I've officially been Linked-in

Mark Harmon—the world famous coder and not the world famous actor—told me that because I wasn't "linked in", I was essentially a "nobody in the modern world".

Mark's suggestion that I "link in" sounded like the birth of the Borg to me, but I looked into it anyway.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with LinkedIn, it is a social networking site targeted primarily at "professionals" (vs. MySpace for high school students and Facebook for college students).

All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.

From my observations, most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to share experiences, exchange leadership tips, make a sale, form a partnership, or build a team. It works well for this because it is an online network of more than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 130 industries.

If you're not a member of LinkedIn yet, I encourage you to try it out. They last thing we want is for you to be a "nobody" in Mark's modern world.

In the LinkedIn's Q&A section, someone asked the question...

"In the corporate scenario, contemporary leaders depict different behaviors—some, we can't even see in management theories. Considering today's participatory culture, what are the best 3 leadership behaviors?"

If you read this weblog regularly, you have an idea of how I answered, but I wanted to share it here—just in case...

“To be a successful leader today—first and foremost—you must have a team to lead. Assemble a group that is individually qualified, then the following leadership behaviors become essential to building a team and leading them to success:

(1) To begin building a team, the leader must first be genuine with the team—open and honest, admitting goals and mistakes with no hidden agendas. This is essential to building trust with your team. Without first establishing trust between leader and team, there is no real leader or real team.

(2) Next, the leader must establish processes that are transparent, making ALL tasks visible to EVERYONE on the team. These processes will ensure that everyone on the team is accountable to a peer—not just to the manager. Once this visibility and dependency is in place, the team will begin to jell—trusting each other as they do their manager.

(3) Through established processes, the leader must constantly monitor—and immediately tackle—any obstacles that are blocking the team from completing tasks and slowing down productivity. Removing team impediments—and refining processes to prevent obstacles from reoccurring—will ensure that the team succeeds, thus improving morale and constantly increasing productivity.”