Digital age leadership Archives - Leading Virtually

The Human Behind Humans of New York

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 16:31:40 +0000

A little over a month ago, I had the opportunity to attend a talk at Cornell University by Brandon Stanton, the author of Humans of New York (HONY). A very eloquent speaker, Mr. Stanton kept his audience engaged with his stories of how he has interviewed thousands of people not only in New York City but across the world. What I took away was the importance of the human element when leading via technology. Technology is helping us spread our word far and wide but a human heart is what gives it the voice that others can connect with.

Behind the social media powering HONY is a human who has overcome the fear of rejection on his way to amassing a worldwide following but still feeling vulnerable like the rest of us. When asked about his biggest fear, he replied that he sees himself as someone who is not a good person but is now entrusted with a job that is noble. He is afraid that the things that he did during his younger years might be exposed on the Internet and sully his image. I felt that his fear, paradoxically, was also his strength; it showed the vulnerability he perceived. A leader who feels powerful and invincible cannot connect with others. Humility and a feeling of vulnerability are needed to empathize with others and connect with them.

The importance of the human element in connecting with others was also highlighted in Mr. Stanton’s experience traveling abroad during the last two summers. Mr. Stanton mentioned the engagement of his social media followers fell during his Summer 2014 travels but stayed normal during his most recent travels. He attributed this shift to the choices of his interpreters. His 2014 linguists were skillful at translating accurately but they failed to connect on a human level with those he interviewed. This year, he changed his strategy to choose interpreters who were ‘people’ oriented and found that they made all the difference in bringing out impactful stories.

Another story Mr. Stanton shared highlighted the importance of creating a culture of humanness. Some have criticized Mr. Stanton’s work for not following journalistic standards. He half-jokingly remarked that, indeed, he does not fact check if someone is narrating from personal experience. He went on to illustrate that what he hears from someone is indeed a story in their head and that it is significant even if it is distorted.

The example he gave was of someone who claimed to be a Navy Seal and said that his father served in the military. After this person’s story was posted on HONY, former acquaintances of his commented on the post and painted him as a chronic liar who had made up all that he claimed. Mr. Stanton took down the post but a month after that he received an email from the individual’s mother asking him if she could get a copy of the picture he had posted of her son. Her son, she wrote in the email, had committed suicide. Social media technology, because of the way it reaches and touches different people far and wide, has the tendency to bring out the truth. As this example shows, this truth can sometimes be uncontainable and hurt badly.

There is no way a leader can withhold the truth from coming to fruition. Nor should one try to do that. A leader also cannot be in a position to judge what is a lie and what is the truth. Indeed, Mr. Stanton noted that there is a fine line between what is a story of someone’s life and a falsehood. My suggestion to leaders is to foster a culture of compassion and forgiveness. Forgiveness is a virtue that helps us live in the present and look forward to an engaging future instead of clinging onto a painful past. While the above example alone solidifies the significance of forgiveness to a life, emerging research (see 1, 2) is suggesting that creating a culture of forgiveness may bring physical, mental, and organizational benefits.

I am glad I got to attend Mr. Stanton’s presentation. It offered a different perspective than what I get to see when I read HONY. It reinforced the continued importance of the human element in a world where our interactions are increasingly mediated by technology.

Continue to stay human, Mr. Stanton. You’ll do fine.

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank Arina Zanin for providing valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

xvltbjyl [test]

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Is Leading in the Digital Age Different?

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 21:43:14 +0000

Many say or assume that leadership does not change in the digital age. The scant attention paid to technology in the leadership literature is a testimony to that. But, isn’t it hard to expect that with so much of our interactions and work occurring via technology, leadership would remain unchanged?

Technology is changing the fundamental human processes that underlie leadership. When we use technology, the mental processes that are triggered change due to the absence of nonverbal cues and lack of social presence. We bring different information and emotions to bear on a situation. For instance, email has been shown to trigger egocentrism. Receivers may also perceive messages to be more negative than they actually are. Attraction between individuals is also altered by electronic communication. While attraction generally decreases, it can also increase in certain conditions; we are all aware of someone who has fallen in love online.

In the digital age, with workers spread all over the globe, a leader cannot hope to supervise and manage like before. With delayed information from remote followers, direct supervision and management is not possible. Proper and more elaborate structures have to be established beforehand. For situations where prior structures are not sufficient, the intent or purpose behind follower’s work have to be clarified and followers have to be trained and empowered to deal with unexpected situations themselves. With technology-mediated work increasing unabated, there is greater need and expectation for leaders to provide an inspiring purpose and structure that would hold the followers together and propel them forward despite the numerous challenges of working virtually.

