As your organization makes the Hyper-Social shift, it is likely to require managers and employees with skills and attitudes markedly different from those that are currently in place. In Chapter 10, we looked at how the Hyper-Social company would require new managerial thinking; now we turn our attention to the qualities and skills that will be required of company employees. Our Tribalization of Business Study indicates that one of the key drivers of a successful Hyper-Social community is the quality of facilitation and moderation (see Figure 12-1), but how many companies have the ability to identify and retain the sort of people who can interact with customers on such different terms?
The skill set that the new corporate Hyper-Social superstars may well need will include comfort with social media, the ability to communicate effectively from both the corporate and the human perspective, the ability to communicate with a minimum of oversight
Figure 12-1 Community Features that Contribute Most to Effectiveness
and direction, the authority to speak for the business, and a sufficient depth of knowledge about the company to find customer solutions, no matter where the employee may personally reside within the organization chart. Employees who are well suited for the Hyper-Social organization also tend to be relationship-centric, open-minded, adaptable, collaborative, and comfortable with technology. Even if such people do exist at your company today, how can you identify them? And can you articulate an attractive career path for them?
The Hyper-Social shift will also challenge executives to discover or develop different skills within themselves. One key skill that successful executives will need to cultivate is the ability to continually define what business they are in. As noted earlier, with the increased involvement of the community in product development, marketing, customer service, and just about every other corporate function imaginable, savvy leaders will need to determine what the community values, and what the company can most effectively and economically provide. These managers will develop a clear view of what the organization’s real mission and competencies are, and shed those investments that don’t move them in that direction.
As John Hagel and Marc Singer observed in their article “Unbundling the Corporation” in 1999, when you deconstruct a company, you often discover that there are three different types of businesses working side by side by side, with vastly different economic, competitive, and talent imperatives.1 The three types of firms-within-a-firm are
Customer relationship businesses
Product innovation businesses
Infrastructure businesses
Each of these requires a different operating model, and each differs with regard to who the actual customer is. According to Hagel and Singer, as the transaction costs of working with entities outside the firm drop, leaders must decide which one of the three businesses to retain, and which two to shed. In a customer relationship business, for instance, employees must focus sharply on serving the customer, whereas in an infrastructure business, talent focuses more on optimal efficiency. Clearly, if Hyper-Sociality drives unbundling in your business, you will need to carefully consider what sort of talent you need.
Managers will need to develop frameworks for identifying and motivating passionate individuals, and endowing them with sufficient training, guidance, and then autonomy to act effectively. Passion is critical when you are dealing with tribes, and those people who have it are the ones who you want managing those relationships. As Barry Judge, CMO of Best Buy, recently told us:
The guy that thought up Prediction Markets [a program in which employees trade virtual stocks that predict future outcomes, like sales numbers, or future events], he runs it. He happens to be running Geek Squad, but he has the passion around it so he runs it. The Loop [another market prediction tool] is run by retail operations. They have the passion for it so they run it. Typically at Best Buy one of the ideas is if you’ve got passion then you may be best suited to take it on regardless of what organization you’re in because you have point of view.2
One observation from the Tribalization of Business Study is that successful managers in Hyper-Social companies are skilled at communicating with multiple stakeholders. Hyper-Social managers instinctively realize that at any moment, they may be communicating simultaneously with employees, members, customers, and business partners, and they transparently convey information to all of these people simultaneously. They are also comfortable with not having exclusive control of their marketing messages, their brand, or how they are viewed by the external world. Nonetheless, they work tirelessly to make sure that their organizations are viewed in the best light by all observers. They keep their ears to the ground, listen to what’s being said about their companies, and develop systems for responding to inaccuracies (even leveraging their tribes for assistance in correcting inaccuracies). As Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, observed of the Dell Hell debacle, “We screwed up. These conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not. Do you want to be part of that or not? My argument is you absolutely do. You can learn from that. You can improve your reaction time. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.”3
A critical, albeit sometimes subtle, issue that emerges as you consider the Hyper-Social shift is that as your company becomes increasingly Hyper-Social, valuable employees may well possess skills that are very dissimilar to those that successful employees of yesteryear possessed. In the past, a great employee might work 10-hour days, executing corporate marketing campaigns expertly. Or perhaps the model employee was corporate counsel, who prided himself on never exposing the company to any risk whatsoever. Clearly, either one of those paragons of corporate success would be severely challenged in navigating the Hyper-Social shift if he expected to behave the same way.
