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Want A Stronger Work Ethic? Learn How To Raise Informal Leaders

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When informal leaders emerge out of the network of enterprise collaboration, do they end up with the same dilemmas of juggling their attention as formal leaders? If you become a recognized leader because of your participation in your enterprise social or collaboration, it is likely you will have more and more people coming to ask for your input or your help. This is great for working relationships, mentoring, or even finding new opportunities, but in the end would you have to find better ways to manage your time and attention? So, in this case, what is the differentiator and benefit of networked organizations and wirearchies over traditional organizations?

Does the network view of enterprise collaboration fall into this same trap as in hierarchical organizations? If this is the case, then this particular aspect isn’t really solved by changing your current or future organizational structure. So what benefits can we receive from building a networked organization?

In my recent post, Both Holacracy and Hierarchy need Agreements, I described how two very different, almost opposite models for organizational structures, hierarchies and holarchies have a common underlying idea. As Jon Husband described: “Our structure is in our agreements.” This underlying idea of agreements on work to be done with each other, is one common—I would say an atomic unit—aspect in how companies are designed.

Social obligationsour obligations towards each other in a network of people such as at work—may be another common aspect. We grow up learning the concept on a personal life basis, but in the workplace, the context is different. In some organizations (hierarchy or not), the obligations are forced or expected either by reporting chain, or by culture. Referring to Alan Fiske’s study of the four forms of sociality, these two expected obligations map to Authority Ranking, and Equality Matching, respectively.

This is one particular point raised in the Work Hackers Salon this week at San Mateo, CA , a small power group discussion on the future of work, talent and business management. The participants included Ayelet Baron (a lead in the Work Hacking and CreatingIs community, and for Chief strategist for a Fortune 100 firm), Chris Heuer (CEO, Alynd), Charlene Li (Founding Partner at analyst firm, Altimeter Group), Philippe Mora (Managing Director, Hughes Creative), Bill Sanders (COO, Alynd), Catherine Shinners (President, Merced Group), Jim Ware (Partner, The FutureWork Forum), Todd Wilms (Head of Social Business Strategy at SAP , and Forbes contributor), Carrie Basham-Young (TalkSocialToMe, and formerly of VMware Socialcast), and myself.  [Disclosure: Chris Heuer and Bill Sanders are my business partners]

Consider the scenarios that arise from expertise location, a commonly referenced capability of social business. Enterprise social tools can help employees discover others with particular areas of skills or expertise across their organization. You can feed the system information on areas of expertise as well as take a dynamic social approach and let people identify themselves or others with specific skills. These systems have some risk of accuracy but all in all there is some level of definition of who has expertise in various areas that can be leveraged by others in the organization.

Several of the participants at the Work Hackers Salon chimed in on this issue. "When you are part of a team, people feel psychologically part of a team, so they feel some sense of obligation to each other," says Jim Ware of The FutureWork Forum. "I think we tend to [be more responsive] to people that we feel more obligated to, as opposed to getting a ping from somebody half a continent away, or half a world away."

Charlene Li of Altimeter Group pointed out that when they become burdened with too many requests, it turns these leaders off of social networks. This, to me, is a challenge to broader use of collaboration tools. Success can kill just as well as failure.

Carrie Basham-Young of TalkSocialToMe, also pointed out that “Higher your hierarchical level, the more people [want to talk to you.]  I observed that this is the same whether you are a formal leader in a hierarchical organization, or an informal leader emergent from the network. Ms. Basham-Young observed that the more someone in the network becomes known for their skill, the more they become the first on the list for others to contact. If the expertise system allows social input on skill definition, then they may likewise get tagged even more. This becomes a power law or exponential growth over time. For the expert, they are reached more and more often, eventually to the point that they simply may not want to be part of the enterprise social environment or have to start choosing and prioritizing which ones they can help.

Another similarity is that the intent of the message or the weight behind it may be understood. "When someone at a high level is pinged for a response, they are often afraid to because they think it is going to become an edict," said Ms. Basham-Young. Since a leader, formal or informal, is speaking it carries some weight, so a small missive may be misunderstood as a broad directive. That in turn causes hesitation by the leader to participate in enterprise social networks, especially with the brevity of many of the messages.

Both Ms. Li and Ms. Basham-Young’s points refer to issues due to the nature of Authority Ranking—implicit or explicit rank (informal or formal leaders) eventually define an asymmetry of power. The only difference is that the implicit leaders emerge organically from the population through their efforts. Regardless, they face the same challenges of attention demands.

This one set of issues remains a challenge even if we change the organizational structural models. Are there particular benefits along the way for informal leadership even if we come to this same obstacle later?

I will focus on the impact of mobility across the ranks of employees. A work culture that supports emergent informal leaders makes a big statement about the capacity of the organization to provide real mobility and opportunity for smart people. This mobility at the same time isn’t a popularity contest but should be evidence-based. Trust in our leaders shouldn’t have to be an implicit factor. We want to know how they came there, not simply in gross-level achievements for the organization, but more in terms of the impact to our network.

This may the big difference that we look for now: Are they trusted by other people like me? What is that trust based on? Are there people I know directly that have vouched for their trust based on actual commitments with them? Or is it a more vague feeling or other bias that I don’t know? Is there transparency that describes this trust?

In a way, this is looking at degrees of influence but rather than an amorphous notion, it asks for visible evidence. That transparency of evidence reinforces credibility into the sources and clarifies how leaders earned their stripes. Such earned leadership lets other candidates and future employees know that job mobility is based on earned possibility and actual execution, and not for all the politics and back-room machinations that make us think work is broken.

In the American cultural ethos of the land of opportunity, this inspires people to work for a common cause because they are not just involved in shared work, they may even become a leader someday. That is opportunity calling, and a supportive environment for a strong work ethic.

The Work Hackers Community on Google+ is a membership focused on the future of work and the challenges we face on this long transition towards that future. We are also holding a live session Workhacking away from Business as Usual at SXSW Interactive on March 9 in Austin, TX. If you can, come and meet Ayelet Baron, myself and many others for our campfire style conversation on our subject.