Hurray, my hometown New York Giants won the Super Bowl. Yet another fourth quarter comeback for the Big Blue. They also won big with a record-breaking number of mentions on Twitter and Facebook.

The team’s owners scored big time with the leadership and enduring commitment to a philosophy that produces winners. It’s a lesson that other CEOs could emulate that I’ll discuss later in this post.

Super Bowl Site Traffic

Twitter tweeted that in the final three minutes of the Super Bowl there were an average of 10,000 tweets per second.  That is mind-boggling, really – 10,000 x 60 x 3 = 1.8 million tweets.

The Washington Post reported that sports fans sent about 11.5 million comments during last night’s game over social media networks (quoting All Things Digital), about six times higher than last year’s game. The Giants were interacting with fans on Twitter and Facebook before, during and after the game.

Giants Leadership

Eli Manning was the game’s MVP for leading his record-breaking fourth quarter comeback. But I want to talk about the team management’s leadership that has made the Giants one of the most respected franchises in sports history. It is a lesson for every company that wants to build the core competencies that will lead to success over the long haul.

It began in 1925 when Wellington Mara bought the NFL franchise Giants for $500. Over the years the Giants went through some very bad patches. But in the last 20 years the current ownership has honed a philosophy that you pick the right people, stick by them when things are tough and love your fans and players.

A Winning Philosophy

This philosophy has led to four Super Bowl victories, including this year when fans and media were calling for coach Tom Coughlin’s removal when the team lost four straight games. But the owners publicly continued to support their coach. They committed to him and their team and they were rewarded with the ultimate prize – the Lombardi trophy.

The Mara family still owns a half interest in the Giants, along with the other owner, Steve Tisch, from another respected New York family, (you can read about their leadership philosophies in a New York Times interview of the owners and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots who lost to the Giants 21-17).

Loyal Fans

The Giants fans are among the most rabid and loyal fans in football. The Giants have never had a “blacked-out” game. If a team doesn’t sell-out the game, it is not televised locally. The waiting list for season tickets is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years. Seven hundred fans paid $5,000 each to travel to Indianapolis for the Super Bowl.

In post-game interviews, the players, the owners and Tom Coughlin repeatedly mentioned how much the fans contributed to their victory.

Employees, like Giants fans, want to see their team succeed. Do you have a winning philosophy of hiring the right people, providing them with training and showing your love and respect for them? If you do, they will work their hearts out for you.

What more could you want?

That was the question that Bea Fields, a top leadership coach, asked 14 business leaders. I’m flattered that she included me in that group.

There were a variety of answers, as you might expect. She printed them, including mine, in her post Gaining Loyal Customer By Building a Strong Leadership Brand.

Bea’s Definition

Bea’s summarized own take on the question as follows, “When you build a brand based on true, enduring leadership, each person in the company not only speaks about the brand and the promises you make to your customers in your marketing strategies… each person in your company truly lives those promises every day in both their personal and professional lives…”

What is Your Definition?

Both personal and company branding can be confounding to define. How do you define your leadership brand? Don’t be shy. Please leave a comment below.

Virginia Rometty

Dow Jones reported late yesterday afternoon that Virginia M. Rometty will become IBM’s new president and chief executive. History was made because the Dow Jones article did not mention her gender. No headline that a woman is taking the reins. Just a straightforward story. Oh, have we come a long way, baby.

I just had to write about this because it’s so significant for the women who were the pioneers in establishing equality for women in the workplace. It took a long time but a woman CEO is no longer considered unusual. There still aren’t enough of them. This condensed Dow Jones article is another sign that it isn’t unusual for a highly-capable woman to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company without it being a big deal. Whoopee!

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) tapped company executive Virginia M. Rometty as its new president and chief executive, electing a company insider who was long seen as a front-runner to succeed current chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano.

On Tuesday, the blue-chip company said Palmisano will step down from the helm of the company but keep his seat as chairman. Palmisano, 60 years old, became IBM’s chief executive in 2002 and chairman in 2003. Palmisano helped transform IBM by easing focus off hardware and shifting toward software and services.

Rometty, 54, who will take her post at the start of next year, is now IBM’s senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. Before running sales, she served as senior vice president of IBM Global Services and helped lead the unit’s integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting.

Congratulations, Virginia! Give ‘em hell!!

