I’ve seen some great traction over the years to harness the power of new technologies. Every day I learn about countless new software solutions that my clients can add onto their environment. Which is why I’m posting this blog, it is time for us in Social to look beyond the tool. It is time to invest in our people commensurate with our tool development investments. Chief HR Officer, Douglas Reid has advised me that issues in HR have been fundamentally the same throughout his entire career. I thought to myself that cannot be? For we have new generations of talent and tools, right? This just doesn’t compute for me as I know countless consultants who are brilliant in the areas of Diversity and Inclusion, Change Management, Talent Management, Learning, Human Resources and Organizational Design and Social Business.
Yet we continue to see pieces like Coffee VLOG which have amazing storytelling potential come across as ethnocentric because the leaders lack authenticity. I was inspired by the idea; I was inspired by the real people on the video talking to one another. Many of us working in market know about their organizational acumen. Yet when the Vice President enunciated poorly CEMEX and interviewees names, I was disappointed. The Vice President highlighted herself and her degree from Harvard during the piece. I felt we lost focus on the interviewees and their story. To be customer centric, we must have that in our titles and in our thoughts throughout the day. Why not focus entirely on the customer story? I was inspired enough to share it on my social networks and was surprised to see that the Vice Presidents avatar was featured as the #1 thumbnail when posting the url on Facebook? I was left wondering why IBM didn’t recognize CEMEX content in the thumbnail.
Don’t get me wrong – right social storytelling concept. It simply lacked in diversity and inclusive execution and authentic leadership.
Why does this happen? We need to focus more on creating great organizations, as described in the May HBR article by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. We don’t have cross organizational alignment and engagement with our People programs. We still cannot seem to interlock the People programs with the technology solutions in ways that allow us to harness the talented people’s gifts they have within organizations to allow both parties to ‘sing’. Although we may have amazing talent, we often can’t figure out how to harness their potential without courageous conversations, courageous conversations, open leadership models and alignment between marketing and technology organizations.
