How Executives Use Social Media to Lead

Doug Downs (00:05):

Since this pandemic began, remote work has blurred the traditional boundaries between work and home. Even when the workday is done, many of us, maybe most of us, find ourselves fielding messages that are work related. Think about what you're doing right now, listening to this podcast in which you have both a professional and a personal interest. You're more relaxing than working right now, but it's not clear cut for many. Gone are the days we could simply knock on our manager's door. We're in the middle of a societal shift from an in-person environment to one blending or maybe entirely shifting to a digital atmosphere. Leaders find themselves needing to digitally transform and adjust not only to a more digital world, but one in which work time and personal time is a little fuzzy. Enter social media. An increasing number of CEOs are now on at least one digital social platform. It's a good idea. It ensures visibility of brand and culture while signaling the organization is tech savvy. It also helps with the perception of personal connections by sharing personality. Major political leaders have already figured this out. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the corporate world, Mary Barra of General Motors, Adena Friedman of the NASDAQ Exchange and Doug McMillon of Walmart are examples of CEOs online and in the conversation.

(01:54):

And just being online isn't nearly enough anymore. Employees, customers, and all stakeholders want to see leaders engaging. And yes, that's tricky. There are conversations online, but it's also the place where arguments can happen. People get offended, they become outraged. So how do you engage more without offending more or upsetting more? Well, nobody said it was going to be easy. Today on Stories and Strategies. We talk with Craig Mullaney of Brunswick Group who says authentic and accessible leadership has never been more important, and that being online is just table stakes.

(02:54):

My name is Doug Downs. My guest this week is Craig Mullaney of Brunswick Group in the Washington DC office. Hello, Craig.

Craig Mullaney (03:01):

Hello, Doug. Great to be with you.

Doug Downs (03:03):

Great to be with you. How are things in DC today? It's a Friday as we record, so I imagine slowing down a little, or is it never slowed?

Craig Mullaney (03:10):

Yeah, well, it's sunny and 70 degrees, which is pretty good. So we'll get out outside and run today. It'll be a lovely day.

Doug Downs (03:18):

Awesome. Craig, your background includes being a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a salutatorian at the United States Military Academy at West Point. You founded the Global Executive Program for Facebook, now Meta, you served as a senior advisor at the US Agency for International Development and at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, and you were on the National Security Policy staff of President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. You've also written a New York Times bestseller, the Unforgiving Minute, A Soldier's Education. There's a link to that in the show notes, and you've been on television various times on C B S, C N B C, BBC, N P R, the Colbert Report, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Craig, what we're focusing on in this episode is the results of a study done by Brunswick Group as part of your connected leadership research program. So let's first focus on the methodology of the study, how it was done, who you talked with where do they live and work, and broadly, what kinds of questions were you asking?

Craig Mullaney (04:23):

Yes. This is the third year we've done this study and we've evolved the research approach every year for 2022. We spoke with three audiences. The first were employees, 3,600 employees at companies with more than a thousand employees, so large companies, readers of financial publications. We spoke with 2,800 of those respondents across seven markets, Germany, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, UAE, the UK, and the US. And then we also spoke with 16 CEOs or their leadership teams at companies that were representing a range of sectors around the world collectively more than 3 million employees and more than one and a half trillion in revenue. And these were leaders we wanted to learn from what are the practical benefits that they found and what are the lessons for maybe companies who are earlier in their journey?

Doug Downs (05:29):

And a clear message you got back is that we've gotten to the point where stakeholders, the people who believe they have a stake in the business, were the leaders' interests, they now expect the leader to be online. We've gotten to that part of the evolution now.

Craig Mullaney (05:45):

That's right. We've been saying for the last couple of years that expectations are rising, and now we're saying, oh, the expectations are clear. This has now become a business imperative, and if you're not doing this your competitors will and you'll be the worst for it.

Doug Downs (06:01):

And you use the term connected, right? So I want to dig deeper on what connected means because it feels a bit subjective As an employee or a potential employee of an organization, what does it mean that I want to feel connected through social media to my leader?

Craig Mullaney (06:18):

Well, the way we define connected leadership in the research and the way the questions are structured is these are business leaders who are using social media to engage stakeholders. And 99% of cases, that's one of the major social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram that they're not just present on the platform with maybe a profile photo and a biography, but active. They're sharing content with their communities

Doug Downs (06:52):

And engaged. They're sharing content. I think of that as a broadcast style approach. As an employee, am I expecting that my leader is going to interact with me back and forth on social media, have conversations with me, comment on my posts, is that the kind of thing I'm looking for?

