A Team Needs Power to Work

As you consider and hire the people for your social media team, think through the responsibilities you’ll be handing over. Because if you don’t hand over responsibility, accountability and the corresponding power, you’ll be be setting the team up for failure.

Now, if that’s your purpose – to ensure failure. You can do that by first setting aside any leadership skills you’ve learned and tapping into your own insecurity. Get closer to your fear of change and cling tight to what used to work. Repeat after me

If this social media thing works, I might have to change how I do things or worse they might take my job.

If you read that without a smile, then maybe it’s time to click away, because this is really is about how to make your life easier by building a powerful social media team who will take work and worries off your desk.

Yes, the worries too … because if you can avoid these five critical pitfalls they’ll on your team and be making the same great choices you would make in the social media situations they face.

• Pitfall 1: Change your team’s priorities randomly and often. Make each day a moving target. As soon as they start to look good at one thing, place your focus on a different aspect of the job.
• Pitfall 2: Don’t allow them time to develop a realistic social strategy. Ask for a schedule that will have them up and using every tool you can name before they have enough time to learn it’s nuances and relational value. Just pull out a calendar. Then hold them to dates they can’t control.
• Pitfall 3: Develop a plan for resources and budget, but don’t share it. That way they’ll have to ask permission for every paperclip they need to use. They won’t be able to have a viable idea, let alone respond to someone on social site.
• Pitfall 4: Focus heavily on a quality and communication standard that requires every word to be vetted by 14 approval stages before it can go live. Remove all sense of trust in the people you hire. Train them to fear failure, mistakes, and problems. Then complain about the lack of response to customers.
• Pitfall 5: Constantly point to misbehavior of customers that have spoken out against other companies. Live by a defensive motto of us versus the “users.” Never allow or invite customers to offer input or reach out to build relationships with the people who buy or use your company’s products.

The pleasures of the pitfalls are that they will keep a team “on their toes” and so busy trying to make something happen, they won’t have a chance to do something that will build anything.

On the other hand, if you want a peak-performing social media team let them onto the field.

• Hire people who love serving people and give them clear goals and priorities.
• Choose the people who love the company’s mission and let them build a practical strategy to achieve it. Give them time to move slowly onto the social web as they know the tools.
• Give them the resources — people and tools — they need to perform well.
• Train them how mature online relationships work and trust them to ask when things get critical or need legal counsel.
• Encourage them to advocate for customers and ways for customers to build relationships with the company and each other.

The pleasures of opening the door to peak performance is a team that grows, keeps learning, and turns customers into fiercely loyal fans.

What are the pitfalls of social media management you’ve discovered? What do you see that leads a team to peak performance?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!