Will Social Media Wreck the World or Save It?

The basic idea: Three years ago, Mark Anderson—founding CEO of Pattern Computer and chair of the Future in Review (FiRe) conference—told me, "The Web is not a mirror of human activity; it is an amplifier." He went on to admit that the negativity of social media, and its corrosive effect on society, was one problem he was not certain how to solve.

Since that time, we've seen Facebook morph from a goofy place to chat with people you knew in high school to a tool embraced by evil forces and subversive government agents. That's pretty scary, and it's time each of us adopted a proactive, personal strategy to push back.

Social media is only a positive tool if people approach it with a positive and constructive mindset. In particular, there are five principles that will help you bring out the best of this medium.

A bit more background: To be useful, this newsletter edition is a bit longer than unusual. I hope you don't mind.

1. Gain insight, by sharing

Used properly, social media is one of the best tools ever invented for gaining self-insight, because it provides a highly efficient way to share your thoughts with an extremely diverse group of people… and to gather their responses in one place, where you can easily absorb them and reply.

At least once a week, you should ask yourself something along the lines of…

• Am I living true to my core values, and would this be a good time to remind myself and members of my network what they are and how they are playing a role in my daily life?
• What is occupying most of my time and energy this week, and why is it so important?
• What is the smartest thing I learned last week?
• What is the most important thing on my mind that most people don’t know or understand?

Whatever arises, polish it a bit and share it online.

2. Be human, not perfect

Are you familiar with the term “psychological safety”? It has come to be applied by many as referring to a corporate culture in which individuals feel comfortable displaying their genuine self at work. This has led me to create a two-part definition of what it means to be a genuine leader:

1. Being true to your own self in how you communicate and act at work.

2. Creating the conditions that not only allow—but also encourage—your employees to do the same.

To be a leader who is true to his or her own self—and to encourage others to do the same—requires a commitment to be genuine that extends from social media to personal interactions to performance measurement and compensation and finally to corporate culture itself.

This implies that being genuine is more important than any specific set of desired behaviors. As Wharton researcher Julianna Pillemer writes, “There may be clear organizational expectations for desired behaviors, and there’s a potential downside to acting in a way that’s actually genuine.”

Pillemer cites a consultant friend who perfectly encapsulated this challenge by saying, “Now not only do I have to deliver a perfectly polished presentation, but then go out for drinks with the client, seem like a really fun, genuine person, and tell them all about my life.”

The way out of this perceived trap revolves around a single word: to be genuine rather than to seem genuine.

• It means being honest about your flaws as well as your strengths.
• It means asking for help instead of simply trying to be the smartest person in the room.
• For leaders, it means rewarding honesty and credibility rather than adherence to what a leader wants to hear. 

3. Share mistakes as well as successes

One morning I made myself a bowl of oatmeal, poured an iced tea, and headed towards my home office. But I was already preoccupied with work and not really paying attention. My toe caught the edge of the second step. Wham! Oatmeal and tea splattered everywhere.

At 7:58:01 a.m. I was excited about a great new idea. At 7:58:31 I was mopping up a mess.

This is a trivial example, but it’s also the way life is. The one thing all human beings have in common is that we all make mistakes. Some of them are minor, and easily resolved. Others take years to clean up.

By sharing your mistakes, you come across as a genuine human being… and you make it easier for the people around you to also be open and honest.

So… when you mess up, admit it. Share it on social media.

I advise my clients to bring errors out of the shadows. Model behaviors that show others it’s about cutting ourselves a break, trying to get smarter, but also admitting that trial and error is the fundamental nature of our world. Much as business managers might try to engineer “faults” out of the system, that’s just not the way life works.

When all you do online is to “share wisdom,” you become two-dimensional… and appear less like a human being and more like a carefully curated caricature of yourself.

When you mess up, share it.

4. Show respect (to everyone)

It pays to be yourself, but only if you do it in a manner that is both respectful of the people around you and of service to them.

To illustrate my point, let’s consider Bill versus Bob.

Bill has no filter. If he feels it, he says it... even if that means interrupting someone else. He’s a talented executive, but his talent often gets obscured by his lack of impulse control. In a conference room packed with 15 people, he hissed at a subordinate, “That’s one of the worst pieces of work I’ve ever seen. It makes my skin crawl!”

