Information Technology Archives - Leading Virtually

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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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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Surprise! The Internet and IT Will Actually Increase Leader Misconduct

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 13:04:28 +0000

In my last post I argued that the Internet would not curb leader misbehavior. In today’s post I suggest that the Internet and, in general, the use of information technology (IT) may actually increase leader misconduct.

The Internet and IT make misconduct easier and more tempting for organizational leaders. Harvard University administrators ordered a search of email accounts of resident deans in early 2013 after they were suspected of leaking the word about mass student cheating to the student-run newspaper. The availability of email correspondence on a central server and, thus, the relative ease of conducting a search electronically probably played a role in the administrators’ order.

Leaders don’t have to stick to their internal networks to spy on others. There’s a new industry to help companies dig up dirt on their adversaries by hacking into their internal networks and emails and by investigating their Internet footprint (see relevant article, another article). It is very easy to take an electronic record of someone’s communication and doctor it to create a distance between what was actually communicated and what is attributed to that person. The case of Shirley Sherrod, a former U.S. Agriculture Department official who was removed from her job on the basis of a doctored video posted on the Internet, illustrates this possibility.

The Internet, especially social media, makes the thoughts and actions of others transparent. When leaders learn what is on the minds of others by looking at their social media posts, they may be tempted to take action against those they disagree with. With today’s data mining technology, followers don’t even have to make their thoughts explicit to invite action by leaders. For example, a tool released by IBM scans employees’ email and social media posts to flag who might be nursing grudges and is likely to divulge company secrets. Since such profiling tools are never perfect, their use by leaders to take action is certainly questionable.

Leaders try to justify such actions, at least in cases where they are spying internally, with the argument that whatever is happening on an organization’s network is no longer private or that certain types of employees should not expect the privilege of privacy.

It is not just the transparency afforded by the Internet and IT that may tempt leader misconduct — it is also the anonymity that is afforded. It is possible to take advantage of others by assuming a fake identity. In the midst of uprisings against authorities in the Middle East in February 2011, Sudanese authorities pretended to be activists and invited protesters via Facebook and instant messaging to gather in a specific place. Protesters were arrested when they arrived. The case of Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, serves as another example here. For a period of about eight years up to August 2006, John Mackey used the pseudonym Rahodeb, an anagram of his wife’s name – Deborah, to post numerous messages on Yahoo Finance’s bulletin board. In these posts, he touted his company’s stock and even criticized the strategy and management of a publicly traded competitor, Wild Oats Markets, that his company eventually purchased.

In summary, the Internet and IT offer greater possibilities for leaders to conduct themselves in ways that may be unethical or questionable. As the examples I have provided here indicate, some leaders have learned to take advantage of these possibilities.

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