We’ve been talking about how community management is as much of an internal process as it is external for a while now, but I was glad to see some affirmation of our argument from Quy Huy and Andrew Shipilov on the Harvard Business Review blog yesterday:

Firms that lack leaders with social media skills are often tempted to outsource community management to outsiders, such as web development firms or advertising agencies. Unfortunately, this increases the risk of failure. The problem is that when community development is outsourced, the organization doesn’t learn and people inside communicate like they always did, even though the use of social media might have speeded up internal communication and flattened the hierarchies. As a result, the company is often very different from the face it portrays online, which almost always gets discovered.

A better solution is to bring in new leaders who do understand social media, which some companies do through acquisition.

The concept is also presented Lee Bryant’s Social Business Inside and Out presentation, in which Bryant compares companies who are only social on the outside to buildings that put up shiny decorations—they may attract people to your organization, but once people get up close, they will see the same cold, hard exterior walls of every other building.

In essence, it’s a facade.

The challenge is in implementation

But even if we accept that social practices between members of an organization are just as vitally important as social practices between orgs and customers, we’re still left with the long and arduous task of shifting industrial business practices to social business practices.

While Bryant and other social business leaders talk about moving social change from the edge through dedicated grassroots efforts, Huy and Shipilov suggest that we start with the middle.

To inject passion and manage inter-generational diversity, top executives should also think about co-opting a group of middle managers into using social media. In a previous research (see HBR article “In Praise of Middle Managers“), it has been found that co-opted middle managers who are trusted by their colleagues help executives implement innovative ideas because they know the “hot buttons” of their group.

It’s not as simple as “injecting” passion

There are a few fundamental assumptions that are going on here. First, Huy and Shipilov assume that we can simply “inject passion” into our organizations. While they reference John Hagel and John Seely Brown work, they miss the point that, as Hagel and Brown write,

We can pursue the passion that has lurked inside since our childhoods, bring it to the surface, and nurture it. This might mean that we redesign our careers, change fields, pursue reduced workloads, or develop the parts of our jobs that are truly meaningful and satisfying.

All this to say it’s difficult to inject a passion for accounting in someone whose real love in life is creative writing.

If you want to develop the passion of your workforce, you will most likely find that many people’s passions don’t line up with their job descriptions. If you want to increase passion among your workforce, you’re going to need to take a flexible approach to how you define job function (ideally this should start with your hiring practices; if you hire people who are passionate about what they do, there’s no need to inject it later). You will also need to take the time to help individuals focus on finding and developing what they enjoy doing in their current positions.

So it’s less like “injecting” and more like “cultivating.”

Co-opt less, Listen more

Secondly, the article seems to suggest that executives can simply co-opt middle managers to help them implement a defined plan.

While I agree that there should be a senior executive who is in charge of thinking horizontally across an organization, and while I agree that senior-level buy-in is vital, the process of change itself has to be informed and guided from the bottom up.

This means that executives must start not with co-opting, but with listening to their managers. What are their needs? What are their direct reports’ needs? How might those be solved, not by some group of social media buzzwords, but by altering work processes to make them inherently more social?

If the goal is to embrace the power of social interaction for the good of our organizations, then we must acknowledge that social organizations are flatter than industrial organizations. In social organizations, the value of the people doing work surpasses the work itself. In social organizations, the importance of title is second to the work that you actually can produce and your professional reputation for doing so.

This is to say that you can’t change an organization to be more social through the hierarchical methods just as you can’t interpret new paradigms with old ones (at least, that’s what Kuhn thought).

So what now?

As we go forward, it’s my hope that the first organizations who make the difficult switch from industrial enterprise to social business might give us a glimpse into what sorts of processes are successful in inacting such wide-sweeping change. Until then though, it seems like we should focus on investigating what’s different with this shift than other organizational shifts that preceeded it.

Because when we understand what the shift is really all about, then we can avoid the temptation to apply old systems to new processes, and we can increase our chances at success.

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