What would the marketer do in an environment in which there were few or no formal campaigns, and every day was an unpredictable, thrilling, and sometimes disappointing conversation in real time with humans who find real flaws in the company’s products? What if a willingness to endure 10-hour days wasn’t good enough—would she be ready to respond to a blog over the weekend, or be savvy enough about the business to pass on critical information from the tribes to product development? Would she be able to develop new metrics for tribe satisfaction, loyalty, or lifetime client value and communicate them to the finance group as it set budgets for the coming cycle? As conversations with customers and other members of the tribe continue into the future, possibly outliving the original marketing campaign that sparked them, will she have the strategic foresight and skills to support those conversations, so that the members of the tribe don’t feel that they are being ignored?
And would the diligent lawyer be able to quickly develop protocols and procedures that permitted employees to engage in product development with consumers? Could he design policies that ensured that hourly workers could blog about the company after hours without exposing the company to labor-law violations for permitting hourly workers to work “off the clock”? Could he accept the ambiguity of allowing more risk in return for a more Hyper-Social relationship with the customer, and communicate that to his superiors effectively?
Given the reality of working with social media, an organization’s talent will inevitably need to engage with detractors. Detractors range from one-time complainers to protracted adversaries who maintain long-term criticism of a company or its products and its behavior. Encouragingly, however, there have been a number of cases in which online detractors, after complaining publicly and vigorously about a company’s performance, have been converted to supporters. For instance, last year a Twitter user named James called out Bank of America for shoddy customer support. Because of a rapid and authentic response from the bank, James reversed himself, and publicly thanked the bank for its help.4
Clearly Bank of America had developed a means of monitoring such complaints and empowered a company representative to remedy the problem. But this can be a daunting challenge for companies, as it requires people who may be untrained in dealing with customers to step up and begin engaging with them. At the same time, in order to be successful, these same employees are often given the task of creating and running the systems for routing inbound information to the right decision makers, updating and refreshing company information in customer-facing online venues, understanding the dynamics of the tribe, and ensuring that a small group of commenters doesn’t monopolize the conversation or keep others from contributing by intimidation and bullying.
Discussions with executives from companies that are undergoing the Hyper-Social shift confirm many of these observations and research. For instance, when we asked Ram Menon, CMO of TIBCO, about hiring marketing talent, he noted that he looks first for smart people who may have come from areas outside of marketing. What is important, according to Menon, is finding people who can “correlate and parse” information so that they can prioritize and make quick decisions. Menon further observed, “If you’re a marketer who doesn’t understand technology, you are a problem. So, you know, get on it real quick. Don’t hire a social media agency to tell you how to do a social media strategy; do it yourself—start a blog, post things, be on Twitter, read on your own every morning what people are saying about your company and figure it out.”5
Mozilla’s CEO, Mitchell Baker, when asked about hiring into her open-source company, observed that if potential employees are too inflexible with stakeholders, it gives her pause. “If we ask, ‘What do you do if someone disagrees with you? What do you do if you think something needs to happen and it seems to be slow or stopped?’ And the answer is, ‘Well, I tell them I’m in charge.’ Bing. Even our employees rarely get told that, because I believe that many of the things that work in open-source management are also very valuable for your employees. You can try to tell an employee what to do, but if the two of you disagree the employee may be right. There’s much more negotiation here, like a professional partnership.”6
Mark Gambill, CMO at computer distributor CDW, told us how the company trains its sales talent at CDW to interact with customers, and the autonomy that salespeople are given. When CDW noticed that it was not as visible in the social media as it might have liked, it asked its sales force to begin engaging in more online conversations with buyers. “You don’t want to create an employee’s script such that they’re very rigid, but you want to give them some perspective around what we’re trying to do as a company in these different types of conversations. We have a bunch of great entrepreneurs. They’ll take the bull by the horns, and they’ll move out and get involved in these conversations. So, we have a lot of confidence in our sales force and coworkers to do the right thing, but we want to make sure we’re continuing to give them the right tools as well.”7
In addition, Beth Comstock, global CMO at GE, looks for digital capabilities and community- and network-building skills in her marketers.
