Engagement is the new currency for influence

A new mindset modeled on open leadership

Executive communications

This article was originally written on behalf of Colliers International’s president and CEO, Doug Frye. It appeared in the Spring 2013 edition of Knowledge Leader magazine.

The context for leadership is changing.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. While there, I noticed that leaders were not simply the people who controlled the world’s largest companies or countries. The emerging leaders in Davos—and indeed, in the world—are defined by what they invent, imagine and affect.

They’re idea people.

But it’s not enough just to have good ideas, or just to share them. What makes the world’s emerging leaders most dynamic and powerful is their ability to engage with their followers and other influencers to create meaningful change.

Engagement is swiftly emerging as the world’s currency. Consider the power of social networking and how it shapes our attitudes and actions. People use social media before they make buying decisions for products and services. And they’re not just researching restaurants and gadgets—71 percent of B2B buying decisions start with online research, and a large portion of that is social.

Social technologies also cannot be dismissed as playtime for the younger generation, as social tools are increasingly important to the influence of brands, politicians and individuals.

The Pew Research Center’s study on social networking use revealed that half of people ages 50 to 64 are engaged in social media, as well as nearly three-quarters of people ages 30 to 49. With this in mind, leaders can capitalize on the potential for engagement through social technology.

Recently, Colliers International hosted a forum on open leadership aimed at marketing leaders from a variety of industries. We took a closer look at how social technology is changing what it means to be a leader, and driving changes in business.

It’s clear there’s a shift toward a greater culture of sharing, as individuals become more open and public about their lives. There’s also a shift toward feedback, as users routinely rate experiences, products and places.

This combination of openness and feedback has the ability to dramatically enhance a leader’s capabilities, and the first of these is listening. For example, leaders can use social tools to listen to their employees on platforms including Yammer and Glassdoor, and they can track industry conversations, client mentions and competitors on Twitter.

But there are also new demands on how leaders behave: They are naturally expected to be more open with their lives, more forthcoming with plans (even those in progress) and more open to hearing feedback.

Most importantly, the audience demands that leaders respond—a question or negative comment launched into cyberspace by a follower demands an answer, and many brands have fallen down in their failure to respond quickly, respond honestly or respond at all. With this in mind, I wanted to share some of the new rules of open leadership from Charlene Li’s book Open Leadership, which we discussed at the Marketing Leadership Roundtable:

• Respect that your customers and employees have power

• Share constantly to build trust

• Nurture curiosity and humility

• Hold openness accountable

• Forgive failure

For me, the guiding principle is to trust our people to use their best judgment at all times. My guess is you already have plenty of legal and human resources policies governing privileged information and codes of conduct, and you won’t need many more. Some companies cut off social channels by blocking them from work computers, but I don’t think that solves a concern for productivity (it typically just migrates non-work use of social channels to employees’ mobile devices).

A more effective way to create structure for open communication and social technology is to create guardrails rather than directives, and to define expectations on how employees may engage with clients, leaders and each other.

We see a business case for promoting—not hindering—social technology use at Colliers. Colliers’ professionals routinely use LinkedIn both for prospecting and for keeping in touch with our clients. Many are on Twitter (see public lists maintained by @ColliersIntl for a directory of our people and offices) and use that to effectively share news and stay abreast of new information within their areas of specialization.

We use internal social tools, including our Microsoft SharePoint-based intranet, Colliers Hub (which includes collaborative team sites), Yammer and Microsoft’s Lync technology which indicates presence and enables chat, desktop sharing, videoconferencing and more. We have also developed external collaboration sites that are customized per client.

There’s a business case for all this openness:

McKinsey Global Institute estimated that more than $1 trillion (with a T) of added value could be unlocked through social technology, with a 20 percent to 25 percent increase in employee knowledge and productivity. Yet, only 3 percent of companies currently derive substantial benefits from using social technology across all stakeholder groups.

When will the other 97 percent get on board? It’s a big opportunity, and to capture that value, it’s up to leaders to guide the way.