Expectations about leadership are also changing due to the workforce seeing an increasing number of workers who have grown up with technology around them. Our younger generation, which is growing up in an open, tell-all culture, is likely to seek similar information-sharing qualities in its leaders.

The digital age offers greater opportunities to take advantage of the innovation and leadership capabilities of an organization’s workers and external stakeholders. Research suggests that organizations seeking to benefit from IT investments that enable grassroots participation, leaders would need to delegate more and they would need to focus more on team building and goal alignment (e.g., through inspirational leadership).

In sum, leaders need to be cognizant of how technology can change their mental processes and behaviors and adjust themselves appropriately. They also need to be aware of how the relevance and requirement of certain behaviors and tactics changes with technology so that they can change their behaviors accordingly. With so many things changing for a leader in the digital age, leadership cannot remain the same. Can it?

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Leadership is Becoming Harder!

Surinder Kahai — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 19:31:18 +0000

What if I told you that leading others has just become harder? And that it will become increasingly challenging in the future?

How we lead others effectively is not remaining constant. Ever-changing technology that is touching more and more of our lives is making sure of that. Leadership is all about how we influence others and motivate them to meet expectations and, in many cases, exceed them. With an increasing amount of our interaction mediated by technology, that influence process cannot remain the same, can it? Technology changes how we interact with others, how we perceive them, and how they perceive us.

Work, too, is shifting with more of it being executed by technology. The human worker is now expected to do much more to prove her/his value. As we disambiguate work using techniques such as machine learning, more of it is moving to technology. We humans are being left with the more ambiguous work for which we can’t specify clear expectations beforehand. Forget exceeding expectations in such a situation, let alone meeting them. How can we continue to influence and motivate others in the same way as before?

With technology permeating our work and consuming more of our dollars, it makes sense to make sure that we realize its full potential. Yet, it often falls short in delivering on its promise. And that is largely because leaders fail to recognize that realizing the true potential of technology involves more than writing a check for it and switching it on. I am sure they are going to tell me: “Isn’t that why I have hired IT people? Isn’t it their job to make sure that we get the bang we expect from every dollar we invest in technology?” At that point, I will have no choice but to give them the bad news that whenever we invest in technology, we also have to make complementary changes in the organization, including those in their leadership, in order to get the most out of technology. It is their job and not IT’s to make those changes.

Of course, I have talked very broadly about what lies ahead for leadership. I am going to be elaborating more on these points in my future posts.

Stay tuned!

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When the Leader is the Only One Remote From the Team

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 20:58:37 +0000

On my LinkedIn profile, I received a suggestion in response to one of my recent posts that I cover a particular configuration of virtual teams. In this configuration, the team leader is in one location and the rest of the team is in another. There is some research on the effects of different configurations or distributions of members of virtual teams but there is none, to the best of my knowledge, on this particular configuration. I have used relevant research to put together some educated estimates of what is likely to happen.

Presence of a faultline

When the leader is the only one remote from the team, a faultline results, which then triggers social categorization on the basis of status or authority. The leader, because of the power and authority that s/he yields, will be seen by the team member as belonging to a different category compared to them. Frequent interaction among team members and lack of such interaction with the leader is likely to make their separation from the leader even more salient and provide opportunities for them to reinforce their separate identity and solidarity with each other. The leader, too, may categorize the rest of the team as those who share a role different from her/his and who are accountable to her/him.

This faultline separating the leader from the rest of the team is made worse by distance. Most or all interaction between the leader and members is now mediated by technology, which tends to restrict what is communicated. Additionally, whatever is communicated may not be shared with the whole team. The leader is not fully aware of the actual circumstances of the rest of the team just like the rest of the team is unaware of the leader’s circumstances (see a related post on the presence of subgroups in virtual teams). Under these conditions, attributions play an important role in how the leader and followers evaluate each other. Individuals have a tendency to generate explanations or make sense of the happenings around them. In a face-to-face setting, one has access to significant levels of direct interaction and observations from which to make sense but such interaction and observations are scarcer in a virtual team and sense-making is likely to be based more on one’s mental models rather than the actual circumstances.

Biased sense-making resulting from the faultline

The problem with this sense-making and the resulting attributions is that they tend to be biased. So, we not only have a clear separation between the leader and the team that lends itself to a us versus her/him or me versus them mentality, but we have each of the parties influenced by systematic biases when trying to make sense of the other. Unless a leader and the rest of the team are aware of these tendencies and guard against those by giving the benefit of the doubt to the other entity, the end result may not always be pleasant.

