This is the fourth in a series of posts looking as how aspiring leaders can learn from Web 2.0 practices and theory.
On The Web: On the web, users are accountable for their own behaviours in a community and in most cases, the community will create its own champions and police those who don’t meet community standards. The community will learn from its mistakes and get stronger, faster, better over time.
Take Wikipedia as an example – as most people know, not every entry is 100% factually correct, but the community’s passionate, engaged users they have learned how to correct most of the mistakes themselves. If Jimmy Wales hadn’t given them this trust, Wikipedia would have faltered early and often and would’ve ended up no better than the Encyclopedia Brittanica or World Book.
Another example of how communities deal with ‘failure’… If Ralph writes a horribly inappropriate comment on Jane’s blog, Jane’s community (the audience) has several methods of policing itself. It can chastise the behaviour within the community (in the comments) or it can flag inappropriate behaviour directly to Jane. The key is that Jane doesn’t necessarily have to be the first one to act every time someone is offensive – in fact, it’s more valuable for Jane to let the community sort out its own problems, because THAT’s what strengthens and defines the community.
As A Leader: In order to build trust and full engagement with your team, you need to be okay with failure, too. If a team tries something that’s different than the way YOU would have done it and it doesn’t work, you can’t panic and madly reach for the reins again so you can re-assert control. Just as you trusted the team with the initial idea and execution, you need to trust that the team will learn from its mistakes and get stronger and better from each failure.
And you need to build in mechanisms for the team to deal with problems on its own. Yes, you still need someone that let’s people ‘flag as inappropriate’ situations that you must solve yourself. However, as a leader, you can’t solve everyone’s problems all the time. The team needs to learn to solve its own problems – just like on the web, that’s how the team gets stronger, faster, and better.
It’s not about you. It’s about your team.
Have you ever succeeded because you’ve been given ‘permission to fail’?
Related Posts:
Web 2.0 Leadership Secret #1: Give Up Control
Web 2.0 Leadership Secret #2: Engagement
Web 2.0 Leadership Secret #3: Be A Valuable Community Member
