How new workplace model is affecting business

Kenya: The rate at which businesses are turning to new media as a social business tool to reach their target market is not very encouraging. Reports have shown that less than 20 per cent of Kenyans use social media to do business.

Research has further revealed that the main challenge is how to map social media strategies to business strategies. This requires a new form of thinking for doing business that refuses to use the old model as a crutch.

Welcome to the changing global marketplace.

In these changing times, the traditional leadership style of top-door management is gradually evolving to incorporate employees in collaborative decision making. This is blurring the lines between boss and worker.

In fact, many business settings have dismantled the ‘my door, my office’ barriers that defined the pecking order and made it virtually impossible for top-tier management to interact with lower-cadre workers. These firms have instead adapted an open platform.

The crowning moment of these changes is the new generation of communications technologies that are addressing the new way to work. Virtual teams have come to characterise business relationships.

Different platforms

Not so long ago, collaboration used to happen in boardrooms, with whiteboards and tea, coffee and snacks for a select few.

But as matters stand now, collaboration is taking place on different platforms, such as in sharing screen data and chatting over video. These new times, which are also disorienting those still beholden to the old order of doing things, are literally pushing top management in many companies from their ivory towers into the ‘trenches’ where they are interacting humanely, meaningfully and productively with once-upon-a-time ‘lowly’ workers.

But how does the old order differ from the new workplace order?

One is power. In the old system, power is bestowed by the corporate hierarchy based on how long one has been with the company or how deeply connected he or she is with the power wielders. In other words, loyalty, blood and friendship determine how close one gets to the top, irrespective of their performance.

In this arrangement, power is the possession of a few privileged souls. The rest can only serve as salaried workers at the pleasure of their boss(es).

The new order crushes this way of running profitable ventures. It’s literally a revolution, a coup d’état at the workplace. Power is no longer viewed as an entitlement, but as a collaborative goal, a shared commitment to a mutually agreed agenda.

This form of shared power encourages equal participation across all worker levels. Solutions are no longer packaged from above by persons of lesser capabilities and pushed down the throats of workers, but are allowed to evolve through active problem solving.

Collaborative power

When promotion does take place, it is largely acceptable to everyone because it’s earned. Even more importantly, the promoted candidate does not have to flaunt his or her power to anyone since it is shared and derived from the other workers. Simply put, the boss is the first among servants.

This concept of collaborative power is outrageous to old-school thinkers who are ardent students of Machiavelli, the medieval Italian power theorist who had little regard for the so-called small people.

Thankfully, this new thinking debunks the big-man syndrome that has come to dominate many corporate enterprises and political scenes, wreaking damage in terms of lost business opportunities, lost human resources and lost human relations.

In the new work environment, reality is coming full circle, with businesses learning from the wisdom of ancient philosophers, teachers and thinkers who wrote and taught extensively on perils of unmerited and disconnected leadership.

Was it not Aristotle who warned that they that have never served should never lead? Is Kenya’s corruption-laden environment not proof enough that this ancient thought is true for all times and seasons?