What are some of the biases that affect the process of making attributions? Two that are commonly cited in the attribution literature are the actor-observer and self-serving biases. These interact with one another to give rise to an interesting tendency. When something goes well, the leader is likely to attribute that to her/his leadership and actions. If something goes wrong, the leader is likely to link that with factors external to her/him. These might be the rest of the team or other factors, such as the time zone difference, if one exists. The team members may be similarly biased to attribute any positive happenings to themselves and negative happenings to external factors, including the leader.

Due to such evaluations by the leader and the rest of the team, lack of trust, not liking or being persuaded by someone on the other side of the faultline, incomplete diagnosis of issues, and conflict are likely. Team performance is likely to suffer. There is research that suggests that when the leader communicates her/his evaluation of the rest of the team’s role in any negative happening, the team members are induced to make the same attribution (of their role) and experience learned helplessness. Research also suggests that there are many factors that moderate how the above tendencies actually play out. Culture is one of the factors. A leader from an individualistic culture is likely to attribute any negative happening to team members rather than to the peculiar set of conditions that may be facing while a leader from a collectivistic culture is more likely to attribute a similar happening to external conditions.

Overcoming problems due to the faultline

But the presence of a faultline caused by a leader’s separation from the rest of the team is not always bad news. Nor is the process of making attributions. A deft leader is likely to make the faultline less salient by breaking down the status difference and giving team members an equal say in the workings of the team. Such a leader is also likely to encourage greater interaction and information sharing so that sense-making is based on actual happenings and circumstances instead of mental models and biases that can lead to erroneous evaluation. A smart leader, in fact, would take advantage of being virtual and shape the attributions of others in a way which leads to her/him being easily seen as transformational and charismatic. In the absence of direct observation of the leader, the leader is in a position to communicate selective information about her/his performance or behaviors that cues the rest of the team to see her/him in a very positive light. Of course, if in actuality the leader is not transformational or charismatic, the leader will eventually be seen as hypocritical and unauthentic.

The above are some general behavioral tendencies that may show up when the leader of a virtual team is the only one remote from the team. There are many other factors that could also influence the actual happenings. Good, frequent, and open communication by the whole team and considerate behavior by all can go a long way in alleviating the ill-effects of the faultline separating the leader from the rest of the team. The leader has to set the example of open and frequent communication, including that oriented towards building social relationships, and considerate behaviors for others to follow.

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Leading Virtual Teams Continues To Be Challenging

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 22:54:13 +0000

Talk to those who coach leaders and they will tell you that leading virtual teams continues to be challenging. The interesting thing is that that there is fair amount of relevant research that can benefit leaders. Unfortunately, such research never makes its way to the general public. We academics do a pretty good job conducting rigorous research but we are not good at disseminating our research. I had started this blog to share what research is telling us about leading virtual teams. There are quite a few articles there that are likely to be helpful for anyone leading work over electronic channels, including those who are not leading pure virtual teams. A fair amount of our work in teams gets conducted over electronic channels such as email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, etc. even if we are not part of a pure virtual team.

Here are two sets of five articles each that can help someone interested in leading virtually get started. Start with the first set and move on to the second set to learn more about the topic. The articles are likely to be beneficial even to those who are not formally responsible for leading work over electronic channels. Leadership is not something that rests only with those put into leadership positions. Others also end up exercising influence numerous times; whenever that happens, leadership is being attempted.

Set 1

Set 2

I would love your feedback on these articles. Also, let me know if there are topics related to leading virtually that you would like me to write about. I would benefit significantly from knowing what you in the field are struggling with. It will help me focus my writing.

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Humans of New York: An Illustration of How IT is Affecting Leadership

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 20:11:00 +0000

My two decades of research on leadership and information technology (IT) has led me to believe that people think that leadership is not affected by IT and, consequently, the way in which leadership has worked in traditional and formal settings would work online too. Or they may believe otherwise but they lack specifics and wish to know more. Finding a good story that shows how IT can affect leadership and to which others can relate is challenging. A recent story makes this job a little easier. It is that of Humans of New York (HONY) and its author, Brandon Stanton. HONY appears on various social media including Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook. I am focusing on Facebook because that is where I most clearly see how leadership is impacted by technology.

