Employees Are Not Your Greatest Asset . . .

“People can't serve as your company's greatest assets unless you motivate them”, say Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald.

People are not your greatest asset. Even great people are not your greatest asset. In fact, great people can be your greatest liability.

So if it’s not people, what is your greatest asset?  The answer is how you empower your people. Think about it. What is the purpose of a business organization? To assemble a group of people, who previously may have had no association, and motivate them to accomplish a shared goal and align them to the organization’s objectives. More effective empowerment equals more productive work.

As leaders and managers, the real ‘job’ is to empower people. Therefore, we organize them into divisions, units, groups and teams. We provide goals and incentives to motivate them. And we provide them with authority, training, tools, resources and processes necessary to complete their task.

With the advent of Social media, there are new ways to enhance your greatest asset, because now you are empowering people to collaborate at unprecedented scale. With social media, we motivate people to form ‘communities’ around a meaningful and common purpose or job. We provide them with new technology and guidance, with the ultimate goal of creating “mass collaboration”.

“Collective Intelligence”

“Collective intelligence” is the formation of relatively small communities into a larger knowledge bank. Collective intelligence is not new, but the mass collaboration via social media provides a scale like never before thought possible. Even the most modest individual contributions can be impact, when combined at scale. Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr are all social Web examples of collective intelligence. Each Wikipedia article by itself is relatively insignificant, but with the accumulation of millions of articles linked together, this becomes powerful.

Expertise Location

Expertise location is about finding specific expertise in the masses of people and the amount of available content.  The goal is not to collect numerous small contributions from many, but to find just what is needed. ‘Crowdsourcing’ is a well-known example of expertise location.

New Structures

The new structures are: the processes, the content, the categorizes, the organizational networks and the teams. The goal is to gain a better understanding of the true “nature of things” to effectively organize, guide or interact with a community or its efforts. Social media, applied with transparency, can implement these structures.

Interest Cultivation
Interest cultivation is the forming of communities around a shared interest or mission. Social media facilitates the mass sharing of interests like never before. Businesses often pursue interest cultivation with the aim of engaging customers to market product/services, improve delivery and increase sales.

Flash Coordination

A new concept involves the leveraging of a number of people into activities through short mass-messaging and texting.  By using flash coordination, companies can leverage a powerful and immediate response to an important occurrence.

Relationship Leverage

Relationship leverage is the practice of managing and creating value from a number of relationships. What you hope to do is maximize the strength of weak ties and the power of unbalanced relationships. For example, Facebook is all about relationship leverage. We can keep numerous people up to date on what we are doing and thinking with only minimal effort. Now, we only need to respond to those who choose to interact around something a common interest or theme. We sacrifice intimacy for scale, but that is the trade-off with relationship leverage.

Conclusion:

Examine these items in relation to your business strategic goals and plans, major customer challenges, and business practices.  Then determine where and how mass collaboration might empower your people to deliver value to your organization and enhance what is truly your greatest asset.

1-    As a leader, how are you empowering the next generation of leaders in your organization to exert their creative influence?

2-    As a leader, what are you doing to infuse the values of your organization into its systems and structures and to transfer those values to the next generation?