We’re sort of on this tear right now about what we’re calling new world skills…. The big one is digital capabilities and understanding how we move more quickly…. There are a few others. First, this notion of simplicity, of trying to, if you will, curate an experience for a customer, help them sort of take away all the extraneous and deliver what’s most valuable. That is so hard .... and I think our new challenge is, how do you focus and simplify? That is hard for marketers. The other thing we talk a lot about is just this notion of networks, communities, and understanding how do you better mine those for insights. How do you better create more participatory marketing?8
Remember that many of these conversations and interactions between employees and community members are taking place in a context in which all conversations are visible, searchable, and probably archived for perpetuity. In addition, front-line employees could well find themselves up against an army of disgruntled customers as a result of a service or product failure that is no fault of their own. And, of course, there is no real “end” to the job at the end of the workday—the conversations happen after hours, on weekends, and while workers are trying to take a vacation.
Given that many companies are product-centric and think of their value proposition to the client as being related to the technical excellence of their products and their features, will your employees be able to shift from product-centric to customer-centric? Talent needs to create trust, to be fair, and to put humans in the center, all the while constantly gathering insight and suggesting actions to the company. Employees must be able to deliver on the Four Pillars of Hyper-Sociality and think:
Tribe vs. market segment
Human-centricity vs. company-centricity
Network vs. channel
Social messiness vs. process and hierarchy
In addition, management needs to be aware that when the firm is dealing with humans socially, there will be a lot of “exception handling.” This refers to the situations in which a human needs to get involved in a process that is typically automated because an “exception” has occurred, and a human’s fuzzy logic is required. Perhaps the exception is a product return, a suggestion about how to improve a process, or a request for assistance in a difficult-to-articulate area. Your business will be generating an increasing number of messy, nonuniform interactions with customers as the pace of the Hyper-Social shift picks up. And although machines are increasingly being integrated into our workflows and our interactions, it appears that one place where they won’t find a home anytime soon is in dealing with humans in a Hyper-Social context. As Don Peppers noted recently in an interview with us, judgment, creativity, empathy, and wisdom are things that computers still can’t supply.
Given the Hyper-Social shift, companies will not be able to rely on programs to sway public opinion. In the past, a narrow view of customers reigned supreme: they all appeared to be the same, and one public relations or communications message would fit them all. In a networked, Hyper-Social world, you will need talent that can connect quickly, create trust, and follow up with an army of voices.
To ensure that your talent is well aligned with the Hyper-Social shift, run through the different areas of your company, and see what the talent there should look like to match the tribes. For instance, a customer service professional who spends his entire shift responding to blog posts or tweets is likely to be outgoing, conversant with social media tools, and able to communicate expertly through written words. Mark Colombo, senior vice president of digital access marketing at FedEx, noted that he looks for employees “who have the right academic skills; you want great listeners; and when you start to talk about the skills, you want someone really well-rounded with great business acumen and some strong technical skills—not necessarily the technology du jour, but strong technical skills being quantitative, and an understanding of how to leverage technology to drive business results.”9
Barry Judge, CMO at Best Buy, when discussing how he chooses talent to speak with Best Buy’s tribes, observed,
I think there’s some basic understanding of what the brand is about and there’s some basic understanding of policies and then you hire the right people ... and you let everybody participate and for the most part people will do the right thing. They won’t do the right thing every time. But if you hire the right people and they’re trained to some degree and have some knowledge, then in general they’ll do the right thing and the brand will be better off because it will be human. So I think that’s the opportunity. I think brands can become human. Especially as a retailer I think that’s a critical idea.10
A key aspect of making a process Hyper-Social is ensuring that all the people who are interested and capable in the role are given the opportunity to engage and demonstrate their abilities. Accordingly, we suggest that employees who are interested in engaging with the tribes be permitted to self-select. Self-selection has been proven to work in cases like Wikipedia’s article drafting and crowd-sourced product development, and we have observed a number of additional cases where employees in Hyper-Social organizations have effectively self-selected.
