One area where ONA will help is enabling organizations identify latent Leadership talent. The VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) nature of today’s economy demands a lot from leaders. Yet, for all the effort that is put into selecting > training > assessing leaders, there still seems to be a dearth of leadership talent. The problem may have less to do with talent availability than with the top-down structures in which they operate.
In most organizations, the responsibility for setting direction, developing strategy and allocating resources is highly centralized. That means, especially in large organizations, there is significant pressure on a relatively small group of individuals to take meaningful and high impact decisions on a regular basis.
Also, even the most malleable minds can only attend to so much. With 25 billion gigabits of digital information getting created every day, each of us is becoming ignorant faster. Is it feasible to expect leaders to know everything, all the time?
With these Structural and Cognitive limits in mind, we should be working a lot harder to unleash the leadership talent throughout the firm. This is where the cognitive surplus within an organization can help. ONA tools (like https://www.orglens.com) can identify ‘leaders’ who may be relatively junior associates — but have the Subject Matter Expertise and the Social Capital to provide thought-leadership and influence opinion. This can also help with Succession Planning by identifying a pool of prospective leaders. ONA tools can also use conversational data to sense the sentiment in the organization.
These unofficial leaders are critical to share the leadership workload with formal leaders by helping them interpret signals being generated by employees on Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) and responding to these signals in a manner that is aligned with the zeitgeist.
ONA tools use a combination of Network Analytics / Natural Language Processing / Machine Learning etc to proactively identify and engage with leaders. Hence these tools are going to be critical to help organizations achieve better synergies and manage change.
Found this article interesting? Do reach out to the OrgLens team at https://www.orglens.com (Twitter: @orglens) to see how we can help your organization with “Revealing the Real Networks”.
