Be a Social-Media-Ready Leader

You can’t control every post, every image shared, every story that someone decides to tell the masses. But there are steps you can take to help limit the risk of opening your phone to a notifications jumpscare.

Today’s post is by Melissa Swift, founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, and author of Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World.

Today, there are so many places where people can go to talk about their jobs, workplaces, employers, and bosses. From LinkedIn and Reddit to Instagram and TikTok to Glassdoor and Blind, there is no shortage of discussion of work on social media.

And much of it’s pretty negative – which can have a range of impacts from hurt feelings to people getting fired to companies actually losing value or failing. I remember vividly getting called out on a consulting platform for perceived sins around some employee engagement awards.  The poster didn’t quite have their facts right, but they weren’t entirely wrong about some of the underlying issues, either. And I went from feeling a bit awkward already to feeling downright terrible. Who wants to be that person getting complained about as hordes of people watch?

So what’s a leader to do? (other than avoiding Coldplay concerts, of course)

You can’t control every post, every image shared, every story that someone decides to tell the masses. But there are steps you can take to help limit the risk of opening your phone to a notifications jumpscare. You don’t need to have a perfect profile or an immense following yourself, but you do want to protect your own professional image (and your company’s) from unwanted shocks. Let’s look at some ways to do so.

A good place to start is how you communicate and operate at work. A number of executives have recently highlighted to me the role of coherence  – being consistent and logical in what you say and do. This is a fantastic example of something that’s “simple but not easy.” Every day, a million imperatives push us in a million directions. Even the most focused leaders can find themselves all over the map on a bad day.

But coherence is critical in a world of pervasive social media. Think about what triggers someone to post…so often, it’s frustration. And frustration is frequently triggered by a moment of “I just don’t get it” – someone’s words don’t make sense checked against their actions, or their words don’t make sense in relation to their other words, or their actions to their other actions. Or maybe it’s all just a hot mess from the point of view of someone not inside that leader’s head at that particular moment. In any of these scenarios, frustration can very easily turn into a public statement.

So coherence is your friend. To the extent that what you say and do makes sense with all of the other things you say and do, you avoid triggering the co-workers in your vicinity and limit the risk of being publicly shamed for a perceived inconsistency. You may not always have this perfectly under control – many organizations are incoherent beyond what any one leader can impact – but it’s a worthwhile guiding aspiration.

It’s not just what you do and say, though: it’s how you do and say it. Emotional appropriateness is another key ingredient in staying out of the social media hot seat.  Simply put, as experts on emotion in the workplace like UVA’s Jim Detert will tell you, conveying a type of and level of emotion that matches the situation you’re in helps put others in the conversation at ease. This doesn’t mean always damping down emotion: if something terrific or something terrible is happening, and you display a fairly flat way of communicating, that can cause further emotional arousal in your audience…just as if you started yelling or crying during an unremarkable meeting. That emotional arousal looks for an outlet – which could be a sympathetic spouse or a social media post seen by millions. You can’t always count on it to be the former. Particularly in trying moments, like layoffs, emotional appropriateness is particularly critical. Think of the number of posts you’ve seen on executives conveying job losses robotically vs empathically; when a leader displays emotions that match the moment, there’s less pithy fodder for a 30 second takedown.

Finally, be smart and measured about your own social media presence. Consider private accounts for political or otherwise sensitive content, as you cannot reasonably know what your co-workers’ most deeply held beliefs are. Be scrupulous about placing content on the right platform – no one on LinkedIn wants to see your bathing suit photos! And when in doubt, less is more. A measured quantity of social media content is far less likely to set someone off – and get them responding in ways that are damaging to you – than a wildly unpruned garden of random thoughts.

Social media at work can feel absolutely impossible to navigate. It’s not completely uncontrollable though – and much of what you can do to manage it, such as being coherent and emotionally appropriate, pays huge dividends far from just the social media realm.

It’s a highly transparent world, but you can show it a leader worth seeing.

Melissa Swift is a leading voice on how organizations, teams, and individuals can succeed in an ever-more challenging world of work. As founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, she is a practicing consultant and keynote speaker. She has held consulting leadership roles at Capgemini, Mercer, Korn Ferry, and Deloitte. She is also the author of Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace (Wiley, 2023).

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