November 30, 2011

Transformative leadership: Get out of the way

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Michael Skoler, vice president interactive at Public Radio International, believes leaders must first recognize that “the game has changed” and then they must step back and trust digital experts to lead the way.

New and old cultures may clash in newsrooms. Traditionalists cast themselves as protecting key journalistic values when they resist Web-driven practices. Digital pioneers understand the power of the Web to engage users in journalism, but they grow frustrated with the slow pace of change in tradition-bound newsrooms.

Skoler believes digital natives can carry organizations forward if the leadership is willing to step back and let them - even if it feels risky.

“You need to have a special kind of leader who’s secure enough to surround themselves with people who know stuff they don’t. People at a higher level can jeopardize your progress when they thwart your attempts to get new people like that.”

Skoler sees two stages.

First, “you need leadership to buy into the fact that the game has changed and everything needs to be questioned. Not many achieve it,” he said.

“The next step is that you have to have leaders who understand that they don’t understand the new world and be willing to hire people who are steeped in the new world, and they need to then trust them to lead.”

Change management requires consistent, clear communication as well as a feedback loop that tells the leader whether or not she or he is getting through.

“Clearly, overcommunication in the extreme” is crucial, Skoler said. “I’ve sometimes communicated things multiple times and have thought it was sufficient. But people often have to go over the basics, things I thought were agreed upon and understood. When things are changing, it takes time for people to understand that and absorb it.

“You have to constantly reiterate what the key practices and thinking are about the new world.”

Skoler was a fellow in KDMC’s Knight-McCormick Leadership Institute in 2010. He focused his fellowship on engagement, developing strategies and benchmarks for deepening internal understanding of new tools and practices so that PRI can excel at engagement in order to bring new voices into the national conversation.

This is an excerpt from an interview with Michael Skoler for an upcoming KDMC report, “New practices shape transformative news leadership in the digital age,” to be published Monday.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By Michele McLellan, 11/30/11 at 4:00 am

Comments

Now that marketers have taken over websites, I suppose digital natives are the logical leadership successors. Attention to news integrity is so passe. jack driscoll,retired (Boston Globe and MIT Media Lab)

By [email protected], 11/30/11 at 2:01 pm

I guess we are not looking at the same news web sites. I see lots of impressive journalism being produced and digital experts are helping to make it more accessible to more people. Of course, just as there were always plenty of bad newspapers, there are bad Web sites. In any case, broad characterizations rarely hold much truth.

By Michele McLellan, 11/30/11 at 7:18 pm