This video interview from the Washington Post is a nice look into the head of CISCO Systems CEO John Chambers, who, despite his professed love of command-and-control leadership structures, has begun to transform CISCO’s structure to one based on social media-enabled collaboration and teamwork.  I’d like to point out a few important points Chambers made, and why these are important points for any organization considering moving to any sort of decentralized practice, especially those considering the use of social media as part of the move.

Social Modeling

“I think one of the things that is becoming more important as a leader is how do you communicate and collaborate, both yourself and how do you teach your teams to do it.”

“i’ve put [into employee performance measurements] collaboration and teamwork and how you work across functions and how you use the new technologies to do it.”

“the ability to take these technologies and move from command and control which i love.. to collaboration and teamwork, which i think is the future of  leadership in this country and around the world.. requires developing your leaders to do that, it requires changing your rewards system, it requires educating your employee family why this is important in transitions, and instead of doing one or two key objectives per year, during a downturn we’ll do 28 this year. “

Albert Bandura did a lot of great research in the 60’s and 70’s on theories of Social Modeling (for a great summary of the concepts, check out  http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/bandura.html) , which identified some of the important ways that people learn and adopt new behaviors by watching others perform those behaviors.  While many leaders try to delegate social behaviors like collaboration and teamwork to their employees, or make the use of social media the job of the marketing and communications department, by his account Chambers has led through example by becoming more collaborative in his own behavior.  In another, more detailed talk on the topic, Chambers even admits to his initial dislike for blogging, which he overcame by using video.  He also has reportedly shifted higher-level decision making from an executive team of 10 to a team of 500.  By doing these things, Chambers has maximized the likelihood of his employees reproducing the behavior in their own ways by providing three of the key things Bandura said contributed to behavioral change through observing a “model.”

1. Attention – Chambers is a pretty colorful guy.  Without having seen his internal videos, i can imagine that his new video blogging behavior is easy to remember, as is the fact that the decision-making process is de-centralized.
2. Making the Behavior Easier to Reproduce – People have to be able to do the behavior before they can do it.  Chambers suggests that leaders teach their teams skills necessary to reproduce these new behaviors.
3. Tieing the New Behavior to Reward – Making teamwork and collaboration through new technologies a part of the employee reward structure ensures that employees have some extrinsic motivation to adopt the new behavior.

Un-Natural Selection

“by creating a culture that thrives on change, that makes us a little uncomfortable and might make us sweat a little bit: that’s what leadership is all about.”

“..instead of doing one or two key objectives per year, during a downturn we’ll do 28 this year. “

Whenever possible, experimentation is important for an organization which is trying to adapt to a changing environment.  Traditionally, the direction of this adaptation would be identified by researchers and product developers (for adaptation to external environment) or by human resources, operations, etc (for internal environment) and decided on by the top leadership.  In such a model, having too many simultaneous objectives would likely swamp the organization.  What Chambers is suggesting here is a much more messy, “natural selection” or “portfolio of experiments” approach, where the company allows for non-C level people to create and run with objectives, knowing that some of them will succeed and some of them might fail.  This is an inherently “messy” and less-predictable approach.  Many systems in nature, business, and society actually end up more robust and resilient, and adaptive with some “messiness” as part of their operations.  Cisco is using social media (what he calls “networked technologies” as a way for their company to more quickly fuel, adapt and learn from this “messiness.”

Learning and Relationships

“yes, and i think [my losing control] that’s good.  first, it makes your leaders better, second it makes it a more enjoyable place to work.. and i know it’s old-fashioned, but we’re like a family.  To the best of my ability i know the serious illness of every employee, their spouse or their children.”

By de-centralizing power, more people have more reasons to develop their own leadership skills.  They also have a greater chance to make increased contributions to the organization beyond their core job function.

The common misconception of social media is that it increases isolation.  A growing amount of research is showing that this is not true – and that, in fact people often use technology to augment the face-to-face relationships they already have.  Social media tools can allow a relatively large group of people to augment their awareness of each other without having to always meet in-person.  By using Twitter for 15 minutes throughout an average day, for example,  i keep up with the thoughts, recommendations, academic and commercial work, and important life events of about 150 of my academic colleagues.  Due to the scattered schedules of these people, who work in various locations and who travel quite a bit, the level of community awareness we maintain and the number of people who are involved could never be maintained via face-t0-face communications or via other technologies like e-mail.