Trusting People

I'm a pretty trusting person by nature. Sometimes I have gotten burned, of course, and kick myself for having trusted someone who turned out to be untrustworthy. But for the most part, I think I have gained far more than I have lost by extending the benefit of the doubt to others.

Social media is built upon trust. If you stop and think really hard about the way people could mess things up by using social media tools, it's actually pretty scary. Of course, the safest place to live is probably to stay in a bomb shelter, but that's not much of a life. Similarly, the upside offered by social media tools and communities outweighs the risks for many of us, and so we take some chances.

A wiki, in particular, requires a leap of faith for people who are used to approving everything. How can we be sure the information posted is accurate if management has not pre-approved it? How can we expect employees to find correct information and not get confused? These are some of the questions I hear as our wiki community manager.

Social media does require a different kind of thinking compared to traditional management mindsets. It's nothing radical, of course, as we have been talking about "empowering" employees for a long time now. The difference with social media, I believe, is that social media suddenly makes empowerment a widespread reality, instead of a management objective. It's one thing to talk about empowering people, while carefully controlling how empowered they are allowed to become, and another thing entirely for any employee to have the power to create, edit and comment upon anything, anywhere in the enterprise wiki.

We're seeing some managers embrace this empowerment for their teams, while others need some more convincing. The momentum is clearly moving forward -- I picture a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger and bigger -- but we have more work to do to get everyone going in the same direction.

Then again, I wonder, is it realistic to expect everyone to go in the same direction? Will there always be resistance, just because people are inevitably varied in their opinions and outlooks? Maybe the 90% that Matt referenced in his post applies here, too: perhaps we can only expect 90% of people to get on board with all the trust that social media asks us to give to our community.