But self-selection is no replacement for training and orientation. Are your salespeople comfortable with having much more discussion about the prices, concessions, and deals they have put together with the customers? Do your employees in general know enough about Human 1.0 through formal training? One suggestion for formally training employees in this regard is to role-play various processes that involve interactions that may be unfamiliar to the employee. These may include
Cocreating with a customer for product development
Handling a very visible and cantankerous customer through a customer experience touch point
Negotiating with a potential buyer through the sales cycle as other members of the tribe (and competitors) view the process
While this greater social interaction is likely to be exciting for the right talent (those who decide to engage in the increasingly Hyper-Social relationship with the customer and other stakeholders), it will be tough on other individuals, and will increasingly require facility with statistics and research. As we’ve shown, there is a great deal of science concerning human social behavior that needs to be considered, as well as increasing amounts of Web-based data showing tribal actions and conversations. Increased Hyper-Sociality will also require deep and up-to-date knowledge of the company’s products and services by all workers, not just the marketing and sales personnel who formerly had those discussions with prospects. Since conversations between the tribes and the companies will be taking place through new pathways (buyers conversing with product designers, support people, or marketing folks, depending on the buyers’ outreach and choice of forum), employees will need to know more about the company and its products to be responsive to customers.
Talent needs to be constantly innovating and communicating those innovations to the firm through knowledge management systems or other processes. A lack of talent that can handle this new knowledge flow (process and business innovation) will be a huge lost opportunity, and the companies that do not capture these people will eventually lose ground to better-run peers. This is a perfect example of an area where Hyper-Sociality can profit both the customer and the company—make sure that your talent is improving and innovating for you in tandem with what it’s doing for the customer.
Although management must focus on the attributes of the talent that will be necessary to drive successful Hyper-Social organizations, it must not lose sight of the fact that the talent will have access to unprecedented amounts of insight from customers. What will management do to ensure that this information and insight will be visible to the right people in the organization? Employee training on both data parsing and knowledge sharing is likely to be required. As we speak with Hyper-Social companies, the need for significant data analysis skills repeatedly crops up as a need-to-have element of employees’ skill sets.
Other organizations are experimenting with the creation of a chief commercial officer or chief customer officer (CCO). Charged with managing all contacts with the customer across the organization, CCOs are still a relatively rare breed. Their ranks are growing, however: in 2001, there were only 5 CCOs worldwide, but in 2008, the number of CCOs had jumped to 56.11 The Chief Customer Officer Council, a peer-advisor network where CCOs share experiences, states that the CCO “must be the ultimate authority on customers, understanding customers better than any other individual in the company and perhaps better than some customers may even understand themselves.” The CCO Council cautions, however, that a CCO must have the power to create and implement customer strategy across all business units or silos, and that without this ability, “the individual’s purview is limited and does not warrant the CCO title.”12
Given the importance of understanding Human 1.0 principles such as trust, reciprocity, and fairness, and our sometimes irrational behaviors, managers might also consider consulting with behavioral economists and anthropologists as they develop their view of what sort of talent their organization needs. Hyper-Sociality, as we’ve seen, can bestow significant benefits on organizations, but the benefits carry with them the requirement that your people understand humans, their motivations, and their behavior in groups. Indeed, you need to come to terms with their irrationality, and how Hyper-Sociality can be at the root of that irrationality. As Dan Ariely, professor at Duke, visiting professor at MIT’s Media Center, and author of Predictably Irrational, observed to us recently about the current global recession:
So, the failing of the market in such a big way this year in some sense has been very good for behavioral economics. I think we understand it. Irrationality is not limited to a few people who are making small decisions, but instead it’s a huge part of the market, it’s very important to understand and figure out and unless we do it, we’re going to get into difficult, difficult circumstances, and repeatedly doing so.13
By now it should be clear that your organization will need different talent to help drive its success in a Hyper-Social world. Do you think your organization is thinking ahead of the talent curve, or is it merely recruiting the same sorts of talent it always has? Is your company thinking enough about Human 1.0 behaviors, and what sort of employees would best engage with those behaviors, or is it hiring based on evidence of past success in unrelated areas? Is your organization assessing how well employees are exhibiting the Four Pillars of Hyper-Sociality? Are decision makers taking the proper measures to ensure that those employees who are increasingly interacting with your tribes have the information, training, and authority to act in those ways that are best for both the tribes and the organization? And is your organization managing its talent so that learnings about your tribes are being captured and acted on?