Craig Mullaney (07:10):

We think that comes through and some of the responses that we heard, so we ask, why do you as an employee prefer to work for a company with a C E O who's using social media? And what they talk about is the benefits of having an accessible leader of transparency of direct communication. We think that this has accelerated in part because of the communal experience of a pandemic and in times of crisis wanting to feel closer to colleagues and management. And social media happens to be one of the leadership technologies, if you will, that makes that possible when you can't be literally in the room together.

Doug Downs (08:04):

And social media now enables us to not just be active in a written form, but on Twitter, you can broadcast live on Facebook, of course, Facebook Live, you can do it on Instagram. I don't see in the report where that's an expectation yet of the stakeholder, but if expectations are part of the evolution somewhere down the road, is that expected from the leader that they will start to participate or lead live events?

Craig Mullaney (08:36):

Yeah, I think certainly the trend is away from just reading your leaders and what they put in text, so sort of seeing, hearing and interacting with them in a live format. And that's the growth of live video, the growth of live audio with platforms like Clubhouse, Twitter spaces, LinkedIn now has a live audio format and whether or not it's an expectation doing so is absolutely an advantage for a business leader because the platforms all reward use of audio, video and visual communications so the algorithms give preferential treatment to that type of content, so you'll just reach more people if you use more immersive more visual formats. And two attention spans are short. People are scrolling through their feeds fast. I mean, before I left Facebook four years ago, I want to say the average time spent on a post was about between one and two seconds. So you've got one second. As a business leader to stop someone's thumb and get their attention and doing so with video and really high quality visual communications really helps

Doug Downs (10:06):

Podcasting. Now, there's an idea you listen to podcasts. Maybe a podcast is right for you or one of your clients stories and strategies is a full podcast production company with clients in the United States as well as Canada, great Britain and Australia. If you want to chat, send me an email, doug@storiesandstrategies.ca, and we'll set up that chat. Let's talk podcasts.

(10:40):

And I have to selfishly ask are podcasts somewhere on the horizon as an expectation of all leaders?

Craig Mullaney (10:49):

We think of podcasts as signature content, and that is a trend amongst leaders having sometimes video series, sometimes audio series where on some periodic basis, say once a month an executive is sitting down with another executive to talk about an issue that's particularly central to their platform because there's audiences create habits. They appreciate when there are sort of deep dives on topics. And so I absolutely think we'll see leaders using podcast some are already doing so quite effectively.

Doug Downs (11:37):

One of the notes in the connected leadership report is that social media platforms enable communications quote on a leader's own terms. Can I just push back a little bit on that? They encourage one to respond and the response is not always on your own terms. And in fact, we've seen some major media outlets disable questions and comments on many stories because there's a rabbit hole there on social media too.

Craig Mullaney (12:09):

Yeah, I mean, this maybe is mostly a contrast with relying entirely on earned media to shape the way that you or your company are perceived. A lot of executives that I work with have some trepidation about engaging with media and even if they recognize the importance, very few are looking forward to sitting down with a reporter who could really take that interview in any direction. Obviously, it's very important for leaders to engage with traditional media. There's a great degree of trust in those audiences, and there's the built-in reach of media platforms but say in the midst of a crisis or in an issue that just doesn't merit media attention, you want to have a channel directly to your stakeholders, and that's what social media provides. And yes, you can't control, per se, what happens below the fold in the comment threads. Yeah. But we see some of the more effective leaders look at that as an opportunity. They're looking to respond with the critical comments because they want to do more than just preach to the choir. They want to convert minds, change opinions about their organization, and this is a way to do so.

Doug Downs (13:40):

Yes. And they can use it as anecdotal the way people are thinking about certain things

Craig Mullaney (13:47):

If I may, there, I think that's the flip side of having concerns and fears about what happens in the comments section is thinking of what I think is a greater risk for an executives that they are trapped inside a bubble. And social media does give you a highly tuned listening device to see what's bubbling up from your employees, your investors, your customers. And many executives find that incredibly valuable to keep a finger on the pulse of their stakeholders.

