Catherine Shinners on ESN as launchpads for digital leadership (video)

Catherine Shinners is the founder and principal of Merced Group. She works with (digital) leaders on matters of organisational change and design, social and digital technology implementations, and individual work and leadership practice.

At Social Now 2019, Catherine delivered a very practical talk about the way leaders can and should use enterprise social platforms to engage and influence positively their teams. She fears that organisations, and their leaders, still fail to see the rich potential of the (digital social) processes she describes.

“if you ask your workforce to work collaboratively, socially, digitally, you must do it yourself”

For those who really want to be digital leaders, Catherine leaves a few tips:

• navigate and cultivate networks;
• participate in social learning opportunities;
• use social models for sense making;
• leverage digital, social tools for observable, narrated work;
• recognise and bring forward network leaders;
• find a reverse mentor, if struggling with the above.

The talk was peppered with examples and ideas extracted from real organisations and it is well worth watching. If you want to be a digital leader or develop digital leaders in your organisation, that is.

Here is the video of Catherine‘s talk at Social Now 2019. (Click here for the slides she used for her presentation.)