More Reasons to Hang Up and Lead!
In the May/June issue of Wildfire, I encouraged would-be leaders to "hang up and lead" because our personal communication gadgets don't seem to be contributing to leadership and teamwork. These inherently interpersonal activities are deeply rooted in trusting relationships and persuasively influencing people. Without doubt, trust and influence evolve from collaboration, inter-action and shared experiences between people. Relationships develop when people get to know one another, spend time together, trust one another, prove trustworthy and gain respect for each other. This takes time, focused attention and interaction on a personal level.
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An organization's leadership can benefit from our communications technology. After all, e-mail, voice mail, cell phones, Twitter updates — "tweets" — and posts at social-networking sites can help busy people stay in touch. However, they are beginning to look more and more like obstacles along the path to good leadership.
Previously, I disparaged three trends that I had observed: people becoming slaves to their technology, dependence being bred in organizations and communication technology degrading our situational awareness. How we communicate affects our leadership, and in today's workplace, the challenge remains to stay connected without hiding behind our personal communication technology when we really should be interacting with each other on a more personal level. Now comes new evidence that we should hang up and lead.
According to a recent article by Sharon Jayson in USA Today, a poll of college students conducted by the organization YPulse found that social networking makes them more self-absorbed. In fact, more than half of the poll respondents said their peers used social-networking sites to promote themselves, to exhibit narcissism or to seek attention. Fully two-thirds of the students polled consider the members of their generation more self-promoting, narcissistic, over-confident and likely to seek attention when compared to others.
When it comes to leadership, we talk about all kinds of traits, characteristics and behaviors that people find desirable in their leaders. I have read tens of thousands of pages of leadership literature and have talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of people about leadership and what people expect from their leaders. Not once have I read or heard someone say, "I just wish my leader were more into himself." How about, "If only we could find someone more self-absorbed" or "We just wish she would come around less and send us more e-mail"?
Leadership is personal. It is about character, credibility, interpersonal trust and active dialogue. The authentic leaders I know, those people who can really move an organization and its people, understand that they succeed by focusing on their relationships and by interacting with people in ways that matter. Others are just too busy trying to look like the leader to be a leader, all wired-up and ready for road-warrior battle.
In a related USA Today article, Jon Schwartz cited a new study by Pear Analytics that characterized 40% of tweets on Twitter as "pointless babble" and only 9% as "moderately interesting." More importantly, Schwartz also cited a recent survey conducted by Brightkite and GfK Technology in which 87% of adults surveyed said they prefer to deal directly with other people rather than via computer or smartphone.
Teamwork experts know that people in work teams rely on visual, verbal and non-verbal communication cues to understand each other's intentions. Those experts view opportunities for people to interact with one another using those cues as sources of trust-based relationships between organizational members. It's pretty clear that relationship-building occurs best in a face-to-face context and that frequent and meaningful interaction allows a deeper kind of relationship to develop than do text messages or phone calls.
People pick up on the signals that would-be leaders send, and those signals form lasting impressions. When the signals say, "I don't have time for face-to-face interaction with you," leadership suffers. Leadership represents a reciprocal relationship, a partnership of sorts between people who choose to lead and people who choose to follow. People decide to follow another person in part because would-be leaders treat them with respect, take interest in them as people when needed and give them their undivided attention.
Nothing in my experience suggests that people will feel this way if you give them less than the courtesy of your undivided attention, interrupt a conversation with them to take a call or check a message, text while talking with them, e-mail when you could have called, or call when you could have sat down next to them. Nothing says "You're important to me" like a 140-character tweet, especially if it's about you!
In modern organizations, leadership and teamwork require essentially interpersonal activities made up of trusting relationships and persuasive influence. People develop healthy leadership relationships and can influence one another positively when they get to know one another, spend time together and develop trust and respect for one another.
Leadership is personal. Unfortunately, too much of our communication technology makes our communication not only impersonal but somewhat anti-social — just the opposite of what we want. Apparently, even heavy social-networkers believe that social networking leads to narcissistic behavior. Even communication technology companies think too many messages are nothing more than useless prattle. People are starting to resent those self-promoting and vain messages that have become so common. And finally, people would rather talk to you face-to-face than get your text message — more reasons to hang up and lead!
Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in leadership studies at Fort Hays State University. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire organizations. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. focused on organizational leadership. He can be reached at info@guidancegroup.org.
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