Doug Downs (14:21):

I would agree. And there's this bizarre sense of anonymity for some people responding on social media and in some cases, I suppose they are anonymous, but you get to the ugly truth sometimes of what people are really thinking

Craig Mullaney (14:37):

And that's worth hearing even if you don't like it.

Doug Downs (14:41):

Agreed. Another advantage in working with social media is that idea of setting the narrative for something. And in that sense, truly you are at least persuading the communication on your own terms. Often we see this in political discourse where something has taken place and Blue wants to set a narrative that goes one way, and Red wants to set a narrative that goes another way and people will respond and have discourse based on that narrative. Does that get to a bit of what you're trying to get across there and the advantages of participating on social media?

Craig Mullaney (15:18):

Yeah, I think so. One thing I'll say to an executive that says I don't want to be on social media is I say, you're already on social media and I can show you the conversations that are happening about you and your company, but you don't have a voice in that conversation. And that gives you no opportunity to influence the narrative, the discourse. Absolutely. Yeah. Unfortunately, there's no escaping it. There's no escaping it now. It's the world that we live in, and it's to your advantage to master the tools that are available.

Doug Downs (15:51):

Yeah, the fishbowl's getting bigger. From my own experience, I can share that. I think most leaders shape their approach to communication by wanting to avoid rebuke from their board that the chairperson of the board has always at the forefront of their mind. And if it's the chairperson or the board, we're talking about it, it's the most persuasive stakeholders or shareholders in the company. What I'm saying is so many leaders are extremely cautious as a base approach and then trying to be genuine or casual on top of that approach, which ends up coming across as kind of rehearsed and fake, and they hire presentation coaches and media training and all that stuff. But that base approach is how they stay alive, at least for a few years in that really high paying job.

Craig Mullaney (16:47):

I think boards are, I think the perspective of boards, and we hear this from the directors and chairs nominating committees we work with, is that their expectations of C-Suite executives have changed as well. And they've seen that engaging with a broader set of stakeholders is ultimately preserved shareholder value. And that a C E O, who is not attuned to and responsive to, for instance, strong demands from employees in the wake of a social crisis or a major breaking news issue, which has relevance for the company and it's employee base that presents a real enterprise risk. And so they're looking a afresh at leaders with strong communication skills and engagement skills as that's part of the role of a modern C E O. It's no longer enough to just deliver the numbers.

Doug Downs (17:49):

Now, this is all part of your connected leadership research program at Brunswick Group. Tell me a bit more about that program who it reaches out to and the kind of clientele that you bring into it.

Craig Mullaney (18:02):

Brunswick Group is an international critical issues advisory firm. We work exclusively with corporate clients. These are typically large multinational companies, but not always, and provide strategic communications council around their most pressing issues, whether it's a major acquisition, a restructuring, a crisis reshaping their employee value proposition. And so in the course of that work, we serve alongside many C-suite executives. And we set out three years ago with this program to ground our advice in really a more in-depth appreciation of stakeholder expectations and to understand how the role of a modern business leader has evolved and will evolve. And what we found through that research is that there are much higher than expected expectations from stakeholders that their leaders today our adept communicators capable of and engaged with social media platforms in particular. And so we have an ongoing research platform. We're publishing thought leadership on the topic, evolving the sort of the state of the art of leadership in today's corporate world. And we work with at this point, hundreds of clients around the world to develop their own leadership approaches that are holistic and integrated that think about social and digital alongside traditional media engagement investor engagement, and so forth.

Doug Downs (19:50):

Okay. And where can people find out more about that?

Craig Mullaney (19:53):

If you go to brunswickgroup.com/connectedleadership, you can subscribe to our newsletter. You can see research from this year and past years. Of course, I am active myself on Twitter and LinkedIn at Craig Mullaney. and I'd be delighted to have you as part of our community.

Doug Downs (20:17):

Craig, thank you so much for your time today.

Craig Mullaney (20:19):

It was great to be with you.

Doug Downs (20:22):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Craig Mullaney of Brunswick Group, best way to do that, he mentioned his Twitter handle. It's @Craig Mullaney. We've also have a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. We're hoping you might help us connect and engage with people online with more people. You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn, but on Apple or Spotify, if you would just leave a rating on this podcast, leave a four star or a five star rating. I'm not choosy. I love the Five star, but the ratings really help tell the algorithm that we are worth listening to. A we'd really appreciate, more than anything else., If you like this episode, would you do us a favor and tell just one friend? Thanks for listening.