After some time I shifted the conversation to culture. I wanted to understand the way that the team operated and why. I wanted to know what worked and what didn’t – and also what happened when things go wrong (as they inevitably do with even the most harmonious teams). And suddenly the lights went on.

This team had spent a considerable amount of time “as a team”. They worked well with each other and often could second guess decisions that each could make. And while this had provided them cohesiveness over the years, it seemed to me, that they had fallen into the consensus trap – confusing alignment with consensus. There seemed to be no clarity around responsibility, accountability or even role.

During team meetings, the point of view of each person was canvassed and debated. Decision making unofficially required a consensual team view. This meant that a large proportion of collaborative time was spent reaching an agreed view and discussing the fine points of disagreement. Not only that … untolled hours before these meetings were devoted to lobbying particular view points and gaining support. The end result was a roaring sense of group think that had turned this high performing team inside out.

I turned to my friend and suggested that it’s time to kill the culture of consensus that had served them so well. Channelling Mike Myatt, I spoke of the role of leaders:

Great leaders intrinsically understand team building catalyzes collaboration, creates both disruptive and incremental innovation, facilitates a certainty of execution, and is one of the key foundational elements associated with creating a dynamic corporate culture. Consensus thinking undermines all of the aforementioned. Just as consensus is team building’s silent killer, it is also often the assassin of culture.

If consensus is the “assassin of culture,” our role as leaders is to combat it where and when we find it. This problem, I explained to my friend, would not be resolved until he was resolved to end it.

A few weeks later I met my friend for lunch. I was keen to understand whether there had been any changes – and what impact they had had. By the way that he walked into the restaurant, I knew that the situation had improved. “You just can’t lead by consensus”, he said to me as he sat down. Even small changes to the team format had dramatically changed the dynamics. The focus on culture – on alignment – but also on responsibility and accountability had freed the team to pursue action rather than consensus. And the weekly meetings were quickly transformed into much more vibrant forums. There was still work to do, but a bridge had been crossed – and all it took was a single decision.

Have you seen or experienced these types of turnarounds?

Nina Nets It Out: Culture is the great enabler of business – but without care and attention, culture too can drift, become unfocused and problematic. Leaders must constantly be on the lookout for shifts in the culture of teams (large and small) and proactively work to set the optimum environment for success. Be sure to look below the surface of even your high performing teams, you might be surprised to see what’s there.

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This is a great article, covering some of the key principles of management – from an understanding of business through to team motivation and change. Geoffrey’s approach calls out the distinction between an “average boss” and an “extraordinary boss” – identifying eight core beliefs that differentiates one from the other. And while I can’t quibble with the distinctions he makes – I’d like to think we could take this distinction further. Rather than thinking about the notion of a “boss” or a “manager” – let’s reframe our role in the guise of the “leader” and let’s test each item against business culture.

Imagine a world where:

• Business takes place as a process of collaboration between your customers, partners and suppliers
• Your company, your teams and peers connect as though a tribe
• Management simply provides a platform which handles the transactions of business while unleashing your creativity
• Your employees are not only considered peers, but responsible and empowered leaders
• Fear and even vision are overcome by purpose
• Change is itself seen as the precondition for innovation and reinvention
• Technology changes not just the way we do business but our reasons for doing business
• Work not only contributes to our sense of wellbeing, but inspires us in a virtuous process

But why, you may ask is this important? Eric Jackson suggests that it’s not just a company’s leadership that impacts its longevity – but its DNA. Take a moment to read his explanation of why Google and Facebook might completely disappear in the next five years. And if each company’s DNA is set at its inception then we cannot simply rely on restructuring or innovation to ensure we remain relevant to our markets, useful to our customers and vital for our employees. We need to reinvent, out-think and re-imagine what it means to be in business in this changing world. And the only way to do this is to be a leader, not a boss.

Nina Nets It Out: We can’t achieve different outcomes by following the same path over and over – for even our businesses choose to stand still, our customers constantly evolve. The only choice for the leader is to innovate – to seek new outcomes for new markets and new conditions. The question is – “are you ready to be a leader”?

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I can remember when customer relationship management (CRM) was the shiniest new toy in the IT bag of tricks. I was working with Tom Siebel and some of the smartest executives in the industry and we felt like we were ahead of the curve.

Back then, contact management systems were the lifeblood of every business manager. We’d live or die by these vital records. And then, at Siebel Systems, we changed the game. We came to market with the right software solution at precisely the time in which enterprises craved these services. We had seen the trend coming and were able to move quickly and comprehensively to claim the lion’s share of the market opportunity.