Every day Mr. Stanton posts 3 to 4 pictures of individuals, young and old from different walks of life, whom he encounters when walking in the streets of New York. Each picture is accompanied by a brief story or quote. By his admission, Mr. Stanton has walked thousands of miles and stopped ten thousand people to photograph them. Last October, he published a New York Times bestseller with four hundred of his pictures. He hopes to continue taking and posting pictures for a long time. Mr. Stanton’s work has been described as beautiful, a celebration of individuality, and a tribute to the spirit of New York.

Mr. Stanton has amassed a huge following from all over the world. Though he did not set out to become a leader, he has become one — he is able to engage people and influence them in a way that appointed leaders would give anything for. What is really illustrative of Mr. Stanton’s leadership is the community he has enabled. When you view any HONY post, you see a healthy conversation in the form of an extremely large number of likes and comments. You find people sharing stories that illustrate the triumphs and travails in their own lives. Many other jump in to congratulate those succeeding and to support those facing challenges. It is not uncommon for those commenting to amass a large number of likes and comments themselves.

What makes Mr. Stanton a leader? What has helped him become one? Mr. Stanton’s leadership role can be seen in how he is helping others make better sense of the world around them and how they fit into it. He writes posts that others find as touching because they can identify with them. They see something about their own lives in the posts. It may be a personal triumph or challenge. HONY’s stories evoke basic human values of care and concern for others irrespective of their race, nationality, gender, and other characteristics. People feel good when the stories make them feel human. A post and the ensuing conversation may remind people of something that may be missing from their lives such as a relationship, the love of someone, or being with someone they love. By being validated and knowing that they are not alone in how they feel and what they experience, readers feel empowered.

Mr. Stanton has also become a leader by stimulating others to think differently, thereby disrupting existing patterns of thought and behavior. Recently, Mr. Stanton embarked on an eight country UN sponsored tour. As part of that, he visited and posted stories of Syrian refugees camped in Jordan. These stories are unlike those of the fighting in Syria and its victims, which usually evoke feelings of horror. Some readers say that by observing the stories of others, they have learned more about what being human means — more than what their school books have taught them. Others mentioned how the tragic stories were breaking their hearts. Many remarked how fortunate and grateful they are for what they have in their lives. Some noted the resiliency of the human spirit.

One can also see Mr. Stanton as a leader in the ‘swarm like’ emergent behavior he enables. After Mr. Stanton makes a post, his followers collectively address the post without any external coordinating mechanisms or any explicitly posted rules. Occasionally, you notice conflict when posters counter others’ interpretations. For most part these conversations remain respectful. But when some cross the limits of respectful behavior, others jump in to control the conversation and prevent it from going out of control.

So, what does HONY illustrate about IT’s effect on leadership? It illustrates that technology enables the emergence of unappointed, informal leaders who have a powerful influence over others. The networking, viral communication, and widespread reach enabled by technology makes it more likely for those with an appealing vision to be discovered by people from different corners of the world. These individuals are not ordered to follow the leader. They do so because they feel an emotional connection to the leader, the leader’s vision, and the leader’s work. The leader is passionate about her/his vision and is constantly modeling it through actions shared via technology. After stimulating action, the leader gets out of the way. The followers, with the help of technology, take it up upon themselves to share their thoughts, their interests, and become leaders in their own right. There is no top-down system through which leadership is exercised.

This effect of IT is not restricted to the non-corporate setting only. It can occur in and is relevant for all types of settings. In today’s highly complex and dynamic environment, leaders cannot take it all upon themselves to interface with the outside world or even those within their own organization. A leader cannot be at all the places demanding attention. Not only is the pace relentless but the variety of issues is too large for one supreme leader to be able to handle all events in a timely and competent fashion. An emergent, self-organizing system, such as one envisioned by the US Intelligence Agencies, is needed. Others will have to be empowered to rise, respond, and engage others to rise too. Smart leaders create conditions for others to emerge as leaders and then get out of the way. They create an emotionally engaging vision that others can relate to readily. They share their vision, model that vision, and stimulate a conversation among their followers. They don’t try to control the events. Instead, they become facilitators who remove the barriers and make it easy for others to make their contributions towards the leaders’ vision. The followers then take off. Some emerge as leaders themselves.

Technology, especially social media, plays a critical role in enabling this type of leadership. For how else will the leader be able to engage a multitude of people beyond her/his immediate span of control? Engaging a lot of people and that too from different domains and walks of life is critical because it is not possible to predict the situation one will be facing in the future and thus anticipate who might be ready to emerge as a leader or simply participate. Only technology can enable such an engagement. Though HONY has been around for a while, it was only after it moved to social media where others and their actions could not be controlled that it really took off!

