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I wanted to wait until all the Lebron hoopla calmed down, because this isn’t a rant about sports. In fact, the NBA has very little interest for me these days, but I do pay enough attention to sports headlines to have seen this:
Heat Signs Zydrunas Ilgauskas
MIAMI, July 17- The Miami HEAT announced today that they have signed free agent center Zydrunas Ilgauskas. Per club policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.
During the 2009-10 season, Ilgauskas averaged 7.4 points, 5.4 rebounds and 20.9 minutes, while shooting 44.3 percent from the field in 64 games (six starts). He recorded double-figure points on 19 occassions and four double-digit rebound games.
Curiously enough, Ilgauskas was a teammate of Lebron’s in Cleveland.
Lebron James was once known as one of the best basketball players never to win a championship, prior to his entrance in the public consciousness as one of the most egocentric athletes in history. He goes to Miami as a free agent, along with other highly-sought free agents Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. The three are often thought of as cooking this together, but you get the feeling that Ilgauskas is coming along because a title isn’t enough for Lebron James; he wants a legacy as a team-builder.
Body Mind and Soul
There’s a story that appears on the cover of my first-edition hardbound copy of Annette Simmons’ The Story Factor. It’s lightly glossed, and hard to read in the picture:
A man came upon a construction site where three people were working. He asked the first, What are you doing? and the man answered, I am laying bricks. He asked the second, What are you doing? and the man answered I am building a wall. He walked up to the third man, who was humming a tune as he worked and asked, What are you doing? and the man stood up and smiled and said, I am building a cathedral.
Simmons’ use of the story is meant to convey the importance of one’s attitude in determining happiness, and how our satisfaction with various tasks are influenced by the part we think we’re playing in a bigger picture. But that’s not the issue with Lebron and the Miami Heat.
Unrealistic Expectations
A bricklayer is not an architect. That’s not to say a person can’t be both, but the jobs are quite different. A bricklayer has an important job, which can get lost in the repetitive task at hand. Going into a mind-numbing trance makes for an easy flow, but if you lose sight on the wall you’re building, you can lay a row of bricks that extends too far.
And that’s my fear – that Lebron James is trying to do something that’s not necessarily within his zone of competence.
- It’s one thing to play the game.
- It’s another thing to coach the players.
- It’s yet another thing to manage the team, assembling players and coaches that mesh.
On the whole, the business world recognizes this, and so does the sports world. Yes, there are excellent managers who worked their way through the trenches, but they are individuals who happened to have separate skill sets. Most of them were not the best salesman on the staff before their promotion to sales manager.
And this is the very reason Social Media is having difficulty in getting adopted in many industries.
Take a look at many of the job listings floating around for Social Media Directors. Some of them read like they were written by Human Resources Aliens from some alternate dimension. Where exactly will you find someone with both five years experience in Social Media and eight years experience with management and budgets? If you had that kind of budget experience, you likely weren’t playing around with Twitter and RSS feeds. They want Architects who have experience laying bricks.
Immaturity Breeds Distrust
It’s no real secret that corporate cultures are suspicious of things with silly names like Twitter and Yammer, or any of the services with dropped vowels, unexpected capitalization or misspelled words in the title.
There’s even more room to be suspicious of turning over authority and accounts to interns who have “an account with the Facebook.” The inversion of the knowledge base has turned stomachs in C-Suites, where top executives find they want Big Picture summaries from people who have no experience in Big Picture culture and can’t speak Big Picture language.
The successful organizations are the ones that recognize communication as communication, no matter the format. They apply the same sort of strategic thinking to new tools as they do the old ones. Smart companies will integrate rather than eliminate. But it won’t be an easy transition, because those who champion social media in their organizations don’t often have the resume (or the personal relationships to navigate their particular culture.)
There are more than enough people who know how to manage other people. There are plenty of people who know how to manage communications. There are hordes of people who know about successfully implementing social media. But they aren’t the same people, not yet.
Which brings us back to Lebron. He’s the “rock star,” the practitioner who can bring the house down at any moment. He’s leveraged that ability to create a unique situation, where he can fail on multiple levels.
- Will his play suffer if he spends too much energy soothing the egos he’s assembled?
- Will his desire to excel on the court bruise those same egos?
- If Ilgauskas shoots bricks instead of laying them, will Lebron’s Architectural legacy diminish?
Would any sane business put the top salesman in charge of the company’s direction on a whim? No. And that’s why Social Media is still scary to the Architects at the top.
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I agree that sometimes we confuse skill sets on related products. To take the analogy further, the architect may not be the best person to physically build the home, just as (more than likely) neither the architect nor the builder will be the best person to sell it. I hear this a lot with people who built their own house, or designed it, or whatever. They can’t conceive how an agent can sell their home better then they, who have almost a perfect knowledge of it. I don’t know that their doorknobs came from Italy. How can I possibly sell the home? Selling is a different skill set. Maybe the designer / owner also has that skill set, but more than likely they don’t. Just as I would be lost if I had to build a home.
On social media phobia – some of it is justified by how it is being played out in the real world. In my industry, social media “gurus” are 2 dozen for a dime. The same agents that were paying for big ads in the yellow pages 15 years ago, and Glamour Shot billboard ads 10 years ago, are now claiming to be social media experts just because they have a few accounts set up on the big networks. So what? I say. How are they using those channels to engage people? How are they being used to serve their clients? Do they point attention to themselves, or to their clients’ products?
Whether you’re making the SM case to a C level exec, or a home seller, you have to answer the question: “so what?” Best way to do that, with both groups, are success stories.