In the past we have talked a couple of times about the undeniable impact that social networking (for business) is having in traditional management and thought leadership by helping reshape and redefine some of their various long time existing conceptions . There have been, indeed, a few great articles out there that not only have they assessed the importance and relevance of social technologies to help define the next generation of management, leadership and employee engagement, but they have also ventured to state, and rather accurately, how traditional management would need to keep moving on with its own social transformation, if it would want to survive over the course of time. Long gone are the days of command and control. Long gone are the days of micro-management, of managing by fear, power, bullying or mediocrity, or, just simply, by believing that the mantra “I am the boss; do what I say … or else!” would still work in today’s current business environment.

But if that’s the case I am sure at this point in time you folks would be probably wondering what’s the new role of leadership then in the world of Social Business? Can we define it nowadays in some sort of form or shape? Or will we have to create a new one altogether? Well, we may not. Once again, we may not need to go ahead and reinvent the wheel, since we may have had it all along over the last few hundred years and we never noticed… Welcome to the Era of Servant Leadership! 

Indeed, Servant Leadership is 

“[…] a management philosophy which implies a comprehensive view of the quality of people, work and community spirit. It requires a spiritual understanding of identity, mission, vision and environment. A servant leader is someone who is servant first, who has responsibility to be in the world, and so he contributes to the well-being of people and community. A servant leader looks to the needs of the people and asks himself how he can help them to solve problems and promote personal development. He places his main focus on people, because only content and motivated people are able to reach their targets and to fulfill the set expectations” (Quoted from Wikipedia’s reference article on the topic)

and while catching up last week with my good friend, the always insightful and equally thought provoking, Stowe Boyd I just couldn’t help thinking about how we may not need to redefine much what was already hinted hundreds of years ago about servant leaders, but perhaps just fine tune a little bit more the work carried out eventually by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970 on this very same topic, as a way to help define what will be demanded of, a few decades later, Leaders 2.0 in the knowledge economy of the 21st century where social technologies have finally introduced wirearchy in the corporate world for it to stay, moving right along, with traditional hierarchy. 

And in that context I just couldn’t help thinking about this superb article at Inc.com under the suggestive heading “8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses” by Geoffrey James that has been making the rounds on various social networks out there and which clearly portraits the kind of shift that traditional management needs to make in order to help prepare the leaders of tomorrow, if not today altogether already. No, I am not going to spoil the fun and try to reproduce Geoffrey’s article with plenty of quotes here and there. On the contrary, I would like to encourage you all to have a look into that truly inspirational dissertation and be prepared to be wowed big time! As a teaser, here you have got the 8 Core Beliefs Geoffrey talks about, just to get you going: 

1. “Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield
2. A company is a community, not a machine
3. Management is service, not control
4. My employees are my peers, not my children
5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear
6. Change equals growth, not pain
7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation
8. Work should be fun, not mere toil”

Pretty powerful stuff, don’t you think? I am sure you would all agree with that assertion, but there is more, there is always more eventually!, because, just as I was putting together this article I bumped into a rather evoking image on Google Plus that can certainly help folks differentiate between traditional management, the boss, and this new kind of management, the leader: 

And as I kept reflecting on that transition from bosses to leaders as the one that is going to shape up management as we know it within the business world, and all of that thanks to social networking, amongst several other timely happenings, I just couldn’t help remembering, quite fondly, the absolutely stunning blog post that Kathy Sierra (Gosh, how much do I miss her mind-boggling blog posts!) shared over 6 years ago!! under the title “Manager 2.0” with this brilliant image that would surely resonate quite a bit with that of servant leadership:

I would happily recommend you all to go through Kathy’s article to realise how close Social Business has been all along, even right from the start!, on helping shape up the way we understand and embrace both management and leadership 2.0 nowadays, 6 years later, into something that perhaps we have been having all along, but that we just didn’t know it, or maybe that we have neglected and ignored for far too long. The reality is that if someone would be asking me to define the new role of leadership in today’s interconnected, instrumented, intelligent, engaged, smarter, trustworthy and transparent social business world the one single key concept that would keep coming up, in a recurring way, time and time again, would be what’s been there all along with us throughout history: Servant Leadership. 

And here is probably the toughest question of them all that will keep coming up repeatedly, now more than ever, and that we all need to try and find an answer for: in todays social business world are your / our current leaders servant leaders? And if they aren’t, what can we do to help prepare them?