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a quiz: “Is Your Company Socially Media Savvy?”

My guest author, Bea Fields, asked these questions and, while the responses keep dribbling in, I decided to stop at 25 so that I could report the cumulative scores.

I’ll do that later in this post. But if you haven’t taken the quiz before, why not have a little fun.

Take the Quiz

Here are the questions. Cover the bottom of the page and answer “Yes” or “No” for each question. Then see how you scored:

1. Our company is blogging a minimum of two times per week to add value to the lives of our customers and to keep them constantly updated on company events.
2. Social networking (use of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) permeates our company. It is being given top priority in our marketing department and is being used as a way to gain customer feedback to help us improve our products and services.
3. Our company has employed a social media professional/professionals to manage our social networking programs to ensure their effectiveness across all departments.
4. We have educated our entire company about the use of social networking and how to leverage social sites to expand our business partnerships and to increase our company’s visibility online.
5. We have integrated our social media sites into our business website and mobile devices such as smart phones and iPads.
6. Our company is using YouTube as a way to let our customers actually see our top leaders and to learn more about them as people.
7. We are using tools like Facebook and Twitter to follow current trends and discussions so that we can improve our products and services and recruit top talent.

How Did You Score?

If you answered “Yes” to 6-7 of these questions, congratulations! You are moving in the right direction of being social media savvy, and will want to refine any steps you are not currently taking.

If you answered “Yes” to 3-5 of these questions, you are moving in the right direction and you still have some work to do.

If you answered “Yes” to less than 3 of the questions, you are a beginner and bringing in a social media expert to help you move forward with your social media marketing will make you more competitive.

If you answered “No” to all the questions in the quiz, the time is now to begin a very proactive campaign to begin using social media and leveraging it so that you can stay competitive in your industry. If you do not take these steps your future clients will more than likely be choosing one of your competitors who is social media savvy so that they can interact with company employees and receive the value that you cannot provide without using new media.

How Did Respondents Score?

Here are the results from the people who took the online quiz.

1. Yes: 10 No: 15
2. Yes: 17 No: 8
3. Yes: 10 No: 15
4. Yes: 16 No: 9
5. Yes: 16 No: 9
6. Yes: 7 No: 18
7. Yes: 21 No: 4

As you can see, our respondents are quite media savvy – barely savvy, though, on question 6 which asked about their use of YouTube. That’s the next frontier for companies that want to integrate all their social and online marketing activities.

If you just took the quiz and need help with your social media program, contact Jeannette Paladino.

That’s the conclusion of a new report Civility in America 2011.  The 2011 online survey* was conducted in May among 1,000 American adults to assess attitudes towards civility online, in the workforce, in the classroom and in politics.

I was particularly struck by the statistics on workplace civility: 65% of the respondents blame corporate leadership for making the workplace more uncivil.

More than 70% of Americans consider political campaigns, pop culture, the media, government and the music industry hubs of incivility. Not surprisingly, Congressional Democrats, Congressional Republicans and Tea Party supporters are all viewed as more uncivil than civil.

According to the study, “while more than one-third (39%) expected things to turn less civil when surveyed in 2010, now more than one out of two Americans — 55% — expect a lack of civility to become the norm. Only nine percent in this year’s survey expect civility to get better compared to 26% who expected some relief last year. Incivility seems to be here to stay.”

Workplace Incivility Hurts Sales

Approximately seven in 10 Americans (69%) have either stopped buying from a company or have re-evaluated their opinions of a company because someone from that company was uncivil in their interaction, says the study.  Not good for sales or a company’s brand. In another disturbing finding, over four in 10 Americans — 43% — have experienced incivility at work.

Respondents blame workplace leadership and other employees for the growing incivility problem. As I wrote in an earlier post, Treating Fired Employees Like Criminals, losing a job can be devastating. But when companies mistreat employees they are letting go, it poisons the workplace and, now we learn, can add to incivility.

With the 2012 Presidential campaign heating up, I guess we need to be resigned to even more incivility as the battle lines are drawn by politicians and we’re subjected to mud slinging in commercials. How sad.

*Study sponsored by Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate and conducted by KRC Research 

Personally, I'm glad he invented bifocals

[tweetmeme]The creative director from an agency I worked for used to say, “There are no little ideas or big ideas, only powerful ideas.” I wrote in a post last week that the Journal Register Company was saved from extinction by powerful ideas – from its own employees.

