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Extending Your Influence: Share to Shape, with Charlene Li, Founder and CEO, Altimeter Group, Author, The Engaged Leader
Sharing to Shape
When I talk about the skill sharing to shape there’s a key difference between talking at somebody versus sharing with somebody. Talking at somebody really feels like messaging. You’re telling them something that they may or may not want to hear. Sharing though says I’m sharing because I believe this will help you and help us achieve a common purpose and goal and mission that we all share.
Consider it a win-win
Sharing has a common purpose, has a win-win aspect to it, because you wouldn’t share something with somebody unless you thought they were going to be receptive to it, unless you were doing some listening to understand what is it that they wanted to hear, not just what you wanted to say. And that give and take, again, it could be done off line in a non-circular way. That understanding of what your audience needs to hear, wants to hear from you, is a key part of sharing to shape because it has the context of a relationship. And in the end that leadership that you’re trying to promote inside of these new channels really allows for that relationship to take place. You may be asking yourself, well, what can I absolutely not share, things that I should just completely take off the list? And I think this goes back to what’s really important to you. What are things that you really wanna keep private? For example, I talk about my family. My kids are an inspiration to me, but I will never mention their names because my philosophy is until they’re of age, until they’re adults and can control their social identity, I should protect it. Every single person’s going to have a different limit. You will have to figure out what yours is. You may feel very comfortable talking about your family, your personal relationships, but you may not.
Lessons Learned by John Chambers, CISCO
I love to use the example of John Chambers who’s the CEO of Cisco. He actually took a video of him doing duck calls in his office. And now on the surface you go, why was it interesting to hear a CEO doing duck calls? Well, in many ways he was trying to show “I am a real person. I can talk very fluently and passionately about what Cisco was doing”. But on the other hand, “I’m a real person and I’m passionate about duck hunting. And let me just show some of the things I can do with this duck whistle…” because he has a whole collection of them on his desk. And by doing this he was showing, first of all, how open he was. He was showing that he’s a real person that you could connect with. And very importantly, his employees started really getting behind this video saying, yeah, this is the real John Chambers that we know. This is why we follow him. It’s not just because he’s a great business leader but because he’s a great person.
Lessons Learned by Padmasree Warrior, CISCO
A great example of this is Padmasree Warrior, who is the chief technology officer and chief strategy officer of Cisco Systems. Now, she has almost one-and-a-half million people following on Twitter. Now, granted, she knows a lot about technologies as one of the leaders. But the reason why she has so many people following her is that she has a relationship with people that is both professional and also personal. And when I mean personal, she’s not sharing what she has for lunch. That’s not interesting. But she has great insights on life and she draws them from her personal stories, her personal experience as an immigrant, as a woman in technology. And one of my favorite posts that she put recently was, you know, “Write and read and dance like the world is watching, and then email like it’s going to be read on the front page of The New York Times”.
And she just has little interesting insights like this that help you become a better person – and also at the same time incredibly deep insights into the future of technology and the role that Cisco has. So you follow her because of her technology and business acumen, but you really truly follow her because of her whole person that she brings into the space.
Now you’ll have to figure out what is the right balance? When do you want to talk about work? When do you want to talk about personal? But think about this: In work we know that business is personal. We know that we have to extend ourselves. We know that we need to ask and break the ice by saying, who are you?, before we will follow you as a leader – and all the more importantly in these digital channels when you can’t actually look at somebody in the eye.