Bob is a deeply passionate person. He’s driven, ambitious and highly creative. But he also has a strong set of core values, and the top two are to be of service to others and to always treat others with respect. He can be himself without being offensive. He can bite his tongue long enough to actually listen to others, even when they disagree with him.

Both Bill and Bob feel that they are bringing their true selves to work, but only Bob does it in a manner that recognizes he is not the only person in the world that matters.

Just as with everything in life, there is a price to be paid to get what you want. If you want to bring your true self to work, the price is to be respectful and to serve others. Here’s why.

My view of being respectful is that it is all about how you conduct yourself; it is not the metric by which you rate other people. You can be polite, courteous and even kind to someone who is ignorant. You can show compassion to someone who is immature and even mean.

Being respectful should not be conditional on the other person passing your test. Such behavior says more about you than anything else, and it sends a signal to others that—no matter what—they can be themselves in your presence.

No matter who you are or what you believe, you can get along with others by simply being respectful. It won’t work 100% of the time, but it will come close.

Being of service: Over the years, I’ve learned to transform the ways that passionate, driven entrepreneurs communicate both on social media and in person with their stakeholders. All it takes is getting them to embrace a three-word principle: serve, don’t sell.

It means that:

• Everything you share should be of service to others, even if they never do what you want
• You should only share opinions and ideas with the intention to be of service
• If you follow the two steps above, you will attract people who will enrich your career and life

Failure to follow this principle, perhaps more than anything else, is what causes “authentic” people to have the disappointing results Grant described. If you burst into my office and proceed to dump a 20-minute stream of consciousness diatribe into my lap, I will resent you. Why? Because nothing you shared was with the intention to help me.

Being yourself does not mean being all about yourself.

5. Serve, don’t sell

Last year, a client of mine went to three very different events in Texas, Florida and New York. One was with people in the trucking industry, another with top minds in the legal industry and a third was with hard-charging entrepreneurs.

He told me, "Everyone was talking about the same thing. People."

Even at the "technology" event, he said, the focus was on people.

This is a critical insight if you want to advance your career.

Too many professionals move through life trying to sell something:

• I want you to buy my product
• I want you to buy even more of my product
• I want you to pay me more because, well, I want more

No one likes to be sold. No one wants to be a bank or funding source for what you want. No one wants to help in your job search and then have you forget them.

But...

People do want connection. We want to find others whom we like and respect, and who feel the same way about us.

For example, if you are trying to "network your way" into a job at a leading company, are you genuinely interested in building relationships with the people you meet along the way? In many cases, job candidates treat such new connections as little more than stepping stones to what they want (i.e., a better job and more money).

This is no way to run a career.

Two-thirds or more of the business posts I see on social media can be summarized in one word: Me.

They are all about the person or company that shared the post: what they are selling, what they want, what they did.

(Yawn. Pause. Where's the unfollow button?)

I'd like to propose a better path through your career.

Everything you share on social media and every time you reach out to others should offer a benefit to whomever is on the receiving end.

What does this mean? Imagine that you are delivering a webinar in Chicago, and you share this news via social media. Don't just say, "Come to my seminar." There are a ton of people who don't live in Chicago or will be busy that day, so they can't come. Instead, offer a lesson related to your seminar, and then say, "By the way, if you're going to be in Chicago next Tuesday, I'll be talking about this and related lessons."

Thus, members of your network benefit even if they can't do what you want them to do.

"Serve, don't sell" is a simple philosophy that you can memorize by the end of this article, but it takes years to deeply integrate it into your career and life. Every single day, you encounter opportunities to serve others. The more of these opportunities you embrace, the more you will build and nurture true human connections. No single one of these good deeds may result in more money or a new job for you. But collectively, they will lead to a rich and rewarding career.

"Serve, don't sell" also works for employee engagement. It works for customer engagement. It works to power revenue growth. It works with anything and everything that includes people.

Using your unique talent and expertise in a genuine effort to help others is by far the fastest way to strengthen your relationships—and cultivate valuable new ones.

One last point: the harsher and more strident our world becomes, the more welcome it is to come across a person who is genuinely interested in helping others. Let that person be you.

Want to go deeper? Would you like to find more growth, meaning and impact in your life? Join my Being Growing Doing community, a tiny membership-based organization intended to number in the hundreds. It's organized around my new Being Growing Doing monthly newsletter and my weekly Zoom session for members only.