Key was that each team member of the IdeaLab had a specific assignment. Telling someone to “make the business better” is too fuzzy. While some tasks may seem small (but powerful), they all added up to a plan that saved the company. Now that’s real power – in the hands of the new community of employees that includes the CEO.

Here is the link to The Ben Franklin Project – a Bold New Experiment that lists the discrete task of each employee. No doubt more have been added since that post.

Does your company have a similar kind of program? Would love if you shared how it works by commenting below.

Hosni Mubarak

[tweetmeme]The riots in Cairo have reinforced the movement exemplified by the Tea Party in the U.S. – leadership by community.  It is the new leadership paradigm — the spontaneous formation of new communities of leaders, made possible by the power of the Internet.  The old paradigm of one leader at the top of the leadership pyramid is crumbling everywhere. We’ll talk later about what this new paradigm means for business.  But, first, let’s learn from what’s happening in Cairo where it is chaos and bloodshed and events are unfolding by the minute.

The Power of Twitter and Facebook

The images from Cairo on TV are frightening and Twitter is again center stage with a continuous stream of updates, many with links to videos from the scene.  Here’s how it all started:

Before the Egyptian government shut down popular networking sites, many thousands of disaffected young Egyptians joined the Facebook community entitled We are all Khaled Said, which called for the downfall of the current regime and where members post updates of events on the ground in real time.

According to Newsweek, “The anonymous Facebook page administrator who goes by the handle El Shaheed, meaning martyr, has played a crucial role in organizing the demonstrations, the largest Egypt has seen since the 1970s, that now threaten the country’s authoritarian regime.”

No One is in Charge – Everyone is in Charge

Yet, through the coverage of this historic uprising, you learn there is no one leader in charge. Instead, a spontaneous community of protestors has literally linked arms in the “march of millions.” They have coalesced around a unified theme – changing the regime. They want better lives for themselves. It’s as simple as that.

As one my favorite leadership gurus, John Kotter says, “leadership is about coping with change.”  By his definition, Egypt’s long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak failed to recognize the terrain shifting under his feet. He lost his leadership role, not because he was overthrown by another leader or in a military coup, but because power had spontaneously transferred to rule by the community. Now he’s being forced out and it’s gotten ugly and brutal as he tries to hang on to power, at least for now.

In the U.S., the Tea Party movement is another community that emerged and coalesced around the common goal of bringing change to government they thought had become too big and intrusive.  Luminaries like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh at first appeared to assume the mantle for the Tea Party, but no one single leader has emerged.  Yet, loosely affiliated local Tea Party groups are toppling existing office holders and pushing through changes in how cities, states and the federal government operate.

What This Means for Business Leaders

So what has this got to do with our business leaders as they “cope with change,” as Kotter puts it.  Anybody who ever doubted that the old “command and control” model is dead just needs to examine the paradigm shift in Egypt and U.S. politics. My view is that the corporate CEO is now just another member of the broad community in his or her organization. Companies that openly invite employees to share their ideas for innovation to make the organization smarter, more competitive and more profitable will be the big-time winners.

The Journal Register Company is a great example of how a company unleashed employees to give it a new lease on life.  The company owns 170 publications, including 18 daily newspapers in major markets including Philadelphia, Detroit and Cleveland. In a blog post to employees in December, CEO John Patton wrote:

“Folks, in 2010 you proved that a tired, old, broken down and bankrupt newspaper company like the Journal Register Company could be turned around. You proved that a company’s strength resided in its employees and not its infrastructure of buildings, trucks and I.T. The wonderful Ben Franklin Project proved that determined employees could find the strength and energy to innovate — and you published daily newspapers and websites using only free web-based tools. You proved that while many in the newspaper industry might be devoid of ideas you were not and the ideaLab was born.”

Google is another company that carves out time for employees to go off and think about new ideas. Look where they are.

The revolt in Egypt is a vivid and brutal example that leadership by fiat is dead. Anyone disagree that we’re experiencing a new leadership paradigm?

Addendum: My colleague Bea Fields added her perspective on this post in her blog Self Directed Leadership Defines a New Era for Egypt and the World, noting that many protesters are under 30, or part of the Gen Y generation. Visit her blog for her take on how Gen Y is going to respond to this historic event.

