Twenty-two years ago, a long-forgotten technology company called American Online introduced the concept of something called “Instant Messenger.” It offered its connected users the ability to have instantaneous two-way communications, via typed messages, 24-7. It was all the rage.
It changed the world.
Today, we live in a world that expects to know everything that is going on everywhere, by everyone, instantly. We believe it is our right to know and your duty to keep us informed. In other words, we all want to be omniscient – a quality that used to be reserved for God.
Not anymore.
But just like every other time in history that man has flexed his prideful muscles pretending to be God, God has gently (or not-so-gently) reminded us that that being God is His job, not ours. He’s just better at it.
Here are two of the difficult side effects of our collective attempt to play God this time.
We Are Losing Trust In One Another
Since we all expect to be in the know - at all times in all matters, in all circumstances - we expect to be able to provide our passionate input at every step along the way. If we can get enough people to agree with us, perhaps through the collective weight of our accumulated social media posts and concomitant “likes”, “retweets” and supporting comments, history should change its course to comport with our views. The prevailing cultural view is that when the court of social media speaks, we must respond accordingly… or not... at our own peril.
Just because we are able to know what each of the Kardashians has had for breakfast this morning does not mean, by extrapolation, that we deserve to know every element of the layered, complex issues that our leaders are dealing with and every thought that they are having on their way to making a decision. As a result, leaders of organizations are more and more seen as “secretive” or “poor communicators” simply because they are hard at work doing the difficult job of leading – which is by its very nature a lengthy, iterative process – without showing us all their work along the way.
The shifting sands of our cultural norms have led us to the false conclusion that all organizations are democracies and that their leaders must submit each element of their decision-making process, on every issue, to a public vote. This is, of course, impractical, unwieldy, divisive and ineffective. But we want it anyway.
As leaders, we must learn to thrive within this new reality. We must resolve to be faithful to the mission of the organizations we lead and to lead well, with character and conviction. We must be willing to lose our case in the court of social media in pursuit of the common good of the organizations we lead. Leadership has always been hard, and it just got a little harder. It’s our new normal.
As followers, we need to give our leaders the benefit of the doubt. If the organizations we belong to are being led by people whom we honestly believe to be soul-less scoundrels, we should question whether or not these are organizations of which we want to continue to be a part.
We used to trust each other more. The fact that we don’t isn’t technology’s fault. That’s on us.
The Flood of Trivia Is Crowding Out The Important Stuff
As a leader, have you tried diligently communicating with all members of your organization via extensive multi-layered communications plans… only to hear those you lead say soon thereafter: “Nobody ever told me that!”?
If so, you’re not alone.
Marketing experts estimate that each of us is exposed to 4,000-10,000 advertising messages each day. Add to that the hundreds (thousands?) of notifications from we receive our social media platforms and the hundreds (thousands?) of text messages and emails we exchange with one another each day. Not to mention the time and brain space we spend responding to/liking/retweeting/commenting on each of them. On top of all that, we add the sheer complexity of our daily lives – getting our work done, keeping our schedules fulfilled - all the while not letting down anyone who is depending on us. Call your Mom.
But let’s suppose amidst all the noise, along comes a tidbit of information from those who lead the organizations of which we are a part. We analyze it quickly: “Do I agree with that?”, “Is it actionable right now or can it wait?.” If we deem the information to be neutral or better and if it can possibly wait, we push it to the side – only to reside briefly in our brain buffer and then be quickly moved aside by the incessant flow of incoming information.
As a result, despite technology’s false promise of omniscience, we find ourselves strangely out of the loop on things that are important to us. And we blame our leaders for not communicating effectively with us.
As leaders, we must recognize this new reality of the harried lives our followers are living. We must recognize that we have the “curse of knowledge” on the issues at hand – forgetting what it was like not to know. Then we must be both selective and relentless in communicating the important things, in any creative way we can come up with, in order to break through the clutter and make it stick.
As followers, we must learn to have better filters to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps even turning off or limiting our exposure to social media. Priorities, people! The Kardashians will be OK without us.
In summary, we who have chosen to be in community with one other must remember why we all banded together in the first place. Let’s trust each other better and give each other the benefit of the doubt. Let’s listen better and prioritize the voices worth listening to. Because we’re all in this together.
And we are all we.