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Will public shaming on the Internet make leaders behave better?

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 20:15:32 +0000

We had gathered with some friends recently and our discussion veered towards the Donald Sterling case. Someone wondered if the strong backlash on the Internet would serve as a lesson for leaders and inhibit them from misbehaving in the future. During the age when a person’s every move is a click away from being posted on the Internet, are leaders going to be more careful?

Two camps developed to debate this question. One side believed in the Internet’s power to curb leaders. I was in this camp. The other side believed that inappropriate behavior of the kind that Donald Sterling had engaged in is largely wired into people and public shaming on the Internet won’t make much of a difference. My wife was in this camp. The debate remained unresolved. That was the best I could hope for against my wife because the only other option was … defeat.

It is not uncommon for judges to punish misdemeanors or crimes by ordering public shaming. However, there is no evidence of whether public shaming works. As an academic, I turned to the scientific literature to see if I could answer whether the fear of public shaming on the Internet would curb leaders’ inappropriate behaviors. The answer I found provides more evidence to my wife that she’s always right. The Internet, according to my analysis, is unlikely to curb leaders.

There are models of human behavior according to which, prior to any behavior they might consider to be inappropriate, people consider the probability of getting caught and the resulting consequences. Greater probability of getting caught and more negative perceived consequences would lower the inclination to behave inappropriately. It is easy for a leader to see that the probability of getting caught is greater today due to the increased ability to capture anyone’s behavior. With the use of the Internet as an extremely potent weapon for destroying someone’s reputation in plain view of any intelligent leader, the increased negativity of the consequences of being caught should be obvious too. Thus, theoretically speaking, leaders would be inclined to curb their inappropriate behavior lest they be exposed and publicly shamed on the Internet.

But recent models of human tendencies suggest a more complicated picture. According to one study, people underestimate the social pain caused by acts like public shaming and ostracism unless they have experienced the pain themselves. While people can see that someone has undergone social pain, they are unable to gauge the actual extent of that pain. When asked to estimate the social pain they would feel if they were to experience an event known to cause that pain, people underestimate the pain compared to those who have actually undergone the experience. In psychology, this is known as the cold-to-hot empathy gap, or the tendency for people in a cold state (i.e., not experiencing the pain-causing event) to underestimate the effect compared to those in a hot state (i.e., experiencing the pain-causing event). Thus, just the knowledge of painful shaming on the Internet may not be ‘hot’ enough to curb a leader’s behavior.

One could claim that even though a leader has never experienced a particular pain-causing event, and thus underestimates the intensity of the social pain, that leader may still be inhibited due to greater awareness of the possibility of experiencing the pain. Thus, the leader may still be able to consciously stop the inappropriate behaviors from occurring. But this relies on self-restraint. And it assumes that one’s behavior is largely conscious or deliberate. The transgressions that leaders often get publicly shamed for are usually impulsive in nature. Think Donald Sterling’s racist rant or Anthony Weiner’s sexting. A study has shown that people suffer from what is referred to as the restraint bias, or the illusion of self-restraint during impulsive situations. Consequently, people tend to put themselves in tempting situations believing that they would be able to restrain themselves. Unfortunately, the belief of restraint is largely illusory and one just gives in.

Then there are those who may have previously committed a transgression and experienced the associated social pain. But due to an emotional deficit, they may experience the pain at a lower level which makes them more likely to commit the transgression again. Anthony Weiner’s repeated sexting transgressions, despite public shaming for earlier misbehavior, illustrates this emotional deficit.

A person may occasionally transgress due to another reason: ego depletion, or the exhaustion of the self-control reserve. According to a model of self-control, self-control is a limited resource that gets depleted with use during the course of a day. Exhausting this resource leaves one depleted and self-control on behavior requiring restraint suffers for the rest of the day. Knowledge of public shaming on the Internet does nothing to this reserve; whenever it is exhausted, restraint for the inappropriate act would be missing.

So what can we conclude from the literature? Essentially, awareness of the inflation of the pain or negative consequences of transgressions that make it to the Internet is likely to have little impact on a leader’s behavior. Thus, attempts, including one by a recent Wall Street Journal article, to make leaders aware that their roles are increasingly public due to the Internet and caution them are likely to go nowhere. Leaders are unlikely to straighten themselves unless they have previously been through the social pain associated with being exposed. Even in such cases, leaders who have emotional deficits or suffer from ego depletion are likely to succumb to their temptations.

Once again, my wife was correct. And, I have no problems with that.

I’ve always believed in the best person winning the argument!

xvltbjyl [test]

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