[tweetmeme]I played in a regional bridge tournament recently and stopped in my tracks when a man walked by wearing a T-shirt that said: “The flogging will continue until morale improves.”  I laughed, but it wasn’t really funny.  Flogging employees doesn’t happen anymore, but verbal abuse and unreasonable demands are all too common in many companies. (Unfortunately, punishment by flogging is still prevalent in less civilized societies).

The company shall remain nameless, but I once worked for a CEO who would simply phone senior executives with the command “get over here.”  No hi, how are you.  Oh, and he once threw an ash tray in a meeting.  Don’t think this doesn’t happen anymore.  With the bad economy, some companies are getting away with mistreating employees, who need to hold onto their jobs.  But things will get better in time, and then employees will flee.

Arrogance Doesn’t Cut it Anymore

In a recent issue of Business Week in an article entitled  Twelve Signs Arrogance is Running Your Company leadership expert Alaina Love with Purpose Linked Consulting recounted the story of Joe, who astonished the CEO of his company by resigning because his cautions about the company’s direction fell on deaf ears.  Joe was a key player and nobody wanted him to leave so they brought in Love to try to talk him out of it.  As Love writes in her bylined article, “The significance of Joe’s impending departure was enormous, I realized. He’d grown up in the company, starting first in sales and eventually working his way up to a leadership position in marketing. Losing him would mean a tough blow for the organization, one from which recovery would be difficult and lengthy, if not impossible. With him would go years of irreplaceable institutional wisdom and history.”

Joe’s Reason for Leaving

He told Love, “We’re not positioning ourselves for ongoing success, and I just don’t think this way of operating is sustainable. I’ve done everything I can to convince leadership we should adopt a different approach, but they’re not listening. They won’t even sit down long enough to learn about the suggestions I have for changing things.”

Employee engagement has become the new mantra for forward-thinking companies, but, alas, too many CEOs take the position of Joe’s.  “We don’t need somebody around here who doesn’t embrace our way of doing things,” the CEO said to Love.  In other words, it’s my way or the highway.

How shortsighted.  As I’ve written before, the economy is bad now so employees are staying put.  But in time the job market will improve and those companies that value their employees will be rewarded by their loyalty.  Companies like Joe’s will experience an exodus of employees who don’t want any more floggings.

[tweetmeme]A new study Generations Online in 2010 offers a wealth of information about how people across all age groups are participating in online activities like social networking sites, playing games, instant messaging and blogging, which was of most interest to me.

Information Needs Differ

Writing blogs is only up slightly, by 4% since in the last two years, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  Only half as many people read blogs as visit social networking sites.  But this doesn’t bother me.  Why?  Because various online activities are filling different information needs. You may visit Facebook to post your vacation photos, or Twitter to follow trends, but you’ll visit a blog for information about a product or service.

Oh, and one other thing, the study doesn’t distinguish between blogs and websites.  If you ask someone if they read a blog regularly, they will give a very different answer than if you ask them if they read blogs and websites.  Because, dear readers, many blogs are masquerading as websites.  You are now on my website, which is actually blog technology.  Click on “blog” in the navigation bar and you will find my articles about social media, employee engagement and branding.  So I think a lot more people are reading blogs than the Pew research study reports.

We all read studies and then interpret the results so they support our points of view.  Be honest, don’t you?  That’s why I glommed on to the blogging stats so that I can make the point that a combined 77% of the demographic groups that consumer products companies most want to reach – ages 18 to 45 – are reading blogs.

Blogs as a CEO Platform

As I wrote in my article Blogging as the Centerpiece of a Company’s Social Media Strategy, companies are using blogs as a platform for the CEO to get out the company’s views on a variety of subjects and to disseminate information quickly during a crisis.  Blogs can be distributed with the click of a button to dozens of social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter.  That’s where the study says a majority of people are congregating online.  So, again, it’s information from a blog they’re reading, but studies can’t dig that deep.  A study can’t distinguish where the information is coming from.

So take a look at the study and come to your own conclusions that support your points of view!

[tweetmeme]I have my ideas about the subject, having worked for good and bad leaders.  I’ll open with what I consider a leader’s primary duty – to communicate his or her vision for the company.  Some experts would say this is the second step in being a leader; first comes the vision.  But without communications across, up and down organizations, the leader’s vision will never be realized.