But where had this trend come from and how did we know it was going to reshape the landscape of enterprise technology.

In my first article for Forbes.com, I talk about some of the thinking behind the work I am leading with SAP’s Premier Customer Network. You can read the full article here.

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For while we have never been more connected, we are also more exposed. With social media we find both success and failure within our grasp.

Some time ago, when I wrote about the work-life balance, I was of the opinion that we all live on a continuum – where sometimes our work lives take precedence and at others that our personal lives do. But social media is complicating this spectrum – what we say, do and even believe in one part of our lives can impact other parts. And not just other parts. Other people.

Take, for example, the situation where Brooklyn based journalist Caitlin Curran found herself unemployed after participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement. In How Occupy Wall Street Cost Me My Job, Caitlin came face to face with the contradictions and complexities of this new world.

With every tweet, blog post, status update, photo, video or podcast, we push ourselves – our individual selves into spaces and situations for which we are not always prepared. And while many have embraced this new communications freedom, they often do so without understanding (or even imagining the consequences). But this is a problem that is not confined to the young or inexperienced – nor is a problem that is going to go away.

If analyst, Paul Greenberg is right, and we are shifting from a focus on customer management to a focus on customer engagement, then the same focus should apply to all other business disciplines. And social media will be at the heart of these cross line of business shifts. As leaders, it’s time we not only began to engage with these technologies, but with the shifts that they are making within and across our businesses. We need to find a way to grapple with and understand these pressures and then work with our teams to integrate this all intelligently.

Nina Nets it Out: Increasingly our passionate employees, business partners and customers are engaging in social media in one form or other. Inevitably the lines between our personal and professional lives will blur – but rather than being penalized for this, we need to find a new way to make this work.

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This week I was reading the 12 Most … website and came across an article on Lady Gaga. Now, there must be hundreds of websites devoted to this talented and controversial artist (and dozens of articles, believe it or not, connecting Gaga with leadership) – but Shawn Murphy took a different approach. He wanted to find 12 nuggets of leadership insight that are often overlooked. This was something that greatly appealed to me.

Out of the 12 items identified, one in particular caught my attention. Reinvention.

Gaga takes down her platinum albums before recording a new album. Why? To start all over as though she’s won nothing. It’s a reminder for leaders that previous successes do not make us special. They do not make us better than others. We must always step back before moving forward when we take on a new project or lead a team.

This idea of stepping back before moving forward is important. Even as leaders we need to take stock and re-assess our position – and the start of a new project is the perfect opportunity. We need to treat each new challenge with the respect that that challenge deserves, otherwise we run the risk of replaying ourselves rather than reinventing. Just look at the way that the best musicians change and tweak the same songs they have been singing for years. They find something new or profound with every performance. Just look at this bare bones performance of the Gaga hit Pokerface. It’s one performer, one instrument. There are no dancers, no support singers. It’s intimate and immediate. As viewers – as an audience – we have the sense that the performance is only for us.

This is the impact that we, as leaders, strive for. It’s what Wally Bock calls giving the gift of attention. The gift of attention is something that should not only be reserved for our teams – it should also be given generously to ourselves. It is vital to our own reinvention and ultimate success.

Nina Nets It Out: Singing the same old tune can make us feel safe – but also stale. The leader’s challenge is to tread the line between the two. A bit like the modern day Madonna, Lady Gaga is truly an artist who shows us how reinvention can trump repetition while still delivering to her audience – and there is much we can learn from her discipline and practice.

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Let’s move on from email – and ask about social networks. When and how often do you check Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? Amazingly (to me), a report last year indicated that 53% of people surveyed check their social networks before getting out of bed. That is significant for business. It is significant because these people work in our teams. For me, it is yet another indicator of what I call the life continuum and the need for us all to manage outcomes, not process. But it is significant for another reason – because these people who check their networks, their email and source their news as a high personal priority are also our customers.

As leaders, when we talk about leadership, we often talk about vision. We seem to think that leaders – real leaders – have the ability to peer through the chaos and hectic daily activity of business, perceiving a clear path towards a promised (and promising) future. But, in my view, we are seeing a new form of leadership emerge. One which is less reliant on that leader’s personal vision. This new leader engages in what I call customer-oriented thinking. But it’s more than just thinking – it is about the eyes, the voice and the shoes of the customer.

