to accelerate market feedback and R&D – in short, to make the organization the responsive body that its customers want. When you don’t have your people talking to an audience, the level of intelligence and ability to respond will continue to be led from an elite centre – the management – and thus remain crippled, expensive and unresponsive.
But if you get it right, social technology can free up your organization. With the connectivity enabled by the web, we can see how well we’re organizing in real time, and contribution and value can be measured easily when people work digitally.
Of course face-time and offline relationships will always remain vital, but digital activity can help reveal who is really contributing to a company, whether through micro-blogging, email, wikis, or other collaboration tools, and so we can work together with fewer top-down and intrusive management layers and processes in order to build collaboration, leaving organizations with more time to work on relationships.
Focus on tasks, not roles
One symptom of conventional management short-sightedness is the common focus on, and confusion of, roles and tasks. For example, a luxury travel group that represents 480 member hotels wants to build a strong online digital presence and communities of interest between itself, its members and their audiences. To achieve this they are creating a range of separate mid-management roles within their organization – one role to manage social networks, one role to mange the online customer experience and one role to manage their websites. And the consequence is not excellent delivery of these elements of community, but territorial conflict between the three managers in question, while the community itself still has little voice.
This focus on roles rather than tasks creates fragmentation, a culture of people jockeying for position rather than thinking creatively about the contribution they can make, quarrelling over who owns the customer, creating internal conflict rather than a holistic outreach capability and all this has to be managed. Instead, what they should be asking is, ‘We have a great opportunity, who is going to help?
Those managers who fear that in giving their communities a voice they will lose control of activity and wreak havoc with their brand need not fear – as long as the values are clear, and the focus is on tasks, not roles. Wholefoods CEO John Mackey talks about ‘a shared fate’. I like that phrase. Organizations that frame corporate achievement in social as well as commercial terms create a feeling of belonging, which creates both social and business benefits.
When there is a task to achieve – a passion, a cause, great questions to answer, interesting challenges to solve and a common sense of direction – it’s much easier to self-organize. Linear command and control gives way to scalar dynamics, to a rhizomatic culture that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.
“Lead, follow or get out of the way”.
This means moving from a competitive working style to a collaborative one that focuses on win/win. But the ‘shared fate’ helps here: when people work together to create the best idea beyond themselves, rather than getting bogged down with creation by committee or personal advancement, then rapid progress can easily be made.
How we credit someone for their contribution is part of this equation. We reaffirm the value of association when we profit with rather than from others, by helping people to build their own reputation. The core principle becomes contribution, not ownership. And if it transpires that some people really don’t like what you’re doing, then there are always other cultures and communities that can welcome them.
An emerging culture
A huge influx of new people is migrating into the emerging social space. It is comparable to the rise of the industrial middle classes about 200 years ago, which drove dramatic changes in codes of behaviour, as people learned to manage new social contexts in a civilized fashion. Similarly, we’re beginning to understand that social technology requires us to maintain certain standards in how we treat one another: collaboration, relationships, transparency, values, reciprocity and win/win situations. Obviously there is potential for chaos, but I believe that this emerging culture has the potential to lift us out of the deadening business structures of the 20th century towards something human, humanizing and sustainable for the future.
Anne McCrossan is the founder of Visceral Business, a marketing and organizational change consultancy that specializes in helping organizations create social leverage through strategic change initiatives, brand management, leadership training, and social marketing capabilities. (See Anne speaking at the SOMESSO London 09 roundtable discussion here). For more information please go to www.visceralbusiness.com.