Recent Blog Posts

58

How Social Networking Can Improve Work Meetings Sat, May 18th 2013 2:07p Luis Suarez I am not too sure whether meetings lower our IQ or whether they make us all more stupid, as my good friend Stowe Boyd reflected on a recent blog post, but I can certainly confirm they do take a toll on your own productivity. Specially, when those meetings are not set up by you, but by everyone else, and therefore making you lose the control, once again, in terms of one of the most precious things all of us, knowledge workers, have that we don’t seem to treasure well enough: Time. Attentio [read] Keywords: collaboration ibm blogging email google linkedin networking office social software twitter

76

Open Business – From Document-Centric to People-Centric Collaboration Mon, May 13th 2013 5:09p Luis Suarez Lately, I have been thinking quite a bit around the topic of Social / Open Business Transformation. Something completely different to what we may have experienced so far in the last three to four years on living social for the sake of social, which is perhaps what we pretty much keep seeing today all over the place. Instead, I keep pondering about how we can transform and redefine the way we do business through our day to day workflow(s) and if there is an idea that keeps coming back stronger b [read] Keywords: collaboration email google instant messaging mac networking social software twitter wiki

56

Industrialisation of Social Networking for the Enterprise Sun, May 12th 2013 5:46p Luis Suarez Or, to put it in other words, automation of your social networking presence. That worrying topic has been in my mind for quite a while, and, lately, even more so, specially, seeing how plenty of people continue to automate, even further along, their online digital footprints with the argument, amongst several others, that they have got to do it, because they just can’t find the time anymore to make it happen in a natural, authentic, self-driven manner. Yes, it happens. Yes, it’s a to [read] Keywords: connections ibm blogging email enterprise exchange exchange google networking social software twitter

134

Meet Your New CEO – Your Kid Thu, May 9th 2013 4:43p Luis Suarez Summer time is usually one of the busiest times of the year for me in terms of extra curricular work related activities. I know that this may sound a bit weird, but it’s actually rather accurate. While most folks keep enjoying their summer vacation, or a relatively quieter time anyway, my busyness increases a notch or two! And it’s actually quite fine. I have been enjoying it for a good few years already, more than anything else, because of a particular activity that helps me advan [read] Keywords: collaboration ibm email google networking twitter

119

Life Without eMail – 5th Year Progress Report – The Community, The Movement Mon, May 6th 2013 3:24p Luis Suarez There have been a lot of people who, over the course of the last few months, have been asking me whatever happened to that initiative I started a while ago around ditching corporate email (Under the moniker “A World Without eMail“), since things seem to have been a bit quiet over here in this blog for a little while on that very same subject. Did I give up on giving up on corporate email? Did I get tired of it and moved back to email? Was the experiment a total failure? Did I get tir [read] Keywords: calendaring connections ibm archive community email google leak networking twitter wiki

75

Radical Transparency in the Era of Open Business Fri, May 3rd 2013 1:45p Luis Suarez In a work context, I have always been fascinated by transparency. And, lately, even more about radical transparency. I have always believed that if we would have been, all along, a whole lot more transparent in what we do in the corporate business world, the vast majority of the problems that we are currently suffering from, including what I still think is at the #1 spot, Employee Engagement, all of these troubles would be a thing of the past. Yet, they keep lingering around, because, after al [read] Keywords: collaboration community google network networking twitter

89

One Month Anniversary on the New Job as Lead Social Business Enabler Thu, May 2nd 2013 6:05p Luis Suarez I cannot believe that, in just a few minutes from now, I will be celebrating the first month anniversary in my new job as the Lead Social Business Enabler at IBM and I hardly did notice how fast and furious it’s gone by. Goodness! One full month already?!? Where did April go? Even more important, what have I been up to during that time? Well, time for an update that I will try to summarise briefly with these few key words to then perhaps expand further along a single key point that has be [read] Keywords: collaboration connections ibm email linkedin network networking office twitter

79

Social Business Adoption – The Laggards, The Critics and The Skeptics Tue, Apr 23rd 2013 4:49a Luis Suarez A couple of years back, Giovanni Rodriguez put together a guest blog post over a ReadWriteWeb on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption: Does It Have To Be So Hard? and it’s rather interesting to see how almost three years later the challenge seems to be there still, alive and kicking: Social / Open Business Adoption is hard. Well, it should well be. If not, what is the point? What’s the challenge? Where is your vision? Where is the business value? What are your goals? Think of it, [read] Keywords: collaboration ibm enterprise twitter

92

Lead Social Business Enabler for IBM’s w3 and www Connections – Job Role and Responsibilities Mon, Apr 22nd 2013 4:44a Luis Suarez Now that the word is out there, and since I have been in the new job for a couple of weeks already, I guess it’s a good time to reflect on what does the Lead Social Business Enabler for IBM’s w3 and www Connections do on a daily basis in terms of my job role and responsibilities. As a starting point, the novelty effect has been huge altogether, because in these first two weeks I have been in the IBM CIO Organisation there has been a growing trend that I am finding it quite fascinati [read] Keywords: collaboration connections ibm community email enterprise networking social software

119

My New Cheese – Lead Social Business Enabler for IBM’s w3 and www Connections Sat, Apr 20th 2013 9:28a Luis Suarez This is it! The moment of truth! The wait is over. The long hiatus of silence is now a thing of the past. The soul-searching period is finished and dealt with. It is, at long last, official and I am now ready to announce it to the world! As you may remember from a previous blog post, I mentioned how late last year someone decided to move my cheese and how that turned around into becoming a very good opportunity for me to make the move into the next big thing. It’s been a rather interesting [read] Keywords: collaboration connections ibm blogging email enterprise network networking office social software twitter