Next Level Blog
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You Can’t Lead Through Text Messages December 19 2011
Last Thursday night, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion on leadership at a celebratory dinner for Eagle Scouts past and present. The panelists were all accomplished people and had a lot of interesting reflections and insights to share.
One comment from the dinner that I’ve kept thinking about came from retired Rear Admiral John Butler who’s now an executive with Lockheed Martin. The last question I asked the panel was, “What do you think has changed in the practice of leadership over the past 10 years? What changes do you predict in how leadership will be practiced in the next ten years?”
Looking back at the past ten years, Butler has noticed the emergence of what he calls a “kinder, gentler” approach to leadership. His recollection of the 1980’s and 90’s was that it wasn’t uncommon for leadership to be about how loud you could yell and how close you could get to somebody’s face while you were doing it. He’s noticed that the practice of leadership has become much more collaborative over the past ten years and believes that’s a good thing. (See Tom Friedman’s recent column in the New York Times for a similar point of view.)
Looking ahead to the next ten years, Butler is concerned about a lack of human connection in the practice of leadership. While text messaging is the preferred form of communication for millennials (replacing the email that Gen X and Baby Boomers have preferred), it’s not a great leadership tool. As Butler said, you’re not going to convince a young soldier to lead a dangerous assault through a text message. Or, for that matter, you’re not going to get a team fired up and committed to do something challenging at work through a text either. Leadership in both situations requires voice if not face. To do difficult things, followers need to hear and, preferably, see the credibility and commitment that their leader is bringing to the table.
If I were to sum up the Admiral’s points on his look back and look ahead about leadership, the common denominator is connection. The practice of leadership is evolving from the top down, do it because I tell you to do it model to an approach that engages followers (collaborators may be a better word) mentally and emotionally. You can’t do that through a text message.
What about you? What do you think has changed about leadership in the last 10 years? What do you predict about the practice of leadership in the next 10 years?
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
Leadership has had a definite change and I agree that much of it has to do with the lack of actual contact between individuals. I always taught my classes that leadership was 80-90% psycology and the rest was numbers. In the past, the effective managers were the ones that knew HOW to deliver a message in person. With this new era of vertual contact, a new style of teaching leaders must continue to evolve or leaders will be held at a distance just like their vertual message.
I think that "text leadership" depends upon the audience. Gen Y is very comfortable communicating via text, so why then would we not engage them (at least sometimes) through a medium in which they are familiar?
I agree 100% with the idea that there are significant risks in the future of leadership given our increasingly digital world. The most effective leaders will know when it is appropriate to use available digital technologies and when it would be more appropriate to employ in-person influencing skills. Unfortunately today, that is seen as a 'new school' versus 'old school' paradigm choice. No matter how many technological advances we make, we will always be a 'human' race.
In the past 10-years I have seen a positive change in leadership development that has recognized and appreciated that there are different styles of leadership and each style can be effective if the right person uses it. In the past, the top-down hierarchical approach was the 'only' way. Now, there is recognition that your personal leadership style can be just that — personal.
In the next 10-years I am anxious to watch the evolution of 'remote' leadership as our work world is increasingly global. I see challenges in leading and managing a global workforce that are different than the challenges in leading a large, local workforce. This is again related to the personal touch and ability to influence.
The voice mail of my 23-yr old is as follows “I can’t answer the phone right now, if it is urgent, text me”.
I think the digital world forces leaders to grow. If you are a good leader, people will share their experience through social media and if you are not good, people know that too
Texting is connecting and group texting could work well to inspire team work. It’s really about how you use the technology to be a better leader.
The practice of collaborative leadership that embraces autonomy (individual workers and teams) is still in its infancy. It sounds simple to embrace collaboration and to empower workers so that they are fully committed to and taking full ownership of their work, but there is a great deal of change in the approach to management required to pull this off successfully.
As your article pointed out, leading as a faceless entity behind text messages (or email, for that matter) won’t gain commitment. Text messaging is simply one of many communication and collaboration tools available for leaders to use to engage people on their terms. In the future, leaders will need to make use of a variety of tools to communicate and collaborate: in-person communications, email or other written communications such as a blog, text messages, and video.
There will be times when the use of many—if not all of these tools—will be required to communicate and reinforce key concepts. In addition, using these new social media tools can be great for getting real-time feedback and taking the “pulse” of your organization and the perception that customers have of your company. These tools should augment in-person, real-time management, not supplant it.
I believe that every communication style has its use. In the same manner as a relationship can end via text, email, phone call or any other means of communication, any truly meaningful communications should be conveyed using the medium that most makes sense. This can be applied from the personal to the professional – if you need to really mean in, and you need them to really get it, isn't it important enough to be sure you communicate it properly? The medium is the biggest part of that communication, so make it fit.
I agree with this post. It would be rather difficult to lead via texting, even for a generation that grew up typing messages on a cell phone. Good leadership requires a lot of charisma and a great idea. To get your message through to an audience and get them "fired up" you need to establish a personal, emotional connection that is best achieved face to face.
John