• Eyes: Today’s leaders must look through the eyes of their customers. What is your customers’ vision for the future? The GE corporate culture expects their leaders to take an external focus and see “around corners.” We need to do the same. We need an industry perspective and understand the way that our customers see their world. This, in turn, becomes part of our own customer insight.
• Voice: We need to moderate our own terminology and begin speaking with the voice of our customers. We need to also listen to the way in which our customers describe their challenges and opportunities – and even the language that our customers use to describe the products and services that we provide them. Only by listening, learning and speaking in the voice of our customers can we truly begin to communicate deeply.
• Shoes: As leaders we cannot any longer walk a path on our own. On the contrary, we must walk, instead, in the shoes of our customers. We need to understand – on the ground – what it means for our customers to live with our products and services. We need to seek out opportunities for co-innovation, collaboration and deeper relationships – and this should then inform the way that we speak, think and view our joined futures.

But what does this mean in practice?

Start by asking how your customers start their days. What keeps them up at night and what drives them to start their day connected to business and social networks? After all, we all want to do a good job, be recognized for our efforts and deliver value to our companies, our shareholders and our customers. How can you help your customers help their customers? Starting with the eyes, voice and shoes will get you a seat at the table.

Nina Nets it Out: We are all inundated with information yet only have limited attention. As leaders we must more deeply understand the lives, challenges and opportunities faced by our customers – and we can only do so by looking through the eyes of our customers, speaking in the same language and authentically joining them on their professional journey. It’s not just the best way to conduct business, it’s the most rewarding – for us all.

Regular readers will not be surprised that my favorite skill is identified here as the “trial of insight”. Powerful communication is one of the hallmarks of a leader – to be able to listen, engage and respond – and ultimately to action requires a great deal of effort and experience. Aspiring leaders should never underestimate the importance of communication – nor as the graphic points out – that communication is often coupled with courage.

As leaders we need the courage to communicate – and to follow that communication through with action. Sometimes it is indeed our actions which communicate most forcefully.

Nina Nets It Out: A great chart for the aspiring leader – it reminds us of the challenges that come with leadership. We must listen, evaluate, decide and communicate. In the words of MY favorite sci-fi leader, Jean-Luc Pickard, only then can we “make it so”.

In particular, I want to understand where social media can impact customer oriented thinking.

Interestingly, for me, social media almost seems like a perfect storm of convergence. For example, just look at how:

• Technologies are getting easier to use – blogs make it easy for executives and non-technically savvy leaders to publish their thoughts and ideas on the internet
• People are attracted to ideas and connections – like moths to the flame, we all find topics that we are passionate about and engage in spirited conversation with others who share our passions
• Conversation and opinion rule – the conversations and opinions of customers are not only important online – they drive web traffic, promote products, deliver feedback, do a great job of marketing our offerings, and they can “encourage” a strong customer service ethic given their public nature
• Behaviors are shifting – we are becoming more used to “participating” in the online communities that form using social media

But while social media applies easily to the marketing arm of your business – it strikes me that there are many ways to align social media and business value beyond just the marketing funnel. One such method would be to look at the complex models that govern the kibbutz. Let’s compare the elements and qualities of kibbutz and social media:

The kibbutz has been able to survive – and in some cases to thrive – because it was culturally self-reinforcing. The experience of working and living on a kibbutz is a meta-experience – after all, “For the founders, tilling the soil of their ancient homeland and transforming city dwellers into farmers was an ideology, not just a way to earn a livelihood.”

A brief look at blogs and at sites like Twitter provide more than a snapshot of some aspects of a similar meta-experience. Participation in social media is evangelized by those who “get it”. It is encouraged and advocated as a force which is changing the nature of the very way that we live, work and play (see my points above). But where the kibbutz was strongly predicated on aligning social activity with economic progress, we are only just starting to see this focus in the realm of social media. This will come but there is more work to be done. Perhaps we could start by following Olivier Blanchard’s better business doctrine and simply “giving a s#*t”.

But the kibbutz model of social media goes beyond this also. It covers:

• Social: the relationships that we have are all personal. And with a personal relationship comes a form of interdependence. It is part of the fabric of our lives.
• Economic: our social relationships also tie us to economic realities. In business as in life, we choose where to lay our affinities and how to act upon them. Increasingly we will choose to work with those we like and trust.
• Cultural: like life on a kibbutz, living in the realm of social media brings with it an understanding of the customs and behaviors of the online social environment. Adhering to such aspects makes for easier engagements with others online and fosters a greater social reputation. This is important when taken in the context of social media background checks.
• Participation: each member of a social forum chooses their respective level of participation and engagement. As such, those that contribute more eventually “earn” higher status and recognition. Similarly, while historically people on the kibbutz were compensated equally, regardless of individual work done, more modern kibbutzim use a more capitalistic approach to compensating the members.
• Commitment: stating one’s commitment is easy; but, demonstrating a true commitment takes hard work. Remaining active on the social networks is time consuming, but can foster relationships that would otherwise not exist. My efforts have resulted in relationships with several great writers, thinkers and leaders such as Wally Bock, Dan McCarthy, Erika Andersen, just to name a few. Likewise, being committed to a kibbutz takes hard work. Many members realize that it is too challenging and leave after a few years. The same can be said of bloggers, social media enthusiasts and the like.

