Page 93 - Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders

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LEADING WITH E-COMMUNICATIONS
CHAPTER 5
a communications center but also as a place for posting leadership resources
related to development and evaluation.
The secret to building the successful e-community is to give people a
reason to visit. This means keeping the information lively and pertinent. It
also means giving people a reason to return again and again. This requires
keeping the content fresh and up to date. The center of the e-community is
the web site. 71
Leaders also need to keep in mind that in an e-community, transparency
(openness) rules. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter puts it, the days of “mushroom
management . . . keep[ing] employees in the dark, cover[ing] them with
3
manure, and when they ripen, can[ning] them” are over. In an e-community,
information is everywhere and is freely shared. Such a community diminishes
the opportunity for bosses to lord it over underlings because they have knowl-
edge that no one else has. When people know the bigger picture, as happens in
a transparent culture, they can make better-informed decisions for the organi-
zation and for themselves.
A note about access:You may decide to restrict access to members of the
team or employees of the organization. You can also have levels of access, with
everyone able to see the home page, but sections of the site being restricted. In
this way, you can set up virtual workrooms where team members can collabo-
rate. In this virtual space, members can share documents, edit them, and post
new findings, with the information restricted to members only. Many corpo-
rate universities are doing this for their participants, enabling “students” to
collaborate in virtual time and space.

TELEPHONE AND VOICEMAIL

In our age of e-communications, we sometimes forget to use the telephone.
Often it is more appropriate to make an initial contact with an individual on
the phone and follow up with email, or vice versa. Telephone and voice-
mail, as mentioned in Chapter 4, have the advantage of personal warmth
and one-to-one connection. Also, a telephone conversation is a dialogue;
the parties to the call can go back and forth quickly, amplifying and expli-
cating in 30 seconds points that might take three or four rounds of email to
sort out.
When leaving a voicemail, think about what you want to say first. Make
your points quickly and in reasonable order. The person retrieving the message
will thank you for your clarity and brevity. And, if you cannot think of exactly
what you want to say, send an email. The time it takes you to compose the mes-
sage will give you an opportunity to develop and organize your thoughts.