I was struck by something I read yesterday. In response to an announcement by the management of the Toronto Star newspaper that it would be outsourcing editing jobs, one of the Star editors took the text of the announcement and marked it up as if it were a story being edited. At the top of the edited version of the announcement, there is the phrase “No one else has experience, knowledge and investment in Star’s excellence to maintain the brand,” followed by a thorough demonstration of how badly the announcement was written, by the number of corrections and criticisms from the anonymous editor. It was an eloquent demonstration of the skill-set that management feels could merely be shipped out to the lowest bidder.
It seems to be more and more the case that organizations are managed not by those who gained experience in a particular industry or activity by starting with a hands-on role and working their way up, but rather by professional managers with freshly minted MBA’s, but no expert knowledge of the activities performed by those they manage. Without the hands-on experience, these executives lack an intrinsic understanding of the skill-sets of their employees, and how these skill-sets provide the value proposition for the business or organization.
As a result, employees are commodified and seen as interchangeable widgets, to be shuffled around or shuffled out of the organizational chart in never ending games of Executive Checkers. Employees have ceased to be human, and are merely “headcount”, whose worth to the organization is reduced to a bullet point in the latest Management-By-PowerPoint exercise.
So how does this relate to social media? If we look at the philosophical underpinnings of social media, we see the importance of interacting with people as humans. Humanity is at the core of social media, and how can an organization claim to “get it” if it believes social media is an outbound/external activity only, indeed in many cases just another activity that can be outsourced to save a few dollars? If the ethos of social media does not permeate an organization from top to bottom, with employees valued as human beings, bi-directional communication at all levels, and the constant use of social media technologies to fully leverage the skill-sets and creativity of employees, what is the brand message that is being promoted?
If social media tools are just used as wallpaper, where is the humanity and the transparency that people will demand when they interact with the organization? Organizations who feel they can get away with this disconnect will be caught out, and called out.
The cry will go out “The CEO has no clothes!”
John, I see this all the time! It’s funny because you can’t pick up a business book these days that doesn’t have some sort of teamwork aspect when in real life there are no teams. If the team exists it is at the department level and the high rise silo’d execs often have no clue of the culture or inner workings of that team. They are often playing chess without a ckue as to what the goal is being reactionary rather than proactive.
Social media is the thorn in the side of this enterprise wide systematic failure. We’ll see if social ideals can make inroads into what has always been a very self-serviving segment.
On the other hand, I truly believe in most situations the execs in companies of any size have gotten there for a reason and are often times deserving of their position. I am seeing a trend of new business owners and emerging companies that better understand the new culture. Check out this article by Jason Fried of 37 Signals: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-fried-of-37signals.html
It really boils down to human or inhumane. If companies continue to treat vendors, employees, and customers like numbers… they will die.