By focusing on these five elements and learning from the kibbutz, as business leaders, we can begin to transform our businesses – and the ecosystems in which they operate. We may start with the customer relationship, but the opportunities clearly extend into almost every other part of the enterprise.

Surely leaders can see the impacts of their participation and commitment across social, economic, and cultural arenas. These play out be they in day to day leadership, interactions with key stakeholders be they investors, clients, partners or vendors, and in pursuit of business opportunities such as acquisitions, mergers or divestitures.

Nina Nets It Out: Learning the lessons from the historical kibbutz-style collective communities can shine a spotlight on how to succeed in the modern, online social networks of today. Be certain, while the means of interacting with the “collective” may be vastly different, the approaches to communal engagement are tried and true and the lessons learned from them very real.

Customer Leaders – Innovators and Early Adopters

Just imagine for a moment that you have a group of customer leaders. This is a group who are very closely aligned with your business. You have deep reciprocal relationships across your businesses and leaders at all levels are in regular contact. Quite possibly you have extensive co-innovation or co-marketing arrangements. What’s more, these customers expect to be in the advanced guard of any new innovation that you produce – and they work with you closely to preserve a competitive market advantage. In this way they are what Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations calls “innovators.”

Following closely behind the innovators are the “early adopters”. These are likely to be your upstart customers – more recent, ambitious customers. They can see the opportunity that close engagement represents and they are open to playing with moderate levels of risk. They engage you because they lend you credibility in different (or emerging) markets, and they love the stability and scale that you deliver. It’s a win-win.

Customer Followers – the Early and Late Majority

The early and late majority cover a large proportion of your customer base. According to Geoffrey Moore who extended Rogers’ model in Crossing the Chasm, attention should be paid to each of these segments in sequential order. This means that a customer tipping point is achieved at the level of 15-18% of the customer base – and until this is reached, customer followers are unlikely to engage until there are “proven models” and “best practices” already well established. Therefore, early stage focus should remain with the innovators and early adopters.

The chasm and discontinuous innovation

Now, Moore’s model applies only to innovations which are discontinuous in nature – where you are seeking to effect a change in behavior. This is particularly prevalent in technology focused businesses, but with the rise of social media, these days it can readily be applied to almost any industry sector.

Moore suggests that the challenge is in bridging the chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. It loosely equates to what I would identify as Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment” stage of the Hype Cycle – where the early excitement of a new innovation wanes and the hard graft of gaining more widespread acceptance kicks in. The challenge for leaders is ensuring that not only are customer leaders engaged quickly and powerfully, but they also help set the agenda for the early adopters – building momentum that can spread across the entire customer ecosystem. Remember, it is important to understand the leadership aspirations of your customers. Allow them to not just follow an agenda, but to set one. Allow them to own and engage the innovation process, and encourage them to activate their own business ecosystems – those who could also be your other partners and customers.

And in the process, your business (and your leadership), will also be transformed. For the better.

Nina Nets It Out: Your best customers are not just transactions. They are, and should be, a strategic category of their own. Recast your best customers in the terminology of leadership and you will find new opportunities to engage, build and sustain relationships well beyond a single sale.

You see, leaders only do what leaders can do.

Or more precisely, leaders should do what only they can do.

Take a look through your inbox and your list of to-dos. What can be handled by your team? What can be delegated to another person? What is worthy of your attention and where can you have the most impact?

You will see that there are some tasks that only you can complete. That’s what you should focus on. That’s what you should prioritize. And the rest of the things that you have on your ever-growing list can be delegated or re-routed to others.

By concentrating on the things that only you can do, you not only free-up your thinking for the important tasks, you also provide opportunities for your colleagues and your teams to demonstrate their abilities. But more importantly, this allows you to focus your own leadership on the act of “doing”. As Wally Bock explains, “… great leaders are great because of what they do, not because of who they are”; and this simple, but useful, technique ensures that you spend most of your effort where it will have the greatest outcome.

So what’s the first thing you’re going to do now?

Nina Nets It Out: The modern business is a challenging place with competing priorities. As a leader, your role is not to do everything, but to do those things that can only be done by you. All other tasks can be delegated or re-prioritized.