John Kotter

John Kotter is perhaps the most articulate and brilliant theorist on what makes for leadership in an organization.  He says it better than I can, so I’m going to reference his words of wisdom here.  Then, we’ll see how his theories apply to three leaders, or visionaries, of today — Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, and Reed Hastings, the chief executive and co-founder of Netflix.

Kotter, a retired professor of organizational behavior at Harvard, has written countless books and articles.  I still have an article that he wrote in the May/June 1990 issue of the Harvard Business Review entitled “What Leaders Really Do.”  I hadn’t read it in a while, but just did, and was blown away by how his vision of a leader could have been written yesterday, even though in 1990 most companies were just dipping their toes into email (my own agency had one computer that could send and receive emails and it usually didn’t work).

No Internet, no Twitter, no Facebook, no internal networks, hardly any electronic connectivity, in other words.  Yet leaders today face the same challenges as those back in ancient times (ca. 1990).

The Difference Between Management and Leadership

Kotter clearly delineated the difference between management and leadership, which are both crucial roles in the success of a company.  Let me cut to the chase with his definitions:

Leadership is about coping with change

Management is about coping with complexity

To quote from that article, “These different functions – coping with complexity and coping with change – shape the characteristic activities of management and leadership.  Each system of action involves deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people and relationships that can accomplish an agenda, (my bold face) and then trying to ensure those people actually do the job.”  Isn’t that what social networking is all about today?  Forming networks and communities that share common interests and goals?

Kotter says that leaders seek relationships and linkages that help explain things.  Leaders need to be visionaries. Most discussions of vision have a tendency to generate into the mystical, “but people who articulate such visions aren’t magicians but broad-based strategic thinkers who are willing to take risks,” he says.

Visions With Mundane Qualities

Kotter makes the point that many visions and strategies are not brilliantly innovative.  Many are mundane, but “what’s crucial about a vision is not its originality but how well it serves the interests of important constituencies – customers, stockholders, employees – and how easily it can be translated into a realistic competitive strategy.”

So that explains why so many people think that Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are geniuses.  They were visionaries who changed the world, when you think about it.  Zuckerberg took a simple idea:  college students wanting to bond with each other.  Getting together in the local hangout wasn’t enough.  They wanted a common meeting ground where they could interact 24/7.  Zuckerberg saw the possibilities and took the college circuit by storm.  He understood how to make the linkages to help people create networks of friends.  So in 2004, as a Harvard undergraduate, he launched Facebook in what amounted to a revolution in communication – it all comes back to communication – and his followers grew to be 500 million strong.

Steve Jobs capitalized on a simple idea.  Bring the Internet to your cell phone.  Not very imaginary.  The technology was already there but he had the vision to harness the pieces and figure out how to make it work.  He encouraged thousands of people to create iPhone apps that users can download that meet their particular needs. Now his competitors are rushing to catch up with smart phones of their own.

Transforming a Business With Snail Mail

Image via CrunchBase

Reed Hastings, the chief executive and co-founder of Netflix had a simple idea to offer a subscription service for customers to rent movies by mail.  Hardly an earth-shattering idea, but nobody else was doing it. As my former agency’s creative director used to say, “there are no big ideas, or small ideas, only powerful ideas.”  The service took off – remember Kotter saying not originality but serving consumer interests was key — and now Netflix has moved beyond snail mail to become the biggest source of streaming web traffic in North America during peak evening hours, according to an article in the New York Times “Netflix’s Move into the Web Stirs Rivalries.”

Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, was quoted in the article, “Netflix used an open-source network, the U.S. Postal Service, to launch an alternate distribution business without asking anyone for permission…now they are using another open-source network, the Internet, to transform the business.”

Here’s the thing – nothing has really changed in the definition of leadership in the past 20, or 30 or more years.  Ideas about how to make something bigger, stronger, better, faster so it serves your community is still the currency of leadership.

So, are you a leader or a manager?  Most people think it’s cooler to be known as a leader, but it’s the managers who turn the leader’s vision into a profitable product or service.

For an excerpt of the HBR article by John Kotter go this link What Leaders Really Do.

This post originally appeared on the website of Bea Fields Companies, Inc. — Leadership Coaching and Training for High Growth Companies