There is a revolution sweeping through our lives, measured by our experiences with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the like, which is not being replicated in the organizations in which we work. For many of us, going to work means actually slowing down in our ability to gain information, insights and connections, relative to what we normally do at home in our private lives. Seems crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s true. The social media revolution moves at two speeds: “normal, gale-force change” at home, and “near-glacial speed” at work. As a result, in a world of unprecedented change, far too many organizations are unaware of how badly prepared they are for seeing into the future. The reason for this is always the same: there is a generation of managerial insight that they lack – a generation of leaders lost.
 
The idea of lost leaders originated in an OpEd piece in the Financial Times, written in 2010, when then-outgoing Chief Marketing Officer of Unilever, Simon Cliff, warned that there was, within his organization, a “lost generation” of brand managers who do not understand the web and social networks”[1]  This lost generation has since turned out to be more than a Unilever-only problem; it appears endemic to large set of complex modern organizations who inhabit a wide-range of industries, and with managers across a diverse set of functions, all of whom are either uniformed, unaware or unprepared to deal with the opportunities and challenges inherent in the social media revolution.   
 
As a result, these organizations have failed or hesitated to make smart moves employing social media, have missed-out on major opportunities, and/or have been blind-sided by disruptors that they never saw coming.  Simon Cliff’s article did, however, awaken at least one, major European-based FMCG that took his warnings to heart and began an effort to remedy the lost leaders phenomenon.
 
The initiative started by identifying about 30 high-potential, yet young [mid-30s on average] Marketing professionals who were tasked with addressing the lack of organizational social media literacy, explore ways of remedying the issue,  and then become “ambassadors” of change to the senior-most management. Taking advantage of the geographic dispersion of the group, they were asked to take on the role of “anthropologists", who would explore the most energizing brands in their own communities and then establish a personal social media presence – blogs, facebook and twitter – to share and compare their findings.  After several months of gathering impressions, they then spent a week together to create a story of what each team had discovered, and to understand how to best use their findings to make a difference within their own organization. It was this combination of messages that was then presented to the senior leaders of the company.
 
The exercise yielded a number of lessons that speak to the importance of the quest for achieving “Organizational Social Media Literacy”:
 

• For many firms, social media is their best chance to establish “pull” relationships with their customers. Pull is always more effective than push in moving ideas and products to customers, and getting customers to “pull” is much more easily accomplished through social-media than any alternative channel available today.
   
• To make thoughtful strategic decisions, senior executives need first-hand, personal experiences with social media.  Yet, most senior managers have no direct contact at all with societal-changing social media. They are “too busy”, “too old”, or “too sophisticated” for such activities, and as a result every strategic conversation that involves social media becomes necessarily abstract.
   
• Young high-potentials are part of the lost leaders’ generation. Surprisingly, also the young professionals who engaged in the project admitted to be unfamiliar with even a fairly basic level of social media engagement. Already in their thirties, they were too old to be at the forefront of social media adoption in their organization. In fact, as GE’s example in Deiser & Newton’s article demonstrates, social media is a logical and easy place for any organization to consider “reverse-mentoring” as a means of spreading familiarity among the leadership team.
   
• Dreams are critical…. The most sobering lesson the team learned from examining other companies, who were far more advanced in social media than their own organization, was that “the others had bigger dreams!” But they also found out that if these other firms  had only relied upon “insiders” to dream, their dreams would have been far fewer and far less vivid. The power of social media is let others in to help co-create the future.
   
• …. but Reality too.  While it was important for the young high-potentials to see the success of other organizations so they could build a compelling story around their own dreams, it was essential that they could break down these successes into a reality that senior management could relate to: business models, financial impact and execution plans. Without this language they would not have been listened to, and without the business context they would not have been taken seriously.
   
• Self-confidence and confidence as essential managerial traits. Leveraging Social Media requires a culture of openness and transparency. To engage in co-creation and seriously listen to outside ideas - social-media-derived or not - is a threatening proposition for many senior executives, particularly in a mature industry leader. Self-confidence and personal courage are essential to see any such initiative through.
   
• Leaders as Architects:  Finally, it makes no sense to even consider the adoption of an organizational social media agenda unless the organization is prepared to rethink its entire architecture. New ideas need a social support structure to give them a higher probability of success, and this social support structure is the result of making different and better managerial choices which will result in a more disciplined culture.

 
We believe that the lessons from this experience are valuable and worth considering if we want to bring big-change into reluctant organizations.

Bill Fischer is a Professor of Innovation Management at IMD. 

[1]http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/14a1d65c-40cd-11df-94c2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz36BqKFaGv