Social Media for Better Leadership and Learning

Leadership in a connected world is a complex sport. Leaders risk relevance quite fast if they continue to operate in an isolated box within a tight hierarchy.

When the complexity around us increases, we need more connected leadership that is constantly making sense of evolving patterns, thinking and mindset.

Leadership that is social in approach when it comes to building communities, enabling engagement and participating in knowledge flows across the network (both inside the organization through corporate social tools as well as external social media).

I was fortunate that when I started leading teams in 2006, I started my blog to document my lessons and share them along. Little did I know then that I was stepping into something that would totally transform how I think about leadership and learning. Fellow bloggers, people who commented on this blog, authors and later communities of learning on Twitter groomed me as a leader and shaped a lot of my thinking.

Thanks to social engagement, I am able to stay in touch with current thinking, participate in conversations/tweet chats around topics of my interest and become a part of an empowering network. I could learn, absorb patterns, prepare for the waves of changes likely to come, put some of those lessons into practice at work, and share my reflections back with community. In my case, social media made me a clearer thinker, better leader and a curious learner.

In the spirit of learning from community, I recently followed Twitter backchannel of #SocialNow conference in Lisbon to absorb key insights.

In one of the talks, Celine Schillinger referred to her Forbes article titled “Three Ways Social Media Make You A Better Leader” where she writes,

“In times of deep social and technological change, social media enables leaders to take advantage of the radical cognitive and relational transformations that are taking place everywhere. Social media creates within leaders and through them more capacity to metabolize the complexity of our modern world and turn it into a strategic advantage.”

A lot of insights she presents in the article resonated with me and my own journey as a leader so far. In the article, Celine outlines three ways social media can enable sensemaking for better leadership and engagement.

You can read the full article here and here is a #sketchnote summary of key insights from the article.

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Related Posts:

Here are a few posts and visual notes I have created in the past touching upon the mindset shift required for organization transformation, critical competencies for leadership in future, social mindset for better engagement and role of organizational leader as a social architect.

• Social Mindset: A Key to Engaging People (my article for PeopleMatters magazine)
• 3 C’s for Learning and Leading on Social Media
• Mindset Shifts For Organizational Transformation
• Future of Work: Ways to Prepare
• Peter Senge: How to Overcome Learning Disabilities in Organizations
• 12 Critical Competencies For Leadership in the Future